I love how @wordpress just randomly decides to stop collecting stats. Then one day I'll open the #Jetpack dashboard and find it telling me to activate stats again. That invariably says it failed, but actually works (reloading the page shows it). But then there is a gap where it decided not to bother collecting information.
Like below where apparently at some point on January 8/9 it just deactivated itself.
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 think one of the biggest practical hurdles here is the authorized fetch issue which prevents some Mastodon instances from correctly federating with lemmy and peertube. From what I understand the issue there is actually Lemmy-side, so that probably needs a serious look at first.
I appreciate that. I’m starting to understand that while I have been hoarding these links like a dragon, most folks are not aware that this is a thing at all. That said, the community is still fairly small and following the 90-9-1 rule we should only expect to have 3 regular posters anyway. I really wish authorized fetch was working for Lemmy as I feel like some crossover with the academic circles of Mastodon would be a gamechanger for growth. This post was actually a repost so that I could pin it on my new Mastodon account and I think we saw substantial subscriber growth from it. Unfortunately, on some instances the user can follow but will not see future posts.
Can we PLEASE make the top bar be customizable already? Or at least filter NSFW by default? It's a really bad look whenever I open this and "jailbait" is at the top of my screen almost every time.
Looking for a place to discuss what you've been reading? Consider checking out the new Lemmy instance dedicated to all things books and writing over at: https://literature.cafe
The best part is you can participate from your existing fediverse account. Communities on Lemmy can be followed like users and have similar functionality to other fediverse groups!
I just put this account together but had not considered that these promotion posts would effectively be spamming the communities themselves. Does anybody know if there is a way around this?
Looking for a place to discuss climate and climate action? Consider checking out the new Lemmy instance dedicated to solarpunks organizing for a better world over at: https://slrpnk.net
The best part is you can participate from your existing fediverse account. Communities on Lemmy can be followed like users and have similar functionality to other fediverse groups!