maegul

maegul , 5 months ago

As far as I can tell, it’s not lemmy’s problem, it’s mastodon’s.

Lemmy can’t control how mastodon presents the information that lemmy shares.

And mastodon does a bad job of formatting lemmy content because mastodon is actually a fairly minimalist (I’d say brutalist) platform. No text formatting. No threads (well now they have minimal threading). Only one feed type (equivalent to “new” on lemmy). And communities and groups aren’t processed as groups, but just like users that boost/re-tweet everything in them, which is not what groups actually are at all.

This is the fundamental problem with the promise of the fediverse … platform inter operation is not guaranteed at all as there’s no clear path to reaching common ground on how to format every other platform’s content. The protocol has nothing (or very little) to say about that. Then, once you have a bunch of platforms, you’ve got a lot of work to do, as each platform needs to workout how to render every other platform’s formatting. For N platforms, that’s basically N^2^ formatting projects.

In reality, federation is mostly an inter-platform system. For the moment at least. It makes sense that at some point one’s “window” onto the fediverse is capable of understanding any format you want and will render everything as it was intended. Instead, at the moment, the fediverse is running like it’s still 2010 and the cloud is still new and cool and having users on servers is the only way to do things so that we’re all still stuck on servers/instances and bound to their admins and applications. IMO, it’s hardly living up to the promise of the internet, and hardly doing to social media what the internet did to computing.

With the internet, I opened my browser and visited any webpage I wanted to see it as it was intended by its author no matter who wrote it.

With the fediverse, I visit one webpage and see any post I want, so long as it doesn’t come from a defederated server (which can be a problem sometimes), but only in the one format that my one webpage/instance has decided on, no matter how it’s supposed to look and indeed does look if I were to view it on another webpage/instance. When the browser is over 30 years old and PCs around 50 … this feels unimaginative to me.

maegul , 5 months ago

Umm … is so this could be a better way for mastodon users to follow lemmy communities right?

maegul , 5 months ago

It’s basically a mastodon problem.

Mastodon doesn’t have a true group interface but just models it as like a user boosting everything which is a poor interface to group discussions.

The whole firehose problem where every comment gets put into your feed is the major symptom of this, where the idea of groups is that they’re hierarchical and give you the option to look at the comments if you want.

On top of that, mastodon lacks threading. It has basic one-level threading now, which I honestly find more confusing sometimes than everything being flattened.

A very annoying issue is that mastodon doesn’t render links from lemmy posts as they’re part of the metadata, which, AFAICT, lemmy does correctly according to ActivityPub but mastodon ignores. I’m not sure but images might have a similar problem (?).

Relatedly, mastodon has no post formatting like bold, underlining etc, so all of that gets ignored (though I’ve heard masto might start respecting the formatting of other platforms to some extent).

TLDR: mastodon is actually a relatively brutalist or minimalist platform. It’s defined in many ways more by what it isn’t than what it is and is otherwise a Twitter clone.

Beyond that, It’s not a good fediverse citizen in that its constraints combined with its dominance are a bit of a stranglehold on the rest of the fediverse.

IE, if they at least had a decent interface to lemmy and groups in general, the Reddit migration here could have been a bigger deal, as the promise of the fediverse could have actually been fulfilled.

Instead of joining a new platform with few users (lemmy), Reddit migrants could have been joining a new ecosystem with plenty of users (fediverse, lemmy+mastodon) expanding into a new interface.

maegul , 5 months ago

A big general problem I have with the fediverse (as do others I've spoken to) is that it affords not real capacity to foster both private and public spaces with good and convenient means of moving and connecting with people between them. From the lack of truly private DMs, to no private group chats or local only spaces ... the whole idea of private spaces for when people want them seems to be absent from the fediverse creators and it's a significant gap IMO.

In the case of lemmy, I can imagine private communities being rather useful and pleasant. That is, communities visible only by people who are members or who have subscribed, with membership being optionally open or closed to being invite only or requiring approval or something similar. Having both federated and local-only versions of these would also probably be nice.

The useful part would be that you could meet people/accounts in private spaces and then see the same person/account in public too, which should only foster community creation through personal connections and discovery.

Then, whenever people need a quieter and more private space for a particular conversation or topic, they can take discussion out from the public and shield it in private. While you might argue that this would stifle discussion (and I see your point), I think there's a relatively natural equilibrium between our needs for public and noisy engagement and quiet/safe/private interactions. I think people would naturally move between these spaces as they need.

maegul , 6 months ago

So I think the problem I have with all of that enthusiasm is that I don’t quite trust someone who hasn’t tried to make something with the fediverse themselves.

