cross-posted from: https://futurology.today/post/221862

Which do you think is the better microblogging platform? Why?

To really own your content, I think you need to host it yourself. The fediverse makes it possible.

The EU's Next Generation Internet grant continues to support innovation in the Fediverse, funding the social platform of the future.

Mastodon has the responsibility to promote diversity in the Fediverse

I love the Threadiverse. Compared to the microblogging Fediverse’s sea of random thoughts, Lemmy and kbin are so much easier to navigate with the options to sort posts by subscribed, from local instances or everything federated. You can also sort by individual community, and then there are the countless ways to order the posts and comments (which are stored neatly under the main post, by the way). That people can more easily find the right discussions and see where they can contribute also means that the discussions tend to be more focused and productive than elsewhere. Decentralisation also makes a lot of sense, since it is built around different communities. All that’s needed is users.

Things were going quite well for a while when Reddit killed third-party apps, prompting many to leave and find the Threadiverse. However, it is quite difficult to entertain a crowd that has grown accustomed to a constant bombardment of dopamine-inducing or interesting content by tens of millions of users, if you only have a couple hundred thousand people. This is causing some to leave, which of course increases this effect. The active users have more than halved since July, according to FediDB. The mood is also becoming more tense. Maybe the lack of engagement drives some to cause it through hostility, I’m not quite sure. Either way, the Threadiverse becoming a less enjoyable place to be, which is quite sad considering how promising it is.

But what is really frustrating is that we could easily have that userbase. The entire Fediverse has over ten million users, and many Mastodonians clearly want to engage in group-based discussion, looking at Guppe groups. The focused discussions should also be quite attractive. Technically we are federated, so why do Mastodonians interact so little with the Threadiverse? The main reason is that Mastodon simply doesn’t federate post content. I really can’t see why the platform that federates entire Wordpress blogs refuses to federate thread content just because it has a title, and instead just replaces the body with a link to the post. Very unhelpful.

The same goes with PeerTube. There are plenty of videos on there that I am quite sure a lot of Mastodonians would appreciate, yet both views and likes there stay consistently in the tens. Yes, Mastodon’s web interface has a local video player, but in most clients it is the same link shenanigans, may may partly explain the small amount of engagement. This is also quite sad, because Google’s YouTube is one of the worst social network monopolies out there, if not the worst.

And I know some might say that Mastodon is a microblogging platform and that it makes sense only to have microblogging content, but the problem is that Mastodon is the dominant platform on the Fediverse, its users making up close to 80% of all Fedizens. It has gone so far that several Friendica and Hubzilla users have been complaining about complaints from Mastodonians that their posts do not live up to Mastodon customs, and of course, that people frequently use “Mastodon” to refer to the entire Fediverse. This, of course, goes entirely against the idea of the Fediverse, that many diverse platforms live in harmony with and awareness of each other.

The very least that Mastodon could do is to support the content of other platforms. Then I’d wish that they’d improve discoverability, by for instance adding a videos tab in the explore section, improving federation of favourites since it is the dominant sorting mechanism on many other platforms, and making a clear distinction between people (@person@instance) and groups (!group@instance), but I know that that is quite much to ask.

P.S. @feditips , @FediFollows , I know that you are reluctant to promote Lemmy and its communities because of the ideology of its founders, but the fact is firstly that it’s open source and there aren't any individual people who control the entire project, and that the software itself is very apolitical. In fact, most Lemmy users both oppose and are on instances that have rules against such beliefs, so I highly encourage you to at least help raise awareness on the communities. Then, of course, there’s kbin, which isn’t associated with any extremism at all. As a bonus, it has much better integration with the microblogging Fediverse, but it is a lot smaller and younger, and still very much under development.

Anyways, that was a ramble. Thanks for hearing me out.

#fediverse #threadiverse #mastodon #lemmy #kbin

Lemmit online is a lemmy instance that mirrors content from some subs from reddit. It seems to be federated and not blocked but when you subscribe to any of its community, you don't get any new posts in your feed. Any clue about why?

Hi folks! Today I have asked myself if I could login with one (no, not google or apple or micosoft) account in all the (30 I think) forums that I have to use as a FOSS admin. Nextcloud Forum, Ubuntu Forum, Mint forum, Makemkv Forum, Papermc Forum, linux.org, etc.

