Mastodon might introduce quote-posts, and that's bad for us

Fri, 05 Jan 2024 23:25:47 +0100

jupiter_rowland@hub.netzgemeinde.eu

"No quote-post" flag proposed for Mastodon could endanger federation with all instances of many non-Mastodon projects; CW: long (over 2,100 characters), Fediverse meta, non-Mastodon Fediverse meta, quote-post/quote-boost/quote-tweet/quote-toot meta, actual quote-post/quote-boost/quote-tweet/quote-toot

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Sat, 06 Jan 2024 04:21:41 +0100

LisPi

lispi314@udongein.xyz

@jupiter_rowland @mima > Or else Mastodon will defederate all their instances for being non-compliant.
You know, I'm here just thinking, why not just tell Mastodon to sod off?

They're the king of no one, fuck 'em.

Sat, 06 Jan 2024 09:08:20 +0100

Scott M. Stolz

scott@biztechtonics.net

What a minute. I thought we had to worry about Embrace-Extend-Extinguish from major corporations. It sounds like Mastodon is using that strategy themselves.

Sat, 06 Jan 2024 09:57:37 +0100

Jupiter Rowland

jupiter_rowland@hub.netzgemeinde.eu

I'm not even sure if that's an intentional move to keep the non-Mastodon Fediverse at a distance, or if they simply neither know nor care what damage this could do.

I mean, this would hurt the federation with Threads just as well. A proprietary project developed by a huge corporation with massive command structures like Meta will probably take longer to even realise there's something that needs to be implemented than Hubzilla would take to actually implement it, modifying Redbasic and all.

Sat, 06 Jan 2024 13:12:08 +0100

Mike P

FenTiger@mastodon.social

Artikel ansehen

Sat, 06 Jan 2024 13:54:20 +0100

Scott M. Stolz

scott@biztechtonics.net

I read the GitHub issue requesting this feature, and I don't see how they could possibly implement this. Doing so basically isolates themselves from the fediverse, more than they already are. Implementing this would be like shooting themselves in the foot.

Right now they are the big kid on the block, and they feel like they can do what they want and tell everyone else to live with it, but that is not always going to be the case. There are a lot of competitors in the space and eventually someone else will dethrone them as king of the hill. When that happens, they will be left with a platform that is largely incompatible with the rest of the fediverse and the emerging social web, which will have moved on and implemented more advanced features, like threaded conversations, which has been around since the beginning of the internet.

I think the bigger issue is that people don't understand what public means. Public means that everyone, including your opponents and enemies, can see it. If you don't want that, you should probably make it private and limit who can see it, or use a pen name instead of your real name. I see suggested features like this as a symptom of a bigger problem. Mastodon does not know what privacy is.

Sun, 07 Jan 2024 10:39:17 +0100

Jupiter Rowland

jupiter_rowland@hub.netzgemeinde.eu

@Scott M. Stolz

Right now they are the big kid on the block, and they feel like they can do what they want and tell everyone else to live with it, but that is not always going to be the case. There are a lot of competitors in the space and eventually someone else will dethrone them as king of the hill.

This will take a lot of time to happen.

Currently, Mastodon is just about the only gateway for new users into the Fediverse, also because everything written about the Fediverse outside the Fediverse is either mostly about Mastodon and just name-drops other projects in one half-sentence somewhere, or it's entirely about Mastodon and sweeps everything else under the rug. In addition, almost all Mastodon newbies land on one and the same instance owned and controlled by the devs.

So almost all Fediverse newbies spend their first one, two, three or more months thinking that the Fediverse is only Mastodon. My personal record was someone who learned from me that the Fediverse is more than Mastodon after five months.

Then they read about Threads being (increasingly) part of the Fediverse. Then they read about Pixelfed and PeerTube. Then they read about Pleroma, Misskey and maybe Friendica from people who don't know more about these than the names. Add a few more weeks or months until they learn about Akkoma and the still maintained Forkeys, all of which are Mastodon's actually serious competitors. It'll probably take them even longer to find out about Hubzilla, not to mention (streams).

And even then they will only know that these projects exist, and that they're federated with Mastodon. But they will still believe that all these projects were created after Mastodon and glued onto Mastodon because Eugen Rochko has invented Mastodon, ActivityPub and the Fediverse in 2022 in the wake of Musk's Twitter takeover announcement.

