It's great to see so many new people joining various services.
Let's talk about some terminology to help you -- don't worry, we will keep it simple.
The #fediverse is a word used a lot. Basically, it is a way for lots of social servers to talk to each other and share posts. Like email, we are all on different email servers, but they all communicate.
When you join the fediverse, you pick a server to join. Some servers cater for niche topics. Don't worry, they still talk with the fediverse, but it means your server has people with the same interests as you. Other servers are more general.
There are various server types. Here are a few examples:
#Mastodon -- very popular; similar to Twitter. You can post messages, attach images, reply, like, share (called boosting)
#Calckey -- similar to Mastodon, but has some extra features (example, text formatting)
#Akkoma and #Misskey are also similar to Twitter but more niche
#Pixelfed is a phenomenal alternative to #Instagram. You will feel very at home there.
Importantly, all these servers talk to each other. So, if you are using Mastodon you can follow someone on Pixelfed and Lemmy and Calckey, all from your one account -- and interact with them too. How great is that?
There are NO computer algorithms in the fediverse to force content on to you. You only see posts from people you follow. So follow lots of people; you can unfollow later.
Do an #introduction post to let people know about you. Use the hashtag '#introduction' to allow others to browse collective posts and maybe follow you.
You will see I have used the # a lot here. Hashtags help others find similar posts. Use them for key topics in your post.
Don't be afraid to ask for help if you are not sure.
Import your Mastodon content/posts into your new Calckey account.
Customisable notification sounds
You can add more than 4 links in your profile.
Quote-replies! And if it's done and viewed within Calckey, the quote-reply is displayed within the original thread, too! Great way to keep context!
Better polls
You can attach more than 4 images (but only the first 4 will appear in mainline Mastodon, that is a well-known limitation of mainline Mastodon for years).
It's interesting sitting here on an old version of #Calckey seeing someone on #Mastodon server telling their fellow user that posting to unlisted will opt-out of #search when I can see Unlisted posts in my antennas quite easily though I believe this has been rightly rectified in the newest versions of [#Firefish / #Iceshrimp but need to confirm]. Being hidden from the Explore tab on Mastodon is not the same as being unsearchable across the fediverse. Frankly, there's little understanding even among admins across the #fediverse about what's a Mastodon / Mastodon API function that is federated to other Mastodon servers but doesn't translate well outside of Mastodon on other #ActivityPub connected platforms like #Misskey and it's forks, #Hubzilla and #Friendica, or rapidly growing platforms like #Lemmy and #Kbin. Kbin also scrapes posts from across the fediverse and puts them into its own magazines.
Unfortunately simple, up-to-date documentation doesn't really exist to explain the realities of federation vs what your admin said was the reality. AP was not built with privacy in mind, and 'security through obscurity' was mostly a Mastodon thing from when folks thought either the Mastoverse was almost the dark web, or the whole fediverse [which has never been the case], and Google et al weren't interested in scraping it.
Unfortunately we have a cadre of devs across all fedi platforms who'll give glowing lip-service to both the fedi and ActivityPub histories of being built by queer or other minority identities but still won't work on giving folks the granular #privacy and #safety controls that weren't included in those protocols, and whose feature roadmaps now just look like bird site 2.0 funded by the milquetoast liberals in political tech who provide their seed money.
Beyond Mastodon and GoToSocial, every other fediverse project treats posting to public as opting in to search and indexing. Indeed, this is pretty much how the ActivityPub protocol handles such too.
Hi! I am excited to share a brand new FediVerse iOS app I developed and published that works with :mastodon: Mastodon, :misskey: MissKey, and :firefish: FireFish (with BlueSky support coming next week).
Some features include:
Learns your interests from your interactions, uses smart algorithms (combined with local ML) to feature posts:firefish_bongo:
Direct Message support (extracted from direct mention notifications) 💬
Floating emoji reaction picker (long press like button)
Differentiation in the Fediverse is starting to play out in more and more pronounced ways. For most users in the Western world, it is tightly linked with Mastodon. But the Japanese Fediverse community is growing extremely rapidly, mainly using Misskey. It has grown in less than half a year from 75k accounts to 325k accounts.
The number of Misskey forks continues to expand. How do we mention them collectively? I'm veering toward Forkeys, as in "Catodon is the latest Forkey to enter the stage." or "The Forkeys have one thing in common - emoji reactions."
