It’s a broken/missing feature in Lemmy. There should be a nice simple way to crosspost, and they should be deduped by the server. Every user should see the post once, with some indication of the activity in the various communities.
Misskey, the fediverse microblogging platform that’s popular in Japan, has provided a recap of 2023, and it has been a big year for Misskey. The platform saw massive growth, the main server Misskey.io incorporated itself, and a number of new features and performance improvements.
The flagship server Misskey.io grew from 500 daily active users in January to 28k daily active users in December. They grew from around 20k registered accounts at the beginning of the year to over 400k accounts now. As with most social networks, growth happened in bursts, with a major increase in March and July, while the other months grew much slower.
With the growth came other changes as well: the server misskey.io incorporated itself, and main developer Syuilo became a director of the organisation as well. Donations and sponsorships also grew significantly. For the future, Syuilo says that “there are limits to relying solely on donations from everyone, so I would like to find a way to monetize the project.”
Misskey Pages allow users to create custom web pages on the platform that they can share. It can be programmed as well, and Misskey created a custom scripting language AiScript so people can safely add code to their Misskey Pages as well.
Other updates include refactoring of code and performance improvements, more information on that can be found here and here.
Misskey’s vision for fediverse servers is visible in their updates on moderation; every user can be assigned different roles that control permissions of the user in detail. In the update they say that this has greatly affected the operation of the Misskey server. This implies a vision for Misskey of larger servers, with a more complex structure for administration and moderation.
The future plans for Misskey focus heavily on the playful aspect of social communities: two games will be added that can be played on Misskey; Misskey Room as a way to play with other users in 3D space, as well as a chat interface. This puts Misskey further it’s unique place in the fediverse.
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.
Mastodon supports long form and rich content perfectly fine. The problem is that Lemmy and Kbin extend ActivityPub in a way that nothing else does. While most of the Fediverse uses Note objects, Lemmy chose to use Page objects. Mastodon supports Pages but only renders a title and a link because it doesn’t really know what pages are.
Pages represent web pages, whereas notes represent “a short written work typically less than a single paragraph in length”. In my opinion, using Page was a mistake on Lemmy’s end. Just like Lemmy won’t support Place objects, I’m not sure if any other platform will ever support Page objects, because Pages are much bigger in scope than anything most Fediverse applications ever deal with.
There are also other problems. Lemmy expects the community to be CC’ed or Federation may break.
Something that’ll undoubtably confuse people is that Lemmy will send a Create to create a post (makes sense) followed by a boost (Announce) to populate it across servers. In Mastodon, this manifests as a long list of boosted posts. This is the only way Lemmy can spread comments to every other server, but it’ll flood any normal timeline with boosts.
Notation invented by other platforms (!community) isn’t going to make it into Mastodon, I don’t think. You can just paste a full URL (lemmy.world/c/linuxmemes) into Mastodon and get to the community, though, so I don’t really see the need. This is because of perfectly sensible design choices made by both the Lemmy devs (using group: in webfinger to indicate groups, even though that URL scheme is nonstandard, so username and community can overlap) and the Mastodon devs (accounts follow the standard Webfinger notation and usernames are expected to be unique).
Mastodon has stupidities of its own (think “you must @mention usernames” despite ActivityPub having a non-content field for that purpose that’ll work just fine). But in this case the problem is that different projects use the same standard for different purposes.
Interaction between Mastodon and Lemmy is possible, but it’s a massive pain, and even if Mastodon were to support Page objects to render Lemmy posts, it’ll always remain a pain. I don’t think asking Mastodon to change the way their software works to support use cases it was never designed to support (and perhaps doesn’t want to support) is very viable.
That said, you could try to check out the code over at Github and see if you can make Page objects render better in Mastodon. Probably best to ask the maintainers what approach they’d prefer, but I think rendering posts would be a rather small change that would greatly improve interoperability.
I’ve been here a week ago already asking if Arch would be fine for a laptop used for university, as stability is a notable factor in that and I’m already using EndeavourOS at home, but now I’m curious about something else too - what about Arch vs NixOS?...
