@gbhnews
(TL;DR, cut the unnecessary predatory parasitic middlemen.)
This is the way to make the content you work so hard to produce directly available to the public in a familiar, easy to consume post/microblog format without the need for us to login through abusive external intermediaries that siphon and exploit users' personal information and don't even provide you any tangible benefit in return.
@TCatInReality@Hey_Beth@gbhnews@Dragon i honestly think it is exactly like the 1990s with the birth of the web. Media just doesn't "get" the advantage of the open social web yet, they are still wrapped up in the previous paradigm. They will get there though.
I do believe more #mastodon users should use #BlueSky there’s a lot that the team and users in general can learn from those in the #fediverse and clear up misconceptions
Tech people, especially OSS folk, expect non-tech folk to do way more work than is realistic. Our decision to underinvest and under-prioritize both marketing and user experience design, is directly responsible for people choosing different options.
But rather than internalize this as "How can we onboard better / explain value better / increase safety?" We tend to externalize it as "Why don't they get it?"
@supernovae@damonoutlaw@mekkaokereke@atomicpoet Here's a list I put together of things I read and heard in case it's helpful. Haven't shared publicly til now, but feel free to share if helpful.
Looking back at it in the context of this discussion, it clarifies why some people would feel more comfortable on a nascent BlueSky than on Mastodon as it exists today.
what do we have to do to make the #ActivityPub plugin attractive to more #WordPress users? We are currently at 4000+ active users on WordPress.org + the WordPress.com users.
I think what Stefan may be talking about is a kind of directory that lists available fediverse wordpress blog accounts, perhaps along with the profile description and gives you the option to follow them.
@pfefferle I would love to see ActivityPub get put into WordPress Core, and an interface developed capable of reading articles from other ActivityPub-enabled WordPress blogs.
One real headache we have right now with @wedistribute is that we want to output our articles as the Article type, but Mastodon doesn't support that. We can switch to Note, but that's more of a social status thing, rather than something specifically intended for publishing platforms and readers.
I think a picture of what this could ultimately might look like is:
Make ActivityPub a standard thing in every blog that's easy to turn on.
Add sections to the dashboard for user following and notifications of ActivityPub interactions.
Turn the like, bookmark, and reply functions into ActivityPub actions.
incorporate it in such a way that articles, likes, and responses can be seen within the WordPress dashboard.
The dashboard also has a section for following feeds. Basically, the WordPress.com reader, but ActivityPub-powered, and a standard part of WordPress.
I’ve been using fediverse stuff (Mastodon and, most recently, Calckey – I’m just going to use “Mastodon” as shorthand here, purists can bite me) for over a year now, a…
So its done! I finally released a fairly easy to install (from scratch) Hugo based Static Site generator with full ActivityPub support.
It has step-by-step instructions on how to set it up for your own blog or static website.
One of the coolest features for me, other than having your static site blog posts show up as posts in the Fediverse is the support for interacting with those posts. Any replies you leave, likes, or boosts will show up in the "comments" section of the website on the page associated with the post. How cool is that!
@testing Not a bug.. i changed some things about how the site renders its pages so it broke old boosts knowingly.. but it continues to work properly.. thats just a "ghost"
So now I'm being told that a few people on a instance with 1000s of users who complain that you don't use CW or alt-text the way they want can result in your being blocked for the entire instance, even when you've never received any notification of this.
Sort of like how you'd get arrested in fascist countries and never told why. Kafka would recognize this for sure.
I would assert that this makes #Mastodon even more of a toy than I thought it was, and utterly unreliable for much beyond trading photos of kitties. Leela the Siamese Snowshoe approves of kitty photos of course, but beyond that anyone depending on #Mastodon might charitably be called "misguided" at best, if my understanding of the situation is correct.
And I feel that the public needs to understand that they're buying into this sort of nonsense if they're looking at #Mastodon as an alternative to Elon's #Twitter hellscape.
@lauren The culture here is weird and unpredictable in ways I still can't wrap my head around. I was reported, and blocked from a mid-sized instance, for being a "white supremacist" because I posted a thread about ways the DM mechanism here is broken and has non-intuitive semantics, and then reported (but not instance blocked, apparently) because I refused to edit my year-old blog post on Faraday cages to suit a stranger's preferences.
@steely_glint I'm frankly done with self-appointed morality police trying to guilt me into becoming a bland, insubstantial version of myself, especially when they do so by exaggerating the (legitimate) need to protect others from real harm.
Don't like politics? Fine. Don't follow people who post about it. But if some political discussion gets through, you'll probably survive.
Having spent a lot of time on Mastodon... There are tons of people there talking about federated and self-hosted services, software freedom, censorship, encryption, tech regulation... A very narrow range of topics directly surrounding the fediverse get a lot of attention....
I echo that worry - having to leave posts behind when migrating - and add to it another:
The situation where you click on a post and you don't see all the replies, unless you go to its original location on its original instance. Then of course you can't interact with it (or the new replies you've now found) from there.
