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.
Not only this, #Mastodon ‘s poor UI design and user experience has done damages to the adoption of #Fediverse when hundreds of people wanted a viable option for social media beyond Facebook and twitter. The surge in the registration of #Calckey social so much that this is breaking your server should tell you a story, speculative as it may be, if people had the choice of #Calckey and mastodon a year ago, that choice would bode well for #Fediverse.
Just trying to be neutral here, of all the fediverse platforms I've tried/looked at (Mastodon, Lemmy, Friendica, calckey, Akkoma(?)), Mastodon might be my least favourite (which doesn't mean bad), though there are probably features that I'm taking for granted.
@maegul@atomicpoet I’ve got accounts on Mastodon, Akkoma, CalcKey, Friendica (and a couple of WriteFreely instances). I almost entirely use mobile (iOS), so a good app experience makes the biggest difference to me.
So far Mastodon/Ice Cubes wins. Fast, slick, power efficient (I used to use Metatext and that drained my battery quickly). I’m missing long posts and emoji reactions.
CalcKey/Kimis is close. Give me post editing and updated Kimis and I might switch.
@maegul@atomicpoet The Friendica/Relatica combination is disappointing so far. I like the Facebook style handling of groups and conversation threading, but they’re both so slow. Relatica is a Flutter app, and cross platform apps always seem to end up slow, inefficient and weird feeling.
Akkoma doesn’t really have a good mobile app. Mona works, but doesn’t support emoji reactions. So far it’s my last choice.
@markrprior@maegul@atomicpoet Once you’ve seen Emoji reactions and the parallel world you’re missing out on, it feels restricting to go back. CalcKey is promising to let me transfer all my posts as well (with different URLs, but that’s another issue the Fediverse as a whole needs to address).
@MetalSamurai@markrprior@maegul@atomicpoet
Same idea, I want to use calckey more, but the thing that's holding me back is the mobile experience on Android. I can use it via the same app I use for mastodon, but it wasn't built for it and is missing features (e.g., emoji reactions). Using it as a PWA isn't that much better, so I keep drifting back to Mastodon.
@themadcodger@markrprior@maegul@atomicpoet I keep seeing people recommending PWA as a solution for the lack of mobile apps for the non-Mastodon ActivityPub platforms. And I don’t get it. Those people really must have a thing for pain, because every PWA I’ve tried can most charitably be described as “janky”. Doesn’t feel natural, doesn’t deal with being offline and generally just awkward.
The main reason why I can't move from my current #Pleroma installation to anything else ( #Akkoma, #Misskey, #Calckey, #Hubzilla or #Friendica ) is that none of them accept importing an existing backup from a different service into a brand-new account. At most you can migrate your address but not your posts.
@csolisr@maegul@atomicpoet@markrprior It’s a difficult problem. It’s one Bluesky claim they know how to do, but absolutely do not when you check into it. CalcKey is close to having a minimally functional version, with some of the problems I discuss in this post
@MetalSamurai@csolisr@maegul@markrprior The timeline flooding problem with post imports can be solved if users are put on silence while they undergo the process.
A bigger problem is that when you have a critical mass of users, all trying to import their posts, this becomes incredibly taxing on the server.
@markrprior@maegul@atomicpoet That’s fair enough. I can switch to one of the other platforms if I have something longer to say, so the 500 character limit is a minor annoyance.
I did like the solution Metatext had, the composer allowed you to chain a whole thread of posts together and edit them as one unit before posting.
@atomicpoet Are you suggesting there isn't a massive difference of user experience between using Linux vs using GNU/Linux? WOOOW. 😬😉
Definitely trickier to market the "network" though. Every time I've brought up Mastodon/Calckey etc. it's been as an entry-point to discussing the Fediverse. By which point their eyes have glazed over and they're doing that nodding thing that indicates that they wish to walk away now.
@atomicpoet So many people just see 'the app' - ie. the Gmail icon for so many people is 'email,' they don't necessarily know or care what's going on under the hood or the 'fediverse' of other email servers.
Whether it's bluesky, cohost, spoutible, t2 social etc. a lot of these places are 'one thing' - 'Join the Fediverse' is a far more taxing decision.
@atomicpoet I agree with you, I'm just communicating my experience explaining it to folks.
I've asked people what email service they use and they've said, "what do you mean?"