I’m a bit surprised to see that you disagreed with the “NixOS is hard to configure” bit, but then also listed some of the reasons why it can be hard to configure as cons.
By “configure”, they probably didn’t mean just setting up say, user accounts, which is definitely easy to set up in Nix.
The problems start to arise when you want to use something that isn’t in Nixpkgs, or even something that is out of date in Nixpkgs, or using a package from Nixpkgs that then has plugins but said plugin(s) that you want aren’t in Nixpkgs.
From my experience with NixOS, I had two software packages break on me that are in Nixpkgs - one of them being critical for work, and I had no clue where to even begin trying to fix the Nixpkg derivation because of how disorganized Nix’s docs can be.
Speaking of docs inconsistencies you still have the problem of most users saying you should go with Flakes these days, but it’s still technically an experimental feature and so the docs still assume you’re not using Flakes…
I was also working on a very simple Rust script, and couldn’t get it to properly build due to some problem with the OpenSSL library that one of the dependent crates of my project used.
That was my experience with NixOS after a couple of months. The concept of Nix[OS] is fantastic, but it comes with a heavy cost depending on what you’re wanting to do. The community is also great, but even I saw someone who heavily contributes to Nixpkgs mention that a big issue is only a handful of people know how Nixpkgs is properly organized, and that they run behind on PRs / code reviews of Nixpkgs because of it.
I’d still like to try NixOS on say, a server where I could expect it to work better because everything is declarative such as docker containers - but it’s going to be a while before I try it on my PC again.
It’s great for communicating among individuals and in group chats, but I think it ultimately fails as a platform between creators and fans even though it seems like every creator or product team has one these days....
I mean, people could just make an announcements channel that allows public messaging, that's not like a legal requirement of servers to make those restricted to posting, but they could totally make an announcement discussion channel, and even make a thread within the channel for each announcement post. Threads don't actually disappear, I don't believe, they go away from the immediate discord sidebar, but you can go to any channel and press the threads button at the top and see all previous threads intact.
And replying to someone's old message with context is totally possible. You can quote reply and @ them so they're notified and they can also tap your quote message to be taken back to the original message, helping them to remember context.
I don't really see discord as best at being a social media overall, but it is a decent community platform. I think the fact that reading older content is extremely difficult is true, and sort of a symptom of Discord's design, but that's the only real con I can think of.
And traditional forums don't theoretically disappear, but pretty much all of the self hosted ones I used to frequent back in the day are dead and gone, unless you count the way back machine. Actually, I'm curious, is there any software that allows you to back up at least the text contents of a discord server?
I have found that every extra “community” server I join ends up getting muted and forgotten until I eventually leave it. I think Discord having a really low barrier to entry (free, insta-hosted servers) is why it is chosen nowadays.
But yes, I find it works best as a sort of advanced IRC replacement for my gaming group.
Discord hasn’t ever been trying to do what forums do; it’s an evolution of text and voice chat rooms. Discord is for synchronous, live communication, while forums are asynchronous. Information gets lost in synchronous platforms because there’s an inherent assumption that the value of that information is highest in the moment when people are communicating real-time. Getting the 50 message chat history isn’t supposed to be about catching up on what everyone was talking about last week, it’s intended to get you caught up in the conversation that’s happening now. Twitter is the same way. It’s not particularly easy to browse older conversations by design.
It’s possible the format just isn’t for you, but there are a couple things that could help. I think the most important part is finding the right size of community. I personally prefer servers in the range of 50-100 active people. I joined up with one as a part of the Reddit exodus and it quickly grew to 1,000+. Too chaotic for my taste, but I know people who love very active servers like that. Threads are designed to help with the reply problem. A large server that doesn’t permit threads is probably not one you want to be a part of unless it has a mod team that’s very on top of things.
