Forgive my ignorance, but for those of us new to the "Fediverse", how do people use different types of instances? Is it common for people to have different accounts for different types of ActivityPub instances? Even though Mastodon can federate with, say, kbin or Pixelfed, would I need to set up new accounts on the latter services to use them?
@keet While you can follow Pixelfed and Bookwyrm accounts from say Mastodon and get the updates on your Mastodon home page, you cannot use the full functionality of Pixelfed and Bookwyrm from your Mastodon account. So it makes sense to create separate accounts for each of these services. I personally have an account on Mastodon, Bookwyrm, Pixelfed and now kbin.
@keet It depends on what your intentions and needs are. If you want to only interact with the content, you can just choose the platform that fits your needs better, join an instance, and interact with other intance in and outside your social media of choice through that account.
But if you want the full functionality each can offer, having accounts on each or some of the federated social media platforms may be a good choice.
take into account that sometimes intances on certain type of social media may limit certain content that are central to other style of platform. For example some mastodon/misskey/calckey/akkoma/pleroma instances have limits on media applouding. In cases like that is better (and even suggested) to have pixelfed, peertube, and funkwhale accounts where you can post images, videos and audio (respectively) and just share the links in the microblogging servers instead of saturating say microblogging servers.
Gestern wurde wieder der Grimme Online Award (GOA) vergeben. Ich war wieder in der Jury, die im Mai die Preis-Entscheidungen fällte. Wie immer sind viele der 28 nominierten Angebote & der 8 Preisträger (Glückwunsch!) gute bis sehr gute Online-Publizistik.
Dieses Jahr allerdings hatte ich mich erstmals für eine Nachnominierung stark gemacht, die leider knapp scheiterte: Für meinen Geschmack hätte #Mastodon einen #goa23 (oder zumindest eine Nominierung) verdient. (1/8)
100% of my Redditing was done on my phone. I keep seeing a lot of people talking about #lemmy and #kbin and I’d love to give them a shot, but it doesn’t look like anything is available for apps on my iPhone. If anyone knows of any or if anyone is creating one, I’d love to not only try it out but also promote, qa, and/or help develop if possible. DMs open if anyone would like to know more or let me know more. #fediverse
Noticing some people levying that against people bringing up complaints about their experience here. It's not the spirit which I hope will prevail. Also, lazy cop out in a discussion.
@riversidebryan@jeff@SLV As a developer I feel an obligation to contribute to the code. I'm going to try and get involved with Calckey as I have the time. Love the stack choices there, as great as Mastodon is.
@psjbeisler
i believe that kbin will help to make rss a little more popular again, as kbin magazines do not boost a single post, but rss feeds for articles on kbin are available
So… am I the only one that uses Mastodon with blinders up to the grand concept of the #Fediverse?
I acknowledge it exists, I like the idea, but… it doesn’t really affect me? I don’t really understand why people feel the need to explain the concept to newcomers, and risk potentially turning them off. People these days need a 5-second sell on things.
I just see Mastodon as a mostly similar, slightly different, successor to Twitter. No reason why it can’t be explained that way.
@tashen Yeah, for some people it’s a selling point, for others it makes everything feel more complex than it needs to. I think saying you can sign up on different servers is enough, probably don’t need to dive into explaining that some are actually Mastodon and others are not. 🤷♂️
I’m very new to all of this federated stuff. One question I have is what happens to communities if a server is just taken offline without notice, indefinitely? Say the owner dies or something and they were the sole manager.
1 - I think we need to live with the fact that digital permanence probably isn’t good for us, and it probably isn’t something we can count on. I think websites and communities come in cycles, so we should collectively plan for both the boom and the bust.
2 - (respected) instance admins in Mastodon have a covenant they sign that provides a bit of a backup against this scenario: more than one admin per server (or at least have another trusted individual who can step in if the admin becomes incapacitated); backups in case of data loss on a hosting provider; and I believe at least some kind of terms of service that says racism/bigotry etc will be dealt with actively. (Correct me if I’m wrong here). I think users need to look for instances on Lemmy where admins can provide a similar set of guarantees
Edit: another point - I don’t think it’s immoral if people set up bots that can clone submissions to a backup instance in case of disaster, too. But of course there probably wouldn’t be a way to take the discussions/comments
If a server goes permanently offline, then yes, the communities hosted there are just… gone.
The same is true of corporate-owned social media, of course, so the real difference is not impermanence so much as the relative instability of grassroots social media servers. Mastodon has some pretty high profile, abrupt closures over the years, and the solution that's been evolving is to more conscientiously structure instance administration so that there's no one single point of failure. In general, that's meant:
Multiple admins with a joint ownership agreement
Regular backups to multiple locations
A transparent funding structure
Clear policies and communication around maintenance
A contingency plan in case the server needs to shut down (e.g. six months advance warning)
What I usually advise is that you look for instances that spell all of that out, either on their about page, or on an easily found and bookmarkable secondary page. And if your server offers a way to contribute to funding, that you set up a recurring donation, however small, so that one person doesn't end up footing the monthly bills all on their own.