Wenn ich wissen möchte, was im #Fediverse (und nicht nur auf meiner Instanz) zu einem bestimmten Thema geschrieben wird (z.B. dem Fortgang der Rettungsarbeiten am vor Ameland havarierten Schiff #FremantleHighway) – WIE GEHT DAS?? Wieso kann ich nicht suchen? Warum finde ich nix unter dem Hashtag? 😩😩
@janboehm@map es sind ein paar angefragt. Leider ist immer bisschen undurchsichtig, welche noch aktiv sind. Ggf. sollten wir einen eigenen Relais-Server einrichten. Ich schreibs mal auf die Liste.
There’s been a lot of speculation around what Threads will be and what it means for Mastodon. We’ve put together some of the most common questions and our responses based on what was launched today.
As more and more instances are providing multiple services under the same management, we need a term to talk about this type of arrangement. A Fediverse Galaxy is a collection of federated software that is provided by the same admin or collective.
@christian feel free to play with the term. I was just trying to document a thing I was seeing and give it a name. Not really that familiar with the Tor world
Most Fediverse software supports image uploads, so there's no reason to use Imgur for image hosting. Hell, even on my small single-user server (atomicpoet.org), image hosting is easy peasy. Not only is Imgur not needed, they're an annoyance for those of us who are used to seeing images natively on the Fediverse....
@gbhnews I mostly use the web app phanby.social, with its great and constantly improving interface. But I also keep Ice Cubes handy because it lets me easily browse and interact with the local timelines of other instances such as newsie.social and fediscience.org.
@gbhnews@voron It’s Toot! and I wish more folks would give it a try. The access to other instances makes for a really well-rounded Masto experience, and it covers every other base beautifully. @tootapp
Hey everyone, super excited to be exploring the fediverse both here on kbin and elsewhere. Looking for a Mastodon client primarily for iOS, great to see the main app is open-source, but there seems to be quite a few options out there. Feel free to share non-iOS clients for others' benefit as well....
If you're on a centralised platform like Reddit, this is what they can do. Centralised platforms have all-powerful leaders who can do whatever they want, and you have no alternatives if you disagree.
The point of the Fediverse being on lots of servers is that each server's power is limited. If you disagree with one server's actions, you can move.
p.s. Have had lot of people asking similar questions, so here are some answers:
Kbin's website is at https://kbin.pub, they have a flagship server at https://kbin.social. There's no app yet, but you can use Kbin servers through their websites.
The lead developer of Kbin is @ernest, at the moment that's the account to follow for news on the project.
@aral this is what basically happened with XMPP. All big players joined, only to build walled gardens later and excluding anyone that had their smaller servers.
@pls@aral I used to run my own email server. I did everything I could to make sure my server did all of the SPF and DKIM stuff correctly. I made sure I wasn’t on any public blocklists. I wasn’t spamming. But I discovered that some people would just silently not receive email I sent. Apple mail and Gmail addresses were common examples. There was no appeals process or even acknowledgment that my server was being blocked. So eventually I had to give up and move to a commercial email provider that was big enough that the major mail providers couldn’t just ignore.
For #ActivityPub the question of "Why use #LinkedData?" has never been answered. There should be clear merits to wade through all the complexity that this choice brings, right?
Yes, its ultra flexible, and you can define your own semantic #ontologies, and theoretically it could provide a robust extension mechanism to AP protocol. Except that right now it doesn't.
What's the vision of a Linked Data #Fediverse? What great innovative #SocialNetworking#UX would it bring, that makes it worthwhile?
@smallcircles In a lot of ways I think we keep circling back to the same point:
There is a lot of aesthetic nicety to a lot of the linked data concepts.
That aesthetic nicety has a lot of theoretical benefits and in theory there is no difference between theory and practice.
Realizing that benefit and making it usable is an increadibly difficult problem to the degree where it may not even be solvable in a generalized sense.
@smallcircles@edsu@steve@helge
We're working on https://www.valueflo.ws/ as a vocabulary for economic networks and one of our future target implementations is Activity Pub and the Fediverse. So to the extent that gets some traction, it will be all about interop.
> What great innovative #SocialNetworking#UX would it bring, that makes it worthwhile?
That will be the equivalent of million-dollar ERP systems but for P2P networks of small nodes.
A growing number of instances (mainly of Mastodon so far) are signing an 'Anti-Meta Fedi Pact', pledging to block any instance owned by Meta in the fediverse....
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 Yeah, lots of the people I knew from Twitter who joined Mastodon fell away from it quickly, saying they just didn't 'get it'. I think they're now all on BlueSky. I blame the latter years of Twitter where everyone just passively absorbed everything.
It took me a while to find my feet here but I did it by actively boosting, liking and replying to posts, finding and following hashtags, then people. And now I have a really nice feed and lots of interesting people and photos and conversations!
