@atomicpoet@nyquildotorg Any experienced writers who would like to volunteer for the Calckey documentation team, that project is about to get better organized. We could use you. Please DM Chris or me.
It feels like people are 50%/50% on the search feature on Mastodon and Fediverse in general. Some Fedi software have quite extensive search implemented already in my knowledge. Mastodon barely has any search if you don't count the open text search patch.
@rolle I might get in trouble for saying this, but there is a 90% chance that improved search (with public posts) will be in 4.2.0 final. PR (https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/pull/26344) is almost ready and we want to deploy is on m.s ASAP to get some feedback, and include it in beta 2.
Threads now has a Supplemental Privacy Policy (https://help.instagram.com/515230437301944) regarding "Third Party Services" like Mastodon. Should Threads interconnect with Mastodon via #ActivityPub, this addresses what they will do with our data.
Note that they will collect information from anyone "allowing Threads users to follow you or interact with your content". The information they collect will include your profile, your content, and your interactions.
This Supplemental Privacy Policy (https://help.instagram.com/515230437301944) also addresses what Threads will do with the information they collect. These uses include advertisements.
@mastodonmigration I thought I might re-share this for #Fediverse instance admins — in addition to #FediBlock-ing #Threads from federating with your server, here’s a list of iptables firewall commands to drop all inbound and outbound traffic to and from #Meta’s IP address ranges (including Threads). This should completely stop all interaction from Threads to your server! https://mastodon.moule.world/@MOULE/110586556696261405
An important distinction is slowly being uncovered about the definition of the term "fediverse." Who is it that gets to decide what this place is? How are we being represented? These are not easy questions to answer and if we don't do a better job describing ourselves, then the job will get done for us by people who don't understand the underlying values we hold. #fediverse#meta#threads
Eine wichtige Unterscheidung über die Definition des Begriffs "Fediversum" wird langsam deutlich. Wer entscheidet, was dieser Ort ist? Wie werden wir repräsentiert? Diese Fragen sind nicht leicht zu beantworten, und wenn wir es nicht schaffen, uns selbst besser zu beschreiben, dann wird diese Aufgabe von Leuten übernommen, die unsere grundlegenden Werte nicht verstehen. #fediversum#meta#threads
I'm changing my stance on the whole Meta/project92 thing after reading this article. I think the entire* fediverse should block project92 by default. Later, some instances can re-evaluate whether to maintain those blocks, once we have a better idea of what the benefits and consequences of federating will be:...
Thanks to everyone for sharing my project! Be sure to also check out a follow up article that shows you what you can do with your data that's available for download:
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.
@tigerjerusalem Not for nothing, but kbin has both a thread-side and microblogging-side to it. Ernest even introduced an aggregate view very recently where you can see both on the same page, formatted to their respective types of posts. You could use any view you like best. I think that flexibility is a great feature.
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.
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!
Big surprise for me was how much mastodon.social is growing (especially given the tension about its dominance).
It's current trend is to grow by the equivalent of the 23rd largest instance per month while most (ie largest) instances are growing by 2% per month (ie a few thousand, which, guessing, would be something like the 300th largest instance or so ... ie small).
Default instance blocks should largely replace defederation
Since what content users might want to see is quite unlikely to match which servers the admins tolerate, choosing instance on the Fediverse can be quite complicated, which is inconvenient and off-putting for new users.
For this reason, and simply that the Fediverse is stronger united, I believe defederation should ideally be reserved for illegal content and extreme cases. If Fediverse platforms would allow instances to simply block the rest for users by default, the user experience would be the same, unless they decide otherwise.
It already is, you just have to convince the server owner whats ‘extreme’ or not. Some servers hate liberals, others hate the right, some are followers of the windmill party and others would get you on a watchlist.
And the more mundane stuff like having porn and gore posts not tagged as NSFW will get your instance defederated.
I would love to see more middle of the road, non-extremist content. It seems that every instance is all the way left, falling off the chart, and then like 3 instances are falling off the other side of the chart, and defederated everywhere.
During my one year activity on the #Fediverse I've now seen at least four instance admins quitting from being an admin or shutting down their server. Half of these cases were admins being dickheads and the rest of them were mostly about users being dickheads leading admin getting burned out.
Both outcomes are unfortunate, but the latter makes me sad. Why do we have to harass and doxx an admin here for such pseudetical reasons like extensive open text search feature? I don't get humans sometimes.
I repeat: We are not free from toxicity on the Fediverse. Be kind. Make a chance.
@rolle People who have never been sysops do not understand what an awful slog it is.
To have the technical skills to keep your shit running AND the people skills to deal with the inevitable assholes AND the patience to deal with the well-meaning but clueless people
Btw, I've gotten really harsh criticism for just saying "Be kind"... that won't stop me from saying it. We can always be kind and I can say "be kind" out of kindness. Encouraging to kindness is not rudeness and I can't wrap my head around it why would it be anything else than focusing on the positive side of things.
