this post was submitted on 14 Nov 2024
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Fediverse

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A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).

If you wanted to get help with moderating your own community then head over to [email protected]!

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Learn more at these websites: Join The Fediverse Wiki, Fediverse.info, Wikipedia Page, The Federation Info (Stats), FediDB (Stats), Sub Rehab (Reddit Migration), Search Lemmy

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 3 hours ago

Speaking of things people are better without, I wish everyone would stop using Medium. There's so many better alternatives - Write Freely, Wordpress, Ghost, just to name a few.

[–] [email protected] 42 points 8 hours ago

im gonna be real, this guy sounds like a loser. he talks about the progressive political lean and the porn as if they're BAD things

[–] [email protected] 39 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

It's weird to me how obsessed some people are with proving to the world that their social media platform of choice is superior. The Fediverse works, we have content, and anyone who decides to seek out a platform that offers what the Fediverse offers can join. Tell your friends about your experience if they might be interested but if they don't stick with it you don't have to be all salty about it.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 hour ago

Agreed. It's silly.

I like Mastodon. It's like social media from 2010, chronological, only seeing what you want, great curation tools, and no ads or stupid algorithm. Moderation is also way better on Mastodon, though it can vary by instance.

I haven't used BlueSky, but I imagine it feels pretty familiar, which is what a lot of people want, and that's cool too.

They can both be good things.

[–] [email protected] 36 points 9 hours ago* (last edited 9 hours ago) (1 children)

Mastodon is lead by a singular developer that uses Ruby for his app that hasnt gotten a new feature in 2+ years and they dont accept pull requests from community members that have been adding features to third party apps that new users never learn exist because they get stufk between learning what a “fediverse instance” is

Meanwhile Bluesky has features twitter or any other platform dont have yet (custom algorithms, chronological feed with a couple posts from your custom feeds in between some chronological posts, adding custom moderators)

The protocol that Bluesky used also has a lemmy/reddit alternative too https://frontpage.fyi/ (in beta)

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 hours ago

That's definitely not beta, it feels more like a very early alpha

And it looks more like Hacker News or lobste.rs, not Lemmy or Reddit, since it doesn't allow the creation of threads, only posting URLs?

[–] [email protected] 37 points 12 hours ago (5 children)

Mastodon would be fine if all I cared to follow was Linux news and if I understood German and Japanese.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 11 hours ago

Hell yeah! Sign me up!

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 hours ago

People tried to bring more content through bridges. Mastodonians promptly started crying about how it literally puts peoples lifes in danger. Some still have #nobridge tags in their profiles to this day, thinking it matters somehow in an open network.

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 12 hours ago (1 children)

Yeah maybe posting it here doesn't really help?

[–] [email protected] 8 points 12 hours ago* (last edited 9 hours ago)

Nope. Every post I've seen about Bluesky has me confused for this exact reason. If it wasn't for people talking about Lemmy in mass on another platform, I'd have no idea what the Fediverse is.

[–] [email protected] 64 points 15 hours ago (2 children)

While I generally avoid politics on this blog, it’s hard to ignore the political biases permeating X and BlueSky. X has veered heavily toward far-right ideologies, while BlueSky is often associated with far-left communities. This polarized landscape doesn’t work for those of us seeking a neutral space for meaningful interactions.

lol

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 hours ago

That cracked me up

[–] [email protected] 14 points 12 hours ago

That's it, pack it up. We're done here

[–] [email protected] 133 points 17 hours ago (38 children)

As long as the fediverse has a barrier to entry for most people of mandating choosing a server first, it will never become the mainstream choice.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 hours ago

joinmastodon.org (the 'official' way to get join mastodon), has a default server for its join button. To me this looks very similar to the default server that appears when you try to create a bluesky account. So... I guess that's not a barrier after all.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

This is the exact reason email never took off. /s

[–] [email protected] 16 points 9 hours ago* (last edited 9 hours ago)

Email was invented in 1983.

It was revolutionary, the utter example of a "killer app" that had people and businesses running out to buy computers just to replace paper memos. You setup your mail server to hook into that brand new, stunning ecosystem of near instant communication from across the world.

Now there are 6,000,000,000 "killer" apps you can install in seconds from your pocket computer. I can hit "install" and be talking face to face with a stranger in Singapore in 30 seconds, all from easy, low effort walled gardens.

Federation was and is a reasonable way to host things, but comparing current systems to email is a misnomer. People dealt with federation because they had to. If gmail has existed in 1983, no one would have had their own federated email servers. Hell, AOL tried to choke the internet itself to death and almost succeeded in the early 90s because it was an "all in one" solution. They had aol only webpages and everything, including email. Its a twist of fate that they failed, mainly due to the onset of always on broadband, not because people didn't want things easy.

Make things easy, people will use it. They will only do hard if they have to.

[–] [email protected] 38 points 17 hours ago (7 children)

Hey... that just gave me a small idea... what if we made a "flock" or "herd" of Mastodon servers? The group of servers would all federate with each other, have the same block and allow lists, moderation policy and teams spread throughout them.

When you make an account you can be assigned a random instance name within the flock. If your instance goes down you could still possibly log in using other servers? Main benefit would be spreading server costs and maintenance effort and de-centralized operating, but still keep a centralized feel to it?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 hours ago

Basically, a single instance

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

If they have the same people running all of them, how is that different from running a single mastodon server in kubernetes, so that it doesn't get overloaded?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 46 minutes ago (1 children)

You'd have different domain names to get people used to the concept. John Doe would sign up, and become [email protected], Jane Doe would sign up and become [email protected]

[–] [email protected] 1 points 44 minutes ago (1 children)

This is quite unnecessary, it would be simpler if we have a list of the long-running and most stable instances and have the users pick one.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 minutes ago* (last edited 8 minutes ago)

That is what we have now, but clearly people are averse to making a choice that they are not technically inclined to know how big or small the consequences of that are. My solution is a spitball one with obvious flaws, but essentially it is that the instance is picked randomly out of a group of very closely, if not identically aligned servers.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 hours ago

When you make an account

Where?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 hours ago

Let me see how you get instance admins to agree on what to defederate.

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[–] [email protected] 48 points 16 hours ago (2 children)

All these "why are people using Bluesky and not Mastodon" topics are starting to give me a headache. You've been told and on some level, I have to assume you understand the reasons, but are simply unwilling to address them. When people say, "it's difficult to use" instead of understanding why they think that way, you just dismissively wave your hands and say, "no it's not".

If you want people to use Mastodon, you need to SHOW people the power of federation while HIDING all the rough bits. People want to go to where the friends, writers, artists, scientists, etc. they want to follow are and sign up for an account there. Simple as. In this way, they very much want at least the appearance of centralization. I don't want to have to get balls deep in an instance's politics to understand their moderation, who they're federated with, if they have the funds to operate into the foreseeable future, and how to migrate my data if any of those things goes sideways.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 15 hours ago (2 children)

I remember when I first tried to use Mastodon and struggled with how best to make it work, so I asked what was probably a basic question to the Enlightened™. Instead of being helped, I was met with "it's easy, maybe you're just dense?".

Then I thought that maybe Mastodon doesn't have the kind of people I'd want to interact with on it.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 hours ago

Unironically, this makes me pine for the old days where usenet discussions were lively.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 hours ago

I've never see anyone respond with hostility to any 'how to' question on mastodon. What you've described sounds totally unlike anything I've seen there. So if you have a link to your discussion, I'd be interested in seeing how that happened.

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 14 hours ago (7 children)

Mastodon isn't even the best micro-blogging service on the Fediverse.

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