@maegul@hachyderm.io
@maegul@hachyderm.io avatar

maegul

@maegul@hachyderm.io

A little bit of computing and a little bit of neuroscience.

he/him/they

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

feditips, to random
@feditips@mstdn.social avatar

I don't think people are realising the danger the Fediverse is in.

The only thing stopping corporations and VCs taking over this place is that the Fediverse is spread out on many different servers, which makes it very difficult to purchase.

If most of the Fediverse ends up on mastodon.social, which is now a strong possibility, there will be nothing to stop most of it being sold to Musk or Zuckerberg or whoever.

The bigger mastodon.social becomes, the more likely a buyout is to happen.

(1/4)

maegul,
@maegul@hachyderm.io avatar

@feditips I think this is a very important point.

It makes a lot of sense to start talking about what is required of platforms to be considered good fediverse citizens.

AFAIK, both Pixelfed and Lemmy actively encourage people to diversify into multiple servers.

Without a good set of ideas around what’s required, and why, it’s pretty meaningless to just get upset and predict nightmare scenarios. You need thought out principles and consequences.

☝️This is a good start.

atomicpoet, (edited ) to fediversenews

📰 BIG NEWS! 📰

The Misskey family of server apps just overtook Peertube to become the #2 most used platform on the Fediverse!

  • Peertube: 310,548 accounts
  • Misskey + forks (including Calckey): 315,377 accounts

While Mastodon currently dwarfs the Misskey family by orders of magnitude, Misskey is growing at a faster rate -- particularly in Japan.

But a fork of Misskey, Calckey, is beginning to gain traction in North America and Europe!

Source: https://beta.fedidb.org/software

@fediversenews

maegul,
@maegul@hachyderm.io avatar

@tom4okstate @atomicpoet I remember people having fun when they first got on Facebook. The little games and gimmicks, people were into it (from what I remember). doesn’t have a fun aspect at all.

When you go check out a calckey/misskey instance (natively on the web) it’s very obvious that they’re having fun.

maegul, to random
@maegul@hachyderm.io avatar

If you haven’t already, go checkout . The fediverse with a different and fun vibe. Some sample links below.

Lead Dev profile: https://calckey.social/@kainoa (@kainoa )
Animated text!?: https://calckey.social/notes/9dxgjs8pcc (@box464 )
Great reply threading: https://blahaj.zone/notes/9dzrvwwgun (@RiversideBryan )
Custom fonts??: https://calckey.social/notes/9dtn138g6j (@MariaTheMartian )

From: @atomicpoet
https://mastodon.social/@atomicpoet/110267528458279999

maegul,
@maegul@hachyderm.io avatar

@kainoa “reading through cheat sheet” …

Bold, quote, code blocks … good stuff.
Math/latex … great!

Flip??!! … what!

Fonts! Sizes!! ANIMATIONS!!!!! … What is going on here!!! 👑

psychictides, to random

deleted_by_author

    •
    maegul,
    @maegul@hachyderm.io avatar

    @Benfell @psychictides for me I was weirded out by the fact that it was all just an analysis of other people’s poll data. As a scientist, where any good scientist knows to be suspicious of the analysis and statistical results, it was hilarious to see a guy get hype for doing the snake-oil part of science.

    Like, couldn’t he have started his own polling process based on his statistical insights?!

    Funny how his arc parallels the data-science bubble or hype-curve.

    maegul,
    @maegul@hachyderm.io avatar

    @Benfell @psychictides well in Nate Silver’s case, and the rise of data journalism, I’m not sure such hard divisions really matter any more, which isn’t to mention the flimsy and meaningless and shallow work that passes as science because it’s got a p-test and gets published in a journal.

    atomicpoet, (edited ) to fediversenews

    "What if Google starts their own Google-branded Fediverse instance?"

    They already did.

    Google Buzz used OStatus as part of its protocol stack.

    OStatus later evolved into ActivityPub.

    As for Google Buzz? Like most Google social media projects, it died -- later to be replaced by Google+.

    @fediversenews

    maegul,
    @maegul@hachyderm.io avatar

    @kevinyoung my memory of it is that many thought it was good but ended up just staying on Facebook because that’s where people were, and the greater amount of manual control you had in Google+ was good in theory but annoying in practice for enough people that it just never really stood a chance.

    Lessons for v big social? (An exercise for the reader)

    erlend, to fediverse
    @erlend@writing.exchange avatar

    https://blog.erlend.sh/fragmentations-in-the-fediverse

    Drawing preemptive lines in the sand is not conducive to a healthy . In fact, it could very well be its downfall. Large scale separation is antithetical to the social fabric of the world wide web.

    Can we take a breather here?

    Hostile VC takeovers are very far down the list of problems facing our nascent community of fedizens. Onboarding and retention on the other hand is easily in the top 3.

