I think the disconnect is it's more like a go-between for kbin/lemmy (a forum) and mastadon (a twitter/blogging service). They're both used to communicate subtly different things, and the same exact post comes across differently depending on what platform it originated from. Their tweets are displayed in our microblogs. Our forum posts look like tweets/twitter replies containing news articles to them. If you go to any pre-cloudflare magazine, m/gaming for instance, you can see a bunch of tweets "microblogs" from mastodon users doing the equivalent of farting around on their off-time, but they're all interpreted by kbin as posts.
Which is probably for the better. If each mastodon post were interpreted on kbin as individual articles, my whole feed would be clogged up with one user's 15-tweet rant about the hole in their socks or their mentally challenged sports team or whatever. But I do still get to read and respond to them, if they happen to tweet about something I'm interested in and one of my magazines picks it up. I could theoretically send tweets out the same way if I wanted to address that whole sphere directly for whatever reason.
I get the feeling the ability to do posts ourselves is probably more useful on the whole for someone who prefers personal blogging in addition to everything else. I don't know if I'll get much if any use out of it, myself -- I came for the forum experience. But I do have it if I want.
From what I know, articles are what we would think of as a reddit post. Naming conventions, and all. They are the things you read in magazines. Posts seem to go automatically under the microblogging section. So they're very much like a collection of tweets/blog posts aimed at a specific magazine.
Therefore if it's something important you want people to see, like a news article, something to fuel discussion, etc., I feel like doing it as an article would definitely be better. Doing it as a post is basically tweeting about it. Someone will probably see it, but most may miss it
@Nepenthe I think on #kbin as it looks right now a microblog post could be easily missed if the magazine is very active but the thing is that when federation works they could also go on all the federated microblogging instances and on the home of the followers. This way they could get "points" from favs and boosts and be more visible here as well.
They could also be useful to comment realtime events, even though this will probably be a problem for the rest of the fediverse because here you don't need to put an hashtag and it's not easy for people to selectively mute them so they would probably mute the user.
I think they're super useful for realtime, that's what that stuff was built for. It's been ages since I've done stuff like that and I forgot how fun it could be. Do we really not even need hashtags, though? Am I interpreting correctly that if I were to, say, make some random comment about being sick as a dog in a microblog, that might get picked up by accounts interested in dogs? If I understand that, that seems like a disastrous oversight.
the thing is that when federation works they could also go on all the federated microblogging instances and on the home of the followers. This way they could get "points" from favs and boosts and be more visible here as well.
This may be true, fair. They're also still battling every other post in the fediverse for that, so I'm not sure how helpful that's going to prove in the long run. I'd have to see how it plays out
I'm not sure, because when you create a new post you have to select the magazine and that's already enough to end in the right place so people that don't care about federation in theory don't have an incentive to use hashtags.
Am I interpreting correctly that if I were to, say, make some random comment about being sick as a dog in a microblog, that might get picked up by accounts interested in dogs? If I understand that, that seems like a disastrous oversight.
I guess the sentence you wrote would be fine if you don't use the hashtag dog but even if you did I'm still not sure it would get picked by magazine fetching that hashtag because you are already posting from "inside" a magazine.
I think it is helping me to read the "same" response from different sources. The repeated exposure as well as the nuances of each response aggregates into a better understanding. Hopefully I can pay it forward when I come across someone else asking it!
Ngl, I chuckled a bit when I saw who Spark tagged. Out of now 137,504 users on this instance, I think we've run into each other some 4-5 times. Which isn't a bad thing, mind. Makes everything feel more like a community instead of a faceless horde.
That second reply took me a while to even put into words, and it definitely is an unusual thing to try to wrap your head around if you're not already used to federation as a default thing. I'd personally never even heard the word before a few days ago, unless it was off Star Trek. So I'm still having to break myself of seeing this as "the one and only forum that is better than all other forums and functions only as a forum." No. We're multimillions of people all using the same exact chat service from entirely different platforms. By necessity, we're going to end up with things it doesn't entirely make sense for a text forum to have, because half of us aren't on a forum. There's even Peertube, for instance.
I know I'm repeating myself, I'm just marveling at it. It's so cool.
@Nepenthe Yeah it's a weird, throwback experience to recognize some usernames on here. I have to admit I never really registered any user on Reddit — I'm sure that's mostly on me and how I used it, of course.
I get that sense of marvel. I've been feeling unsatisfied with my online experience for a while and so far this jump into the fediverse feels like it's addressing what I felt was missing.
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