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
I just found this list of the current top 10,000 most followed users on the Mastodon part of the fediverse. It's interesting to see what the fediverse looks like from that perspective. I do wish we had something like this fediverse wide but appreciate the work that has gone into compiling this list specifically for Mastodon. #fediverse#mastodonmost-followed-masotodon-accoun…
Most folks on the #Fediverse will go - I told you so! But #Substack's design and content choices is fostering a social "class" system of elites, followers and outsiders.
To read this post you'd need to subscribe. It's a sensitive one.
Found 17 new servers found and 18 servers de-listed since 13 hours ago. Check out the Monthly and Daily Stats by software or server or the entire fediverse.
24,632 servers checked. 13,046,546 Total Users, 1,719,080 Monthly Active Users today vs 1,719,715 yesterday for the entire fediverse.
#Misskey and #Firefish Advent Calendars - learn something new about these platforms each day of December! It feels very indieweb / geocities and I love it.
My fellow english speakers - it will require the use of a translation service, but those are in about every browser nowadays, so no excuses.
Side note: What word keeps being translated as "mackeral" - is it "platform" or "instance"? 😆
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.
I should take a break from whining about #ActivityPub to crow about my big breakthrough. Today, I successfully sent my first messages and replies between #Emissary and #Mastodon. And all it required was a complete overhaul the custom ActivityPub outbox.
It’s a small step forward, but a huge milestone for me. Hopefully, it will translate to big wins for other devs who can use my #Golang libraries in the future.
I see #ElonMusk is saying that if X (formally Twitter) goes to the wall, it will be the 'advertisers [that] bankrupted the company'... once again he seems unable to see that is a symptom not the cause of X's problems; which of course lies with him.
I guess we'll be seeing another flow of folk into the #fediverse if the advertisers 'strike' continues (s many think it will).
Its an extraordinary example of billionaire hubris!
Found 41 new servers found and 40 servers de-listed since 9 hours ago. Check out the Monthly and Daily Stats by software or server or the entire fediverse.
24,640 servers checked. 13,025,774 Total Users, 1,704,030 Monthly Active Users today vs 1,719,117 yesterday for the entire fediverse.
To clarify -- the below feature lets you use the same credentials for PixelFed to create a new PixelFed account, importing your avatar, bio and followed accounts.
ORIGINAL:
Apparently, it is possible to use one's Mastodon account to log into Pixelfed. Is it possible to do that with Bookwyrm and Peertube? I'd like to have a seamless login instead of having to create separate accounts for each service I want to use:
