@selzero@Setok Not sure I agree with the the edit. You can follow users on any (non-blocked) instance, so a few boosts and re-boosts should still get you in touch with the sources.
Just to repeat myself, I think a feature to subscribe and unsubscribe to lists wholesale (and possibly to pick and choose afterwards) could lead to a list curator cottage industry that could make us get closer to the discoverability of Twitter et al., with fewer (ideally none) of the disadvantages.
@selzero one of the biggest issues, as I alluded to in another reply: lack of global visibility to posts and hashtags.
This is because #Mastodon search only gives posts your instance is aware of. It comes aware of posts if someone on your instance follows the posting user. If not, the posts will never be seen.
So we need a way of requesting a pull of more posts or, at least, a way of following hashtags from defined servers.
@selzero@Setok I am alone on my instance so I really don’t see much in hashtags . But I actually think it’s ok as I already can’t keep up :-)
I recently joined a local relay with some Brazilians instances so I guess I get a bit more nowadays.
I do miss the ability to search for say “GitHub down” and check if maybe people are taking about it. I’d like a site which just merges the last 48 hours of select public home RSS timelines in a basic search.
@selzero@Setok I was invited to use one (by @cadusilva ) so I am not an expert. From what I understand it just grabs the feeds from other instances so you can see their public content on yours. It makes particular sense for small instances .
But if you want to sync with too many other instances that will add a lot of content on your instance.
@santiago in the end of the day is pretty much it.
Relays allow instances subscribed to communicate directly and share public toots, boosts and hashtags, expanding the federation of the members.
Just like you've said, if the relay has a lot of servers, you'll get a ton of content, but it will also fill your storage more quickly until your server crashes :ms_hand_over_mouth:
@cadusilva@selzero@Setok A bit unrelated but considering how heavy mastodon seems to be I wonder whether it’d make sense to build a minimalist search-only “realtime” hashtag service. Something that just gets some public timelines as RSS and indexes hashtags all in RAM, purging every 8 hours. I wonder how much of the fediverse you could get just as text in a few GB of ram of pure text + indexes.
@cadusilva@santiago@selzero@Setok Unless if you have practically endless cheap object storage and prunes in place and a funding by a company, like I do 😅✌️ dozens of relays in place here.
@selzero@santiago a relay is indeed one way of reducing the problem. Basically a relay passes all the posts it is aware of to your instance. Firehouse style. Everything through. So a big relay could fire huge amounts of posts regardless of whether anyone cares about them. But at least then you get them, through sheer brute force. It’s not very elegant and can eat up resources, and you’ll still miss areas the relay doesn’t follow.
@Setok@santiago I see, and how would I go about setting one up for my instance, do I need to be accepted into the relay or something, or is it just open?
@selzero@santiago if you’re the instance admin there should be a place in the settings to add a relay. I think most are open but you need to know their address stuff. And beware that a big relay could multiply your resource use several times over.
@Setok@selzero Yeah as admin of my instance I just had put the URL of the relay in the settings there — but as it isn’t an open relay the owner had previously authorized my instance
@Setok @selzero
I mean there are already ways to do this. Aside from just having another account on on dot social, if you want to you can just pull mastodon.social's federated feed into your instance, or you can set up a relay to pull from all the big instances. If youre not the admin I could write you a bot in a generous 30m that pulls hashtags from big public instances and injects them into your home instance via the search endpoint. Some forks of mastodon and a number of other fedi apps already have builtin following timelines from other instances. Some mobile apps do too.
Im not trying to say "its actually good that global visibility is hard," bc it is annoyingly hard to find out how to do it, but if you want it, its achievable except for instances that specifically dont want to be globally indexed. I will say when I have noticed my instance lacking posts on a topic, I just go to my mastodon.social alt, search there, spend 20 minutes following people, maybe add them to a list, follow who they boost, problem solved.
@selzero @Setok
Yeah yeah. You can also search old posts and whatnot, but you have to use the paging parameters on the timeline endpoint. Mastodon.py makes this easier. Yes you should probably just leave it running. Like I said not the most elegant way, a relay would be way easier and more efficient, but this is just another way you can do without needing to touch the server
@selzero @Setok
(Also obviously paging through hashtag feeds would get you more relevant stuff if youre doing it this way, and you can also source posts from mastodon.social's search endpoint too for specific terms that ppl don't hashtag)
@selzero@alex@Setok ya tbh it sucks how opaque this is and how this isn't all in a public masto wiki, so it's definitely not a "you" problem. you picked fedi on hard mode, a single (?) user masto instance is definitely a high barrier entrypoint
@jonny@selzero someone did actually run a tool that had a bit where, if you followed it, it would get your interest hashtags and start pushing posts it knew about with a relevant hashtag to your instance. That’s quite a nice user level solution. Sadly it disappeared.
But all this could be done in a very user friendly way with some effort on Mastodon core.
@Setok@selzero they've got plenty on their plate, though i agree the development could be managed in a way better way. it's honestly not that hard, i've structured the next few months of work s.t. i can return to a project where i had the server part done, and the client part just needed some prep work on making graph db that could be juiced into DIY algo query chains
I don't think it will happen within Mastodon first. I think Threads will bring it to Mastodon via ActivityPub federation simply because the media will start posting to Threads without arm wrangling
I hope the powers that be see the importance of independent federation ownership & leave Threads or whatever & setup their own instances & own it
Mastodon, hopefully, or WordPress, will be their infrastructure of choice
Imo the critical thing missing is more intelligent content recommenadtion. Mastodon shows trending hashtags, but I think there needs to be way more going on than this.
