The dev, @hariette, also has a Mastodon profile where she posts updates https://tech.lgbt/@hariette. There is also a link to the apps discord server in her bio.
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.
Looks like #Lemmy and #Kbin keep being mentioned together, which to me suggests we might have averted "mastodonization" of the #threadiverse — i.e. a situation where the whole network gets identified with a single piece of software. 🎉
If there isn’t much cross-platform engagement between the #threadiverse and #mastodon, and Reddit migrants leave because of insufficient activity … is this a failure of sorts of the #fediverse ?
I’m leaning yes. If cross-platform activity is essentially irrelevant but more of a minor awkward perk at times then the fediverse doesn’t exist (yet) at the level of being a social media platform or space.
Instead, it’s a tool for FOSS platforms to scale through decentralisation.
Blahaj zone (the Calckey instance) has been running for around 6 months now. We've had a slow but constant growth of new members, with a big spike when Calckey drew a lot of attention. And as a result, even though we're not a huge instance, we are one of the larger Calckey derived instances around.
lemmy.blahaj.zone on the other hand has seen crazy growth! In the last week, our lemmy instance has gone from almost no members, to nearly as many users as our Calckey instance. The mind blowing part though, is that the lemmy instance isn't even close to being one of the largest lemmy instances. We don't even appear on the first page of Fediverse Observer! And the sheer number of lemmy instances online now is huge compared to where it was a couple of weeks ago.
And that's before we even talk about kbin and the threadiverse as a whole, of which Lemmy is only a part
I can honestly say that this whole thing has shifted my view of just what the future of the fediverse might be. I assumed it would always be microblogging centric, but now, I question that...
Funny how when #BlueSky got the first few thousand accounts all of tech media immediately started tripping one over another covering it and getting a collective aneurysm. :blobcatroll:
Meanwhile, #Threadiverse gets ~70k accounts over 2 weeks, and (with the fine exception of #Techdirt) not a peep. :blobcatgiggle:
Signs of the #RedditMigration in action: Three of the top 6 fastest growing #Fediverse servers are not only not Mastodon.social but they are not even microblogging servers - but rather are #Threadiverse servers.
That is only seriously good for the entire Fedi infrastructure. Diversity is strength.
Hariette is hard at work to create an alpha release that is stable enough to start rolling out. Follow https://kbin.social/m/ArtemisApp (!ArtemisApp for you Lemmy users) for more updates and announcements on the app....
I'm in agreement with her. While I'd like things would be different, I don't see how people can think that the fediverse / #threadiverse as it stands now is a suitable replacement for Reddit. The entire labour strike on Reddit is centered around inadequate community moderation tooling and their API-reliant alternatives threatening to become unavailable.
Lemmy is fediverse's main answer to Reddit. Moderation tooling in lemmy is severely lacking and admins put themselves and the communities they host at risk by using that software in federated mode. I wrote this github issue over a year ago: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/2277 very little has changed since.
In it, I give the example of a user account where description avatar are all slurs and hatesymbols. The account is replicated across all Lemmy instances that existed at the time that account was made, and admins can do nothing about it. For fun: try to change the domain name of the account to any lemmy instance that was around at the time.
The way the main devs are handling that issue also does not inspire tremendous confidence. I'd say in a trusted group lemmy is mature enough to use, but definitely don't turn federation on..
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.
A pic of me just browsing the @ArtemisApp magazine on Artemis.
We just coded up the last bits for the first limited release. Feeling like a real #kbin app! (#lemmy support planned for next month).
What we have in dev build:
Browse Home or the magazine of your choice
See images and open links (in app)
Login or browse anonymously
See comments (collapse threads at your will)
Vote and boost 🚀
Huge thanks to our first volounteer dev for helping w some of these! (What’s ur @ here lol?) We’re also getting an Android dev involve to help w giving as much love and care.
Open sourcing will come once we get the codebase in a good place. Kitchen gets a bit messy this early 👩🍳
A problem many have realized is that there are many /tech, /gaming etc. communities in different instances/servers. There is already https://fediverse.observer/ , so I think it wouldn't be too hard to make a service that periodically roams the fediverse, checks for example the last 100,000 submissions of each (or top 100 active...
One of the cool things about the #redditmigration & the rise of #Kbin & #Lemmy is it is a big positive to both the #threadiverse and the existing users on the Fedi:
On the Threadiverse side: Lots of brand new blood from fleeing Reddit new users now discovering the Fediverse for the first time. New blood. New ideas.
On the Masto/Fedi side:
I think many are seeing REAL federation from/to an entirely other type of Fedi platform for the first time in the wild.
It really works. Opening eyes.
Mastodon certainly has a lot of creative, unique apps. You can definitely find a fit just for you.
But I think the #Threadiverse is having it's own golden era right now with a plethora of choices for us finicky #Fediverse users. The best list I could find for #Lemmy is attached, but it's still missing a few newcomers, like @bean
Nothing near as comprehensive for #kbin yet (the API is still getting it's legs) but there is the amazing @ArtemisApp
The kbin/lemmy app is coming along. Here´s a little preview of the upcoming beta! Heavy inspiration from Apollo. The app will be available for both iOS and Android. (imgur.com)
The dev, @hariette, also has a Mastodon profile where she posts updates https://tech.lgbt/@hariette. There is also a link to the apps discord server in her bio.
OC There is a lesson to be learned here
TL;DR: We should bring blogs (self-publishing) back instead of putting all our knowledge into other people's websites....
[x-post]Private beta for Artemis App (for kbin/Lemmy) will be rolling out at the end of June 2023. (kbin.social)
Hariette is hard at work to create an alpha release that is stable enough to start rolling out. Follow https://kbin.social/m/ArtemisApp (!ArtemisApp for you Lemmy users) for more updates and announcements on the app....
Idea: Fediverse community/"subreddit" explorer
A problem many have realized is that there are many /tech, /gaming etc. communities in different instances/servers. There is already https://fediverse.observer/ , so I think it wouldn't be too hard to make a service that periodically roams the fediverse, checks for example the last 100,000 submissions of each (or top 100 active...