"Well how do you get emails sent to you?"
"Just on my phone,"
And it often ends up being Gmail or .me and they've typically signed up for stuff by pressing the 'Sign in with X' button. Or they have it written down somewhere because they type it in so infrequently it's not important to memorize.
@atomicpoet clearly these people don't understand GNU, Linux or GNU/Linux. A better analogy would be comparing different Linux distributions. Tails for this, Ubuntu for that, Fedora for something else, and then there are the desktop environments on top of that, like all of the clients for each of the fediverse apps
@rmattila74 It's arbitrary and is only seen as good conduct within parts of one part of the Fediverse, which has existed longer than Mastodon has. Even if you limit your scope just to the bunch of microblogging services alone, it's still not the norm.
@jo@atomicpoet It is an accessibility issue. For people with physical limitations, participating in discussion gets increasingly unequal, the longer the posts become. I for example can only type 200-300 characters before pausing to rest my eyes. Anything over 500 is practically off-limits for me. Which is OK if done on purpose but something many people don't automatically realize.
@rmattila74@atomicpoet To be clear, the fediverse had posts longer than 500 characters long before Mastodon was even part of it. It's not a case of whether you "should" do something. That thing has been here since the beginning
@Riku Mattila @Chris Trottier But keep in mind that the 500-character limit will not cut off longer posts coming in from outside or from instances running Mastodon forks.
If I post a 6,000-character rant, you'll see all 6,000 characters in all their glory in one single post whether you want or not.
@rmattila74@atomicpoet
For an English language audience, the 500-character limit is a good option, but not for other international languages where a concept needs more "characters" to be displayed. For example, #Bengali and #CJK . The point to note here is that twitter does not have to be inclusive of everyone, but #Calckey being a software or Calckey.social can choose to be inclusive. That is a big difference. #Mastodon clearly does not get the 'social' part of social networking, from onboarding to features to how they are worded to a host of other things.
@atomicpoet All true, but:
Why, as a user who just wants to do some social interaction, would I want to know about all these differences?
Ease of use ist king, and while some features of the Fediverse may be great for a group of geeks, they keep many other people from embracing it.
@atomicpoet That is exactly what I mean. People don't like it because of such experiences, call it varying feature sets or Missing ease of use or whatever.
You simply don't have such experiences in the cozy one-size-fits-all context of other social networks.
@atomicpoet The difference is if people go "Hey I want to be on Bluesky" the platform says "yes sure, join here". If people go "Hey I want to be on Mastodon" the platform (and its users) say "Well actually, it's The Fediverse and Mastodon isn't even that good compared to XYZ, and you really shouldn't join the most popular server".
The Fediverse is probably the best and only truly viable form of social media. But so far, we've done an extremely poor job creating a good onboarding experience for people who aren't into tech stuff.
so far BlueSky it’s not even a particular relevant news, except of course for technical discussion on the protocol.
Sometime on the fediverse people complain that we speak so much of twitter and twitter content, they even invented a nickname not to say twitter. Twitter is relevant because it has hundreds of millions of users.
Nostr so far is a much more interesting topic because it’s the only other example of a working decentralized network. And we got already a bridge.
BlueSky is some 30k people on a centralized invite only platform. Like post . news , or other closed smaller things.
When BlueSky will get to be decentralized, it will be worth talking about.
@atomicpoet
Additionally, people are attuned to platforms because other social media are platforms. When Twitter supports a feature, it means the receiving end can display it. They are not thinking in terms of what the sender can do.
@atomicpoet@randulo and i have an account on electronicmusic.social, a mastodon instance, that has some ridiculously hugh character count, too. No off topic posts allowed tho.
I don't know if I'll ever complete and publish these tables, but it won't be anytime soon because it'll be a whole lot of features in these tables. Also, I'll very likely need help from users of other projects to complete the tables.
@jupiter_rowland@randulo LOL. I've been thinking about doing this too, but it's too daunting. For one, we have to manually test each feature to be able to present it correctly and be fair with every project.
@youronlyone@jupiter_rowland
This was my starting point, but it obviously lacks federated sites, Mastodon and DIaspora are on it for the moment. Is there a federated documents sharing site?
