I've been thinking a bit about this post regarding #Mastodon's responsibility to be compatible with the #threadiverse (#ActivityPub thread aggregators like #Lemmy & #Kbin). Right now, a thread from Lemmy or Kbin usually federates to Mastodon with truncated text and a link to the actual thread. However, many want Mastodon to be more compatible with threads so that the people over on Mastodon interact with the threadiverse more.
I was initially in agreement as a Kbin user. But having given it some thought, I think this is an unwise approach that'll only serve to overcomplicate platforms on the #fediverse. Yes, people on Mastodon should promote other parts of the fediverse (and vice versa), but complete interoperability shouldn't be expected of every platform.
As much as many would like it, you can't have long-form video from PeerTube, images from Pixelfed, threads from Kbin, blogs from Writefreely, etc. all neatly fit in a microblog feed. These are different formats made for different platforms, and the people making them are expecting them to be interacted with in completely different ways. When someone makes a thread in a Lemmy community, they're probably expecting that the people who are going to see and interact with the thread are people that want to see threads and are thus on a Lemmy instance (or another thread aggregator). If someone from Mastodon were to interact with it as if it were a microblog post, there'd be a big mismatch. People interact with microblogs differently than they do with threads — that's why they're separate to begin with. You don't see everyone on Twitter also wanting to use to Reddit because people who want microblogs don't necessarily want Reddit-style threads, and vice versa.
The other option, then, is to separate these different formats into different feeds or otherwise make them clearly distinct from one another. Kbin does this by separating threads and microblog posts into two tabs. While you can view both in the "All Content" tab if you'd like, they're styled differently enough that it's very clear when you're looking at a thread and when you're looking at a microblog post. This distinction lets users treat threads like threads and microblog posts like microblog posts, which is really helpful since the two formats serve different purposes and have different audiences. This option — clear distinction — is a great way to solve the conundrum I've been talking about… if your platform is meant for viewing all these different kinds of content to begin with.
And that's what it really comes down to imo. Mastodon is a platform for microblogging. Most people go to Mastodon because they want a Twitter alternative, not a Twitter alternative that's also an Instagram alternative and a Reddit alternative and a YouTube alternative. Even if you put these different content types in separate tabs, it would inevitably make things seem more confusing and thus raise the barrier of entry. Add a Videos tab to Mastodon to view stuff on PeerTube, and people are inevitably going to go, "Wait, what's this? Is this like YouTube? I thought this was just a Twitter alternative! This all seems too complicated," even if you tell them to ignore it.
It's probably best to leave Mastodon as it is: a microblogging platform that has some limited federation with other formats. The way Kbin threads currently display on Mastodon is fine. In fact, when I post a Kbin thread, I'm expecting it to be viewed via a thread aggregator. If people on Mastodon were part of the target audience, I would've made a microblog post.
Now, if you want to make something that lets you view everything on the fediverse via different tabs, feel free. As aforementioned, Kbin supports both threads and microblogs, though it comes with some challenges (e.g., trying to fit magazine-less microblog posts into Kbin's magazine system). However, this doesn't mean every platform on the fediverse needs to seamlessly incorporate everything else. I'd love people on Mastodon to promote and even try out Lemmy & Kbin more, but that doesn't mean Mastodon needs to also become a thread aggregator.
This isn't a hurdle because people typically aren't going to the fediverse with the idea of "I want a single app for all my social media." That's not how social media works outside the fediverse, so it's not really going to be a surprise that the Twitter replacement is a Twitter replacement and not one for 5 other platforms. If someone really wants to view Reddit-style threads, they're straight up better of making an account on a different platform (just like they would make a different account for Reddit) because Mastodon is a microblogging site.
Even the best attempt to incorporate all these different types of content into Mastodon is going to further complicate the platform and make more people dismiss Mastodon as too complicated of a Twitter alternative. This isn't a situation where there's no harm at best. And the potential benefit? Lemmy comments having the occasional Mastodon user?
Mastodon itself is a good enough introduction to ActivityPub without needing to make it support other things. It shows how people on different servers can share & interact with a pool of media through the same protocol. When people learn about other platforms on the fediverse, they can go check those out. Just promoting the platforms will do the job fine without complicating people's entry into the fediverse.
I've noticed that a lot of people on the #fediverse aren't particularly welcoming to those who don't initially get it or have trouble with it. You'd think that if multiple people say they have trouble picking an instance, it might be a genuine barrier to entry that we need to consider when introducing them to the fediverse. But no, instead of suggesting an instance to get rid of that barrier everyone gives unhelpful advice like "just pick one" or "it's not that hard." We'd have a much easier time getting people on the fediverse if there weren't so many people with this attitude of "the fediverse is simple, and the people who don't get it are lazy and should try harder."
