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.
The term Threadiverse has nothing to do with Meta’s Threads platform, I think the term is actually older than Meta’s announcement. The Threadiverse refers to the platforms that organize things into threads similar to Reddit or forums, right now this mainly means Lemmy and Kbin
@celeste Yeah just sucks that users data are being taking like always. Guess people just don't care about how much data companies take from them these days
The flagship instance of Fire Fish is now OFFLINE.
The significance of this event is many of the Fire Fish Developers have previously come forward claiming the lead developer vanished. Unfortunately, the lead developer treated their project as a centralized project, meaning that they were the sole person making decisions, giving no access to accounts or code changes or even donations, despite having a team behind them.
@tetra This sucks, but security vulnerabilities can happen to literally any project. Coincidentally, Mastodon also just released a fix for a critical security vulnerability.
They disclosed the vulnerability and released both a workaround and a fix for it nearly immediately after it was reported, which I think says a lot more about the trustworthiness of the project than the fact that a vulnerability existed.
@blag Yeah I think the mechanism is here already, just a matter of presentation. Instead of "following" and seeing posts as combined in the home timeline... we show it as "join" and have a dedicated timeline, where every post / interaction is directed to the group by default without needing to tag it🤔
@ayo I believe kbin's magazines function exactly like this, where each one has it's own separate timeline of microblog posts. Posts can be made directly to a magazine from kbin or collected from elsewhere in the fediverse based on a list of hashtags the magazine's moderator curates.
Wow #Fediverse, thanks for the help! I am genuinely surprised at how close the results were. It looks like the recommendation is to try out the #Threadiverse (#Kbin and / or #Lemmy) first - but only by 1.8% over #Peertube! Y'all must know that I've been getting frustrated with #Reddit lately. I also appreciate the recommendations for other things to explore.
Now the question is Kbin or Lemmy? Or both? (any thoughts?)
@seanbala one more thing i really like about kbin: even with bad internet connection, kbin is still usable > when other fedi platforms such as mastodon etc would not work anymore, kbin still does what it is supposed to do :)
I had a similar issue responding to something in /m/random yesterday, and I ended up making a new mircoblog on programming.dev (and mentioning people) instead. They saw it (and mentioned me) but I didn't get a notification and their replies don't show up even now here on kbin (I see the replies on one of their instances). EDIT: I should say the replies aren't visible on programming.dev either, not sure if that's part of it
What concerns me about the #fediverse / #acrivitypub from a user‘s perspective, is the inflation of identities that will occur as soon as you want to use feature that the platform you started on does not offer.
I am aware that this also can happen, when you use closed services, but …
A) this on of the things that make Google or Meta attractive.
B) federation to me implies the integration of several services under one identity.
So, is a #FederatedIdentity something that is being considered?
@iamlayer8 the main issue that prevents this from being the case is that Mastodon (and the services that preceded it in some part) unified the client and server parts of ActivityPub.
Ideally an ActivityPub server should be able to accept multiple types of activities for different purposes and different clients can make use of different resulting objects. Ie, a Mastodon client can display textual objects in a twitter like format, a Pixelfed client would display image objects, etc.
🤩 Aren't you just delighted by all those proprietary software apps for the #Fediverse?
😮 Don't be. Each time you choose proprietary you help turn the fedi slowly in the direction of the usual corporate hellscape that the rest of the Web already is.
😨 And then we end up in an online space where for years we can complain to each other how we squandered an opportunity and how #capitalism won once more.
🎯 Use #FOSS apps instead, created by the public for the public.
@smallcircles@mativity other than directly naming explaining to non-geeky people which iOS apps are proprietary and which are FOSS, what alternative communication strategy do you think might be helpful?
@smallcircles which iOS clients are FOSS? I'd happily choose a FOSS option over proprietary if it had feature and design parity with the existing options (or near to it, and I could meaningfully contribute).
I wonder what stops app developers building open? It's such a cutthroat space, could code stealing (without attribution) be a concern leading them to take the easier option of closed code?
Hey, #Fediverse experts. Is there is simple way to Boost a Kbin/Lemmy post I like onto my #Mastodon?
I know I can look up the #KBin / #Lemmy poster on my Mastodon instance and boost from their timeline.
