0x1C3B00DA

0x1C3B00DA , 5 months ago

I think the developer of PieFed is mistaken because the microblogging projects also use shared inbox a lot. My understanding is that for certain classes of posts, they actually just use it over a user's individual inbox and the remote server is responsible for delivering it from the shared inbox to the user's timeline.

0x1C3B00DA , 6 months ago

If you take a look at their CEOs fediverse acct, you'll see he's pretty caught up in the mastodon hype. He's coming at the whole thing from the perspective of mastodon being the platform, instead of the weird disjointed fediverse. People have tried explaining things he's not understanding fully, and he kinda brushes it off. I think even in a decentralized network, there are some ppl who still need some centralized platform to focus in on.

0x1C3B00DA , 6 months ago

re: Mastodon I see it as the largest use case of the social web today. But there are many others as you well know. We just stood up a peertube instance today for example and I love my pixelfed account. I have been following kbin and Lemmy with lots of interest though reluctant to sign up and engage mostly cause I am worried about spreading myself too thin across all these amazing activitypub services.

This was my point. You shouldn't need an account on all of these services. You should be able to interact from your single Flipboard account. But its likely that, like most new fediverse services, you were testing mostly (or probably solely) against Mastodon. Despite Flipboard having more in common with link aggregators like kbin/lemmy, yall went for mastodon compatibility first.

A lot of people are worried about large orgs/companies like Flipboard/Meta joining the fediverse and controlling it, but Mastodon itself has been in that position for a long time. It's controlled and limited the fediverse for a while and people keep reinforcing its control instead of expanding on the fediverse's plurality.

0x1C3B00DA , 7 months ago

I don’t think pitching #ActivityPub to existing social media makes sense. Adding federation to a non-federated social media service isn’t a net win.

You have to spend the time and money to implement it. Then you have to spend the time and money to maintain it. Most of the time, ActivityPub support is implemented as mastodon compatibility, not true AP support. This means having to constantly make sure you keep up with masto changes and constantly fielding issues with other implementations because you didn’t fully implement AP.

And after implementation, you don’t just gain access to a ton of new users, you have to take on the burden of moderating all of it (which is a persistent ant recurring time and money cost). And since the #fediverse has a ton of opinions on moderation, you’re always pissing somebody off.

And after all that, what you’ve enabled is an easy way for your users to recreate their social graph without your service. The idea of an interconnected social web is cool, and hopefully it’ll be the futrue, but it doesn’t make sense for profit-driven businesses.

-- From my alt [email protected]

0x1C3B00DA , 10 months ago

Note that they did it in the most mastodon way possible. Non-mastodon accounts won't appear in search until their software stops their own work and implements a masto-specific feature.

https://oisaur.com/users/renchap/statuses/110948896985289761

0x1C3B00DA , 10 months ago

hashtags are supposed to be an optimization for search, not the sole axis of searchability.

0x1C3B00DA , 10 months ago

I still don't think search for public posts needs to be opt-in. But even ignoring that, my point was that mastodon merged this change without coordinating with other projects. They didn't check what the easiest way to signal an opt-in would be for other projects. They made the decision unilaterally and now other projects will be left out of masto search by default. And if their users want to be searchable from mastodon, they have to stop working on features for their own project and work on this.

My issue is just that mastodon never respects other projects enough to coordinate, makes decisions that affect other projects without input from them, implements features that further isolate mastodon users from the rest of the fediverse or makes it harder for them to interact.

0x1C3B00DA , 10 months ago

You could make the argument that they're technically different things, but I think in practice they are the same. If you're looking for something specific, then yeah search is gonna be more effective than hashtags. But if you're just looking for something to read, you could search for "fediverse" or trawl the #fediverse hashtag. Not everybody chooses to add hashtags to their posts so full text search is gonna find more posts than just a hashtag search (assuming full text search also returns matches on hashtag).

0x1C3B00DA , 10 months ago

Right. That's how you grow a walled garden network. That's why I'm criticizing them. Mastodon is not a social network; it's software that connects to the network, which is the fediverse.

0x1C3B00DA , 10 months ago

https://scribe.rip/doctorow/fool-me-twice-we-dont-get-fooled-again-20074e311f1f

Edit: Dang. It doesn't seem to have pulled in the entire article

0x1C3B00DA , 10 months ago

Please use a dedicated test magazine for test posts. https://kbin.social/m/test, for example

0x1C3B00DA , 10 months ago

This was a goal of ActivityPub but it'll take a lot of work to get there. I'd love to see the fediverse evolve in the way you're talking about but I don't think it will while mastodon remains the dominant platform. The masto team did a partial EEE (they did the embrace/extend part) years before Thread was around and they've dominated the fediverse ever since and most people refer to this place as mastodon. The masto dev team has said multiple times they're not interested in adding support for other content and they want to remain a microblogging service.