@atomicpoet@gruber@fediversenews Bluesky has it's own issues in terms of who is currently using it and such, which might put a lot people off. Whether it puts off the same people Mastodon / other fediverse apps attract is a different question.
@gruber@atomicpoet@fediversenews the *key apps are a bit bleeding edge for me. Most instances appear to have less than 20 users. Where’s a user instance that’s friendly to musicians. No, I don’t want to run an instance myself.
@atomicpoet@gruber I still don’t understand what’s so hard or unfriendly about Mastodon specifically or the fediverse generally. Signup and following works pretty much the same as other social media platforms apart from picking a server, and that’s not even a roadblock anymore in the official client. What’s so hard?
@atomicpoet@gruber@fediversenews
Wouldn't life just be easier without democracy?
If we just had a leader to take care of everything for us and make our lives and choices more simple. 🤔
@atomicpoet@fediversenews There's definitely something to what @gruber is saying. With manual account approval on mastodon.social and it being pushed as the default, I'd love to see the abandonment rate... Perhaps it's different when signing up through a phone? But getting someone all excited about trying a new social network is hard enough. Now they have to retain that excitement for an unknown amount of time, and then care enough to engage at some later date... Not much fun...
@gr0k But this is what I'm saying. Perhaps it's wrong to call Mastodon the social network. It is server software for the social network, which is the Fediverse.
It's only a social network in the same sense that nginx is the Internet.
@atomicpoet totally agree, tho that is also where I can see where @gruber is coming from - the "simple" thing. Even some of my more technical friends struggled to understand how to get started with the Fediverse, but they could figure out how sign up to Mastodon. Hopefully collectively we can come up with some appropriate verbiage - or perhaps it's just a matter of time. If you dropped the word 'tweet' into a casual conversation even 10 years ago people would look at you funny.
@gr0k@atomicpoet@gruber Bluesky only seems simpler just now as there’s only one app and one server. The whole reason for developing AT was it would be federated, but “better” than ActivityPub by allowing truly nomadic user accounts. Of course the nomadic accounts don’t exist, so maybe they’ll never enable federation and just be a centralised Twitter replacement. Then their absence of actual moderation will come to bite them.
@MetalSamurai@atomicpoet@gruber for sure. I am no fan of bluesky. Doesn't change the fact it's easier to onboard when you reduce the decisions a user has to make.
@shoq@MetalSamurai@atomicpoet@gruber that's why we're here, and others are elsewhere. I'd like to say it's just 'cause we've been 'round the block, but many others have by now. Who was it who said give me convenience or give me death? We've taken a different approach. But people will be people.
@gr0k@shoq@atomicpoet@gruber I hope eventually knowledge about the Fediverse will spread, so there will be more general awareness that it’s one big social network, but you can choose your preferred on ramp. Like picking a set top box that supports your preferred streaming services, or having a favourite coffee shop (they all sell coffee, but the presentation and vibe is different).
@gruber@MetalSamurai@gr0k@shoq John, I don’t think AT protocol will be less “common denominator” than ActivityPub. There will be competitive apps with Bluesky. If you care about an open web, you should want that.
Looks like @gruber ‘s position is predicated on design, #UI, and onboarding. I have no invite for bluesky so it is clearly not an inclusive media, or open to all and inviting, and Gruber clearly does not care about inclusivity.
But even on the grounds of design, UI, ease of onboarding, there are star examples that incorporate #ActivityPub protocol and in #Fediverse. I am partial to #Calckey and calckey.social, and Calckey does provide a good example. Perhaps the design gurus and social media pundits need to browse a little more of the Fediverse before their pronouncements.
@arinbasu1@atomicpoet@gruber@shoq@MetalSamurai@gr0k Come on, that point about inclusivity totally misconstrues what he actually said. You made that up based on a presumption because Bluesky currently requires invites.
I mean, I get why people want Fediverse tech to win, and I do too, but putting words in other people's mouths is such a miss and will wither goodwill over time.
I’ll let that comment pass, as @gruber already explained that he was predicting about the popularity, and did not consider anything else, which is fair.
I do not believe that if a service in public domain is closed to some people and open to others, that kind of a service is said to be inclusive of everyone. So when one assesses such a service, I presumed all aspects were considered, but looks like this was not the case.