I suggest checking them all out - each has their own strengths. :blobcatstrong:
Fyra Labs, the makers of Ultramarine Linux, were the ones who were tracking down who the Fediverse spammers were and making it known so the authorities could deal with them.
We should introduce "Community ALT text" on Mastodon (and other fediverse softwares which has similar ALT text implementation), much like the Community notes feature on Twitter. This would be really helpful for situations where it's challenging to provide a proper description for an image.
A big hello and welcome to all the new people who've joined #blahajzone the past couple of days. It's great to have you here!
Our admins are @ada and @supakaity.
Ada leads the front of house and moderation side of Blåhaj Zone, while Kaity leads the back-end and maintains Hajkey for us & a small group of other instances.
We also have a #Lemmy server available for signups at https://lemmy.blahaj.zone and a #kbin server that's soon to be open, for those looking for #Reddit - like communities. They can also be interacted with from here or other places in the Fediverse.
👉🏾 Search will be across most Mastodon platforms
👉🏾 It will be Opt-In by default
👉🏾 #Misskey has a similar feature
👉🏾 Search by hashtags is subpar
👉🏾 Idea 💡: What about a Universal search across the entire #Fediverse‽ Including #ActivityPub blogs‽
👉🏾 #Meta can/will use RSS, crawlers & “pings” to analyze our content, making FediBlocking useless
👉🏾 Engage friends, family, etcetera, who join #Threads (Instagram’s #ActivityPub powered proxy) from your #Misskey, #Mastodon, #WriteFreely, #Pixelfed, #WordPress, et al, accounts
👉🏾 If 10% of Fediverse is not on Zuckerverse, we can win
It's kind of both equally sad and equally hilarious to see some folks in the #Mastoverse raging about Universeodon are genuinely shook to suddenly discover that the wider #Fediverse has had federated #search available for years.
When you get told that Mastodon=Fediverse and that its culture and capabilities are those of the wider Fediverse, well this is the ignorance you can expect. Many of the same folks screaming about indexing, and pushing the fediblock, still have not offered any solutions to Google already indexing everything - much wider scope than #Universeodon, or those of use on #Misskey, #Calckey, #Akkoma, etc, can achieve and it's searchable from the public web.
If you are interested in learning more about the #Mastodon spam wave that happened starting on Feb 15, do read @cappy's incident report. Very detailed breakdown.
So a problem I'm having on the #Fediverse that doesn't happen with legacy social media is that I have multiple accounts across multiple services that all show up under the same search.
I primarily use this account hosted on my personal server, but I also have accounts on my #PeerTube server for posting videos and accounts on #Mastodon Social and Misskey.io to test the bleeding edge of their software and use features my server can't support.
None of these are alts in the way that I've had Tumblr alts for specific fandoms or X alts to follow particular subjects. They're all me to the extent that using a different display name or handle doesn't make sense.
The problem occurs when people reach out to me on some of these accounts, and I miss it cause I don't regularly receive notifications from them. I can't even receive the right kind of notification from some of these accounts. For example, PeerTube doesn't get private mentions or tags (outside of video comments), and none of these services render reactions from #Misskey correctly.
#Fedi is still new to many people, and there's a learning curve to "these are all different services under one giant network powered by #ActivityPub". It makes sense that users search for my name, click the first matching account with a photo of me, and interact with that account believing I'll 100% see that interaction.
I'm not quite sure what the ideal solution is, if anyone has any #FediTips for dealing with this specific caveat of our interconnected social network.
For now, I've just added 🔕 to all my ActivityPub accounts besides my main, and hopefully that gives people enough pause to notice the account without it.
Misskey, a decentralized micro-blogging platform, is in need of financial support.
Misskey is not a business, it is a non-profit, not a company.
The only income for the project comes from your donations.
If you like Misskey, please help us continue to develop it! https://www.patreon.com/syuilo
Those who donate a certain amount may have their name added to Misskey's credit.
Thank you for contributing to the future of Fediverse! #misskey
Fediverse Report: The Roundup – episode 21 (fediversereport.com)
Differentiation in the Fediverse is starting to play out in more and more pronounced ways. For most users in the Western world, it is tightly linked with Mastodon. But the Japanese Fediverse community is growing extremely rapidly, mainly using Misskey. It has grown in less than half a year from 75k accounts to 325k accounts.