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Re: Fediverse

#101

Post by dotnet00 »

DerekBickerton wrote: post #13

Is having both a normal social media account & a federated version okay ? I've seen a lot of people delete their Twitter and then hop on Mastodon because they're worried about Musk. Whether their concern about Musk is valid is another question. How do people see his acquisition of Twitter as a bad thing? If anything he will try to improve it no?

I think it's fine, comes down to your reasons for trying the Fediverse. I'm not fully opposed to Twitter etc, a lot of people I'm interested in are there and I've managed to filter out the bad stuff to a reasonable extent.

Similarly I find the Fediverse interesting technically and there's at least some content I enjoy, so I have that too.

It's the same with Discord and Matrix. It's probably even better to have both accounts because then it isn't as much of a hurdle to move platforms if one thing doesn't go in the direction you'd like.

As for people leaving Twitter over Musk, I expect most of the big ones to quietly come back once they find an excuse, after all, most of them are mainly addicted to the attention, which isn't as easy to earn in the Fediverse due to a lack of a recommender system with perverse incentives to manipulate.

Re: Fediverse

#102

Post by moron4hire »

moron4hire wrote: post #36

General purpose social media will be considered the greatest mistake of the early 21st century. Go back to topic-oriented discussion boards. When you have no common topic around which to organize, then people have to search each other's personalities for commonality. And in doing so, they stratify along political lines. This isn't enough, so then they micro-stratify into various, rabid subgroups within those politica…

One more note on the family bit:

I love my mother. I wish I talked to her more often. But I wish it were about whatever she's doing and not whatever stupid shit she's seen on Facebook. Some post from 8 years ago about killer mosquitos that are going to wipe us out so don't let the kids play outside. "This really happened to this person I've never met or even talked to on Facebook". Mom, I think we would have heard about towns getting wiped out by mosquitos. Though I guess she does have cataracts, so maybe she can't see the date field.

But you used to only get that kind of shit from Reader's Digest. So you only had to hear about it once per month, not every day, with old topics you thought were long dead suddenly coming back with a vengeance.

Society used to have bulkheads.

Re: Fediverse

#103

Post by proactivesvcs »

JadoJodo wrote: post #75

The hacker in me loves the idea of the Fediverse. All of these services seem fun and, different, and I would love to participate. I am even willing to (and have in the past) set them up for myself. The issue comes when I think about my community: I can count on one hand the number of people I know that fit (what I think is) the criteria for the Fediverse: A. Possesses the technical ability to set up their own instanc…

It depends on who "your community" is - if they're people who can set up their own instance, and care about decentralisation - congrats, there are already loads of them on the Fediverse, in terms of users and instances. C) solved.

If your community is "people I'm interested in talking to" then they don't need A) or B, and there are so many of those on the Fediverse that congrats, C) is solved.

The fact of the matter is the Fediverse (and even just Mastodon) is that 1) is not the current reality (plenty of medium and small-ish instances), and 2) does not have to be, and indeed is not the reality, and even if it were, A and C still need not apply.

I sometimes fear people jump into the Fedi but, understandably, aren't versed on how discoverability works, thinks there's no-one interesting there, and leaves. Whether setting up your own instance or using a tiny existing one, you can browse the user directories and posts from other, larger instances, and find interesting souls to connect with, without having to make an account there.

Most importantly one can search tags used in posts and profiles which relate to your interests. Any good / mature client (or the web UI) lets you search for tags and pin them as their own timelines - so a rolling conversation about your fav topics, across all instances that you federate with.

Re: Fediverse

#104

Post by armchairhacker »

I joined a fediverse group but it’s all just random short posts. Kind of like knock-off Twitter to put it bluntly. Also the “home” tab is empty which is a bit confusing.

I want this to succeed, but as a social media site in order to succeed they need people (interesting people who like to post interesting things), and a good feed algorithm. This is where Facebook, Twitter, HN, etc. are worth a lot: many social media sites could easily replace Twitter except they don’t have these.

Re: Fediverse

#105

Post by proactivesvcs »

monkin wrote: post #72

Ratio of active vs created accounts is very low, it feels like most of them ware abandon by users after the initial boom. That one that’s stands out is Mastodon which isn’t a surprise. For whole fediverse to succeed it will have to jump out from niche groups and fight for ordinary users that are used to Facebook or Twitter. Which will not happen until some big brands/interesting people start to use them as PR/comment…

Niche groups? Have you seen how huge and heterogeneous mastodon.social and the likes are? They're even bigger than that ;-)

Even the "niche" instances have sufficient numbers that there are enough niches for many people to see something of interest there, and most of them freely allow off-topic chatter, nay welcome it.

One of the benefits of the Fediverse is that even if you're on an instance that's for talking about movies, you can a) almost always talk about anything and b) talk to your followers about whatever you please.