They will not, however, know what these projects can do. By and by, they will learn a little. The first thing they learn is that non-Mastodon projects may have a higher character count, and be it by finding a 1,200-character "toot" in their federated timeline, wondering or complaining about it and then learning it's not a Mastodon toot, it's from Iceshrimp which is totally not Mastodon. As slim as chances are, they might also find out about other projects' text formatting capabilities.

Everything else stays hidden from them unless it's slammed right into their faces in their Mastodon apps. Members of marginalised groups that have been harassed on Twitter can't for the lives of them imagine that every other *blogging project in the Fediverse is fully capable of those dreaded "quote-tweets" until others share (= "quote-tweet") their own posts to themselves repeatedly. And then they'll demand Mastodon introduce a feature that makes it absolutely impossible for users of e.g. Hubzilla to "quote-tweet" them. Or even only quote them.

Either way, Mastodon will stay the big kid on the block as long as Mastodon stays the only kid on the block for every Fediverse newbie and for everyone who hasn't joined the Fediverse yet, including most mainstream media. And as long as Mastodon has a monopoly on mobile app compatibility because just about all iPhone apps and almost all Android apps are built against Mastodon and its API rather than the ActivityPub standard.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #Mastodon #MastodonIsNotTheFediverse #NotOnlyMastodon

Sun, 07 Jan 2024 11:06:10 +0100

𝓒𝓱𝓻𝓲𝓼

chris@im.allmendenetz.de

The aim of this issue is to define

* A universal post attribute that communicates if the author of a post wants their post to be quote-posted or not, and

* Any UI elements required for the user to control that post attribute.

https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/25735

HZ and streams have this implemented since a long time :-)

have a look here

/permcats

there you finde

"Can source/mirror my public posts in derived channels"

Sun, 07 Jan 2024 11:19:14 +0100

Jupiter Rowland

jupiter_rowland@hub.netzgemeinde.eu

@????? Maybe, but do you really believe that Mastodon will take over this implementation or build something compatible?

Remember that Mastodon has developed its own home-brew, practically proprietary, non-standard sensitive image flag. There's a standard for that, Hubzilla and (streams) adhere to this standard, but Mastodon chose to completely ignore this standard to this day.

When it comes to shares/quote-posts and disallowing them, it's highly likely that Mastodon will create its own non-standard solution from scratch. Everything that wants to be compliant will have to implement Mastodon's solution.

Sun, 07 Jan 2024 11:22:54 +0100

Witcraft (Hubzilla)

witcraft@hubzilla.fediversum.de

And the reason for it being
A) marketing and
B) making it simple for new users,

A) can be fixed by an organization behind "the fediverse" (which does not exist since it is decentralized definition), or behind the individual projects (like the recently founded Hubzilla association, leading the Hubzilla Boost team).

B) can be covered by easy to find official documentation (so the community has to accept a central official entity) and a simple path how and where to open your account without further research, like a large, clearly visible, possibly official instance, or some simplified, decentralized alternative, as this is the major barrier for people coming from a centralized platform.

As long as other platforms do not embrace official, central spokespeople, centralized webhomes, a large start instance (or a gateway that assigns newbies one of typical instances, with a comparable default configuration, without the responsibility of choice). Some of these are on the brink of being tackled by Hubzilla, very recently.

But as long as Mastodon is the project that simplifies things for newbies best, without expecting them to understand the fine details of the Fediverse, and without the ideology not to betray the principles decentralization, I trust most people will only know the name of the glowing red-nosed raindeer facing the kids first, of all of Santas carriage...

Sun, 07 Jan 2024 11:32:48 +0100

Scott M. Stolz

scott@biztechtonics.net

No matter how people are introduced to the fediverse, I think there will be a learning curve. If it wasn't Mastodon, it would be someone else. In fact, with some of the projects I am launching, you will see the same phenomenon with members of my communities. The newbies will think they joined a forum community, and then realize later that this forum community is connected to the fediverse.

So I don't think that we will ever avoid the learning curve new members will experience. Even if the fediverse eventually becomes common knowledge, people are still born every day, and they will have to learn about the fediverse when they first encounter it.

Sun, 07 Jan 2024 11:47:06 +0100

Mike Macgirvin ?️

mikedev@fediversity.site

No, the source/mirror permission is different. It's basically permission for somebody to repost everything you publish without attribution - basically claim to be you.