We obviously are on a forum-like social platform but we cant make people use this as their forum I suppose. Ideally, I'd like to federate "all forums" so to speak but that would probably take a shit ton of work. https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/does-this-forum-use-activitypub/2545/2

If not federate the content, maybe federate the logins. So that the profiles federate from one place to the next and you can login anywhere without having 30 different passwords for one "service" (forum in this case).

The next step down would be a foss SSO solution. There seem to be some but I hardly see any pages mention them possibility at all. https://sennovate.com/best-open-source-single-sign-on-solutions/

Am I missing something or is this still in the distant future?

Thanks for reading. Have a good one.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/9006151

Hello everyone,

Books are still one of the most important sources of information we have as a human species. However, the media on which this information has been stored has changed considerably over time and with it its accessibility and influence on our society.

Nowadays you can find an enormous range of books and texts online. Most of the time, however, access to them is extremely fragmented, difficult to find, subject to a fee, incompatible with the software platform of your choice or, in the worst case, goes under with its provider over time.

To counteract this, annas-archive was founded to make the knowledge stored in the texts and books openly accessible and to preserve it for future generations. On the other hand, there are platforms such as Goodreads that aim to simplify the joy of reading and the exchange of information, as well as the review and discussion of books and texts.

Unfortunately, Goodreads is a centralized, proprietary solution that in addition also happens to be owned by Amazon. BookWyrm is a decentralized, open source alternative in the fediverse that steps in right here.

Now here's the kicker: what if we combined the power of both platforms? What if we combined the enormous book database of annas-archive with the fediverse, i.e. BookWyrm? Annas archive could benefit from reviews and discussions about the books and BookWyrm could expand its still very limited database many times over.

From my point of view, this would be the perfect combination of two already great projects. What do you think?

---

TL:DR What do you think about combining annas-archive with the fediverse (BookWyrm)

Mastodon, we wrote this because we love you and care about you. People have been saying a lot of things, and we need to get the facts right.

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/16137693

I like Lemmy. Active development, lots of third party apps, active community, etc but what other Fediverse projects are worth getting into like this one?

For microblogging (Twitter), I know Mastodon is really popular but there are so many other microblogging options like Pleroma, Misskey, FireFish, etc that I don't know which one is really worth getting into (as a user, dev, or admin). Are any of these on par with Lemmy?

For video, there's PeerTube. The content isn't great at all and most servers struggle to pay bills. I think the YouTube replacement is a looong way to go.

nerdica.net/photos/masimatutu/…

91 boosts and still going strong. Federation works, everyone!

@fediverse

While working on Fedimojis, I'd like to check that the link entered by the user is actually a Mastodon server, to avoid bugs or loading thousands of emojis from Pixelfed instances that don't distinguish between local and external emojis.

How can I do this?

Have you ever wanted to download all the custom emojis from another Mastodon server? I have.

With this you can download and import them into your server.

https://fedimojis.retiolus.net

On Mastodon, Followers-only posts are only visible to your followers -- and to admins of any instances your followers on. But if you haven't turned on "approve followes", anybody who's logged in to an instance you haven't blocked can follow you and get access to your followers-only posts.

In your view, are followers-only posts public?

The linked post is a Mastodon poll, and I'll also put in replies here so that you can just upvote the ones you agree with!

I don't quite understand a lot of the details on how the implementations work.

In what ways is AT better or worse than ActivityPub? Are there different versions of ActivityPub? Are there improvements coming to either to make them better (or compatible)?

My current understanding is

• AT makes it easier to move accounts (according to them), but AT is controlled and maintained by BlueSky, and they are a for-profit company that can mess with the protocol in the future, which goes against the central idea of decentralized social media

What other cool technical details are there?

With BlueSky moving towards finally opening up federation, I'm interested in how people feel about it?

Would you be open to the idea of Mastodon, Lemmy, Pixelfed, and other Fediverse platforms adopting the AT protocol in order to federate with it?

If those technical hurdles could be overcome, would you support your instance federating with BlueSky?

Does the same go for other commercially-owned platforms, such as Threads and Tumblr?

#BlueSky #Fediverse #Threads #Mastodon @fediverse

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/9273379

I mean we can sort by new or hot or active etc. But can we add more algorithms that people can then choose. For example id love to be able to have an algorithm that allows me to rate communities so I could say rate a meme community 1 and a chess community 10 so I only see the best of the meme community and most of thr chess posts, since I find meme communities dominate your feed otherwise.