How's your day today? I've left a cloud machine building another amd image of freebsd this time with the cc compiler on it. Now at the gym, after which is time for grocery shopping as I don't even have the basic stuff to prepare salads.
This is how Jero's cat looks at me whenever I get close.
How's your day? I'm right now in between deadlifting breaks
Stumbled upon someone who seemed completely opposed to the idea of federation and the fediverse. Like, if you are opposed to federation then why are you on here? They seemed to be pretty confused about what the fediverse is all about and likely joined due to misleading advertisements.
@InduperatorRex the person I'm talking about seemed to be on a mastodon instance, actually. But yeah. Same idea. It was probably pitched as a Twitter alternative without clarifying the federation bit
Gute Morgen #Fediverse. Das Wochenende klopft an die Tür und ich habe nicht vor es davor stehen zu lassen.
Bei der Gelegenheit: es ist interessant, wie sich das Fediverse erneut zu wandeln beginnt. Mit der Twitter Migration wurden viele, viele kurze und kürzeste Beiträge (Gedankenfetzen) in meine Timeline geschwemmt. Das scheint sich nun wieder zu ändern. Kbin und Lemmy heben mir die Links (je nach dem was ich abonniert habe) in meinen Newsfeed hinein. Es sind auch wieder längere Beiträge zu finden; kleine Abhandlungen und Erläuterungen, die ein wenig mehr in die Breite gehen, die die Dinge differenzieren und sich Zeit lassen. Das ist schön und bereichert doch sehr.
Ich bin immer wieder überrascht wie wandlungsfähig das Fediverse ist.
Rember how i had a mini rant about #Lemmy being a bad name for a program just because it drowns in searches?
Their homepage is still awful. Just the top pitch will turn away 99% of non-techies: "Lemmy, A link aggregator for the #fediverse."
Imagine looking for a #Reddit alternative for your daily shitposting and Wholesome Fantasy Art and ending up at a page filled with code and calling itself "a Link Aggregator" instead of... I don't know, "open source alternative for Reddit"?
@WhyNotZoidberg I don’t think Lemmy is as ready to take on Reddit users as mastodon was for Twitter users but Lemmy & any platform only improves as people actually use it.
@benreaves as I have tooted, the actual main page for Lemmy look like a "100 cool terminal cursor settings for bash shell ". It's not a place anyone not already completely nerded in on the fediverse would "get".
@liaizon It's self hosted, each instance trains its own dataset.
Admins can export/import spam training data, and share it amongst themselves, though the other half of the training data (ie: user posts that aren't spam) are not exportable/sharable due to privacy concerns.
Is Federating Magazines/Communities/etc a possibility in the future?
(Quite new to this, so if this is a dumb question, please beat me up gently ;))
ie; Instance 1 and Instance 2 decide to be closely federated, and share common mod and server rules and expectations. /m/fediverse share content with each other between the instances. Instance 3 wants to join, in as well, but does not share mod and server rules, so is not allowed to join in (contribute mods to the magazine really) but are able to read and post normally to @fediverse or @fediverse etc etc. kind of a consortium of server owners collaborating more closely with like minded servers and cutting down on duplicated magazines.
Perhaps this is overly complicated, I just like the concept of a distributed, mirrored service with redundancy in the event of an issue (ie server owner decides to quit, data center has outages, malicious actors damaging infrastructure, etc. I guess something like usenet was like in the early internet?
While it would be nice to be able to amalgamate some communities, I think a lot of the issue stems from redditors jumping into a server and immediately trying to recreate all of their favorite subs before understanding federation and searching to see if similar subs exist elsewhere (or considering if there are enough users to justify the existence of their niche sub when all of the communities are still relatively small and their content might fit in general communities that would benefit from more users.)
This is especially exacerbated because Kbin had a huge surge in growth while federation wasn't working and so it's users were relatively isolated from the established communities.
I imagine over time people will mostly conglomerate to the more active boards across different instances.
With news of the scab reddit apps preparing to charge $2-3 per month to stay alive, now's a good time to remind everyone that you can actually save money by only donating $1-2 per month to your favorite home server instead! That's $12 per year of savings. You can't afford to not donate in this economy....
Personally, KBIN, although it's only running beta and needs some refinement.
With any luck, I will have a Boston-based KBIN instance up this weekend (https://feddit.online). I did get a test server working on Saturday, but the Sunday update seems to have broken the build. So, I'll get back to it on Saturday and hope I can get it working. I was so looking forward to announcing it last weekend ☹️
Anyway, it's either KBIN or Lemmy at this point.
But, the Lemmy Devs appear to have a record of questionable behavior and given that the Fediverse strongly leans left, there's always a chance that someday Lemmy instances may be blocked or shunned. It may not be the best place for someone to make a home.