@arinbasu1 I would not judge a service’s long-term inclusivity based on its use of invites early on. It’s a strategy used by numerous social networks as an attention-building/audience-management strategy. It’s like complaining that a store has a line at its grand opening.
Bluesky said just a day or two ago it was a stability thing, which is why they declined a prominent invite from a political leader.
It’s a strategy used by numerous social networks as an attention-building/audience-management strategy. It’s like complaining that a store has a line at its grand opening.
😕 Not sure how a store that has a line at its grand opening where it encourages everyone to enter the store, and a software service that deliberately excludes people to use its service by restricting invitations are comparable, perhaps you have a good reason that I am missing.
On that note, the fact that numerous networks do that kind of thing for attention grabbing does not necessarily make them inclusive either.
We are digressing, but at least for me, you made me think about inclusiveness and putting a service in public domain but with restricted sign ups. The ethics around these issues are fuzzy at best.
@arinbasu1 Stores aren’t always in grand-opening mode. Eventually, they’re just open to everyone.
Consider Facebook. At first, it was just open to specific high-profile universities. Within a couple of years, it was open to basically everyone. It did some bad things with that openness, don’t get me wrong, but that model has been used by hundreds of social networks over the years.
Remember, these are not static tools. They change, some more gradually than others.
@arinbasu1 I’m talking about what’s going to be popular, not what’s “better” for some abstract ideal. The arguments for Mastodon are like the arguments for desktop Linux. And CalcKey is like some obscure distribution.
I see what you mean now. I may have overinterprered your earlier points.
“Some obscure” brought to mind an anecdote many years ago; shortly after the release of markdown, I was so taken by markdown’s simplicity and versatility, I wrote a long paper all of it in markdown and presented to my (then) professor. He did not have much to say about the content, but when we met afterwards, he gave me a friendly advice (? chided) not to be bothered by “some obscure” new things and stick to LaTeX, 🙂 , if I wanted that kind of thing, or use Microsoft Word, the de facto software of choice for academics.
@gruber@arinbasu1 That seems like a worms eye view of the Fediverse. The *key family (MissKey/Calckey/Foundkey etc) is the second most popular platform on the Fediverse. It’s by far the most dominant one in Japan, where Mastodon is virtually unheard of. That’s where Japanese Twitter quitters end up, and is getting all the press attention. But it’s all ActivityPub, so you can still stay in touch with your friends wherever they went.
@arinbasu1@gruber People are fickle, so I won’t make that prediction. But once people start to realise what a privacy horror Bluesky is, and the inadequacies of their views on moderation, I think the shine will come off.
@MetalSamurai@arinbasu1 (a) You really think privacy policy will any way affect mass market adoption? How in the world do you explain Facebook and Google’s success?
(b) What do you think is wrong with Bluesky’s privacy policy?
@gruber@arinbasu1 Very few seem to be aware that by design absolutely everything you do on the platform is held on a public ledger, your PDS. There is no attempt at a privacy policy (and really can’t be). Someone copied EVERYTHING the other day, just by firing up their own BS server and syncing across everyone’s data. That’s by design. It’s how the BGS filter/aggregator/scraper/labeller engines will work. That’s why DMs aren’t possible.
But eventually, Linux won on the infrastructure side, and for many organizations is a very usable alternative.
If Bluesky is a lightning in a pan, just a proof of concept as Jack Dorsey has recognized, the experience for the federation will still need to be built… and the infrastructure could be anything if it is good enough.
@gruber@gr0k@shoq@atomicpoet It’s the exact opposite. If you prefer a Facebook experience, use Friendica, but you can stay in touch with all your Mastodon friends. If you want a playful interface with smart pattern matched timelines, use Calckey and still stay in touch with all your Mastodon friends. If you want to try running your own instance on minimal hardware, use Akkoma or GoToSocial and still stay in touch with …
@gruber@gr0k@shoq@atomicpoet For every one of those (and more - there’s Pixelfed, Lemmy, /kbin etc) things will look and feel different. Sometimes very different. You get to choose the one you prefer. But it’s all the same network so you can follow people on the other platforms and they can follow you.
BlueSky’s federation dream seems to be a small number of huge indexers and aggregators. That’s going to be lowest common denominator.
@gruber@MetalSamurai@gr0k@shoq@atomicpoet that is eminently not true, as you can see from the different experiences being built atop ActivityPub, or the Mastodon API itself.