The issue is that there isn’t really anything more to choosing an instance than just picking one though, and we don’t want to funnel every new user to a single instance lest this end up becoming just reddit with extra steps. Or the reccomended instance gets flooded with more traffic than it can handle.
At most, a new user may want to look at what instances have defederated from the one they want to sign up on, but that’s a concept that isn’t going to make sense to someone who is already having trouble understanding “sign up somewhere, interact with everywhere” setup.
Numerous guides to all of this have been created. Rather than tilting at windmills (you will never stop people from being rude online, best to just accept it) your effort would be better spent being the friendly guiding hand. That’s far more effective than trying to call out people who probably don’t care whether we’re attracting more users or not.
@wizardbeard I'd argue that telling people to join largest (or at least a larger) instance isn't a bad thing. If I was telling someone to join Kbin, I'd tell them to just pick kbin.social. Later on, once they get accustomed to fediverse and understand the idea better, they can go to a smaller instance if they want
(e.g., if it's focused on a topic you like, it has features or moderation policies you prefer, or you just want to take some load off the larger instance). Having people initially go to larger, more established instances — where the experience tends to be more approachable due to more active hosts, more old content being federated, a larger community within the instance, etc. — greatly reduces the barrier to entry.
And the danger of a lot of people on a single instance is really exaggerated. If things go badly on, say, a Lemmy instance that most people are on, they can just move to another one with the same features, same UI, and similar access to content. It's not like Reddit or Twitter where moving means you're missing out on a ton.
You're right that it's usually better to be the change you want to see as opposed to simply criticizing others, but I think it's still important to discuss how we introduce people to the fediverse.
@Aatube@maegul@1984@mindlight@maegul
The private key doesn't need to be memorized, it stays saved on the device that the client software is on, allowing the user to integrate mobile device's biometric reader (fingerprint/face/iris/whatever) to confirm identity, or use security key, there are already different ways to implement it that doesn't require pw memorization.
I've got a long unmemorizable string for Firefox sync, Brave, Proton Mail/Pass, it's still more secure than pw memorized
Mastodon has the responsibility to promote diversity in the Fediverse
I love the Threadiverse. Compared to the microblogging Fediverse’s sea of random thoughts, Lemmy and kbin are so much easier to navigate with the options to sort posts by subscribed, from local instances or everything federated. You can also sort by individual community, and then there are the countless ways to order the posts and comments (which are stored neatly under the main post, by the way). That people can more easily find the right discussions and see where they can contribute also means that the discussions tend to be more focused and productive than elsewhere. Decentralisation also makes a lot of sense, since it is built around different communities. All that’s needed is users.
Things were going quite well for a while when Reddit killed third-party apps, prompting many to leave and find the Threadiverse. However, it is quite difficult to entertain a crowd that has grown accustomed to a constant bombardment of dopamine-inducing or interesting content by tens of millions of users, if you only have a couple hundred thousand people. This is causing some to leave, which of course increases this effect. The active users have more than halved since July, according to FediDB. The mood is also becoming more tense. Maybe the lack of engagement drives some to cause it through hostility, I’m not quite sure. Either way, the Threadiverse becoming a less enjoyable place to be, which is quite sad considering how promising it is.
But what is really frustrating is that we could easily have that userbase. The entire Fediverse has over ten million users, and many Mastodonians clearly want to engage in group-based discussion, looking at Guppe groups. The focused discussions should also be quite attractive. Technically we are federated, so why do Mastodonians interact so little with the Threadiverse? The main reason is that Mastodon simply doesn’t federate post content. I really can’t see why the platform that federates entire Wordpress blogs refuses to federate thread content just because it has a title, and instead just replaces the body with a link to the post. Very unhelpful.
The same goes with PeerTube. There are plenty of videos on there that I am quite sure a lot of Mastodonians would appreciate, yet both views and likes there stay consistently in the tens. Yes, Mastodon’s web interface has a local video player, but in most clients it is the same link shenanigans, may may partly explain the small amount of engagement. This is also quite sad, because Google’s YouTube is one of the worst social network monopolies out there, if not the worst.
And I know some might say that Mastodon is a microblogging platform and that it makes sense only to have microblogging content, but the problem is that Mastodon is the dominant platform on the Fediverse, its users making up close to 80% of all Fedizens. It has gone so far that several Friendica and Hubzilla users have been complaining about complaints from Mastodonians that their posts do not live up to Mastodon customs, and of course, that people frequently use “Mastodon” to refer to the entire Fediverse. This, of course, goes entirely against the idea of the Fediverse, that many diverse platforms live in harmony with and awareness of each other.
