#BlueSky and #Fediverse developers could learn a lot from each other: right now it feels like they could learn a lot from here on moderation…but seeing their new “anyone can create and use and share their own algorithm” - that’s great and Fedi should immediately learn from, implement and improve on that idea…
As an effect of the recent Reddit blackout, the company is now surrounded by disappointed investors and community. I predict that Reddit may end up facing the same fate as Tumblr: being sold to another company. Only time will tell what the future holds for Reddit, but one thing is for sure - the protest will leave a lasting...
It’s approximately one year since the peak of the enshittification of Twitter and the big Mastodon influx. Let’s ask again: What is your main microblogging platform? Boosts welcome.
Before the whole Reddit migration I was passively aware of the Fediverse, I thought I somewhat grasped the concept, and had created a Mastodon account, but never really used it....
Hi there! I've been trying to improve the situation for the past few hours. I managed to disable CF Protection, and as you can see, I'm gradually allowing traffic from the fediverse. There may still be delays in deliveries and posts for some time. If anything is particularly troublesome, please let me know through the contact...
Feedback is extremely welcome. This is a loving document, it can only be honed and get better with loving input from other users. What are your best tips for #creators?
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.
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!
"#Mastodon is failing" so hard that #Fediverse just crossed 4mln monthly active accounts (based on the-federation.info). :blobcatgiggle:
This is already slightly more than Nov and Dec #TwitterMigration waves' peaks. And it is still going up.
What I find particularly important is that it seems like a lot of this is not new accounts, but people returning to accounts created before and then left unused.
I expect this to be a more resilient kind of growth. Less of a drop after it peaks.
I love that Mastodon has that thing where someone interacts with you, then you check them out, find out they're cool, follow them, and check out their boosts and find out they follow cool people so now you follow those other cool people as well and now you follow a whole bunch more cool people.
Under-the-radar late night launch: RSS Parrot is live! It talks like Mastodon, but it doesn't walk like Mastodon. BUT! It will relay any RSS feed straight into your timeline.
Turn Mastodon into your very own feed reader. Follow anything that has an RSS feed and get a toot about new posts.
How? Mention @birb with the address you want to follow.
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?
I'm of the opinion that #threads should not be engaged with in any way.
Not because I think it's a threat to the #fediverse, although it could potentially be.
Not because I think it will bring a huge amount of bad actors that will harass users on other instances, although that is definitely a risk.
My reason is simpler; #Facebook has done so much evil, society eroding shit, that I don't work with them on principle.
And Facebook knows that as well, which is why threads is instagram branded.
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.)
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.
I'm getting really tired of trying to run away from big tech, only to be ensnared again by the greed and/or naivety of sites who ultimately cave to the whims of big tech....
This is demonstrably false. Almost all servers that de-federate Threads still broadcast the RSS feed of your posts. This is available to everyone, even servers that are de-federated from yours.
If you don’t believe me, test this out for yourself. Append “.rss” to the end of your profile URL (exampleserver.com/@username.rss), and see what happens.
Hell, if I wanted to build a search engine for the Fediverse and not use ActivityPub, I could use RSS instead and I could index most of the Fediverse – whether you opt into it or not.
Let’s stop spreading the myth that de-federation by itself prevents Threads from accessing your public feed.
The Future of Reddit after the Blackout
As an effect of the recent Reddit blackout, the company is now surrounded by disappointed investors and community. I predict that Reddit may end up facing the same fate as Tumblr: being sold to another company. Only time will tell what the future holds for Reddit, but one thing is for sure - the protest will leave a lasting...
How familiar were you with the Fediverse before coming here?
Before the whole Reddit migration I was passively aware of the Fediverse, I thought I somewhat grasped the concept, and had created a Mastodon account, but never really used it....
Pssst... any ideas for a domain name for the new instance?
Hi there! I've been trying to improve the situation for the past few hours. I managed to disable CF Protection, and as you can see, I'm gradually allowing traffic from the fediverse. There may still be delays in deliveries and posts for some time. If anything is particularly troublesome, please let me know through the contact...
Huh, this looks like a popular post. Imma check the comments and...
Let's say the worst case scenario happens with kbin and Meta. What are some alternate sites/instances that would be more resilient to enshitification?
I'm getting really tired of trying to run away from big tech, only to be ensnared again by the greed and/or naivety of sites who ultimately cave to the whims of big tech....
OC Kbin, FUD, and Tribalism - Where do we go from here?
It finally happened: many Reddit 3rd party apps have officially shut down. With it comes an influx of users looking for a new place....