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Our experience with the Fediverse, and why we left

infosec-handbook.eu

11–20 of 224 posts

Re: Our experience with the Fediverse, and why we left

#12
"The toxic “us vs. them” ideology"

Very good point.

On the one hand, Twitter is full of shit and people need to protect themselves from it.

On the other hand, people tend to protect themselves too much and end up in a bubble that can be toxic too.

Re: Our experience with the Fediverse, and why we left

#13
I've hosted a mastodon instance since 2017 and I see one general misunderstanding over and over, on mastodon or on fediverse related subreddits.

People think it's a completely new concept.

People seem to have forgotten, or not been part of, all the message boards we used to have during the late 90s and all throughout the 2000s.

The ONLY thing Mastodon brings to this is federation. You used to have accounts on over a dozen message boards, sometimes with different avatar names. Most were special interest groups.

All of those boards were hosted by someone.

Having lived through that I view Mastodon as a different kind of PunBB software with federation. Because I view it from the perspective of the hoster.

Re: Our experience with the Fediverse, and why we left

#14
There's subtext here, right? Is this related to Gab and the rest? From their earlier post about Fediverse:

>Some parties in the Fediverse demand “self-censorship.” Especially when we talk about particular services or products, individuals contact us and demand that we delete our posts. “We shouldn’t talk about the topic,” so other people don’t start to use these “evil” services and products. In our opinion, such demands contradict the claim of being an “open-minded community.”

Re: Our experience with the Fediverse, and why we left

#15
post #6
post #3

> 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.

This actually wouldn’t be a problem as long as headlines are descriptive and accurately summarize the content of the article.

If a headline could convey everything in an article why write the whole article? There's always more than could possibly fit in a headline; "yes, buts", etc.

Re: Our experience with the Fediverse, and why we left

#16
I've lurked on Mastodon for a while and honestly your experience will be only as good as your instance you subscribed to. Fosstodon is a very focused instance with like minded people, and the local feed there is pretty top notch. My experience on more "general" focus instances was a lot worse and borderline spammy.

Hoping they put effort in making your activity pub profile more portable as move accounts to new servers is still kludgey at best.

Re: Our experience with the Fediverse, and why we left

#17
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 why even bother? It's no better than using Discourse for a private group and Twitter/Facebook for public groups. Perhaps worse.

Re: Our experience with the Fediverse, and why we left

#18
post #3

> 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.

> HN is one example!

actually i think HN - ie. the comments, especially TLDR - is an example of, at least partial, solution, and this is why me like many other people usually go straight for the comments instead of the original article/post.

Re: Our experience with the Fediverse, and why we left

#19
post #17

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.

Re: Our experience with the Fediverse, and why we left

#20
post #6
post #3

> 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.

This actually wouldn’t be a problem as long as headlines are descriptive and accurately summarize the content of the article.

That is quite a challenge... some people struggle to summarise an article into 5-6 sentences for an abstract.
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