    We need:
    Account migrations
    Account aliases
    Account sovereignty

    maegul,
    @maegul@hachyderm.io avatar

    @erlend I agree both with you and @feditips, through a synthesis of sorts:

    Are we talking about symptoms or causes/diseases?
    @feditips is highlighting symptoms, which if left untreated can evolve into new and worse symptoms.

    You’re more focused on causes/diseases (ie, the UX story around instances is sub-optimal), and making the argument that targeting the symptoms too dramatically will simply cause unwanted side effects.

    I think both approaches have a place.

    maegul, (edited )
    @maegul@hachyderm.io avatar

    @erlend @feditips The value of the approach of @feditips (compared, say, to happily mastodon focused advocacy such as from @davidslifka ), IMO, is that fundamental it recognises is an organisation with its own motives, assets and power, which ultimately deserves, to some extent, an antagonistic position, or at least preemptively canvassing as much.

    Mastodon may raise all boats and still be a problematic fediverse actor.

    maegul, to random
    @maegul@hachyderm.io avatar

    Reflecting on as a whole (as one who enjoyed S1 and S3, but not S2, at all), I think maybe the mistake at the beginning (Stewart's fault it seems) was to be allergic to fan-service and TNG reunions.

    With S3, obviously, it happened anyway, and everyone ate it up.

    In hindsight, S1 was maybe too entitled and committed to doing its own thing.

    The better approach would have been to try to intertwine new stories with S3-like TNG reunions. Aim for a continuous "best of both worlds".

    maegul,
    @maegul@hachyderm.io avatar

    @moira all round agree!

    jo, to fediverse

    I saw @Uraael mention how their engagement had really skyrocketed with the influx of folks from at calckey.social and they posted a screenshot of their activity graph. Thought I'd heck mine, too.

    Yeah, that's absolutely crazy. 😅

    maegul,
    @maegul@hachyderm.io avatar

    @jo @Uraael ooooh … is there a migration happening? Are there any other numbers showing this? Definitely interesting to see … do you know why exactly it’s happening?

    maegul,
    @maegul@hachyderm.io avatar

    @jo One thing that attracted me to (in conversation with a recent migrant to there) was that it's a nodejs based codebase, which makes it more likely that I'd one day dig into the internals (than say Ruby/Mastodon or Elixir/Akkoma).

    How do you find developing a *key platform? Is being based a factor in your liking it?

    wihtlore, to random

    Just watched Nemesis for the first time in 20 years. Yeah it’s not brilliant, but it’s fun enough. Doesn’t deserve all the hate — a lot of it, just not all.

    maegul,
    @maegul@hachyderm.io avatar

    @wihtlore that makes sense. I think at the time it really felt like it was a waste of space. Like it felt like there really wasn’t a point to the movie and it was made because they could. Similarly, there were enough “off the mark” vibes that lost many fans by the half way point of the film. The buggy chase scene. The clone that didn’t look like a clone. B4 out of nowhere for no reason.

    maegul, (edited )
    @maegul@hachyderm.io avatar

    @wihtlore I also recall the depiction of the romulan senate being off-putting. Many of us understood that Romulans are space Romans. But the strong parallels (down to political office names) were always pretty sparse so as to avoid being completely on the nose.

    The senate in Nemesis, IIRC, was depicted as straight-up Roman. For anyone who picked that up, it just felt like “why! We all get it, but you have to keep it somewhat alien for gods sake! Don’t you watch Star Trek!”

    streetartutopia, to random
    @streetartutopia@mastodon.online avatar

    And Earth Without Art is Just Eh

    maegul,
    @maegul@hachyderm.io avatar

    @streetartutopia Really should be an alt-text on this one:

    "
    Graffiti with a speech bubble containing the following text:

    There will always be
    A "lie" in believe
    An "over" in lover
    An "end" in friend
    An "us" in trust
    And an "if" in life
    "

    mcc, to random
    @mcc@mastodon.social avatar

    Inchoate thoughts, no particular conclusion:

    I have a split, in what I want for Mastodon/"The Fediverse"/Decentralized Social Media, between

    "What I want out of the service I use"

    and

    "What I want to exist in the world".

    The two goals conflict, in part because a big component of "what I want to exist" is I want Twitter to die. Actually end.

    There are elements I think are necessary for a Twitter successor "everybody" moves over to, but which I personally wouldn't want to use a service with.

    maegul,
    @maegul@hachyderm.io avatar

    @mcc I think I’m totally with you on all of this.

    I’ve kinda been thinking about it from the perspective of what broadly makes a good fediverse (where the current one isn’t good IMO) and I’ve been vaguely reaching for what you’ve said hear.

    thomasfuchs, to random
    @thomasfuchs@hachyderm.io avatar

    By the by, many people on BlueSky are mentioning how Mastodon didn’t feel welcoming and was very confusing.