Good channel and role organization is also important, but unfortunately a lot of the good tools are third-party. Because not everyone has the same tools, it can be challenging to find a server that’s well-organized. For example, there a tool that allows people to highlight a specific message, listing a history of selected messages in a non-chat channel. If a server is good at using it, that sort of thing might help you catch up. Another thing we could see soon (if it’s not happening already) is generative AI posting daily summaries of conversations.
It took me a while to get comfortable enough to contribute at will in my favorite Discord servers and not feel like I was interrupting. Cultures vary greatly by server, but no matter the server, there has to be some degree of willingness to jump in.
I really liked it when it first popped up as what felt like a skype replacement. Now though, it’s awful. To be honest though it’s not at discords fault, mostly. It’s due to how every online community is wanting to use discord for their communities. They treat it like a forum, even though it can’t truly act like one. Discord is good for having servers for different friend groups, but for the giant, in the three digit populated servers, nah. Too much going on in there unless I’m terminally online.
The creator/fan dynamic is not really its strong point - other platforms do that better. The best servers I’m in are small communities of niche hobbyists.
I do not want to block all bots. I only want to block bots from specific instance. More specifically, the @alien.top instance is using most, if not all, bot accounts with random usernames. It uses that instance to post in communities of other instances. I thought about blocking other instances. But the main issue lies with...
Yeah, I didn’t really understand the description. You sign up by authenticating with reddit, and then it automatically connects you with the same subs you have on reddit?
I see “Your account will be activated and you will be subscribed to Lemmy communities that have a reddit counterpart.” but also “create bot accounts to mirror the original accounts on a corresponding fediverse-enabled server”. Hmm.
Right, I mean, I don’t think we’d want Lemmy to just become a clone of reddit with all the same people. Not being ran by a lame corp would still be an advantage but for now I think discourse on Lemmy is higher quality and I hope it stays that way.
I think there’s a need for a social media platform that allows users to create multiple customizable feeds tailored to their specific, fluid interests over time....
EDIT: I am thrilled with so many awesome responses! I’m taking notes and looking into all the recommendations. Again, thank you so much for taking the time to help me out (and many others, i’m sure), i’m glad i asked!...
When building out the database of recommended Lemmy communities, I think it makes the most sense to prioritize the communities that belong to instances focused on a specific topic over communities that are based in a “general” instance, even if currently the community is smaller in the topic-specific instance....
It warms my heart seeing all the lovely things people are making with @crochet and @knitting and @fiberarts -- does anyone know of other crafting groups which exist on Mastodon?
@lrt_writes@crochet@knitting@kerravonsen it's not a year-round crafting group but the @fastenoffyal is an end of the year stitch along where we (I'm a volunteer) promote independent designers and make there patterns in a very welcoming community. We are active on Mastodon, Instagram and have a Discord server. But all info and the searchable database with patterns can be found on www.fastenoffyal.com The pattern sale is active for a few days! Join the fun if you like!
There’s a huge modding scene for Mario Kart Wii, and lots of custom tracks. There’s also several track compilations. One of the most well-known is Wiimms Mario Kart Fun which currently has 449 custom tracks. It runs on a real Wii as well as in emulators. My wife and I used to play it a lot.
The tracks are made by various community members, but the compilation itself is made by Wiimm, the same guy that made the Wiimmfi service that lets you race people online even after Nintendo shut down the official servers.
Huh? It’s far easier, throw in your server IP+Port or DNS and quick connect your clients with a short code.
The bullshit claim solution by Plex makes me pull my hair out, especially on remote instances.
Even when running, it managed to break the database 3 times, with no repair tool of working, interestingly there are plenty, community built and official ones, so that problem is common.
Rebuilding takes a whole day with the intro-outro detection.
What a nightmare to administrate.
As someone who has bought a lifetime subscription a year ago i was enraged as my girlfriend told me that she got ads in Plex, turns out they just added their free streaming service in there without even asking, fuck them, Jellyfin evolved great!