Without some technical experience to temper the ideological hype, it risks just being hype and not contributing anything to the broader mission.

I say this as someone who is somewhat concerned at how hard it seems to get a platform up and running on the fediverse and how much seems to be gravitating toward simply getting mastodon interop working (eg Wordpress and Discourse plugins).

maegul , 6 months ago

So it’s run by the firefish lead dev, and it’s been well known for a while that they don’t have much time anymore for Fedi stuff, at least not as a full time commitment. I think/suspect they were getting paid by some people before but that’s now run dry. So they’re working full time and studying it seems.

Firefish dev seems to have slowed and their flagship instance is dying a slow but sure death.

To anyone who knows this it’s not surprise that stop.voring.me is down too.

I’d recommend you move one and forget about the instance. Maybe later you can pull your stuff out, but for now that account is stranded on a dead instance and dying platform.

maegul , 6 months ago

Like everyone else you can only hope she’s ok.

It does seem like burnout is a factor here and in such cases it seems, and from my own experience too, that walking away without any contact isn’t an uncommon behaviour. So we can hope it’s that.

maegul , 6 months ago

assuming the name of the community can be changed that is

It’s just like with user accounts. The alias can be whatever you want but the address is static. Fortunately I’d say “house of the dragon” counts as a decent catch all for a ASOIAF community.

maegul , 7 months ago

Live free or die.

Ever since the early days of Google excitement (early naughties), everyone missed the point. You don’t need a big corporation with good intentions to save you. They’ll sooner round on you when it suits them simply because they can.

Everyone excitedly using and in turn relying on Gmail and Google maps like they were healing the tech world simply let the vampire into their home. We need sustainable systems and cultures with values and no “too big to fail” monopolistic companies dictating the landscape.

maegul , 7 months ago

Are these alternative tools open source?

On the federation front, defederating from everything now doesn’t mean it will stay that way. Down the track, it might make sense to federate with similarly aligned instances. So having federation baked in from the get go might actually be a good idea for certain purposes.

maegul , 9 months ago

Just when boomers were young (8-23 yrs old) … totally tracks!

Looking at the linked graph, there’s a relatively clear plateau from ‘56 to ‘80 … basically from oldest boomers being age 11 to youngest boomers being age 20. I’m a little astonished at how well it lines up with the whole fucking generation. Literally all of them, from the beginning of their teens to the end of their teens (at least), enjoyed the best minimum wage of the modern age.

It also, interestingly, justifies the seperate categorisation of the Jones generation (born 1960-1966) who were the first to see the steady decline.

maegul , 10 months ago

ActivityPub (the protocol used by the fediverse) has recently had a proposal to expand it incorporate marketplace exchanges of information. See the proposal, and a discussion thread

maegul , 10 months ago

Adding "English" to the language settings might help (you CTRL/CMD+Click to add another language to the list, from memory)

maegul , 10 months ago

Queen. One of their best of albums. And Michael Jackson. Dangerous and History album (which had a best of disc too).

maegul , 10 months ago

Never really followed this closely over on reddit ... but it seems like people were happy to draw stuff they found fun ... which is cool! The My LIttle Pony stuff, the Blahaj shark, star trek, diagonal rainbow, Marx, NIN, Arch Linux, a few instance tags ... all up it seems fun and like it was a success! Kudos to the people that put this together!!

maegul , 11 months ago

> Mastodon seems to have two goals: To be an example of how a federated alternative to Twitter can work well, and to be a healthier social media experience. It’s not obvious, but I think these goals conflict with each other. A lot of the features that are removed in the pursuit of a healthier social media will be perceived as the shortcomings of federation as a concept.

Basically this all over.

IMO, Mastodon is a paradox that the fediverse needs to move on from. It is not an alternative to Twitter, but, its popularity rests on this very perception. And so we have a dominant platform, that most consider to actually just be the whole fediverse, whose dominance is in many ways arbitrary or luck of circumstance. Which is fine ... that's how things happen. But the sooner we move on from Mastodon dominating the fediverse the better.

The way I've put it previously is that Mastodon is an awkward middle ground that actually doesn't work too well for many people. It's neither particularly safe/healthy or particularly engaging or interesting. And so many BIPOC avoid it while there are LGBTQ folks who openly consider it problematic and are ready to jump ship whenever necessary, while journalists and anyone who's looking to form wide networks (without being influencers or doing anything for-profit) don't see the point. In many ways, it's the white/western suburbia of social media ... and while that's a nice place to visit or be sometimes, there's a good reason to not live there or be there all the time, especially when online.

