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 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.
I feel we need to tighten the #lemmy integration into microblogging services like #mastodon to have an advantage over #reddit. Microblogging has orders of magnitude more active users than lemmy, and a lot of the same discussions are happening in both places. If we could more seamlessly unify these discussions when wanted by the participants, it would help get over this "chicken and egg" problem that the #threadiverse is in.
#wordpress integration with the #threadiverse is, imo, far more useful than masto. That's where structured discussions happen. It's unfortunate to see all the fediverse services always taking a mastodon first approach
What's the status of federation between Lemmy/KBin and Misskey/Sharkey/Firefish/Iceshrimp? I just tried loading several Lemmy and Kbin posts in Sharkey and it doesn't work. I remember having the same issue with Firefish, and I vaguely recall hearing awhile back it was something related to authorized fetch. Have their been any recent developments on that front? #FediQuestions#FediverseQuestions#Threadiverse#Lemmy#KBin#Misskey#Sharkey#Firefish#Iceshrimp
“We need a better site to link to than join-lemmy.org. It should concisely pitch lemmy to everyday users and suggest an instance for them to sign up at. Don’t get into the weeds about federation or choosing instances or selecting apps. Just select a sane default and point people to it. Rotate defaults to avoid overloading a given instance or making it too powerful.”
The fediblock account is stopping operation because mastodon.art retaliated against their parent instance with silencing because of a credible #fediblock report deduplication by @fediblock for .art , until the admin behind the fediblock account steps down from their own instance? And that admin is actually quitting the fediverse? WHAT?!
Mastodon has some wild drama I'll tell you... I'm glad I'm a #threadiverse addict instead.
Y’know, I really wanted to like #kbin, #beehaw and #lemmy, but they really are as toxic as Reddit - the gaming groups at least.
It would be nice to find a gaming group that’s not infected with assholes, but I feel like that’s asking too much, because Gamers are the worst.
Altho it’s not just the gaming groups. There’s a level of nastiness I wasn’t expecting going in after being on Mastodon. Mastodon has the HOA and Well Actually mansplainers, but some folks are just dicks on the #threadiverse.
The administrators of BeeHaw are considering moving on from Lemmy to a yet to be selected platform, citing a multitude of issues with the current state of development on the Lemmy project.
"Twitter and Reddit may have only lost a few million users to Mastodon and Lemmy so far, but these are nation-sized numbers, comparable to what Scandinavia is to the United States of America. The incumbents have allowed the fediverse to reach critical mass. It's only gonna get bigger"
I'm guessing the progress in ActivityPub support in Discourse and GitLab, and the emergence of threadiverse, will all be adding both motivation and complexity to the job of adding federation support to Flarum.
Unsure if this fits here, but the tool's been quite fun to look through. It lets you look at specific Fediverse software and instances, see graphs for their growth. And there's even a whole section for the Threadiverse (Lemmy & Kbin)
Kbin Cafe had a brief issue between early yesterday and now that impacted newly registered accounts or current users attempting to log in. We apologize for the inconvenience and this has been resolved!
Yeah good point by @cendawanita about permissions (or lack thereabouts) for #kbin et al to scrape the #fediverse and put posts/toots into magazines. It feels like so many #Mastodon admins are blind to how the fediverse beyond Masto software & the Masto API actually works.
Seeing such folks write lengthy posts about defederating Masto instances running Vyr's search patch while the rest of the fedi has #FullTextSearch and the #Threadiverse scrapes it with next to no backlash. It's like folks don't know that there's a bigger problem with #ActivityPub re #privacy and #safety than Website Boy's latest antics, and we need to push for #FediverseSafety and privacy flags at a ActivityPub protocol level. Until then, everything is just a non-binding, non-enforceable agreement about cultural norms that there's seems no consensus on; and definitely no focus on minority safety, rather features some will claim are wanted by a majority.
Missing search results when looking for federated communities (at Lemmy)
Hi all,...
FediDB is a tool to track the size and growth of Fediverse platforms and instances (fedidb.org)
Unsure if this fits here, but the tool's been quite fun to look through. It lets you look at specific Fediverse software and instances, see graphs for their growth. And there's even a whole section for the Threadiverse (Lemmy & Kbin)