Other service have to remain compatible with mastodon to gain any traction which makes getting a new project off the ground more difficult. Lemmy was around for a couple years before the reddit migration and you'll notice kbin is just about as big as lemmy despite the head start. Outside of some new huge event, the fediverse will probably continue on as it is for a while. I'm really hoping lemmy/kbin can gain a large enough userbase to throw some weight around and influence other projects development so we can see some evolution.

0x1C3B00DA , 10 months ago

There's also the point about upgrades and storage growing exponentially, which is one of the most recurring complaints about running a fediverse server. Even the ones that are can lighter than mastodon have to contend with huge databases that never stop growing.

0x1C3B00DA , 11 months ago

The fediverse is notorious for overmoderation and mobbing. A lot of ppl have come here looking for a safer space and as a result they are incredibly (over?)zealous about protecting it.

Sidenote: I incredibly disagree with the author's conclusion that calckey should be avoided because of their experience. On mastodon, they likely would not have had their account reactivated because the majority of those overzealous ppl are on mastodon

0x1C3B00DA , 11 months ago

I wish ppl would realize the solution to Mastodon problems is to stop focusing on Mastodon. It's not the fediverse. Fediverse services need to focus on interoperability so that the entire network is the platform instead of depending on Mastodon to fix its built-in shortcomings. These are the same issues that mastodon has had since the beginning and are working as designed. Instead of fighting upstream against mastodon, we could improve the fediverse as a whole.

Kbin and Lemmy bring a huge discoverability boost to the fediverse and microblogging services. Non threadiverse services could better emphasize Group posts to lead users to finding groups that match their interests. Right now they show up as normal boosts on other platforms and there's no indication that it's a Group instead of a single user. Real search features could be built in; the lack of it is a philosophical decision by mastodon that doesn't have to apply to the rest of the fediverse. To fix the CW arguments, services could build in better user based filtering. If you can auto CW other users posts, there's no need to yell at ppl about CWs.

There's plenty of other ways the rest of the fediverse could improve without mastodon; Mastodon is intent on just being a better twitter but the rest of the fediverse could be a platform that's more cohesive and feature rich than any other solical network. And if the non-masto fediverse gains enough traction, mastodon can keep holding back the fediverse and masto users can't keep bullying users into trying to fit into their various disparate rules.

0x1C3B00DA , 11 months ago

There is no main community. Different instances see different posts so some users may not even be aware of some communities. Or they may be subscribed to the largest community for a topic but because of federation wonkiness they don't see all the posts in a community.

0x1C3B00DA , 11 months ago

You can create a new thread linking to the old one (or the url the old threads is linking to).

0x1C3B00DA , 11 months ago

In your example, it wouldn't be local.social/m/[email protected]. If a user on local.social created a immigration magazine it would be local.social/m/immigration The @ part is only for remote magazines. So that same magazine viewed from domainX would be domainX.social/m/[email protected]. local.social/m/[email protected] is an immigration magazine hosted on domainX.social and accessed from local.social

Or can multiple federated magazines be combined in the same local mag?

Not currently. There are multiple proposals for grouping magazines that are being discussed.

And what if domainY has a right wing extremist anti-immigration slant which we don’t want. But we want domainZ’s version but domainZ has federated with domainY?

You can subscribe to whichever one you want. domainZ.social/m/immigration is not affected by whatever the users on domainY post to domainY.social/m/immigration. They are two separate communities.

0x1C3B00DA , 11 months ago

some people like a image focused experience. That's why Instagram and Twitter both exist despite having basically the same feature set.

Even more importantly, open standards need multiple implementations to thrive. Kbin and lemmy offer nearly the same feature set too, but having more than one implementation makes the fediverse more healthy

0x1C3B00DA , 11 months ago

The original idea was that users would only need one acct to interact with all parts of the fediverse, but the mastodon team decided they didn't want that. They've said they want mastodon to be solely focused on microblogging and don't want to optimize for other fediverse media/platforms

0x1C3B00DA , 11 months ago

I wish instead of more mastodon guides we got guides to pleroma/akkoma or misskey/calckey. Other projects could use more written about them, to help users and get some name recognition. Even if its nearly the exact same guide, publishing material for some of the other projects could help break the idea that mastodon is the fediverse.

0x1C3B00DA , 11 months ago

There's no good way to handle this right now. I filed a proposal on the issue tracker to address it

0x1C3B00DA , 1 year ago

but there is presently no analogous operator on Google's search for a distributed system that spans many domains.

Because that's just a basic search. A search engine searches across multiple domains by default. If you're specifically looking for only results from ActivityPub enabled services, that's pretty much an impossibility since there's no way to know (from a web crawl) if a page is served by a server that supports ActivityPub. Another problem is that a lot of fediverse instances purposefully block search engine crawlers because they don't want to appear in search results.