101–110 of 224 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> There are a lot of people on the internet with infinite free time This is what we have to fix. We need to find employment for these people. When you're busy working on something, you don't have time for shitposting.
Wishful thinking. Several of the best/most successful trolls find plenty of time at work to shitpost.
I would argue that what is described in this post is inherent in all social networks. The wonderful thing about the Fediverse is that depending on the node you connect to, or the people you choose to federate with (in the event that you have your own instance) that your experience will be vastly different. It’s given me some of the most enjoyable interactions I’ve ever had online in the last ten years. You need to ha…
> You need to have a thick skin Actually we need the rest of social media to have this, and then we don't need these alternative platforms. There are simply too many people who have grown up without having any meaningful opposition in their lives - without having someone challenge their ideas and values and making them defend said ideas and values, and they simply do. not. know. how to cope with it.
My experience with the fediverse was that enjoying the benefits of federation encountered the same issues with content and user behaviour that can be found in silo'd services. That is to say, fediverse sites increased their likelihood of replicating/serving hate, pornography and illegal content in correlation to the number of external sites they were connected to and the size of their user base. It left me wondering…
There's no algorithmic advertising, no universal tracking, and your instance's mod team is known to you instead of a faceless automation farm.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd really like to see Twitter white-label their app as a managed SaaS on custom domains. Perhaps that's what Bluesky is intended to be.
I don't have much hope for Bluesky. Twitter could re-enable RSS if they really wanted to show that their interest was genuine.
me neither. I think, based on Twitter's track record, people should remain skeptical until shown otherwise. They haven't delivered much to prove they're willing to do the right thing.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's no algorithmic advertising, no universal tracking, and your instance's mod team is known to you instead of a faceless automation farm.
That's all true of hosting a private Discourse instance, as well.
> using Discourse for a private group and Twitter/Facebook for public groups
Even if what freeone3000 said about Mastodon is also all true about Discourse (I know nothing about Discourse, but I'll take your word for it), it's not true about Twitter/Facebook. And since Mastodon is aimed more at the public group use case, Mastodon is a useful replacement of Twitter/Facebook even by your own logic.
Also, aren't they falling into their own "Us vs. Them" argument by complaining about general Mastodon users?
> The “I read headlines only” problem This remains true for most platforms, not just those in the fediverse. HN is one example! I am reading this article with great interest. I've recently started exploring fediverse platforms with much excitement. I'm more interested in building a community at the moment, and although this can be achieved with a classic bulletin board system, the fediverse had me curious.
I am one of the people that got a lot of shares on Mastodon for being critical of Signal. I think this article greatly misrepresents the main arguments going around the Fediverse about Signal, and the arguments for alternatives. 1. Signal holds the only set of signing keys to the only published binaries allowed on the network, compiled by them, that in turn control all signing keys. If pressured they could push a mal…
Question: are you talking about address book protection, right? Because I don't wee how SGX would be required for protecting 1-to-1 chats -- keypairs for identity management and PFS-compatible encryption would suffice for that.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Mastodon and the Fediverse have often been advertised as "microblogging" tools, and the post length is mainly around the same as one would see on Twitter. That is a big difference from old-time message boards, where longform text was welcome and normal. (Even if the Fediverse does support long post lengths, that matters little if the community has not embraced it.)
The problem with Twitter/"microblogging" isn't just post length. The problem with Twitter/"microblogging" is also lack of hierarchical structure. A BBS has a series of subboards, those subboard have posts and the posts have comments. Sure, things can degenerate to just a series of "mega-threads" but if it's done, everyone the topic and the subtopic and so you can good contextual discussion. Facebook has a three level…
I really thought forums lost something when UBB and its clones (vBulletin, phpBB, etc.) became dominant, because those systems only let top-level posts have replies. So you just had forum -> subforums -> posts -> non-threaded stream of comments under each post. It was honestly awful, and for much of the 00s forums just became a chore to read and participate in. And it really seemed to bring the worst out of people and of moderation policies: like, back in the WWWBoard days, if you wanted to respond to multiple comments on a thread, you'd reply individually to those comments, and they'd be threaded in the proper position. But on a UBB forum, if you replied individually to comments like that, half the forum would scream their eyes out at you for "double posting" and often the moderators would threaten to ban you if you did it again. And it also meant that any time an argument would start in a post's comments, that argument would take over any and all discussion under that post. In a WWWBoard system, the argument would be segregated into its own subthread and normal discussion can happen in other replies, but UBB didn't allow that. And when you have megathreads, a lot of times they just devolve into everyone just saying their piece and nobody having any real back-and-forth discussion (and honestly "megathreads" are something that didn't exist at all until UBB came around, because WWWBoard and its clones had no concept of bumping or sticky threads: every post was displayed in descending chronological order with no way to reorder anything)
Honestly, I jumped for joy when Reddit took over as the de facto Internet-wide forums system, because it finally meant we got to have real threads again.
As a regular fediverse user, the main detail I'd be curious about is: Which server was the experiment done on and which servers were federated with? I don't have anything against this article per se, but it's worth noting every fediverse encounter is different. My main take on this article is that it's like walking into a McDonald's and being upset they don't serve pizza and then condemning all fast-food as being ter…
Show me the Mastodon server with the moderation policy that fits the author's use case. It appears I can't even search mastodon instances by the criteria of moderation policy. (But if I'm missing something obvious please correct me because I'd love to be able to do this!) There an abundant history of examples of centralized, publicly accessible forums where the quality of the discussion matches what the author desire…