The reason we don't have a permission specifically for quote posts is that it is physically impossible to prevent somebody quoting something you said.

Sun, 07 Jan 2024 12:01:19 +0100

Scott M. Stolz

scott@biztechtonics.net

@?????

the issue here is not the aim of the function - the function is good and desirable but to make it work across other apps as well.

Even if you implemented this in every single app, it is easy to circumvent.

Have you ever seen screenshots of Twitter or X posted on Hubzilla, Mastodon, Facebook, Instagram, or elsewhere?

People can quote you simply by taking a screenshot or using their phone to take a picture of their computer's screen. Or they can use an app that does not honor (or even know about) the "do not quote" flag. They can even use the copy and paste function to copy the text of your post, and add it to their post.

Adding this "do not quote" flag is not going to stop malicious people from quoting you.

Even if they implement this feature, which I don't think other platforms would adopt, it won't have the effect they intend because it is too easy to circumvent.

Sun, 07 Jan 2024 12:16:33 +0100

Jupiter Rowland

jupiter_rowland@hub.netzgemeinde.eu

Well, it might be possible to keep Hubzilla or (streams) users from quote-posting/quote-boosting/quote-tweeting/quote-tooting Mastodon toots, i.e. sharing them the good old-fashioned Friendica way.

When fetching a Mastodon toot, Pubcrawl would have to dig deep into Mastodon and check for the no-quote-post flag. If it's set, Pubcrawl would have to notify Hubzilla's core which, in turn, would have to tell Redbasic or whichever theme is active to deactivate (grey out) the "Share" button. It wouldn't even be necessary to keep a post with a share from being sent because it'd be impossible to generate the share in the first place.

Preventing quotes would be more difficult and more prone to false positives or negatives.

If e.g. Mastodon accounts can set a flag for not being quoted ever, the post/comment editor would have to check if a) someone is mentioned who doesn't want to be quoted, and b) there is a substring of a post from that user in the draft between a pair of [quote][/quote] tags. If it's posts that are flagged, the mention check is unnecessary. Either way, if no-quote post content is detected, the "Send" button would be disabled/greyed out.

However, this would be so easy to circumvent for Hubzilla's/(streams)' typical tech-savvy users that it would have to be extended. After all, almost all of us are on desktop/laptop computers instead of on phones, and we use standard browsers instead of dedicated apps. Copy-pasting anything from anywhere to anywhere is easy for us.

Posts or bits of posts can be copied and pasted into a whole new post draft, thus starting a whole new thread with a quote. This would make checking an existing thread for unquoteable posts impossible, so the whole database of the instance would have to be checked. Even then, our likes could go to Mastodon, copy something from a post there and paste it into a new Hubzilla or (streams) post without first fetching the Mastodon post to be quoted.

Also, there are many ways to quote a post. Apart from the standard

Quote

there are
>Quote
> Quote
"Quote"
“Quote”
‘Quote’
„Quote“
«Quote»
»Quote«
>>Quote<<
etc.

Hubzilla and (streams) would have to be able to catch them all. And if bad came to worse, that'd be a game of whack-a-mole because those who absolutely want to quote unquoteable posts will keep inventing new ways of quoting.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Quote #Quotes #QuotePost #QuotePosts #QuoteBoost #QuoteBoosts #QuoteTweet #QuoteTweets #QuoteToot #QuoteToots #QuotedPosts

Sun, 07 Jan 2024 12:16:33 +0100

Witcraft (Hubzilla)

witcraft@hubzilla.fediversum.de

@Scott M. Stolz
I really think a lot of good things are forming in the Hubzilla project, and Neuhub. But Mastodon obviously does at least some things better thatbwe can learn from, for external awareness.

Sun, 07 Jan 2024 12:34:27 +0100

Scott M. Stolz

scott@biztechtonics.net

@Witcraft (Hubzilla)

I really think a lot of good things are forming in the Hubzilla project, and Neuhub. But Mastodon obviously does at least some things better that we can learn from, for external awareness.

That is the best approach. Learn from the good ideas, and discard the bad ideas and do something better.

Sun, 07 Jan 2024 13:43:36 +0100

Witcraft (Hubzilla)

witcraft@hubzilla.fediversum.de

@Jupiter Rowland

Mastodon has a monopoly on mobile app compatibility because just about all iPhone apps and almost all Android apps are built against Mastodon and its API rather than the ActivityPub standard.

