tried to pioneer the fedi plays genre(like twitch plays but for fediverse), apparently it has been done before in different ways on mastodon, but this is peertube livestream version. I had it running for about 2 days with not issues. currently it has about 19 seconds of lag and checks for input every 4 seconds.

source code: https://github.com/solidheron/Fedi-plays

This is a unique experiment in the Fediverse.

What’s going on?

To explain what’s happening with my account:

I’ve created a new art form.

I don’t mean this in a pretentious “guy in a turtleneck sniffing his own farts” way. I mean, literally, I’ve invented a form of art that hasn’t been done before. And to understand it, you first need to understand what’s happening.

The Backstory

A long time ago, I organized photos into categories and themes for an ARG (alternate reality game) centered around r/Sizz. But then Reddit went and enshittified itself, forcing me to abandon the original plan.

From that, I learned a crucial lesson:

• Never depend on an external platform to host my work.
• Always build redundancies so the work can survive.

Keep that in mind—it’s key to what happens next.

The Problem with the Fediverse

I tried migrating the ARG to my personal server, atomicpoet.org, but I hit a wall:

The Fediverse makes it really hard to build an art community, and by extension, an ARG. The platform favors certain topics—politics and tech do well, but art? Not so much.

At first, I was frustrated. But then I had an idea:

What if the same content could look completely different depending on where you view it?

The Breakthrough

Mastodon and Lemmy attract different audiences, which means people interpret the same post in completely different ways. What if I leaned into that?

That’s when I discovered Piefed.

• Its moderation tools gave me exactly what I needed.
• Its masonry-style layout prioritized images over text—perfect for what I was building.

How It Works

On Mastodon, my posts look like scattered poetry, fiction, and chaotic personal musings:
🔗 Example

But on Piefed, those same posts take on an aesthetically unified theme:
🔗 Example

Two completely different experiences—from the exact same content. The way each platform processes posts creates a divergent reality.

The Artform

Think of it like this:

• My personal account = a light beam
• ActivityPub = a prism
• Piefed communities = different “colors” refracting from that prism

Each community on Piefed has its own theme and patterns:
🔗 Lumoura
🔗 Blue
🔗 Dustbloom
🔗 Sizz

Look closely, and you’ll see that these patterns form a larger story—one I’ll eventually compile into multiple books.

The Big Reveal

Instead of making you guess the “game,” I’m telling you upfront: this is how it works.

And none of it would be possible without ActivityPub and the way different platforms interpret content.

@fediverse@lemmy.world

Feeds are a combination of communities into one, like multireddit or mastodon tags.

Try it out!

https://pixelfed.fediverse.observer/dailystats

Weather has always significantly influenced my life. When I was a young athlete, knowing the forecast in advance would have allowed me to better plan my training sessions. As I grew older, I could choose whether to go to school on my motorcycle or, for safety reasons, have my grandfather drive me. And it was him, my grandfather, who was my go-to meteorologist. He followed all weather patterns and forecasts, a remnant of his childhood in the countryside and his life on the move. It’s to him that I dedicate FediMeteo.

The idea for FediMeteo started almost by chance while I was checking the holiday weather forecast to plan an outing. Suddenly, I thought how nice it would be to receive regular weather updates for my city directly in my timeline. After reflecting for a few minutes, I registered a domain and started planning.

We Distribute is a community-organized news site which covers the Fediverse. If you like to write about federated social media then you could help to expand their coverage.

See the link above for more details.

I only have limited experience with web development, but this tech seems super useful for hosting on any decentralized platform. Could this be used in place of a CDN? Would love to hear what you guys would use something like this for.

EDIT: I missed the faq with a list of projects that use it. That list has some really cool, useful services i might start using!

https://github.com/webtorrent/webtorrent/blob/master/docs/faq.md#who-is-using-webtorrent-today

Mutual aid spam is becoming a problem on the Fediverse.

And to be sure, I'm not against mutual aid. What I am against is spam.

This person has not verified who she is -- or even if the profile picture is hers. Additional research on her name states she is a scammer with a record of grifting. I am therefore skeptical that any donations will help anyone in need.

Folks, please be cautious with mutual aid requests. Yes, people sometimes need help. But people also lie.

