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…
The future of selfhosted services is going to be... Android?
Wait, what?
Think about it. At some point everyone has had an old phone lying around. They are designed to be constantly connected, constantly on... and even have a battery and potentially still a SIM card to survive power outages.
We just need to make it easy to create APK packaged servers that can avoid battery-optimization kills and automatically configure an outbound tunnel like ngrok, zerotrust, etc...
The goal: hosting services like #nextcloud, #syncthing, #mastodon!? should be as easy as installing an APK and leaving an old phone connected to a spare charger / outlet.
It would be tempting to have an optimized ROM, but if self-hosting is meant to become more commonplace, installing an APK should be all that's needed. #Android can do SSH, VPN and other tunnels without the need for root, so there should be no problem in using tunnels to publicly expose a phone/server in a secure manner.
In regards to the suitability of home-grade broadband, I believe that it should not be a huge problem at least in Europe where home connections are most often unmetered: "At the end of June 2021, 70.2% of EU homes were passed by either FTTP or cable DOCSIS
3.1 networks, i.e. those technologies currently capable of supporting gigabit speeds."
PS. syncthing actually already has an APK and is easy to use. Although I had to sort out some battery optimization stuff, it's a good example of what should become much more commonplace.
I mean, android is fine I guess, but it’s being pushed to be less and less able to be separated from Google. I think for a lot of people interested in self hosting, there’s a low amount of interest in it because of that.
We don’t do dogs often, so there’s usually a hot debate followed by careful negotiations as to which method gets used. My wife likes them best either grilled or pan cooked for the browning that occurs. I’m a beer boil fan that enjoys a good grilling. Our kid is a hard core grilling devotee. My dad is neutral, but leans boiled sometimes.
One thing we all agree on is that boiling them in water is sacrilege.
Most of the time, the pan cooking is so much faster and isn’t as wasteful of resources. The gas grill uses way more gas getting up to heat than the carbon steel pan does. And the pan doesn’t need anything other than heat and the thin coat of oil to get the job done, unlike the can/bottle of beer that goes in with boiling.
So we just throw them in a pan and cook until well browned. You get most of the flavor that grilling gives, with less gas (there’s no way I’m setting up and burning charcoal for hotdogs only).
Sometimes, I get ornery and tell everyone they can either cook their own dinner, or eat the dogs I’m boiling in beer. Which is my version of careful negotiations
Anyone using the Sync for Lemmy app? I sure hope it starts supporting Kbin soon because it's hands down the best Fediverse app already. It has only been out a week.
Unfortunately, being in Kbin this Magazine is not very viewable on it yet. Something to do with Kbin doing things differently - any ideas on what that means?
I actually use several apps. Makes it easier to handle things because most apps start getting glitchy when you’ve got more than 5 or 6 accounts on it.
Sync is awesome, particularly for casual scrolling.
Summit though, that’s the first app with mod tools and the first functional multi list feature. The themes could stand a bit more customization, but it’s a great app.
Connect is a killer. Ties with sync for best looking (though sync has more visual options), was the first with instance blocking, and the dev is absurdly fast with bug fixes.
Thunder is just a great all around experience.
Infinity is another very successful port of a great reddit app. It’s on par with sync for sure.
Alas, none support kbin because they can’t, or rather couldn’t. Artemis is the only kbin app available, and even that’s only possible because the dev is running her own kbin instance while the project is ongoing. Kbin lacked an API for apps to work with. I believe they’re going to open one up soon-ish though. So maybe apps will catch up with that in a month or so.
There’s a handful of other solid apps too, btw. I just went off of my favorites. Liftoff is hugely popular for good reason, as an example. Great app, just not right for me.
I have a question to all of you who have subscribed to Lemmy groups from Fediverse projects that aren't Lemmy. Who follow Lemmy groups from e.g. #Mastodon, #GlitchSoc, #Pleroma, #Akkoma, #MissKey, what's still called #CalcKey, #FoundKey, #Mitra, #GoToSocial, #Socialhome, #Friendica etc., but also #kbin. And I sincerely hope that I'm not the only subscriber to this entire group who isn't on Lemmy.
My question is: If a Lemmy post contains an image or any other media, can you see it?
I'm on #Hubzilla. And when someone posts something with an image in it, I can see the post, but I can't see the image. When someone posts something with a video in it, I can't see the video either.
I can see images in comments with no problem. But I can't see them in posts.
How about you on Mastodon? Or on CalcKey? Or on /kbin? Or elsewhere?
I'm asking and hoping for replies because I need to find out if the issue is on Lemmy's or on Hubzilla's side so I can file a bug report.
This morning when I opened Infinity to check Reddit, I saw the announcement above: they're going subscription-only. Ironically enough, I couldn't scroll down to see the rest of the message including prices, if there were any. I also couldn't see if there was a button to close the message or start a paid subscription. I couldn't proceed to Reddit at all. My only option was to close the app completely. So I uninstalled it.
That's it for me using Reddit on mobile! Can't say I'll miss it much. But I added a LOT of content to Reddit that way, so it's their loss. Fuck you, spez!