My purpose in gathering this informal, conversational feedback is to bring voices into the “how should Mastodon be” conversation that don’t otherwise get much attention—which I do because I hope it will help designers and developers and community leaders who genuinely want Mastodon to work for more kinds of people refine...
Imo part of the problem with mastodon, at least in my experience, is that it's sold as a twitter replacement while still being devoloped and largely populated by people who don't like twitter (because it's too "toxic"). This means that you can't really have the twitter experience on mastodon by design so people coming from twitter mostly wanting to get away from musk bounce of. Bluesky has been a more successfull twitter replacement and I think that's largely because it basically is twitter with feeds.
I think that mastodon should either commit to being more like twitter (which it is propably too late for at this point since I don't imagine that their current userbase would be into that) or people should stop trying to make it the new twitter and instead let it be it's own kind of different thing.
It's gonna go public eventually, this is like a closed beta kind of thing. The purpose seems to be more to get people curious about it and foster a certain culture which I must say that they've been pretty effective at. They strategically handed out invites to a lot of black twitter users for example, which is smart since black twitter has historically been an important cultural force on the internet
Also, since back when I last looked for youtube alternatives, many that seemed good turned out to use things like NFT and the sort, I feel compelled to ask:...
Depends on in what way you're looking for a youtube alternative!
I think peertube might be fine if you're looking for a way to host your own videos, but it's propably not a good place to just browse for video content the way you might with youtube. I think the most solid alternative for that is Nebula. It costs like a dollar a month IIRC and has a couple big name video easayist kind of types. It doesn't really have anything to do with the fediverse or anything, but a majority of it is owned by the creators and from what I understand it is more generous per view than youtube, plus it has a buissiness model that doesn't rely on serving you adds and selling your data.
I have most of the Fediverse-based account and seem to have just gravitated towards Lemmy over Kbin as found it very confusing, What makes you prefer Kbin over Lemmy or any other Fediverse instances?
One thing that I like about kbin is that it's not trying to be "x, but federated" like lemmy or mastodon for example. It's more exiting to try to make something new! I think it's very apparent how some parts of lemmy are full of redditisms on purpose which I disslike.
That said, I do have a lemmy account that I use for posting about other stuff. There are a tons of website sprouting up as contenders for a space in the new internet landscape and I'm having a lot of fun trying them out without really binding myself to one too tightly
Cutscenes can be memorable for many reasons, such as their emotional impact, their humor, their shock value, or their artistic quality. Some cutscenes are so iconic that they have become part of gaming culture and history....
It's from Mass Effect, this is the character Mordin Solus catchphrase. CosmicApe is almost certainly refering to a (very good) cutsceen from one of the possible endings to the Tuchanka chain of missions in ME3.
Five years ago does not sound right to me at all, but I looked it up and apparently it was in 2018, so I guess it has been five years after all. Total mandela effect moment for me.
French authorities confirmed that a protest against police violence set to take place in Paris on Saturday could not go ahead due to police shortages. NGOs say the ban signals a “more and more repressive” approach from authorities.
I think that the main thing this reveals about the bluesky admins is that they haven't thought that hard about harrasment, which is weird to not do if you're trying to launch a new social media platform.
Is reddit really that unaffected? Are tech media companies keeping quiet on purpose? Is the Play app giving more artificial visibility to reddit app VS fediverse apps? It feels like all the mainstream centralized social platforms and search engines (Google) are censoring any updates on reddit's status to maintain a status quo....
I don't think reddit has taken a very large hit by many messurable metrics as of now. The damage that is done is more cultural and will have downsides for the website more long term.
I think reddit will remain in a sort of zombified form for quite some time. I don't know if there will be any more outright migrations of subreddits for a while, but hopefully kbin (and lemmy) will become interesting places to post and read all on their own and maybe eventually take the place on the internet reddit had. Reddit started out as a small place dominated by tech nerds and eventually grew to the place it is today, so it's possible that kbin/lemmy do something similar. I don't know if this means an outright takeover, and I don't know if that's what I'm hoping for either to be honest. I would rather see kbin become it's own thing on it's own terms.
