The response to this thread on Bluesky seems to be, “Saying that regular people should be able to afford a BGS is like saying they should afford to operate a web search engine”.
Indeed, that’s what I’m saying.
Funny enough, the Searx project makes this possible.
@atomicpoet I don’t see why not, but it would probably take some thought to do properly. All of each user’s data is held inside the one PDS blob - the signed merkle tree. The idea is it can be easily synced between client and multiple servers by walking the tree. Once you start stuffing multi megabyte chunks in there you’ll start hitting all sorts of unexpected performance issues.
People are really looking at the Fediverse with Western eyes and aren't considering the fact that in Japan, #Misskey is many peoples' first exposure to the Fediverse.
#Calckey is building on what Misskey has already made. But really, Calckey is exposing the West to the world of *key apps.
@atomicpoet I'm old enough to remember when Push Computing was supposed to be the Next Big Thing, and it collapsed under its own weight due to corporate interests building their own proprietary stacks that never achieved the the critical mass to survive.
Two decades later, ActivityPub looks like the protocol to FINALLY realize that potential, so thinking in such narrow terms of this just being social networking really misses the larger point. I see it as changing things the same way RSS did.
@atomicpoet
I've tried many Social Media Apps over the years, and they all disappointed because there was very little going on there.
But I still kept trying because I'm curious. Now, if you develop a new Fediverse Social Media App, there is already a huge community baked in and waiting.
That's why I think we are heading for interesting times in the Fediverse because all these developers are having a go and are now building on a large and growing community.
@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.
If you're trying to sign up for https://calckey.social, you may have noticed there's a notice saying that registrations are disabled above the registration form. This notice is not accurate.
It is actually a bug, and I've filed it as one in the repo:
@atomicpoet yep, I know .social is growing recently, so it was expected. I'm thankful for the efforts the admins are doing to escalate the server. The same happened to me when joined pixelfed.social before.
But it's also not entirely @gruber's fault because the media doesn't really talk about the Fediverse, and when they do, it's as a synonym for "Mastodon".
How would @gruber know about the massive development efforts to build more user-friendly alternatives to Mastodon?
No one in the media talks about the growth of *key apps, and how they're now the #2 most used Fediverse platform.
Whenever I tell people that Mastodon isn't the Fediverse, the Mastodon stans start saying, "Oh, you sound like a guy who's complains that Linux isn't called GNU/Linux."
No, there's a massive difference.
To most people, whether you call something Linux or GNU/Linux doesn't affect the user experience of using the OS.
Referring to the Fediverse as "Mastodon" definitely affects the user experience of using Mastodon.
And it is because they claim that people are confused when they are going to chose a server.
I personally, think that changing the word "server" to "community" during the signup process would make the process easier for new users (I think/hope).
@atomicpoet@oblomov One simple solution to this that maybe @Gargron could consider: have the #Mastodon app cycle through numerous different instances (say 100) as the default sign up instead of just @Mastodon.
This would make on boarding easy for the user as well as promo decentralization at the same time. Of course, the other admins would have to agree to receiving a lot of traffic.
Plus it would be helpful if those instances had “mastodon” in their name to avoid confusing new users.
@jupiter_rowland@mathiashttps://thias.hellqui.st/users/m@luca
I am aware that Mast, *oma, and *key are separate things that run on AP. I didn't understand that when I got here, and I imagine most people don't. The only thing I was confused about is how you could run Akkoma with a Mast front end--since they are different. I was expressing what I thought new users might be confused about.
I hope you're not always that harsh with people who don't understand how the Fediverse works.
@Cassandra Ah, okay. No, that's often a very effective style of telling those who are still fully convinced that the Fediverse is only Mastodon that this is not the case.
But I think I recall having read something about Akkoma supporting the Mastodon API. That, and there are some more general-purpose apps to the point that you can connect them to just about everything that's neither Hubzilla nor (streams).