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Boy I was wrong about the Fediverse

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Re: Boy I was wrong about the Fediverse

#211

Post by BugsJustFindMe »

alsetmusic wrote: post #206
BugsJustFindMe wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "I consider myself among peers with coders, scientists, and founders. Being asked to understand pretty simple concepts is too much for me." I think I can clarify the framing here. People of all walks are extremely uninterested in being told that they need to care about something that they do not care about. For most people, I bet almost all people, decentralization can really just get fucked, because decentralizati…

> People of all walks are extremely uninterested in being told that they need to care about something that they do not care about. You don’t care. There it is. Just say it. It’s not a crime. I’m not judging you. I’m really not. I care and it might not matter, but I do. It’s not for you. That’s ok. Don’t bag on it for reasons other than this. It’s not difficult and I don’t care if you don’t care. It’s fine.

I'm wondering if the context has been lost because of the length of the chain that this thread is a conversation about why people, especially non-technical and non-philosophically-motivated people, people for whom the concepts of federation and disjoint instances are actually detrimental rather than beneficial because they fundamentally erase some of the most useful features of social network platforms (e.g. global search), don't use Mastodon over something else.

> You don’t care.

Forget about me for a moment. We're talking about people. Most people, in fact. Actually the upstream comments use the term "normies", which is a term that I personally object to because it's pejorative and gross behavior. It's imperative that you evaluate this thread within the given context.

Side note on upstream calling people "normies": It's absolutely nuts to me that the groups most sensitive to othering will themselves engage in mindless othering. But anyway.

> It’s not difficult

To you. In fact one of the things that makes something difficult is how much a person is forced to deal with things that they don't want to deal with, especially when those things are the opposite of what they want from a service.

Re: Boy I was wrong about the Fediverse

#212

Post by BugsJustFindMe »

rsynnott wrote: post #187
BugsJustFindMe wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The only people I've ever heard complain about the slight difficulty are techies Because everyone else has never heard of mastodon or this fediverse shit. Of course you don't hear complaints from people who don't know what it is. > I'll take normies over There are no "normies" as you call them using federated services. They don't want to need to think about server to server federation rules. They want a global cent…

I suppose define 'normies'? There are plenty of non-techies, but they're often primarily using it for a specific community.

Eh. I'm not going to defend OP's use of the term "normies". It's pejorative and fundamentally othering.

> plenty of non-techies

Viewing the concepts and consequences of federation (no global search, disjoint moderation by instance owners) as "tech" is a fundamental category error.

Re: Boy I was wrong about the Fediverse

#213

Post by snackerblues »

jonkoops wrote: post #40
darqis wrote: post #33

The Fediverse has one problem, concentration of users on few instances, mastodon.social being the largest. And cancel culture. Highly politically motivated cancel culture. What right do they believe to have to dictate to their users what the can and can't read? That should be solely in the user's hand. The irony of writing this in HN is ... whatever the right word is Also, fragmentation and visibility. It's neigh imp…

> And cancel culture. Highly politically motivated cancel culture. Most of the people who started on Mastodon are people of the LGBT+ community that were getting constantly harassed on other platforms. This 'cancel culture' is just a healthy attitude to having a zero tolerance policy on abuse, it is how it avoids being the enormous bigoted alt-right techbro mess that is now X. Since Mastodon is federated, you can cho…

> you can choose ... what you see

Not true. You cannot federate with tech news and bigoted alt-right techbro (based) instances. That decision is made for you by the janitors of the instances you federate with. Just like reddit, where the janitors of the subreddits decide what you're allowed to see. Your agency is gone.

Compare this to X, where if it's not illegal, you can choose to see or say it with no repercussions beyond an individual blocking you, which solves their problem of not wanting to see what you say. It's the perfect system!

Re: Boy I was wrong about the Fediverse

#214

Post by neogodless »

satisfice wrote: post #200
neogodless wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could run your own Fediverse server. Can you do one search on one server, and find any email address that exists anywhere? ( not that I know of ) Can you send email regardless of what server the email lives on? ( with some exceptions, but mostly yes ) Federation is not infinite or unlimited, so no, there is no "one search to rule them all" within the confines of a single instance. (But then there's no way to acce…

Thanks for the deep response. I don’t want to run my own server. But perhaps there is a server I want to join. There seems to be no clear way to search for them. You are referring to Mastodon, but the Fediverse is not just Mastodon.

Certainly. I have dipped my toes in a few other Fediverse pools.

Of course, like email / domain names, there's no universal search for picking them. Big ones get network affects or advertise. Small players have to be found organically.

https://github.com/emilebosch/awesome-fediverse

That's a big flippin' list of Fediverse networks. But "a clear way to search" being layered on top of "decentralized" and "anyone could theoretically bring up a server at any time"... there's always going to be friction.

Whether you join any of them... well that's up to you to decide if you're curious enough, you suspect there's value there, etc.

The monetization and network affects of corporate social networks has always lent itself to incentivizing popularity contests and "emotional" content that pulls people in. If you want to escape the bad sides of those, there's also compromises on the independently funded networks.

Re: Boy I was wrong about the Fediverse

#215

Post by __d »

xigoi wrote: post #204
__d wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless I'm missing something, that's exactly the same. If you're using someone else's email domain (like, eg. gmail.com), you cannot migrate to another provider. If you use your own domain, you can change who is hosting it. Like email, there are plenty of Mastodon hosting companies. You can use your own domain, and migrate between them at will. If you use eg. mastodon.social, you can even migrate in most circumstance…

The difference is that you cannot use someone else’s instance with your own domain. You have to get your own instance, which is much more expensive and creates a lot of duplication.

It would be nice to have a server that supported arbitrary domains. Perhaps https://jointakahe.org/ would suit?

OTOH, eg. (not an advertisement, just the first search result) masto.host offers managed Mastodon hosting for $6/month, which is on par with eg. Fastmail or Proton's base non-free plan.

Re: Boy I was wrong about the Fediverse

#216

Post by kemotep »

eudamoniac wrote: post #172
kemotep wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But Elon Musk literally made the website unusable because now it no longer shows profiles in chronological order and posts are now essentially just screenshots. 12 years of using twitter without an account and in a few months he made the site completely unusable. Ignoring anything else this is a massive change that was implemented shortly after he took over and now I cannot use the site anymore.

> Elon Musk literally made the website unusable If it's literally unusable, how are millions of people still using it?

I used Twitter for over a decade without an account and now you essentially are unable to do so without jumping through significant hoops.

That is how he made the website unusable. Like a billion people have Facebook/Instagram accounts but Facebook is equally unusable without an account.

Re: Boy I was wrong about the Fediverse

#217

Post by masterlee_fn »

neogodless wrote: post #214
satisfice wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the deep response. I don’t want to run my own server. But perhaps there is a server I want to join. There seems to be no clear way to search for them. You are referring to Mastodon, but the Fediverse is not just Mastodon.

Certainly. I have dipped my toes in a few other Fediverse pools. Of course, like email / domain names, there's no universal search for picking them. Big ones get network affects or advertise. Small players have to be found organically. https://github.com/emilebosch/awesome-fediverse That's a big flippin' list of Fediverse networks. But "a clear way to search" being layered on top of "decentralized" and "anyone could…

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