I have my CalcKey account and my PixelFed account both in Ivory, but I can also use them from their own apps (which, specially for CalcKey, is better). And I can interact with you from any of them!
We need to follow and boost journalists so that they have a positive experience in the #Fediverse, tell their colleagues, and write about it. They are excellent #multipliers for marketing.
@atomicpoet
To be fair, even by specifically googling it, it is not easy to find a decent explanation of what calckey&co are, and why one should bother.
And this is a problem common to a lot of the fediverse: there are a lot of options out there, but for a newcomer it is almost impossible to learn about it (and I am speaking from personal experience).
@atomicpoet
Trying a new social media is an enormous amount of effort and time spent. You can't expect people to sign in and spend a significant amount of time in it just to see what it is.
The intro page to Calckey you linked is a start, but it assumes the reader already knows very well how the fediverse work, and how the different platforms there connect to each other. This might be obvious to you, but trust me, it is not obvious at all to most people (me included).
@j_bertolotti@atomicpoet I actually agree very much with this. I know quite a bit about the fediverse and my eyes were still skipping around trying to find out what Calckey is and does. A bullet point or elevator pitch version of the same post would help greatly. The blog post spends as much time talking about the fediverse as it does Calckey so I’m not sure why a reader would choose it over Mastodon, which is what y’all are trying to convince Gruber of.
@j_bertolotti@atomicpoet
I have to jump into this very interesting discussion to ask one semi-related question: why "Calckey"?
I'm new to the Fediverse, using Mastodon & loving it, eager to try out some of the other Fedi apps. But "Calckey" sounds like some math application or perhaps a spreadsheet. It's freaking me out! 🙂
Hear hear! #Calckey sounds like a spreadsheet application (actually there is a name conflict with a spreadsheet app). Can we please rename it to mean something more expresive? Perhaps fork it to a different name or something?
@E. Hatt-Swank @j_bertolotti @Chris Trottier The -key part comes from MissKey which CalcKey is a fork of. If you want to know why MissKey is named MissKey, ask its developers.
As for the Calc- part, ask the Akkoma devs; I think they're behind CalcKey, too.
@mentallyalex@ehattswank@j_bertolotti@atomicpoet Maybe it's becase I'm French, but it make me think of a word in my birth-language synonimous with "copy, clone". I can't help but imagine it's creators copying Misskey's code by hand before modifying it. (Ridiculous, I know.)
@Bigou@atomicpoet@ehattswank@mentallyalex@j_bertolotti When you "fork", you do copy and modify. That's the definition of a fork in open-source coding terms. A dev or group of devs take on what they see as a promising project, and make their own contributions towards (they hope) making it fulfill that promise. Often completely rewriting chunks of it, removing stuff, revising or extending.
Open-source is collaborative. That's a good thing!
It would be interesting to hear from folks who aren't familiar with the Fediverse whether or not this kind of stuff makes sense though.
As I was saying before, it's harder to market the network.
'Connected to the Fediverse' I imagine would be ambiguous to people who don't know what it is. It could be easy to draw the conclusion that you can 'Log in with Mastodon, PixelFed, etc' rather than what it's really describing.
@BenjaminNelan@atomicpoet
As someone who doesn't know what it is (and that doesn't really understands how the fediverse works), I have no idea what anything in the screenshot means.
I think the whole fediverse is in dire need of some PR. And by that I don't mean celebratory articles in the press, but I mean good, simple explanations.
@BenjaminNelan@atomicpoet
What I understand from that is: people on different platforms (e.g. the ones named) can interact with each other like they were on the same platform.
If this was the intended message, then now it works 😉
I feel like we're using the word 'Fediverse' as though it's as descriptive as 'Email' when the latter has a much more obvious analogue that was established in the media long before most people even had an account.
@atomicpoet@j_bertolotti I like the comparison table. Missing a couple of platforms (Friendica/Peertube, probably others) but that's the most succinct comparison I've seen.
@atomicpoet@gruber@fediversenews
It is quite simply mainstream....
I don't understand the debate about usability.
Yes it is different, not as easy as Twitter....
But hey who knows, maybe that's just fine and better that some don't understand how it works....
The mainstream promotes mainstream, maybe we should not follow it and be glad that it is so, let others follow the mainstream.
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