Hey! So, TL;DR, we've been putting in a lot of work to make a podcast for the Fediverse, to go along with our news articles. There's just so much cool stuff happening, and we feel that a podcast format can capture aspects of this that regular articles can't.

The podcast in question features what's going on in the network, what cool things are getting built, and what headaches or problems the people on the network are dealing with. There's a really big emphasis on people building the apps and platforms for this network, along with their personal stories and visions for the network.

Unfortunately, we just aren't sure what to name it. We have a few good ideas, but we'd like to turn it over to the community to either vote on one of the names, or recommend something better, if anybody can think of one.

We have a super short survey here: https://cloud.wedistribute.org/apps/forms/s/cPsT7WNs8gXkMziKX695DmEi

There's a really cool open source alternative to Bandcamp that just came out. With some questions raised about Bandcamp's future, some musicians in the Fediverse are leaning into the new platform as a different approach to selling their music.

Faircamp is just a static site, and doesn't federate itself, but its adoption within the Fediverse suggests that people are at least thinking about alternative solutions.

I've been using mastodon for a month or two now. I never used twitter but thought I'd try it out for fun since I love this new fediverse experiment.

Then my mastodon instance started experiencing some downtime and I wondered what happens in this scenario. It seems if the goal is to have lots of smaller instances and decentralize social media, then instances, particularly those not run a big companies (who can reliably fund things for years on end and sell ad space on their platforms), will come and go and users will lose their identity or home base each time this happens along with all their followers and their connection to the wider social graph. This seems not great.

It seems that nostr might actually be a fix for this. In nostr:

• You publish to multiple relays (essentially instances) and anybody from any relay can follow you.
• Your messages are signed by your key so you can prove they are authentic.
• If your relay goes down, people can still follow you via other relays
• You can change between relays without losing your identity. Your post history and followers follow you, not yourusername@relay.com.

Doing some reading, it seems people's main criticisms of nostr are:

• Interface isn't as pretty. Looks like this has come leaps and bounds in the past six months but of course could always use more work
• Populated by crypto bros. This seems like not an issue long-term, there's plenty of crypto bros on mastodon, you can just not follow them if you don't want to see them. The idea that you can "tip" with a tweet or whatever nostr's term for that is seems pretty interesting.

Basically, at a protocol level, nostr seems better in some important ways and the cons don't seem protocol related but userbase and UI related.

What am I missing on the pros/cons list? Anybody got experiences to share?

Disappointing to see another AP project (possibly) coming to a halt. It always seems to be the same issues:

• A lone developer cant handle the work load
• lack of funding
• compatibility issues

It's seeming less and less likely that the fediverse will ever grow beyond mastodon.

Hi everyone, I have some technical questions regarding federation. Answers backed by documentation would be perfect.

1. Is there a way to get the list of federated instances of a specific instance?
2. (Regarding question 1, should this consider active followers between instances? If not actively defederated/blocked, when one account follows another from another instance, the two instances get federated, right?)
3. Can I get a list of actively blocked/defederated/muted instances?
4. How does this change between applications? Are for example Lemmy and Mastodon the same?

My goal is to possibly create a graph/network analysis.

Thank you for your help.

Nicely written post about the potential of the fediverse.

It's a sad time for the social network formerly known as T2, but not all hope is lost.

@fediverse Let's face it. When talking about the Fediverse, it is very hard to sell interoperability between different types of instances as a major advantage.

https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2023/10/mastodon-for-android-update/

The most recent update of Mastodon for Android introduces a highly anticipated feature–lists. With the new update, you now have the ability to create custom lists and categorize your follows based on specific topics or interests, while removing them from your home feed.

This not only helps in decluttering your home feed but also allows you to engage with certain topics on your own terms, when you are ready. Additionally, we reworked the home tab to provide easy navigation between your home feed, lists, and followed hashtags, so you can get the most out of your experience on Mastodon.

We’ve got more updates in the pipeline as we aim to make Mastodon the most beautiful and delightful social media app on Android. Our iOS and web teams are also working steadily on new features and improvements, so stay tuned!

Here's a Verge article mentioning this: Mastodon’s latest update makes it easier to follow the news

They're doing really well! Do you think Lemmy should also implement alt text?

Halloween is just around the corner, so we've gone out of our way to pick some spooky, fun songs from #Fediverse musicians. Come check it out!

Some friends have websites. I encourage them to do. But they have them only to publish contact info, opening times, and a couple of photos of their business. What would be the best fediverse platform for this? Of course being able to post/toot news every now and then, is also a good feature.

On September 22nd the Free Software Foundation Europe, the Landeszentrale für politische Bildung Nordrhein-Westfalen (Centre for Civic Education of North Rhine-Westphalia) and the VHS Köln (Adult Education Centre Cologne) organized a symposium about “The world after Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. A new generation of the Internet?”

fsfe.org/news/2023/news-202310…

The (German) recordings of the symposium are now available at the Peertube instance of the FSFE at media.fsfe.org .

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/7849011

before people criticize me I am not using my main account because I do not feel safe bringing up these issues there, as these people and issues still are not dealt with. I do not want to put myself in danger, I will not be engaging in or attempting to post polls or votes here.

I would like to start by saying that I've noticed a lot of bad faith or spammy communities pop-up recently. The user is dramaticcat many of the communities break rules 1 and 2, maybe even rule 3 (an example of one such community is !kiwifarms@sh.itjust.works) as they are purely dedicated to hatred, trolling, and possibly even spam.

Also a small handful of users have also been making threats or calls to violence and while these have been moderated nicely moderators and external instance admins the admins of this instance haven't done anything about this. This is worrying as admins are supposed to enforce the instance rules and remove disruptive users and communities who are in violation of said rules but the admins of Sh.itjust.works have not been doing that. This is a problem because it means that any malicious actor could join at any time and wreak havok on this instance just like Exploding-heads did on another unmoderated instance known as rammy.site way back when. We obviously know how that went.

It's important that we discuss this problem now while we might have a chance of contacting the admins rather than later when the damage has been done.

I have struggled with my alcoholism for some time and finally was able to get sober. I'd like to pay it forward and decided to start /c/sobriety for ANY drug/alcohol addiction for those currently or afflicted in the past and ready to nurture and guide newcomers to sober living.

If that's you, please join and help me to grow a wonderful place in the fediverse for sober living. Thank you for the consideration and I look forward to seeing you in our community ;)

Very nice improvement and I hope more fediverse software starts supporting this. tl;dr popular videos are also uploaded by the viewers, thus lowering the server load, similar to Bittorrent, but all in the browser.