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Our experience with the Fediverse, and why we left

infosec-handbook.eu

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

#91

Post by kitotik »

TheJoYo wrote: post #58
Mediterraneo10 wrote: post #33

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.)

writefreely has a better UI for reading long form posts and is quite popular among the academic communities on the fediverse. personally I host a gitea server and link to my longer documentation on my federated account. that gives me a bit more freedom to edit the content and easier to reference. matrix servers are also great for hosting federated long form content.

Could you expound on using matrix for long form content?

I host a synapse homeserver, and feel like I’m not using it to its full potential.

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

#92

Post by bluesign »

TheJoYo wrote: post #76
bluesign wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know much about pleroma, I will definitely check. But when you self host your Mastodon, aren't you losing the benefit of local. What is the point of local if I will be alone there?

I have a single user pleroma instance and I don't check local or federated timelines. I think I even disabled them. If I want to discover new content or users I go to the instances that interest me and explore their timelines.

Actually that was exactly my point, you managed to separate identity and content by using your own instance. But for average user this will be pretty hard.

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

#93

Post by moksha256 »

TheJoYo wrote: post #58
Mediterraneo10 wrote: post #33

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.)

writefreely has a better UI for reading long form posts and is quite popular among the academic communities on the fediverse. personally I host a gitea server and link to my longer documentation on my federated account. that gives me a bit more freedom to edit the content and easier to reference. matrix servers are also great for hosting federated long form content.

> matrix servers are also great for hosting federated long form content.

Can you elaborate on that a bit? In my experience, Matrix implementations tend to be Slack/IRC-style chat interfaces.

Are you saying you find such interfaces to be good for long-form content, or are there other Matrix implementations that work out well for long-form content?

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

#94

Post by TheJoYo »

k__ wrote: post #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.

I'm fine with people filtering information going towards them, its when they try to filter the information at the source that's problematic.

inter-nodal moderation works great for this, I'm sure there are many Mastodon instances that de-federate with my instance for some asinine reason.

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

#95

Post by TheJoYo »

wizzwizz4 wrote: post #50

I'm upset that they're painting these social issues as Mastodon-specific ones, and that they're painting the Fediverse as just Mastodon, but they do have a point about RSS.

I don't see how RSS fixes anything they complained about. They also recommended people use stackexchange over federated networks.

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

#96

Post by benibela »

rjkershner wrote: post #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 server…

I thought it does not matter which instance one choosen, since you see posts from all the other instances?

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

#98

Post by joe_the_user »

andrewzah wrote: post #52
hombre_fatal wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see how it's the same. Message boards are all silos that don't mingle with each other in any way. You're saying the only part where Mastodon diverges is this thing that makes it markedly unlike message boards. I don't see the connection at all, not even to Proboards/Ezboard which had one global account across many boards. I'd summarize Mastodon as a confusing version of Twitter that most technical people don'…

I really don't get why the concept of mastodon is so confusing. It's basically twitter/microblogging* with multiple hosts, and you can see posts from other hosts. So instead of just @andrewzah, my handle becomes @andrewzah@ . You could visualize twitter as @andrewzah@twitter.com, but it's redundant as twitter is the only host. This is basically how email works, no? The only other difference is federation, so you have…

Mastodon is only a little confusing (it's inherently going to be a bit more confusing than Twitter, which was the GP's main point). The complaints of the OP and much of the thread are more related to Twitter and microblogging being kind of, well, terrible. The "us versus them" quality is magnified if Mastodon consists of Twitter refugees. Twitter is moderated by the way the whole world can hear you when you scream - and that does not seem to moderate it well. Equating these constructs with BBSes seems kind of absurd. BBSes are the opposite are far as "controllabillity" goes - of course. You can moderate them any way you wish, including no moderate or even moderation intended to set people against each other (if you're truly evil). But the BBS or web forum belongs to someone and has this flexibility.

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

#99

Post by dsr_ »

richard_todd wrote: post #75
skybrian wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fidonet boards exchanged messages overnight so the propagation delay was much longer. Also, the topology was different. I don't think the idea of each user publishing a public stream of messages that others subscribe to was a thing back then? Instead you would post messages in forums.

I was replying to a post claiming the only novel part of mastodon compared to old message boards is federation. I’m merely pointing out that many old message boards did have federation. To your points (1) yes, everything was slower back then (2) people could and did post streams of their work within the BBS framework, everything from multi-part posts to “owning” a message-board topic, to text/ansi e-zines, but back t…

At this point, the Usenet servers which took massive amounts of bandwidth and disk space take tiny amounts of bandwidth and disk space (assuming you don't allow binary posts).

Maybe it's time for Usenet to come back.

- Truly federated

- Topic focus instead of people-focus

- Killfiles!

- Proper threading

- Standards-based servers and clients

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

#100

Post by tylerchilds »

jancsika wrote: post #72
tylerchilds wrote: post #7

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…

I'm not fully sure what their use case is to speak to that. A good launching point to finding like minded people is this list though: https://fediverse.party/en/portal/servers

I joined before that link existed though, so I opted to join a really large instance, mastodon.social specifically in my case. From there, I started searching hashtags for topics I was interested in and engaging there. From my interactions, I got a feel of the quality of interactions from various instances. From there I started honing in on the various code of conducts to find a smaller instance I wanted to chill in.

It's worth noting that smaller, niche communities don't federate with the largest instances. If you're looking for the most down to earth people, it takes a few hops and a bit of time.

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