The Fediverse isn't about brands or influencers using them for PR or commentary, although there's nothing to stop that. It's kinda against the fundamental ethos: that it's about people not brands. And in that, it enjoys the fact that it's already succeeded, but it inherently doesn't want to "succeed" in the commercial or capitalistic sense. All it needs to do is continue to exist.

Re: Fediverse

#106

Post by dotnet00 »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #100
dotnet00 wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't hosted services defeat the point of federation in the first place? That's how we've ended up with email being as difficult as it is to self-host. Same issue with Discord, it's a centralized service where you and your content are at the mercy of the owner of the service, which I think is one of the big things that federated alternatives (like Matrix) are meant to solve, so any single entity can't unilaterally re…

I don't think so. Being able to switch what provider hosts your social media without losing your network is valuable (and has pro-social effects) without needing to self-host. > That's how we've ended up with email being as difficult as it is to self-host. I'm not sure what you mean, what's the "that", what do you think led to the situation where email is hard to self-host? Even if hard to self-host, email succeeds i…

>I'm not sure what you mean, what's the "that", what do you think led to the situation where email is hard to self-host?

I was referring to spam filtering, where all the big hosts know to allow each other through, but make it very difficult for smaller hosts to participate by being tight lipped about their filtering criteria and making others have to jump through lots of hoops to not be treated as spam. Which, when considering the high cost of being spam filtered (eg. if you're a business) ends up making it very hard to practically self-host.

Similarly, I wouldn't think fediverse would have succeeded in the goals of federation with large centralized hosting providers. Since upon reaching critical mass, they could easily enact similar policies in the name of preventing spam or for 'safety'. The content would be going through their network and would be stored on their hardware, so they would use the same logic current social media uses to justify their right to moderate without oversight.

Re: Fediverse

#107

Post by andreyk »

JadoJodo wrote: post #75

The hacker in me loves the idea of the Fediverse. All of these services seem fun and, different, and I would love to participate. I am even willing to (and have in the past) set them up for myself. The issue comes when I think about my community: I can count on one hand the number of people I know that fit (what I think is) the criteria for the Fediverse: A. Possesses the technical ability to set up their own instanc…

For 2, I wonder if there could be a 'wrapper' service (website) around Fediverse that makes it as easy to set up an instance as Slack or Discord. It would still be decentralized, except the service could abstract away the technical bits entirely.

Re: Fediverse

#108

Post by proactivesvcs »

k101 wrote: post #93
proactivesvcs wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Fediverse is not for your target market. We hate Internet advertising: it serves to use and abuse us, and is a security risk to our devices. It exists in opposition of monetising people and what they do and say, because we're sick of being retreated like we're worth a ton of beans. We don't live to be a part of profit.

And how can fediverse survive, and how can it pay for servers? Who among the professionals will do this? If you leave this system only for enthusiasts, then you can leave everything as it is and improve only the code. And if you want to overthrow the monopoly without violence, then the authors will need monetization tools and not necessarily advertising . Linux would not have become so popular without redhat and othe…

How does it / will it pay for servers? This is a great question and I can guarantee if you set up an account somewhere, and start asking instance admins this question, you'll find out exactly how. I'd answer your question but you'll get much more organic answers and they'll answer you in a way you'll believe and understand far better than just from me.

The system is not, and was never, just for technology enthusiasts. The majority of people I chat with probably wouldn't know their RAM from their GPU and I wouldn't expect them to. Sure there are a lot of Linux/FOSS enthusiasts there, but they're the minority.

I don't know anyone trying to overthrow monopolies by running an instance because again, I say that not everyone's motivation for everything they do is for the acquisition of wealth.

Re: Fediverse

#109

Post by DoItToMe81 »

kevingadd wrote: post #76
hbn wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup, it was a typo (edited now). I meant that if they want everyone they don't like to be banned, the fediverse doesn't seem like the place for that. Getting banned from a fediverse instance isn't as impactful as being banned from twitter, and I think those people would want it to work like twitter. Not too sure about instances being defederated though, that's the first I've heard of that.

The biggest defederation example I know of (with the caveat that I haven't actually used Mastodon in years) is that when Pixiv launched their own instance it quickly grew to be something like the 1st or 2nd biggest instance in the network and was eventually defederated by many other instances because people were REALLY antsy about the fact that a lot of Japanese art on Pixiv is illegal in other countries.

"Japanese art" is kind of underselling pornographic images of fictional children. Most forms of Japanese art, I presume, aren't of this nature.

Re: Fediverse

#110

Post by zaarn »

armchairhacker wrote: post #104

I joined a fediverse group but it’s all just random short posts. Kind of like knock-off Twitter to put it bluntly. Also the “home” tab is empty which is a bit confusing. I want this to succeed, but as a social media site in order to succeed they need people (interesting people who like to post interesting things), and a good feed algorithm. This is where Facebook, Twitter, HN, etc. are worth a lot: many social media…

For the home tab to populate, you need to follow people. Mastodon doesn't push content you didn't ask for. I would recommend checking out the local and federated timelines and see what people are up to.
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