I think people already post quite a lot of real time stuff, and it's possible to see reports of events as they unfold here, it's just noisy and hard to pull out the key stories at a quick glance.
I'm experimenting with building in RSS feeds which would link in news websites more natively into my site but I think that could just introduce more noise.
@uc so, is there a reason you're not building in a recommendation algorithm into your server? It doesn't have to be complicated; you could use a simple linear combination score incorporating factors like number of people who you follow who shared a link; keyword matching with terms in the post; or number of times you've liked or shared posts with similar keywords.
@uc I should note that you also have access to the total number of likes, replies and shares on each object through ActivityPub -- as well as information on who liked, replied and shared it (such as, how many people you know liked and shared it). That's also very valuable intelligence!
I'm much more confident in tracking the boosts because these seem to reliably federate. I'm only seeing a very small number of federating like events - I don't think Mastodon sends likes to other servers annoyingly.
Reply counts and boosts do give a good indication though!
@uc most interesting ActivityPub objects have a likes, shares, and replies collection. Don't wait for them to get delivered to you; use the API and go get them.
@selzero The biggest issue I see is trustworthiness. Other social media sites are all too willing to let bad sources flourish; without a way to effectively combat conspiracy porn and outright lies, the platform will suffer.
The issue is already apparent at times in some circles. Refuting bad sources is sometimes met with hostility.
keep making the point to journalists that having their own server here is the only way to ensure they won't be censored and that their followers will see what they post when they post it. and that if everyone was here, what got attention in the culture would truly be determined by the people and not the powerful that they often need to be adversarial towards.
we could also work with journalists to make software better designed around their needs and public conversation generally.
@selzero
We should start by following news sources that are already here, encouraging them to increase their own engagement and inspiring others to follow.
2-3 parallel NGO orgs dedicated to Venture Capital style news, like Pacifica but dedicated to news and empowering new voices
2-3 parellel open source apps like Pixelfed who feed into the fediverse but connect existing tech in algo ways w competing transparent open sources algos that default to searchable
2-3 heavyweight Takei style advocates to make them popular
A group of cyber vigilantes to crush and stop think tank / tech lord rfforts to destroy it
@selzero@jerry places like WSJ and NYT could stand up their own instance and it would be verified on their domain and have a team to keep it up to date
@jerry@selzero they are free to choose what they want to paywall I suppose. It’s my personal opinion that the severity of the live event or urgency of it depends on how much of it should be pay walled.
I wouldn’t pay though.
However, a simple headline like “so and so happened” would prompt me to click the link and if it’s pay walled, I would just find the details elsewhere. But at least it would inform me at some level that something is going on.
@selzero Real time will be difficult due to the federated structure: It takes time for messages to populate over "all" instances. Especially if it's high load times (e.g. times of catastrophies, terroristic attacks or the like)
@selzero
you need to loose the focus on mastodon and look around at the wider fediverse.
https://mobilizon.org/en/
There needs to be more adoption to integrate ActivityPub in meaningful ways for news outlets.
See the Wordpress et al outlets.
And more Outlets need to run their own instance.
There is no good reason why you should not.
You define the post lenght, you get indexed, you can get feedback.
It does not help if you are a major outlet and hide on mastodon.social or similiar.
my2cents.
@mwfc@selzero Honestly the Fediverse has been a boon for small companies who would otherwise be pushed way down by commercial advertising. My Canadian 2 cents.
And I am sure other platforms can take inspiration from this too and move to the fediverse.
We are very much at the beginning seeing some of the possibilities and just need to dream a bit and try some stuff :)
I am sure etsy et al replacements are on their way too.
@selzero Speaking for myself, I think a DIY approach would be cool. Everyone's near something or someone right? Encourage people writing their blogs, those doing research, those close to events. Share if something's on point. Raise criticism when appropriate etc etc.
This is probably naive but I've lost all trust in existing ways of doing stuff. I guess it would be like a peasants digital revolt.
@mxtthxw@selzero This is what I thought they were talking about, so I replied, now I see they mean actual journalists and I’m embarrassed lol I’m leaving my reply though, because it talks about what I could do do better.
@selzero I have a gut feeling (not very reliable, I know), that the changes needed to make Mastodon into a valid source of realtime news on current events, whatever those are, would also make it into a cesspool similar to Twitler.
So even though I kinda have the same need for such information, I don't think I want Mastodon to be it.
@bazkie@selzero There really won't need to be the profit motive given that other platforms on the social web will be doing that and still be able to communicate via the ActivityPub protocol, right? In other words, you may get your media content coming from #threads users.
@ZebKing@selzero Seems unlikely for me, since I blocked the heck out of the threads instance 🤣
I mean that's the thing; if something is profit-driven, it will lower community quality, so if having the hottest news requires a profit incentive, it means..
having breaking news == lower community quality
The only thing I doubt is if getting breaking news really requires profit incentive. But if not, it means getting news from random individuals, which means more search effort.
@selzero Absolutely, so they can set the character limit to anything they required, so they can (and /should/) write actual informative toots, rather than "just" posting a link to their pay-walled or registrations-required website.
@selzero It wasn't the pundit class or randos arguing or ops to get stuff trending that made the dead bird such a source, although in the presence of its algorithm, those were arguably important ingredients.
It was the extensiveness of the social graph, ability of users to recognize where someone had relevant expertise that mainstream discourse was excluding and RT it, ability to quickly reply/QRT and debunk if mistake was made, etc. that made it such a source.
Add comment