The very least that Mastodon could do is to support the content of other platforms. Then I’d wish that they’d improve discoverability, by for instance adding a videos tab in the explore section, improving federation of favourites since it is the dominant sorting mechanism on many other platforms, and making a clear distinction between people (@person) and groups (!group), but I know that that is quite much to ask.
P.S. @feditips , @FediFollows , I know that you are reluctant to promote Lemmy and its communities because of the ideology of its founders, but the fact is firstly that it’s open source and there aren't any individual people who control the entire project, and that the software itself is very apolitical. In fact, most Lemmy users both oppose and are on instances that have rules against such beliefs, so I highly encourage you to at least help raise awareness on the communities. Then, of course, there’s kbin, which isn’t associated with any extremism at all. As a bonus, it has much better integration with the microblogging Fediverse, but it is a lot smaller and younger, and still very much under development.
Anyways, that was a ramble. Thanks for hearing me out.
"(...)Just like Lemmy won’t support Place objects, I’m not sure if any other platform will ever support Page objects, because Pages are much bigger in scope than anything most Fediverse applications ever deal with."
Article or Page objects are supported not only by Lemmy and /kbin (and Mastodon, but as link). It is a default object type on WriteFreely, can be used on WordPress, and is compatible with Friendica. Hometown (a Mastodon fork) also renders Pages and Articles in their entirety.
Pages represent web pages, whereas notes represent “a short written work typically less than a single paragraph in length”. In my opinion, using Page was a mistake on Lemmy’s end. Just like Lemmy won’t support Place objects, I’m not sure if any other platform will ever support Page objects, because Pages are much bigger in scope than anything most Fediverse applications ever deal with.
Using note was the mistake. Limiting communication to short quips, like Twitter does, is a fucking travesty. The fact that people routinely and often make multiple tweets to extend what they want to say proves this point. Twitter/X was the worst thing to happen to communication in the internet age by further reducing the attention span and ability of people to concentrate on longer bodies of writing, thereby making people even dumber.
Twitter/Mastodon should not even be a thing, honestly. They are dumb methods of communication for dumb people. You can always post something shorter in a long form system, but you can’t post something longer in a short form system, without making multiple posts. It’s fucking stupid and always has been. The primary reason for the short form, originally 140 char, was because you could text it in one message. This made a bit of sense… just a tiny bit, as it opened up communication where there previously wasn’t any. But as we moved away from that paradigm of 140 char text messages, the idea of a Twitter became more and more stupid, where today, we have Twitter/Mastodon as the bastion of the idiot regime who can’t think past 280 characters.
Anyone over the age of 30 who has spend any time in tech-adjacent spaces still cheering for #BigTech "joining" the #Fediverse is fucking deluding themselves. We've been through so many cycles of this shit over the past twenty years, how some people can still trust #facebook to do anything remotely ethical is beyond me.
They're not here to join, they're here to destroy. This is just the most cost-effective, PR-friendly way of doing it.
@peter_sc This. I just wish the big guys on the fedi wouldn't be so keen to put growth above anything… Eugen has proven once more he doesn't have the users' safety at heart. But I expected way better from Dan (Pixelfed creator). The fact he now also federates to Threads with its main instances is just… sad.
A case of spec ambiguity, maybe? I can't find a mention in WebFinger or ActivityPub specs of usernames being case insensitive. Are @osma and @osma referring to the same actor? Is that up to implementation? How does a remote server determine which is correct?
Edit: I wrote above (at)Osma@mas.to and (at)osma@mas.to, but some part of the stack converted both to a lowercase mention during posting. I don't know which part, and what specs describes that.
To my knowledge there are no specifications for this. It's left completely to the implementation. Some projects have case-sensitive usernames and some do not. Some provide case-insensitive search and some do not. As a general rule, you'll often avoid issues if you use whatever form was used by the source of the information that you got it from.
@mikedev
Yep. I only ran into this when my server received messages with mixed conventions... Didn't have a unique lowercase index on the actors, so ended up having two records for the "same" one -- for informal understandings of sameness.
or maybe more general #Fediverse crowd: Given some communication over here recently, I wonder whether it's possible to compose posts that are visible to followers only but for which each of my follower is able to see each response and able to interact with each other person responding there no matter whether these people follow each other too?
@z428 look, if you want all the contacts just to be able to answer each other or see each others answers, you have to tell every server and other user who is allowed and should see the answer of every other participant.
So you have to technically group and share this "virtual group with all participants" to everybody else in the group. Otherwise nobody knows who to send replies, except to you.
Even this might be possible in other protocols, you have to trust every other involved node, that it respects your intention to privacy and keep the closed list that you set initially.
