Fediverse

I suppose this may make sense in the case of something like Mastodon. But something as versatile and customizable as lemmy, which allows for the existence of separate topic-based communities, makes topic-based instances of lemmy not necessary.

Instead of making a new instance for a certain topic, it is usually a much better approach to just create a new community on my current lemmy instance. At least from my perspective as a user.

I find the only exception to this is censorship and moderation. If I, for any reason am unhappy with an instance's moderation and censorship, then that is the only potential reason I can see to change and make my own.

What does everyone else think of this?

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/957811

Ariadne Conill 🐰 @ariadne EN

i hate to say it, especially as the person who started IRCv3 in the first place, but there is literally no world in which i would deploy a new project on IRC.

i can manage all moderation tasks on discord with terraform. that is something impossible to realize with IRC.

any project to take back mindshare from Discord has to frame their strategy from this perspective.

with Discord, or any other SaaS, you are dealing with a loss of software freedom, and that should be highlighted, but the solution is to provide a libre alternative that is competitive. IRC (and frankly Matrix) isn't that.

https://social.treehouse.systems/@ariadne/110199185608729068

Ariadne Conill 🐰 @ariadne EN

this has always been the problem i was trying to solve. with atheme, with ircv3, with all of it. how do we provide community plumbing that is usable and scalable?

but IRC failed to evolve fast enough despite all of those efforts, because people didn't understand the real evolutionary threats.

the reality distortion field is a real threat to any free software project: it is very easy to become complacent, because the product is 70% of what is actually needed.

but as the world evolves, that 70% turns into 60% and then 50% and so on, while people resist the concept that product fit and focus are slipping.

everything is Fine™️ because everything is Free™️, and instead of focusing on the real threat (I have been saying that IRC would be eaten by proprietary services since the 2000s), people, thinking that everything is fine, actually, tend to focus on their little kingdoms rather than the big picture.

and so we slipped, and slipped, until eventually, IRC does 20% of what we want, and IRCv3 brings that to maybe 25%, and then when a rich charlatan buys the largest IRC network and ruins it, at least half the people still there who haven't left yet realize that, upon having their reality distortion field shattered, actually 25% of what is needed perhaps isn't the right thing, and they too move their projects to Discord or Slack.

this is a problem, and it needs to be fought, but any such fight needs to write IRC off as a loss and start over. this isn't about "how do we win over the 1990s chatroom user", it's about "how do we win over the 2023 discord user."

https://social.treehouse.systems/@ariadne/110199267432776043 Ariadne Conill 🐰 @ariadne EN

like, seriously, you have no idea how frustrating it was to try to mold IRC into a competitive product. i tried for a decade. i even worked on this as a full-time SRE for a while (Ustream really needed UnrealIRCd to be rewritten).

we even had some wins, for a while: the decline of IRC's userbase was reversed and it even grew for a while.

but for the most part i had the pleasure of advocating that IRC developers do not do stupid shit, like add spying features (looking at you InspIRCd m_invisible.so).

at the ecosystem level, the strong desire of IRC developers to do stupid shit for short-term gains in users, outpaced the desire to promote the health of the ecosystem, and add new competitive features that end-users would care about.

this is because projects cared far more about admin mindshare than user mindshare, and basically shows how the whole IRC mentality is doomed to failure.

community infrastructure projects have to be community focused, not admin focused. Rob Levin (the founder of freenode) used to derisively refer to the people who didn't get this point as "traditional IRC users."

https://social.treehouse.systems/@ariadne/110199317380320492 Ariadne Conill 🐰 @ariadne@treehouse.systems

incidentally, the fediverse is in a similar position, where it is threatened by the free software reality distortion field.

Mastodon isn't good enough for the long run. we laugh at BlueSky, but it is a legitimate threat, and it could very easily wind up eating the fediverse. all they have to do is make it more palatable to the mainstream.

https://social.treehouse.systems/@ariadne/110199369743497066 Ariadne Conill 🐰 @ariadne EN

one last thing. the people who are suggesting FOSS chat alternatives to me.

you miss my point. you're offering me oranges when Discord has offered me an apple.

Discord is not "just a chat platform." I would describe it as an "integrated community management platform."

It combines chat with other forms of community media: forums, for example, and a rich suite of AV capabilities.

this is also a symptom of the free software reality distortion field: the alternatives suggested may be sufficient for some usecases, but that doesn't mean they cover the same niche as the product they are proposed as a replacement to.

it's the concision of experience that has allowed Discord to have such great success in their efforts to eat IRC's userbase.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/956291

Features:

• Lightweight, minimal dependencies
• Extensive support of ActivityPub operations, e.g. write public notes, follow users, be followed, reply to the notes of others, admire wonderful content (like or boost), write private messages...
• Multiuser
• Mastodon API support, so Mastodon-compatible apps can be used (work in progress)
• Simple but effective web interface
• Easily-accessed MUTE button to silence morons
• Tested interoperability with related software
• No database needed
• Totally JavaScript-free
• No cookies either
• Not much bullshit

Fediverse is going mainstream fast. And it is going to be a corporate hellhole if the grassroots initiatives that drove it to its current success are losing their grip on evolution in proper direction: Humane tech that is to the benefit of the people andd society, free culture thriving.