If you are feeling like social media may be a negative factor in your life at the moment, then take a break. Intentionally stepping away for a week or more helps me from time to time. There is also nothing wrong eith deciding to skip lemmy/kbin/etc for now and only using a server/platform that you find most helpful. Some people hate mastodon but love firefish. Theyre both pretty much fully federated eith each other and offer microblogging, but the experience is different. Kbin and Lemmy have some key differences, too, which can chsnge how you experience the fedi.
I think, especially with lemmy and mastodon, that the time i spend is positive. I avoid the busy generic communities and spaces and focus on ones specific to interests. But sometimes fedi drama or a bad actor that moderation was slow to handle can make for a bad time. Or even just bad news in the wider world can make the fedi less of an escape.
With mastodon, i picked a server with a heavy presence of people in my career space and social similarities, but also with a decent amount of diversity, and that has meant that the moderation and especially the local feed are more likely to be neutral or positive than negative. Honestly, time spent on mastodon, for me, tends to be almost exclusively uplifting and informative because of that server choice. I value several mutual connections highly. That’s not to say there isn’t negativity or that I am in a box… thats why diversity was important to me. I rarely found twitter to be uplifting and it was only sometimes informative, and i never had mutuals on twitter that were this active and made social media worth it to me.
If you are seeing a lot of stuff you’d rather not, changing up your server could help. There’s nothing wrong with having multiple accounts on different servers, or even following the same people from different accounts. There’s nothing wrong with being on a server that is more aggressively moderated if that gives you a better experience for YOU. You could have an account for casual use which is intentionally less dense on content to avoid doom scrolling, for instance. Federation means that you can use these platforms as isolated or loose forums in addition to or instead of being connected to the wider federverse.
I mostly used reddit for a small handful of communities. It would not have mattered to me if those communities were on reddit or on forum software. i did most of my browsing from mobile, and i almost never used the website unless i was using it as a search engine. That definitely led me to use reddit far less than if it was an ever present tab on my computer.
I’ve made online friends via the chat rooms for Lemmy communities, that lead to other chat rooms, an online chess buddy, and even a Minecraft server. Perhaps try engaging in some avenues to have more of a conversational style so that you can get to know other users through regular interactions and they can get to know you too. Eventually, you might find a group that you fit in well, and something might come of it.
Gauging interest post. Do any of you fabulous folk want to help start a cutting swap community? Always loved them on reddit. Half of my collection is from those fine folks! :)
Hm, yeah, I would just start up a Mastodon page in parallel with the Meta page. Pick the right “home” server to join; that’s critically important for Mastodon in a way that it’s not for Meta. Put in charge of the page someone who’s genuinely excited about participating in Mastodon, and would be engaged with the gaming community there whether or not they were in charge of the page. I don’t think I would recommend spending anything on ad promotion of the Mastodon page, but like I say I’m not convinced of the utility of spending money on Meta promotion either. YMMV
Anyway like I say my level of knowledge about it is pretty minimal but I’m happy to talk more in depth on details of my experience also if you like.
An “instance” is a techie way of saying it’s a copy of that thing
(disclaimer: I’m not a lemmy expert, just techie.)
A Lemmy instance is just the server where accounts and set of communities lives. e.g, Lemmy.world or Lemmy.ml, etc. Each instance can “federate” content from other instances, which is a way of publishing content to servers you otherwise wouldn’t see. You can see content and communities from other instances as well as comment on those other instances even though you don’t have an account on each one.
Hi! I’m seeking some advice and sanity check on hopping from Ubuntu to Fedora on my personal PC. I’ve been using Ubuntu LTS for almost two years now, switched from Windows and never looked back. But I cannot say I know Linux well. I use my PC for browsing, some gaming with Steam (I have AMD GPU), occasional video editing,...
Read. Then read again. Then read again until you get it.
From gnu.org “What is free software?”
“Free software” means software that respects users’ freedom and community. Roughly, it means that the users have the freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software. Thus, “free software” is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of “free” as in “free speech,” not as in “free beer.” We sometimes call it “libre software,” borrowing the French or Spanish word for “free” as in freedom, to show we do not mean the software is gratis.