    Especially people from marginalized communities like Black Twitter.

    maegul,
    @maegul@hachyderm.io avatar

    @emmah @torb @thomasfuchs “website boy”?

    anildash, to random
    @anildash@me.dm avatar

    Been playing around with Bluesky a bit & it’s pretty interesting. They have an easier consumer experience (signup/discovery/UI works like Twitter) and it all feels very snappy. I like how they use domain names (or subdomains) instead of what look like funky email addresses. By far the biggest problem Jay & co face is that Jack Dorsey has effectively poisoned the well on everything from people assuming it’s a crypto platform (it’s not) to assuming (understandably) that be bad at trust & safety.

    maegul,
    @maegul@hachyderm.io avatar

    @anildash
    You don't think the (allegedly) better "nomadic" identity (or account mobility) built into AT Protocol is worth making a new protocol over?

    Do you think the same functionality could be added to ActivityPub despite the ATProtocol claims?

    maegul,
    @maegul@hachyderm.io avatar

    @oblomov @anildash I don’t know, but my understanding is that hubzilla and streams (and the zot protocol) provide nomadic identity within their own platforms/protocol. With their own zot protocol, I think they’re much more akin to AT Protocol and BlueSky, and, I’m guessing, don’t add anything to ActicityPub that can be picked up by other ActivityPub platforms.

    maegul, to fediverse
    @maegul@hachyderm.io avatar

    With 's dominance on the , I think it's worthwhile to conceptualise what it means for a platform to be a good or bad citizen on the fediverse.

    In mastodon's case, I think the argument could be made that more could be done to promote diversity (in both masto-instances and other platforms). Can't have fediverse without diverse.

    Interestingly, by comparison, @pixelfed impose a default limit of 1000 users per instance for exactly this reason: diversity.

    https://mastodon.social/@pixelfed/110253230361422399

    maegul, (edited ) to fediverse
    @maegul@hachyderm.io avatar

    So, reading @anildash on the existence of cultural barriers to broader growth in Mastodon (link below) got me thinking.

    There's clearly a spectrum here along a safety - virality/growth axis) (or vulnerable-privileged?).

    Given possible upcoming changes to , eg QTs, and maybe search, is Mastodon heading to an effective software forking moment of some sort?

    Feels like culturally it's already happened but could yet easily manifest at the software lvl.

    https://me.dm/@anildash/110252376733242467

    @fedidevs

    maegul,
    @maegul@hachyderm.io avatar

    There could be forks made of Mastodon with a number of current mastodon instances simply running with the preferred flavour.

    Alternative platforms could gain traction, though I'm not sure how many cater to those who require "safety" features.

    There are many possibilities here, but in a demonstration of how much the instances/admins matter, none of it matters unless someone is happily running a large enough instance with the desired software/masto-fork.

    bastianallgeier, to random
    @bastianallgeier@mastodon.social avatar

    I couldn’t be less interested in Bluesky - another Jack Dorsey experiment. As if we learned nothing from the past.

    But it’s also interesting to see how Mastodon‘s flaws are now used as an argument. No quote feature? Instances are hard to find? We need an entirely new platform with better UX. As if this was unfixable.

    It’s the restlessness of an industry that no longer seems to be able to overcome any form of discomfort and leaves at the slightest hint of hype for a new place.

    maegul,
    @maegul@hachyderm.io avatar

    @avuko @bastianallgeier I think it’s low-key, and rather subtle but widespread, one of the major hindrances to growth for Mastodon, for better or worse.

    It’s an interesting though-experiment: what if migrants were given their own instances to populate and build from the ground up like migrants IRL often do, creating distinct sub-cultures but interacting through federation? I feel like a good social federation would have done that.

    maegul,
    @maegul@hachyderm.io avatar

    @avuko @bastianallgeier A much more awkward extension to this is whether there’s a “central” cultural majority that want things to be “nice” but not restricted (in features such as search etc) by the need to protect the vulnerable.

    How big is this majority? I’d imagine large.

    Would they prefer to populate a new place with better features? Yes.

    Would they be happy to leave the vulnerable behind on a niche platform with an “odd” culture and fewer features? Yea.

    maegul,
    @maegul@hachyderm.io avatar

    @avuko @bastianallgeier And perhaps most significantly, would such a place/platform attract more businesses, institutions, influencers and broadcasters, which then attract more users etc? Probably.

    The interesting part for those us not vulnerable to abuse etc is whether such a place could provide a diverse enough culture, feature set and federated flexibility to be everything we want in social media from the fediverse? Would we join? If our friends are there? Heros?

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