While corporate threads are looming, meanwhile the activated developer community is once again splintering, fragmenting initiatives appearing that dilute attention to focus on common efforts, cohesion, cross-pollination and collaboration. The "herding cats" problem of grassroots movements.

Great opportunity is now. Cohesion means that initiatives remain independent, but take care to coordinate with what is going on elsewhere.

👉 You can help! Avoid a CorporaVerse where you are exploited and milked. Bring attention to the opportunity and participate in the related initiatives to help bring them closer together. You might also boost my related toot.

i guess these are posts from the closed beta at https://staging.bsky.app/ which has maybe ~10k users now (they said >4k a while ago, and then apparently they invited 5k from their waiting list yesterday).

permalinks to posts there are currently not accessible without logging in, but i guess since this site exists there must be some API from which posts can be accessed without a login.

I don't have many fedi accounts, but looking at public Mastodon feeds it is very common to see people requesting others to add alt-text to their media and getting a lot of boosts/etc.

Is there any reason (beyond a very mild convenience) for some Mastodon instances not to require alt-text on media? It seems like something a lot of admins would want to do, given their general audience, and naively I'd say it's very easy to implement.

Fediverse hot takes:

1. The only true client is the browser.

2. Microblogging be damned.

3. it’s the instances/servers that are federated, not the users (ie us) … and damn that too.

@fediverse

#fediverse

Anyone have an interesting blog that uses the WordPress ActivityPub plugin?

If so, please leave a link/handle as a reply to this post.

(And even if you don't, please boost this thread on so it can reach people who do.)

#WordPress #WebDev #Fediverse #Automattic @pfefferle #Mastodon @fediverse @asklemmy @technology

I love that I'm seeing more and more posts to Lemmy from Mastodon.
This one feature finally ties Lemmy in with the rest of the fediverse by providing the lacking feature: making top level posts. Lemmy (along with friendica!) will lead the way in making "groups" and forums in the fediverse, accessible from any platform you choose.
@fediverse

Flipboard joins the Fediverse with a Mastodon integration and community, plans for ActivityPub

https://techcrunch.com/2023/02/28/flipboard-joins-the-fediverse-with-a-mastodon-integration-and-community-plans-for-activitypub/

@fediverse@lemmy.ml @acrossthefediverse @fediverse@midwest.social

I'm not sure if this is appropriate to post here, but this may have a significant impact on The Fediverse if it causes migration?

There's something about the method that Friendica uses to generate timelines that I find really compelling, and that doesn't seem to be talked about much.

Friendica's timelines are "post" centred, with replies appearing as a tree attached to that post, in a similar way to Facebook. It's distinct from the more Twitter like method common on most of the #microfedi platforms, in which there is no real difference between a post and a reply.

The reason that I find this framework so compelling is that it means you always have context and full conversations in view. If someone you follow replies to someone else you follow, the whole post and all of the replies appear in your timeline again, with full context at a glance.

Similarly, when you're reading your timeline, everything is grouped together. Everyone in your timeline that replied to a post is there on that post with full context. And if you're not interested, it's trivial to just scroll past.

Compare this to Mastodon, Misskey etc and their forks, where you tend to only see one branch of a conversation, and often have the same conversation showing up in your timeline multiple times depending on who is involved.

It's an option for interacting with timelines that I'd love to see implemented in other FediVerse platforms!

#friendica #Fediverse #Fedivangelism

@friendica @fediverse

@fediverse
♲ ioc.exchange/@alaric/109727704…

Today, Medium is launching a Mastodon instance at me.dm to help our authors, publications and readers find a home in the fediverse. Mastodon is an emerging force for good in social media and we are excited to join this community.

This is a post I originally made on my #calckey account, but I think it belongs here too.

==

The more I use different #fediverse apps, the more I feel that we are on the edge of a different future, in the early stages of something that we haven't seen before.

In the last few months, I've used #Mastodon, #Misskey, #Calckey, #Funkwhale, #lemmy, #Peertube, #Bookwyrm and #Pixelfed. Soon, I'm going to try an install of #kbin. In the not too distant future, we will see #GreatApe bringing more options for video chat to the Fediverse. There are countless more platforms that I haven't had a chance to try.

The network formed by the interconnections between those apps is the Fediverse; a Federated Universe. Federated, because everything out there is connected with everything else, in one giant network. What I am truly beginning to appreciate is just how real that vision is, and just how disruptive to our future it's going to be. More than a truism, these the fediverse platforms really will allow us to see and interact with nearly anything else out there.

The platform we use no longer determines the information we can access; it doesn't build walls around us. Instead, what out choice of platform determines, is how we interact with information, rather than determining what information we are able interact with in the first place. The walls in the walled garden haven't so much been torn down, as simply never built.

I can write a blog post, and someone on Mastodon can reply to it. I can make a group post on lemmy, and someone from Calckey can reply to it. I can see an awesome photo on Pixelfed, bring it in to #Akkoma and boost it for everyone else to see. And then anyone who sees it can interact with it.

The cross platform interactions are still imperfect. Standards are still being developed, code is still being written and features are still being defined, but the future is right here, we are on the cusp of something new and amazing.

Of course, this is all old news to someone who has been part of the fediverse for years now, but it feels different now. The momentum is here, we are seeing a shift and I think once we cross that precipice, once we have normalised the cross channel interactions we are starting to develop, it's going to be very hard to go back.

Honestly, I can't wait.