You may have paid money to get copies of a free program, or you may have obtained copies at no charge. But regardless of how you got your copies, you always have the freedom to copy and change the software, even to sell copies.
As you can see Free Software (and the GPL) says that the end user has the right to FREELY USE AND REDISTRIBUTE the software, AS IS.
In other words, I could get a copy of RHEL and without making a single change, could redistribute it or even sell it.
Yet Red Hat calls this “freeloading”. Yet that is PRECISELY what Free Software is about!
Rocky Linux, Alma Linux etc were well within their rights to rebrand and redistribute RHEL bug for bug to others. Red Hat had no right to shut them out. Yes they could have made them a customer and charged them for it, but they didn’t do that. And if I’m not mistaken they made the binaries available, not the source code. Meaning that Rocky and Alma would need to spend weeks compiling the code before they could even make it ready for distribution.
Now, someone could become a client of Red Hat, get the code and then host it on a server for anyone to download. But I have a feeling Red Hat would drop them as soon as they found out.
Basically RH now have a closed source mentality.
As for Fedora, stop being so naive. Were you born yesterday? I’m an IT Pro and I can tell your if my company set up a working group full of full time employees to work on a “community” distro which then gets directly absorbed into it company and used in our enterprise products, that working group is to all intents and purposes a part of my company since I’m freaking paying their salaries, and they are working on my freaking product!
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Arch or NixOS?
I’ve been here a week ago already asking if Arch would be fine for a laptop used for university, as stability is a notable factor in that and I’m already using EndeavourOS at home, but now I’m curious about something else too - what about Arch vs NixOS?...
Am I the only one who thinks Discord is awful as a social media platform?
It’s great for communicating among individuals and in group chats, but I think it ultimately fails as a platform between creators and fans even though it seems like every creator or product team has one these days....
What are some games you played years ago, which you've recently enjoyed playing again?
Some communities that might be relevant: !patientgamers (/c/patientgamers)...
How can I block posts from all bot accounts of specific instance? (alien.top)
I do not want to block all bots. I only want to block bots from specific instance. More specifically, the @alien.top instance is using most, if not all, bot accounts with random usernames. It uses that instance to post in communities of other instances. I thought about blocking other instances. But the main issue lies with...
Ways to implement customizable feeds that shift with interests over time?
I think there’s a need for a social media platform that allows users to create multiple customizable feeds tailored to their specific, fluid interests over time....
Noob question: what to arrange before switching to linux
EDIT: I am thrilled with so many awesome responses! I’m taking notes and looking into all the recommendations. Again, thank you so much for taking the time to help me out (and many others, i’m sure), i’m glad i asked!...
Suggestion: prioritize topic-based instances as the recommended lemmy communities.
When building out the database of recommended Lemmy communities, I think it makes the most sense to prioritize the communities that belong to instances focused on a specific topic over communities that are based in a “general” instance, even if currently the community is smaller in the topic-specific instance....
Unix and Linux System Administration Handbook?
Hello,...
What is a video game that you'd love to play, but no one has developed yet?
Plex Discover Together shares a bit too much. ... (lemmy.ml)
Although the headline focusses on a obvious category of media, it really can go wrong on a lot of other categories as well.
Which of the Fediverse projects are worth getting into?
cross-posted from: lemm.ee/post/16137693...
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Any interest in a cutting swap community? Also, would love a hand or two!
Gauging interest post. Do any of you fabulous folk want to help start a cutting swap community? Always loved them on reddit. Half of my collection is from those fine folks! :)
Social media marketing on privacy focused platforms ?
I have a question regarding social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and other popular platforms....
What's a food you forget you like? Then you eat it, and wonder why you don't buy it more often?
This post brought to you by cucumbers.
Preparing to move from Ubuntu to Fedora
Hi! I’m seeking some advice and sanity check on hopping from Ubuntu to Fedora on my personal PC. I’ve been using Ubuntu LTS for almost two years now, switched from Windows and never looked back. But I cannot say I know Linux well. I use my PC for browsing, some gaming with Steam (I have AMD GPU), occasional video editing,...