There are always people who focus on negativity, pessimism and hate. Whatever hits me, I choose to smile. #Positivity#Kindness#Attitude
It always amazes me in how in discussions of the future of #ActivityPub services that moderation is generally an afterthought.
Okay, we add nomadic identity, how does that impact the ability for servers to moderate, given all moderation tooling is built on user + server identity?
Okay, we add the ability to put people on lists without following, how does that impact moderation and privacy?
@thisismissem This sort of thing drives me nuts. I've never moderated an instance or contributed to its codebase in any capacity, so my observations come with the "this may only be true in a very limited sense" warning, but...
It feels like a lot of people view the task of building a social network to be a solely technical endeavor, with no consideration for how any particular feature or system affects the social dynamic. Or maybe it's just a few admins and contributors that feel that way, but it seems to permeate the experience of using the network. sigh I don't know. I see people bouncing off Mastodon and leaving for BlueSky and I get pretty sad about it. Sorry for venting in your direction.
But many of us would rather agency over instance moderation.
I’m always focused on giving users as much control as possible over their own experiences, so shifting the balance to them and away from instance moderation is inline with my preferences.
Different people have different preferences in that question, but for a lot of us, such a shift is what we’d rather.
Mathematical italic capital h mathematical italic small e mathematical italic small l mathematical italic small l mathematical italic small o.
WTF?
Oh, I just said “Hello” to you in italics.
(That’s similar to what someone who uses a screen reader hears when you use fancy non-alphabetical Unicode characters to simulate italics or boldface on your fediverse posts. So please don’t do that.)
Perspectives is a tab that will showcase social media posts in their search results. This will give -- you guessed it -- "perspectives" on current events and other matters as well.
While Google is positioning this generating results from all social media, this also has massive implications for the #Fediverse.
I've been saying for a long time that if we Fediverse developers didn't nail search soon, Google will eat our lunch.
Well, it looks like they've just set down at a table and are studying the menu right now -- because I completely expect that the Fediverse will be present on that Perspective tabs, especially since the Fediverse is now generating 1 billion+ posts each month.
What is the next logical step for Google?
If I were putting on my Google product development hat, I'd push for full text search with near-instant results. This is very easy for Google to do. Their engineers could probably build it fast.
Meanwhile, the Fediverse is practically giving away Fediverse search to Google -- Google is what most people use to find posts on the Fediverse right now.
Are we just going to allow Google to extend their search monopoly into the Fediverse, and without a fight too?
Corporations don't just sit out on new technologies, and no matter how hard you try you can't force them to. Defederating from Meta's new project preemptively is naive, and will not do much of anything....
ITT: open-source, #FediVerse, and how it can influence private sector and create change.
Note up front: I'm going to use words like "decommodify", "consumerism", "capital", and "rentierism" a lot here, because I need the vocabulary. I am not a Marxist or some other kind of radical, nor wholesale anti-capitalist, and certainly not a revolutionary. I'm a social democrat, progressive, and reformist. Keep that in mind if you reply to me.
Something else to note: the profitability of surveilling users, collecting their data, and selling it is steadily declining. The whole adtech world is constantly climbing uphill against a landslide.
The takeaway from all this is that for-profit social platforms will eventually create a crisis for themselves. They degrade, trying to squeeze more and more profit out of an increasingly arid source, until they eventually do something stupid and blow their foot off. [13/n]
Two tactics that have actually succeeded in being an impediment to OSS have been carpetbagging (showing up and using organizational weight, presumed prestige, etc to shove out a project's leadership and take over), and de-inventing (my term: what Google did to XMPP, RSS, and is currently trying to do to email). Google has tended to employ both of these in its quest for hegemony.
If Facebook knows what they're doing, this is what they are planning to do. [17/n]
Meta joining the Fediverse is like AOL joining the internet: something that will bring a mass amount of people in, create some friction, but ultimately make the net better as more people federating on #Mastodon, #kbin, #lemmy, #pixelfed and other parts of the Fediverse make open protocols that much stronger.
And it's not like it's hard to keep away from Meta either: just defederate from them, even fork the software to break from any ActivityPub changes they inspire that one doesn't like, and create ones own parallel MetaFreeVerse.
But one should do that in the full understanding that one is going to be left with dramatically fewer people to talk to by doing that, whereas the remaining bulk of the Fedi is going to have potentially millions more people added to it to talk to.
The one thing I do think the AT Protocol is better at than #ActivityPub is data portability. Being built-in at the protocol layer so that you don’t have to do the migration shit (which doesn’t bring your posts) is better. It just is. I think ActivityPub has more potential overall for the social web beyond just Twitter clones, but that part of #ARProtocol is better.
I think data portability is incredibly important and the fact that Mastodon hasn’t prioritized that, to me, is a failing. And I say Mastodon, not ActivityPub, b/c AP does have some options there. But Mastodon wasn’t designed that way, no matter what people want to pretend. It just wasn’t. My followers/following list is only part of my data. My content is equally important.
