@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
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.
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.
@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.
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!
@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.
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
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.
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
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!