On top of all that, it's actually a pretty simple/brutalist take on what social media can be, to the point of being unnecessarily backward. And yet, by the numbers, it is basically the fediverse (like literally ~88% of active users are on mastodon!).

The fediverse can do better. Will do better, and already has.

• There's firefish (and Misskey too, from which it was forked, and Iceshrimp and Hajkey which are forks of firefish)
  • see firefish.social, nice examples: lead devs personal page
  • Or, how far the special form of markdown can be taken, collected in another feature called Clips which are collections of posts: Clips of cool MFM(misskey flavoured markdown).
• There's Akkoma
• Then there's Lemmy and kbin.

maegul , 11 months ago

Yea, increasingly it seems ActivityPub and this fediverse is just a prototype. It’s quite realistic that in 10 years we won’t be looking back on it with huge amounts of praise, apart from proving that this general model can work, which is huge.

I do wonder though, how would moderation work in true decentralisation. Who owns the community should the instance of its creator goes down? I guess user accounts would also be decentralised.

maegul , 11 months ago

Meat eating is a possibility. I don’t see it being universal, but veganism is on the ride and it makes sense to a lot of people.

maegul , 11 months ago

Even beyond that, I wouldn't underestimate the power of cultural change. From what I can tell, drugs, sex and clearly defined gender identities are all on the decline in the younger generations in the west. I'm not sure there's any good or clear external force pushing this. I think it's just change. When it comes to eating meat, it's pretty easy to start thinking through why you don't need to do it as much as the typical western diet does, which feels pretty ripe for some form of merely cultural change.

maegul , 11 months ago

Totally. A few actually. Some of them I had when I was very young such that the dreams themselves are really the only memories I have of the time. All nightmares. One of my newly born little brother in a pram on top of a hill being let go and me running to try to catch him before he hits a car. It was on a real hill that I occasionally see if I'm around that area again, but was so realistic that it's my only/best memory of that hill.

Another was basically a zombie apocalypse and me being around while my dad turns (I must have seen some zombie film on TV or something). Another being chased by apes and spiders with the dream ending with me sinking under water and spiders jumping in the water and knowing how to swim downward to get me (eeek).

maegul , 1 year ago

So, lemmy is an option for running a blog. See it mentioned in the documentation here: https://join-lemmy.org/docs/en/users/06-other-features.html?highlight=blog#lemmy-as-a-blog.

There would be a few levels of complexity to it. But if you're hosting a lemmy instance already, it shouldn't be any trouble for you ... basically make yourself the only account but allow people to federate with your instance. Add your own modified front end too if you like (as lemmy has separate backend and front end software stacks AFAIU). Interestingly, I think it would be a cool project for people to work on ... a front end suitable for hosting a single (or even multi) user blog on the fediverse.

An additional option would be microblog: https://docs.microblog.pub/. It's a single-user fediverse platform written in python and relying on sqlite (which sounds to me like a nice sweet spot for single-user instances).

maegul , 1 year ago

Yep, totally, there's search, sorting, comments etc, all in one backend.

A neat blog-focused front-end would actually be super awesome IMO. Many want to be on the fediverse but interact just through blogs. A sort of blogo-verse (not sphere). Lemmy might be the best foundation to make that happen.

maegul , 1 year ago

Integration across various platforms is one of those things where I’m not sure even know whether they want it or not. We’re so used to disconnected platforms that it really is new ground for most.

It’s also probably hard and very open ended.

Which is all to say absolutely, there’d be interest, it’s just that it’ll be a bumpy ride but also worth it for showing people what is possible.

Allowing multiple accounts across multiple platforms to be merged into single timelines in customisable ways, alone, would be awesome.

As far as platforms go, I’d prioritise, on the basis of popularity and uniqueness:

1. Mastodon (for obvious and sad reasons)
2. PeerTube (video is unique on fediverse)
3. Lemmy (communities, link aggregation posts, no character limits, thread management etc are all unique and powerful on the fediverse … could have been 2nd but pushed out IMO because of uniqueness of video).
4. Pixelfed (for the instagram people, but, ASAIK, not too distinct from microblogging, but it is popular, though easily viewed from mastodon I think)

Roll those 4 into one (and maybe even just the top 3) and you would have a banger of an app. Even rolling mastodon and Lemmy into a single interface would be quite a demonstration.