Default instance blocks should largely replace defederation
Since what content users might want to see is quite unlikely to match which servers the admins tolerate, choosing instance on the Fediverse can be quite complicated, which is inconvenient and off-putting for new users.
For this reason, and simply that the Fediverse is stronger united, I believe defederation should ideally be reserved for illegal content and extreme cases. If Fediverse platforms would allow instances to simply block the rest for users by default, the user experience would be the same, unless they decide otherwise.
It already is, you just have to convince the server owner whats ‘extreme’ or not. Some servers hate liberals, others hate the right, some are followers of the windmill party and others would get you on a watchlist.
And the more mundane stuff like having porn and gore posts not tagged as NSFW will get your instance defederated.
I would love to see more middle of the road, non-extremist content. It seems that every instance is all the way left, falling off the chart, and then like 3 instances are falling off the other side of the chart, and defederated everywhere.
Are you curious about Mastodon? Mammoth, the Google-funded app, could be the app that will use all of you to destroy the Fediverse*
Dear friends of decentralization, welcome to the end of the world!
One of the most serious limitations of Mastodon (not to mention other obscene software, such as the cumbersome Friendica or the toy Misskey) is that... it sucks!
No it's not true, it doesn't suck, in fact it has improved the ergonomics a lot, but compared to commercial social networks it still seems to be several years behind.
At the moment only Bluesky seems to do worse, but in that case we are actually talking about a dead fetus kept artificially alive by American journalists, so it's a bit out of competition...
** Did you want to know why I titled it “funded by Google”?*
The app is definitely well made and has some interesting new features.
The updated app will introduce a number of features designed to appeal to former X users, including personalized suggestions of accounts to follow, to help you rebuild your network on Mastodon, as well as curated “smart lists” that help you find interesting conversations that take place on Mastodon.…
Mammoth will also integrate with the editorial staff of Flipboard, the social magazine app for curating news on topics from across the web through accounts such as News , Tech , Culture and Science. And it is a partner with Newsmast , another curator of news and communities on Mastodon, as well as Press.coop, which imports feeds from popular news websites into Mastodon. These integrations allow Mammoth 2 to create a number of other “smart lists,” including those for News, World News, Business, Tech, Environment, and Nature.
In short, to use Mastodon more easily, users will give up the most important aspect offered by Mastodon: decentralization!
That's how: following other people's lists, integrating rubbish like Newsmast (one of the projects most oriented towards the Anglospheric centralization of news which is starting to have some singers even in the Italian Fediverse), everything we always wanted to avoid by migrating from Twitter to Mastodon!
I won't hide from you that seeing Mammoth become so popular in some way in the last few days is truly disheartening: a campaign of a few thousand dollars is enough to infest the entire Fediverse with the editorials of a small US company.
By the way, many of Mammoth's features had already been implemented by IceCubes . Not to mention, IceCubes has always been free and open source!
Mammoth has also become open source. But when you launch it, the first thing it does (how horrible!) is make you automatically follow their account (I got visual messages on the new features screen, but I wasn't able to stop the following on that screen) and they a very shitty icon similar to that of Threads.
Most concerning though is their SmartLists feature: send your handle to their official moth.social instance, which uses a Mastodon fork that serves the “Smart Lists” feature. One can reasonably see how this undermines decentralization…
In the photo, Hänsel and Gretel appreciating the ergonomics of the apps financed by BigTech
A final bitter consideration? It's not true that we always want to ruin the beautiful things we have. But unfortunately it is true that we always have this overwhelming desire to help anyone who wants to ruin what we have. As long as he is rich, beautiful and powerful…
I don’t agree with all of your conclusions here, but I think it is important to note another problem:
Mammoth’s AGPL 3.0 license is currently incompatible with Apple’s AppStore because Apple imposes restrictions which are explicitly forbidden by GPLv3 (specifically, the paragraphs in the license about “installation information”).
So, while the source code is released under this license, the binaries that Mammoth distributes via Apple are not under a free software license at all. Recipients of the source code are allowed to distribute it (and their own modified versions) under GPLv3 only, which means not on Apple’s App Store (which is the only place most iOS users get software).
This may be an oversight, or may be intentional. Other projects like Signal messenger have for years been using the GPLv3-iOS incompatibility to appear to be free software while actually maintaining a monopoly on the right to distribute binaries to iPhone users.
See NextCloud’s COPYING.iOS for an example of how to release an iOS app under GPLv3 in a way that does not restrict that right to a single entity.
