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.
Way more interesting and healthy fediverse news is happening in the shadows and is barely getting discussed! Which is: Discourse has federation between different instances of itself and other #fediverse software such as Mastodon working!
@liaizon Stuff like this will make engaging with new online groups much easier - no need to create a new account for every single place you want to comment at.
I moderate a forum (it uses nodebb) and spam is always a concern, but then the fediverse concept of distributed server moderation and banning entire untrusted servers should help to alleviate that somewhat.
Hey y’all, it’s been a while. Had a rough month with a flare up of my chronic pain. Doing better now and had a chance to recharge. And I’m so dying to get back to contributing to the #fediverse community ✨❤️
@ernest
I've noticed this week that I'm currently seeing no visual indication that the boost button is active. No underline, color, or anything.
It seems that a now-broken userstyle I'm using expects there to be an "active" class applied to the element, but it isn't anymore. Is that intentional?
Figured I should point this out to you in case you don't know already.
@Pamasich@ernest Can confirm that this is an issue. I brought attention to it a short while back, and there are also some bugs with the visuals for vote buttons not consistently working as they should.
@dansup sad to hear. One of the reasons we decided to ask people to subscribe for Murmel upfront. While we are all for freedom of the web, it’s unrealistic to expect that anything running on a single person or a small-team’s voluntary effort will survive over the long-term. Life happens.
Threads: I'm in a wrong party and don't know what to say. I feel awkward, everyone is so happy with their gym selfies. Everyone asking endless questions and asking things from the algorithm. Lots of people use it like Instagram, every post is a selfie with a meaningless caption. Some are copy-pasting the same sentence over and over again for each line. Endless quote-post memes... What the fuck is this shit I don't even...
Bluesky: A Twitter clone, but still very barebones. Notifications are still not working, there are no hashtags and I don't find any relevant content to me in any of the feeds. It's mostly Facebook-like what's up in life, furry scene and AI photos. No news, no tech/web scene, no nothing. Not to mention it's still invite-only and won't support ActivityPub (yeah I know the reasoning behind that but for me it's mostly bullshit, I look forward to trying bridgy fed).
Mastodon and the Fediverse: Here I'm at home on my own server. Most content, most features. A community is friendly but has also lots of nitpicking, some angry dudes. Still the most safest, most healthy and most customized, but somehow the most hated network elsewhere. "Too techie", they say. "Too difficult", they say. "No algorithm", they say.
Nostr: Kinda promising, but way too obscure, strange and even techier than Mastodon. Too much crypto shit.
Well, that's that. Sometimes I feel like Internet is ruined. But I believe in the open social web movement and I want to see this grow.
In no other place I can write a status update as freely as this, as long as this or with a low bar as this. I LIKE this 100%. The same can't be said in those other places I'm experimenting with out of curiosity. There I'm the weird kid. Here I feel like myself.
I'd argue that we're stuck cause we're buying into their framing. decentralized social media is a technology, not a corporate platform. email is the best comparison. if you could only email with other Gmail accounts but Gmail was huge with lots of nice features, many would be happy with that. Same with Outlook. But when we explain it obviously shouldn't work that way, they'd have no argument. We're clunky like email was at first, but we'll obviously get better with more user adoption.
OK Enough playing with the new Friendica...back to the tasks I am supposed to be doing. The Bluesky bridge, the thing I've been looking forward to the most seems to be working very well. Posts from Friendica shows up there, with proper segmentation if longer than their paltry 300 character limit. Following an account from the Friendica side propagates over to the Bluesky Account. Reshares/likes/comments on Bluesky posts done in Friendica are properly reflected there. Reshares/likes/comments on fediverse posts do not show up over there, as expected. The Bluesky content is not federated to other fediverse servers, as expected. I can't even get it to come up with a direct link search. So all thumbs up! The only hiccup I've found so far is posts that are reflected from Friendica to Bluesky seem to show up in Relatica as from my Bluesky user when they are split up. Still overall excellent work to everyone that worked on it, especially @heluecht #friendica#fediverse#BlueSky
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 don't know who needs to hear this, but the #fediverse does not need a dating app. Please please please do not create a dating app here at least until we fix some fairly substantive issues around trust and safety.
@hrefna
"until we fix some fairly substantive issues around trust and safety"
Given the number of people using dating apps, and the impact these can have on people's lives. I would like to see this happen one day. Commercial dating apps have a conflict of interest - if you find the love of your life they lose a customer. I don't use dating apps but if there was one with community ownership I might
@hrefna That is a mind-bendingly bad idea. I almost want to see it happen just to watch the train-wreck, and then I feel bad for thinking that, because it would be actually just plain bad.
The FOSS user-empathy-free design.
The complete misapplication of cryptography.
Some dodgy dude running a server and reading the DMs.
Trust and safety being planned for v2.
A careful design being hard, so the only implementation is someone YOLOing.
A new episode of Dot Social, the first podcast about the open social web, is out! In it, Flipboard CEO @mike chats with ActivityPub co-author @evan about what the protocol unlocks for builders and entrepreneurs, how open-source social networks change our relationships to content and each other, and why any of this matters at all. Learn more and take a listen!
I've submitted the second to last #kbin#API PR for review! This PR adds thread and thread comment retrieval, creation, deletion, editing, voting, reporting, and moderation functionality to the API! The last PR will be very similar to this one, except for microblogs!
Didn't you have the API 'complete' like 2 months ago?
Yes, but it did not have any tests written to verify that it worked. These PRs have been resolving that issue so that there can be at least some guarantees that the API works when it gets onto kbin.social and others
(Also, please remember to buy @ernest a coffee if you are able, he's been burning the candle at both ends to support kbin.social and deal with personal business)