@fediverse@lemmy.world

It should be noted that Feddit.org was included to represent Germany, Austria and Switzerland.

I did not include Baraza.africa as that was too encompassing as it covers the whole African continent.

Hopefully this post inspires more countries to join the blue club!

I use Bluesky and Mastodon. Mastodon better hits where I want the fediverse to go but Bluesky is so much easier to use. Signup, UI, flagship app, feeds, and content is just so much less of a headache. But it feels like it's a matter of time before it's enshittified.

I was thinking about how much I hate big tech but there's a lot of small and mid-size companies that I have neutral to positive views on. Canonical, Mozilla, 37 Signals, Odoo are the ones that come to mind. All of those have a revenue model but also actively support open source initiatives and developers. None are perfect but better than "big tech" and get more done than just donation based development.

It feels like there needs to be some for-profit companies (without ads and maintaining privacy) that can help support the development around ActivityPub and maintain apps and servers that are easier to onboard and easier to use. Does this exist?

What could be some non-evil revenue models? I pay $20/month for a blogging platform for my business website. Maybe have a service to host AP servers for businesses or journalists? Personal private encrypted cloud services like photo backups that are integrated with AP?

It's brief, around 25:15

https://youtube.com/watch?v=nf7XHR3EVHo

If you've been sitting on making a post about your favorite instance, this could be a good opportunity to do so.

Going by our registration applications, a lot of people are learning about the fediverse for the first time and they're excited about the idea. I've really enjoyed reading through them :)

Hashtags do not replace groups.

No one moderates them. They’re easy to hijack and spam. And there’s simply no permanence to them.

Which is why, if you actually want to discuss something, it’s better to tag a group. For example, if you want to be part of an actual PC gaming community on the Fediverse, it’s better to tag @pcgaming@lemmy.ca than #pcgaming.

This needs to be common knowledge because people new to the Fediverse do not know about groups. Hell, I’d say people who have had Mastodon accounts for years still don’t know. And that’s a shame.

@fediverse@lemmy.world

More from the episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/nf7XHR3EVHo

I want to write an article that answers the question ‘Why should YOU join the Fediverse?’, which would basically be an exhaustive list of arguments for joining the Fediverse, each argument linked (LINKS PLEASE!) to an article/publication that illustrates it. I'll translate it into several languages.

Can you help me?

i came accross this mastodon account that does polls to see what character does in rpg setting https://mastodon.social/@dungeons

I wanted to know if there was any games that simulate an mmorpg and can even have character interactions or mining. it would be fun to promote or make for fediverse engagement. for all I know it can be a simple game where you are stuck in the starting village and all you can do is trade wood, hay, and charcoal.

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/56496251

I'd like to add to suggest a couple of things regarding Mastodon and user onboarding/retention.

The Server Selection Problem^TM^

The single biggest problem with Mastodon adoption is the fact people see talk about a server and give up. As such, servers need to be removed from the conversation and onboarding process. A server still needs to be selected for a new user, however, which raises the question: How should we select a server for a new user?

The obvious solution is to simply direct users to mastodon.social, which is actually what Mastodon already does to a certain extent. The issue with this is that the Fediverse is meant to be decentralized. As such, it's counterproductive to funnel people towards a single server. This causes maintenance bottlenecks and privacy/data-protection concerns.

As such, there needs to be some sort of method that ranks servers based on a few factors in order to select the optimal server for any given user, while keeping the decentralized nature of the Fediverse in mind.

Why any server?

First, it's important to answer the question of why would any given user pick any given server.

Generally speaking, the server isn't a big deal, as in, any server allows users to interact with the whole of the network in its full capacity.

All servers are Mastodon, after all.

However, there are differences. The most significant ones are, I'd say: location, uptime, and language.

A user benefits from being registered to a server that's geographically close to them, as that leads to a better connection. Additionally, servers with high uptime and stability are preferred, as users may have different times they use the server and nobody likes to try and access a server and see that it's down for any number of reasons. Finally, users need to be able to understand the language the server is in (obviously).

I believe these three factors should be at the forefront of the decision-making process for deciding what server to be suggested to any given user on sign-up.

Auto-selector

With that, comes the solution: a server auto-selector. A game I play, DCSS, actually does something similar for online play.