Embrace. The big corporate giant dips its toe into an existing project.
Extend. The corp adds features to their app, improving on the community’s apps features. Somewhere along the line, a previously open source project will become proprietary and closed. People begin to prefer the proprietary option for the added features.
Extinguish. The proprietary app cuts out the original community (defederation) when a critical mass of users is reached. People use the proprietary app instead of the open and free app, because of the features, but also because many of the people they want to follow are now segmented from them. The original open system dies out from lack of use.
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.
The term Threadiverse has nothing to do with Meta’s Threads platform, I think the term is actually older than Meta’s announcement. The Threadiverse refers to the platforms that organize things into threads similar to Reddit or forums, right now this mainly means Lemmy and Kbin
I find mastodon boring and I just think people who wanna use defederated twitter are different and more common than people who wanna use defederated reddit. Peertube though, now that is a compelling argument.
@ajsadauskas@maegul@fediverse I’ll be honest. I’m ambivalent about Bluesky. If Mastodon et al can talk to them, fine. If not, fine. I’m happy & content with the wonderful people here and if federation gives us access to a few more, that’s fine too.
Couple things: The first line of your toot becomes the Lemmy post title so keep it short and don’t add any tags (they format weirdly). Also if you tag multiple communities it’ll only post to the first.
@fediverse Let's face it. When talking about the Fediverse, it is very hard to sell interoperability between different types of instances as a major advantage.
@root_beer@fediverse I understand the point, but what if there are different needs and use cases? Like a network of schools in a specific region that want to coordinate, interact and share events among them?
There are almost as many clients for each of #Pixelfeed, #Mastedon, #PeerTube, and the rest of the #Fediverse, for a single platform.
Switch platforms, and discover a plethora of other clients.
For the last few months our team has been working on an entirely automated AI-powered news site. I am excited to announce that v1.0 is finally being released. This version includes full coverage with every article generated from 2 left leaning, 2 right leaning, and 2 neutral sources. We have also added an anonymous commenting system for people to share their opinions freely. Our servers are now running 24/7 so that new articles appear as they happen! Let me know what you guys think, as well as any comments/concerns/questions you have!
@Chozo Thanks for pointing that out. It appears their was an extra entry for MNSBC in our database with the wrong bias ranking. It is now removed so that articles in the future will be generated with MNSBC as left.
@feditips@fediverse Is there a Fedi version of something like Facebook Groups? Social circles for a specific topic? Calckey looks like it has something similar but they are currently not federated and also I've found the platform in general to be very unstable.
One of the challenges for newcomers to Mastodon is that you're faced with a major decision you face when signing up: what server (aka "instance") to choose? Different instances have different focuses: are geographically focused (sfba.social), identity-based (tech.lgbt), interest-based (mastodon.art), professional (infosec.exchange), a group of friends (friend.camp), or even lipogrammatic (oulipo.social, which doesn't allow the letter 'e' in posts). Others are "general purpose", without a specific focus – like mastodon.social, mastodon.ai, and hachyderm.io. The choice isn't irrevocable – you can migrate your account to another instance and keep the list of who you're following and who's following you – but it's still daunting.
Newcomers are often told that it doesn't matter what instance you're on, or encouraged to join mastodon.social (the "flagship" instance, which is the default for mobile apps and spreadmastodon.com). This is really horrible advice, because what instance you're on has a big effect on your experience – and for most people, mastodon.social is not a good place to start.
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[This is an an updated version of the post I originally did last November. I've tried to double-check that the links all still work, please let me know if I missed any!]
@thenexusofprivacy@daveley@fediverse@fediverse also you don't need to have an overriding interest to join a place, like mastodon.art isn't just all art all the time. I don't post about computer stuff super often I'm just at home with computery people
@thenexusofprivacy@daveley@fediverse@fediverse also you don't need to have an overriding interest to join a place, like mastodon.art isn't just all art all the time. I don't post about computer stuff super often I'm just at home with computery people. There's a few good Canadian instances for example that may just put you a bit closer to "your community" than a giant global dogpile
The main subject of the week is the conversation around Meta joining the #fediverse. To make sense of it all, I created a timeline of the major events, as well as sort out the different types of discourse people are having into different subjects.
I already tested posting to one group and (with a slight issue with replies) it seems to work fine. Now I'm interested to know what happens if I try to post to MULTIPLE groups at the same time, what happens then?