But, that's a bit difficult, I have to translate the KBin/Lemmy user URL into a remote Mastodon user URL, and then I have to manually match up the KBin post URL with the contents of a toot in the timeline.
@BoydStephenSmithJr Well, that's just the lemmy post. Boost it directly if you like.
In truth, it's not the original lemmy post, but that's normal on the fediverse ... all posts from instances other than our own are duplicated on our instance with interactions and replies synced, often, as you may have discovered incompletely.
@maegul I think you are missing the point. I can't find a button or URL in the Lemmy interface that lets me boost something to my Mastodon feed (on hachyderm.io).
Also, it isn't easy to find toot that "matches" a post (or comment) when I'm in the Mastodon interface, even when federation has distributed it to my Mastodon instance.
Yes, once I've gone through copy-paste plus manual search process, to find the right toot, then all I have to do is hit boost, but that final step isn't the problem.
Hey there, wonderful folks! Guess what? @reiver and I are thinking about starting a podcast, all about the fascinating world of the Fediverse. Super exciting, right?
Now here's where you come in: we would absolutely love to hear what topics about the #Fediverse or social media tickle your curiosity. Maybe you're wondering about its inner workings, or perhaps you're keen on exploring some other intriguing aspects. Whatever it may be, please do share your thoughts and comment below. Your input is truly valuable!
Sending out lots of love and appreciation to all of you!
@reiver@atomicpoet Here are some ideas:
Technical topics - you have ideas already I'm sure. Scaling, responding to DDOS, spam control, etc.
Moderation. From the moderator's POV and from the user's. Arguments around pre-blocking, blocklist management, pros and cons. Proactive vs reactive. This is a more complex topic than some like to think.
Talk about particular instances and news related to them. Fosstodon goes invite-only. Talk to some of their users and admins about what they have seen and want to see in the future. Do a survey of the Star Trek instances.
Hashtaggery. What's up with Mosstodon? How about CasioCult? Highlight some of the interesting inter-instance communities. Dadjokes is pretty active!
Personalities. Journalists. The passing and legacy of Kris Nova. mekka okereke. Veronica Explains. Grammar Girl. Technology Connections. Admins like stux or Jerry.
The Infosec community. Jerry has an absolute armada of Fediverse servers.
Orgs and companies on the Fediverse. What kind of impact are they having and seeing? Talk to their social managers about how the Fed is like or different from others. Talk to their followers and blockers.
Comedy on the Fediverse. Low Quality Facts. Dadjokes hashtag. RikerGoogling.
Migrating instances. Who's done it and why? How to make it go well? How to make it go poorly? What's the user experience like after migration?
The Reddit to Lemmy/Kbin migration.
The X-twitter to Mastodon migration.
How about the other biggies, like Facebook or Instagram or Linkedin?
Running an instance. How to get started? How to fund it? Why would you want to? Why would you not want to? Talk to Jerry. Talk to Amin Hollon. Talk to someone who runs a single-user instance.
So many possibilities. Lots more I haven't mentioned.
My #kbin account seems broken? :\ For the last month+ I can't get any thread I create to show up in its magazine, even when the magazine is a local one. Comments are fine, microblog posts are fine, threads show up in my profile but never the magazine.
Admittedly I don't try very often, but that makes it all the more disheartening when I feel like "yay, I finally have something worth sharing" and, well, no apparently I don't.
@harmonea you may be blocking a domain, which causes a bug detailed here. tl;dr blocking any domain on kbin.social right now hides any non-link entries and comments on them. removing them all fixes it, it's fixed in latest which hopefully the main site gets soon
@Gamers_mate I have only briefly used debian pup before, so I don't feel qualified to pass a judgement. To be honest, I forgot what the differences even were. It's all detailed in their home page and Barry Kauler's blog. I'm thinking about installing it on all of my computers anyway, as a helper-OS when things go south. Frugal installation, on the hard drive, bit used from a USB thumb drive (as intended)
As for daily drive, I think I'll gave to keep using #Debian or a deriviative such as #spirallinux as it is the only non-commercial backed distro that is is packaging a lot of the software that I need
You know what's nice about here...knowing I can criticize and call out any corporation, politician, or wealth hoarder without being suppressed, hidden, etc at the whim of advertisers or megalomaniacs. #Fediverse