(I have my location turned off and there are very few servers, as you can see, so listing them is trivial.)

This isn't exactly a novel scientific breakthrough, but I think it's a significant notion for helping the onboarding process for new Mastodon users.

A server auto-selector should filter servers to suggest by following these steps:

• Detect the user's system language.
• Detect the user's location.
• Calculate the server's uptime score.
• Pseudo-rank user-count.

I believe the first two points are self-explanatory. Being that Mastodon (and the Fediverse, in general) stands firmly against data-harvesting, location data should probably not be mandatorily collected. It should be easy to either ask the user for some vague information or simply allow them to skip this step entirely, even if it might affect the user experience. Additionally, there's the issue that many servers don't make it known where they're hosted. Ideally, this could change to facilitate server selection for the users, but there's always the point that, if a server doesn't say where it's hosted, it gets pulled down by the algorithm, which in turn encourages divulging that kind of information; this might a problem solved by the solution, if you get my meaning.

What I mean by uptime score is simply an evaluation of the server's uptime history. For example, it's not good policy to direct users towards servers that are often unavailable, it might be disadvantageous to direct users to servers with too-frequent downtime for maintenance, and so on. As such, the server auto-selector should calculate a sort of "score" for any server that fits the first two points. I can't say how this should be calculated, exactly, but I'm sure some computer-knowers out there can come up with a less-than-terrible methodology for this.

The last point is something that I think should be taken into account as well, regarding the user-count of the servers. As I mentioned, we can't funnel users towards a single server, but another issue is that we should actually encourage user dispersion over many servers. The outlined method might already do this to a sufficient extent, but I suggest doing some sort of randomization of filtered servers based on user-count. I think it's wrong to simply plug a new user into the least-populated server around, but I do think that over-populated servers, in a relative sense, should be discouraged by the server-selector.

Worst case scenario, a random server that passes the uptime score point can be selected for any new user.

The onboarding experience

Basically, this should be as simple as possible. The more questions need to be answered, the worse.

I think a simple "Join Mastodon" button is the best. Just a big blue button in the middle of the homepage.

Server selection should start as soon as the new user accesses the joinmastodon website, and clicking the button simply redirects the user to the sign-up process for that server.

I believe this approach would increase adoption of Mastodon by streamlining the server selection process, as well as help the continuous decentralization of the Fediverse.

The Feed Problem

Another significant issue with Mastodon is the feed and community/discovery aspects.

Creating a new Mastodon account yields... Nothing. An empty feed!

This is absolutely terrible and ruins user retention. I've had several people tell me that this first-experience emptiness completely turned them off from Mastodon. It's not intuitive, and it needs to be corrected.

A simple solution

Mastodon does have feeds, but they're all tucked away in the Explore and Live Feeds tabs.

I think the single biggest change that Mastodon can make, as far as this goes, is to shift the Explore->Posts feed to the Home tab. Just do it like Twitter or Bluesky, make the discovery feed the first thing a new user encounters.

That, by itself, should make a difference in terms of user retention.

---

Maybe I'm delusional and severely underestimating how doable this is, but I really believe Mastodon needs to change the way it deals with new users if we want it to actually grow into a strong social media, keyword social (it needs people).

Thoughts?

First saw on HN

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/29987716

Hello there,

here is my contribution to the Fediverse: a guide to install a Friendica instance using Docker and Caddy.

That should help new administrators and beginners to go online easily.

Friendica deserves a try, this instance variant is neither mastodon nor pleroma, yet after testing many including Misskey forks I tend to lean on Friendica's side for my instance... will you ?

Like this, it is really good for selfhosting or single user instance on a cheap VPS. And it may scale to many users.

#friendica #fediverse #instances #selfhosting #fediadmin

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/56437901

I have seen some people complaining about it, but I think its useful.

Mastodon and other fedi services mentioned

I'm trying to pioneer twitch plays genre onto peertube. I got a script that will scrap data from the chat associated with the stream and use it to control Gameboy color emulator. I don't have my own server so I'm at the Mercy of whoever will let me stream.

Issue are that there's no API or xmpp access to keep the data being sent low and the processing time low as well

I can post the source code and link it if anyone is interested