@hoergen Hmmm, maybe I'm all off here, but ... this somehow feels like a problem that has been solved in the past, and be that as simple as in e-mail: Sending messages to a wide load of recipients with all of them in Cc (because I want to discuss issues with all of them), anyone who responds to any of these messages will send this response to all of the original recipients, and that is intentionally and expected to be this way. If someone modifies the set of recipients - fine, of course everyone's able and allowed to do that, that's a conscious decision, but it's not, like "no matter what - your response will only be seen by those people in that recipient list that have you in their address book"... . Maybe this analogy is a bit difficult, but at least that's a kind of behaviour that, for an addressing as generic as "Following", would somehow be not all too much off.
Is it just Kbin, or does every fediverse service have the issue of being totally swarmed with bots advertising illegal pharmaceuticals? Is this just the result of limited moderation?
Kbin seems more affected than others from what I can see in reports but it exists on other instances too.
It is a moderation issue in the sense that it is too easy for these bots to sign up. Individual instances could improve this by requiring an application for example.
With Lemmy, we have seen huge numbers of bots at times but most large Lemmy instances have registration applications turned on. As in you apply to join an instance instead of just being able to make an account.
By default this means waiting for manual approval of your account, but many instances set up automated approval behind the scenes.
This function means many spam bots are averted before the public sees them, and also spammers avoid instances with registration applications.
I mention this because Kbin, or at least Kbin.social, doesn’t appear to have registration applications which makes it a prime target for spam.
Also Lemmy has coordination between dozens of instance admins sharing details of spammers. I.e. a lot of hard work behind the scenes. I’d guess the lack of moderation at the admin level also accounts for part of the issue on kbin.
(A lot of Lemmy spam also comes via federation from Kbin.social, so much that many instances block high spam communities on Kbin and some block Kbin completely).
Okay #Fediverse, let’s get something straight. We are all grown ups here (hopefully) and can make choices for ourselves. We alive in a society that allows us the freedom to choose for ourselves what to do.
Why would you allow or want to be part of an instance where they choose for you who or what to block? I understand that there are BAD people on #Meta, just as there are on EVERY platform on the internet.
Give the regular people on each platform a chance to been seen.
@SallyStrange I understand why we have moderators...I have been a moderator for years. Moderate a Discord server, etc. What I am saying is...sit down and follow along now, that if we just sit back going around blocking entire instances, etc. What is the point of moderating at all? We are just stopping stuff at the top level?
Now I understand that some users wouldn't want to start with housekeeping (blocking their own), but keeping accounts that aren't bad from being seen is DUMB.
@kylewritescode@SallyStrange If an instance wants to block meta, it will draw people who don't want to deal with things like harassment from trolls on meta. I know people who don't want the abuse. As a white dude I don't face the same abuse levels so will be on a federated site with meta but I judge no one who takes an undue level of abuse just because of their demographics
I'm trying to convince the last friends I have left on Facebook, X, Threads, or BlueSky to join the Fediverse. Some have tried but felt a sense of loneliness. Nowadays, many people are so used to doing what algorithms suggest that they can no longer make independent choices.
My timeline here, on the other hand, is beautiful.
I see what I want, I follow people who post what I like, and no one tells me what I should do. Freedom may come with a "cost," but whatever it is, it's worth the effort. Always. #Fediverse#Mastodon#SocialNetworks
@me Pretty much had the same problem, some people I've told about it have tried it and given up saying there's too much crap to figure out, what's an instance, how do I pick one, how do I find people to follow etc. I started the process of learning Mastodon in case any of my students wanted to try it, ended up liking it pretty well myself though agree I do miss following writers and companies and so on who aren't on here.
@Gordon_Freeman There isn't a crosspost button, but if two threads are similar, they'll show as crossposts of each other. I'm not sure exactly what the criteria are, but from what I can gather, two link threads will show as crossposts on Kbin if they have the same link. Otherwise, they need the same title (and maybe the same photo?).
@Gordon_Freeman Agreed, though it would be cool to have a button that you can click to make a crosspost. Maybe it'd send you to the thread creation page with certain things filled out to make it a crosspost.
I'm thinking I might stop using the term #fediverse#fedi or #activitypub when I want to talk about this community of federated social media services.
It's confusing and to be honest sounds way too much like a corporate brand trying to sell something.
I'm thinking I might start using something like "open internet" in general and "open social media" in particular to make the point that fedi isn't some specific thing; it's the default social media for the open internet.
I admit that it might be a bit of a "lies to children" (Pratchett et al), but it might be the first steps to carefully lead people away and towards a place where that brighter and wider future is visible.
I am using another term #Peopleverse, but not with intent for that to be a real name. More a vision for an online landscape that seamlessly aligns with our offline world and is in support of our daily lives.
“Man the Hunter has dominated the study of human evolution for nearly half a century & pervaded popular culture. [But] it was the arrival of agriculture that led to rigid gendered roles & economic inequality. Hunting belonged to everyone.”