Those of you not plugged into the Mastodon community may not be aware of the predominant reaction to Instagram Threads. This started when it was merely rumored, reaching a crescendo with reports that Meta had been talking to a few of the larger Mastodon instances under NDA, presumably to encourage them not to “defederate”...
While I think that the article is correct in stating that mastodon isn't currently a serious competitor to facebook, it's possible that it (or something else based of activitypub) might become that one day. I think that there's a decent chance that facebook might want to prevent fediverse spaces from potentially becoming serious competitors, and even if that's not the main reason why their implementing activitypub, if e.g. mastodon ever does get to a point where it can challange meta (which I think most of us are hoping!) then facebook will use the position of power they will have over activitypub to try to prevent that. I think it's a misstake to give facebook any power of our spaces because that means essentially giving up on the idea of an internet not controlled by large corporations like facebook.
I'm still not entirely sure how all this magic works but would I be correct to assume it's only thread data that's transfered across the fediverse? And because Kbin is Kbin, it shouldn't have the exploit the Lemmy software has right?...
I don't think there's any risk of someone stealing your kbin account with this, however I do think that admins can access more data than normal users, including from federated instances. They where only logged in on the web, and I think you can only access that kind of data by accessing the database more directly, which the exploit wouldn't have allowed the hackers to do.
Having a single player control most of the market - like meta - means that they will have a lot of sway over how the protocol is developed. This is propably a bad thing since meta har different goals than people currently using the fediverse and also have financial incentives to get people to move over to their platforms instead.
It's honestly amazing that perhaps the aspect of technology that has most profoundly shaped peoples lives during the 2010s has turned out to be almost completely financially unsustainable
I feel like instagram is one one of those apps - at least the way I use it - that relies on a lot of your irl friends having it as well. I would love for them to be open to signing up to some fediverse platform but we're not there right now sadly.
I just read a comment about someone grouping a racist uncle and funny friend into the same category of normie because they aren’t up to date on the fediverse or super tech savvy or whatever.
What I was trying to say is that the barrier of entry for joining the fediverse is too high for some people, and one appeal of threads is that people who wouldn't otherwise join might, so in my mind I was doing the opposite of gatekeeping! It was a normie-positive comment, if you will (although not without caveats).
I was also using the term somewhat ironically although maybe this didn't come through well. People have different connotations with words and I can't expect everyone to share my connotations.
What I think is important isn't the exact wording (if I hadn't written "normie" I would have used a different word to refer to people who wouldn't otherwise join the fediverse) but to not use your fediverse instance as a way to build some sort of upside down social pyramid where you use your outsidernes as a status symbol against people who are well-adjusted irl. This happening or not happening isn't contingent on a certain word being used or not, although arguably normie is a word that has strong enough negative associations to push people away. I don't have those associations with that word so that doesn't ring true for me, but as I said, not everyone has the same connocations.
Hey, glad to hear that we're mostly on the same page!
I should clarify that I'm just grouping fun friends and racist uncles together in the sense that they're both groups of people who might only join the fediverse through threads in the forseable future. This is obviously a very hetrogenous groups so it's not surprising that it contains very different kinds of people.
Right now fediverse is mostly made up of techy people - which is fine! But there are many other kinds of people you might potentially want to interact with online. Threads could bring in normies and celebs to the metaverse. Normies are a mixed bag - this includes your racist uncle but also your really cool and funny friend who can't be bothered to set up a mastodon account. Celebs are a source of real world influence (I'm including politicians and journalists for example in this category) which is obviously attractive. I'm gonna miss cyberbullying local politicians on twitter, and it would be nice to be able to continue doing so through the comfort of e.g. kbin.
I get your point and I largely agree but it isn't that hard to see the appeal of threads for me. I don't think it's gonna work out in the end though so I really hope they mostly stay of the broader fediverse.
Lemmy is the most reddit like experience if that's what you're after, but I'd reccomend getting a couple different accounts, browsing around and seeing what works and then settling on what's most fun
Something I don't understand currently about the whole Meta/Threads debacle is why I'm seeing talk about instances which choose to federate with Threads themselves being defederated. I have an account on mastodon.social, one of the instances which has not signed the fedipact, and I've had people from other instances warn me that...
The way I see it, you can still talk to your friends by making a threads account (or an account on an instance that federates with meta). If meta EEE's the whole fediverse, you won't have the ability to talk to unshowered strangers free of big corporations anymore.
If we buy that the reason for meta joining ActivityPub is to EEE it, that means that meta sees the fediverse as a potential future competitor that they want to nip in the bud. I would rather leave that bud un-nipped and give it a chance to one day become an actual thorn in metas side, die out on its own terms or remain a niche community for freedom oriented tech-savvy nerds.
Mastodon is easy and fun except when it isn’t (erinkissane.com)
My purpose in gathering this informal, conversational feedback is to bring voices into the “how should Mastodon be” conversation that don’t otherwise get much attention—which I do because I hope it will help designers and developers and community leaders who genuinely want Mastodon to work for more kinds of people refine...
Twitter alternatives for the Musk-averse (www.theverge.com)
Twitter isn’t the only social network around — here are some others.
Is PeerTube a good Youtube alternative?
Also, since back when I last looked for youtube alternatives, many that seemed good turned out to use things like NFT and the sort, I feel compelled to ask:...
What if Reddit joined the Fediverse?
So I have thoughts about what if platforms that we seemly are trying to move away from such as Reddit decided to Fedirate and join the Fediverse....
So why do you perfer Kbin over Lemmy?
I have most of the Fediverse-based account and seem to have just gravitated towards Lemmy over Kbin as found it very confusing, What makes you prefer Kbin over Lemmy or any other Fediverse instances?
Which cutscene is and will forever be burned into your memory?
Cutscenes can be memorable for many reasons, such as their emotional impact, their humor, their shock value, or their artistic quality. Some cutscenes are so iconic that they have become part of gaming culture and history....
Thai cave survivor reunites with rescuer at high school graduation 5 years later (abcnews.go.com)
French authorities ban protest against police violence in Paris (www.france24.com)
French authorities confirmed that a protest against police violence set to take place in Paris on Saturday could not go ahead due to police shortages. NGOs say the ban signals a “more and more repressive” approach from authorities.
Bluesky allowed people to include the n-word in their usernames (www.engadget.com)
Before this week, Bluesky did not have an automated system in place to prevent people from including the n-word in their handle..
Is it just me or are there 0 recent news articles about reddit's status after the fiasco?
Is reddit really that unaffected? Are tech media companies keeping quiet on purpose? Is the Play app giving more artificial visibility to reddit app VS fediverse apps? It feels like all the mainstream centralized social platforms and search engines (Google) are censoring any updates on reddit's status to maintain a status quo....
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People with total colour blindness able to see red after gene therapy (www.newscientist.com)
Thanks to gene therapy, people who could previously only detect shades of grey can now distinguish red objects from a darker background
(Opinion:) You're So Vain, You Probably Think This App Is About You: On Meta and Mastodon (micro.coyotetracks.org)
Those of you not plugged into the Mastodon community may not be aware of the predominant reaction to Instagram Threads. This started when it was merely rumored, reaching a crescendo with reports that Meta had been talking to a few of the larger Mastodon instances under NDA, presumably to encourage them not to “defederate”...
Do we have anything to be concerned with from the Lemmy compromise?
I'm still not entirely sure how all this magic works but would I be correct to assume it's only thread data that's transfered across the fediverse? And because Kbin is Kbin, it shouldn't have the exploit the Lemmy software has right?...
Instagram’s Threads surpasses 100 million users (www.theverge.com)
Let the Platforms Burn by Cory Doctorow (archive.ph)
The Opposite of Good Fires is Wildfires
YSK: Pixelfed replaced Instagram for me, the same way Lemmy replaced reddit.
Guys check out pixelfed. Its better than Instagram.Same concept of fediverse as Lemmy and Mastodon....
Rant: I hate the term “normie”.
Posted this in a small community, curious to know what everyone here thinks....
I don't get people that are here in the fediverse and *want to bring over* the content that is on FB, IG, TikTok, etc.
This has come to mind because all the chatter about Meta federating....
OC Question: Why are some instances defederating instances which don't sign the fedipact?
Something I don't understand currently about the whole Meta/Threads debacle is why I'm seeing talk about instances which choose to federate with Threads themselves being defederated. I have an account on mastodon.social, one of the instances which has not signed the fedipact, and I've had people from other instances warn me that...