I wish there was away to offer apps in appstores without actually downloading it from the store....

I still remember how Mike responded to the need of a social app by the theoretic possibility to use a PWA as a virtual app, using the browser API in a dedicated window, completely integrated into the OS with share targets, notifications, and all, installed from the browser menu, completely configured to your website, with a minimum of code and resources. But he would have to look into it, something like this would take a while to develop - Half an hour later he announced "It's in the dev branch" ?
(That was for Zap, it was taken over into (streams), and back-ported to Hubzilla with less functions).

Hardly anyone knows about it because it is, naturally, not in the app stores, and people prefer to give their data to goggle or Apple for downloading resource-hungry apps that need to be configured... ?

Sun, 07 Jan 2024 22:31:12 +0100

Bill Statler

billstatler@forum.statler.ws

Well, I read Setting to opt out of quote posts or quote boosts #25735, and to me it looks like a pie-in-the-sky idea from someone who is just imagining the user interface, and is unfamiliar with how his idea could be implemented. He hasn't even commented on the issue since the day he proposed it.

I don't understand Mastodon developer politics, but I doubt this idea is going to be implemented.

Sun, 07 Jan 2024 22:51:40 +0100

Mike Macgirvin ?️

mikedev@fediversity.site

Doesn't really matter. It's easy to implement. We do prevent reshares it's a private post.

We do this as a courtesy. It can be trivially circumvented. But if Masto folks want to pretend they have a permission setting, fine by me. Easy to implement to placate them. I'd use a popular Aussie slang term here but it gets lost in translation. Rhymes with Cringing Runts.

Thu, 11 Jan 2024 01:41:39 +0100

Cătă

petrescatraian@libranet.de

@Jupiter Rowland Well, Lemmy is pretty much established right now and growing as well, despite being something different. Right now, this seems the biggest competitor to Mastodon in a way. But the limitation of Lemmy accounts not being able to follow other accounts (and only communities instead) makes it a bit of an outsider. Like, you can follow users from Friendica, Mastodon, even Hubzilla I think, and see their activity (comment, post), but they cannot see yours.

This also leads to the creation of a more specific culture, with people that are also unaware of other platforms and capabilities (albeit less pronounced, as the devs did a better job of keeping the whole ecosystem decentralized). For example, some users are surprised to hear that you can see their upvotes on other platforms.

Kbin and Mbin could have brought a solution to this issue, as they do support following users, even those from *blogging platforms, but because the projects are younger and less stable - and more so at the time of the Reddit migration - they failed to gain the required traction (i.e. more servers, user numbers more spread out across them) until now. There is still activity on these, they are still growing (people are joining them mostly because they are dissatisfied with the political leanings of the Lemmy devs, as well as their moderation policy on .ml which is subjective to say the least), but you can clearly see a bigger culture formed around Lemmy as of now.

There seems to be something similar happening to Pixelfed, with user numbers growing month after month, and I am sure something similar will happen to Peertube when YouTube will flop badly again and PeerTube will be mature enough, or with Bookwyrm, Friendica, Hubzilla etc.

My concern is that all these decentralized platforms will just become more and more isolated and joining one platform will only give you access to the servers of the same platform (running the same software), while federation i.e. between Mastodon->Friendica, Friendica->Lemmy, Kbin->Pixelfed etc. will become an afterthought. And so from needing to have an account on one centralized Facebook, one centralized Xitter, one centralized Reddit, one centralized YouTube etc., you will need to have an account on each of their federated counterparts in order to get a relevant online presence.

As a side note, even my server (one of the biggest Friendica servers) is defederated from lemmy.ml, lemmy.world and lemmy.ca, because their activity is too large for it to function normally (or something) and the message sending/receiving is happening slow. There are some communities on .world and .ca that have no presence/alternatives on other servers, so I'm forced to wait for a solution to happen. Other communities on some other servers seem not to be sending messages here at all. Kbin and Mbin magazines are all empty on my side and have always been ever since I followed them, sometimes months ago. Only manually syncing the posts via the link is working, but it's really not convenient for daily usage, and totally unproductive and time-consuming.

@Scott M. Stolz

Thu, 11 Jan 2024 04:47:15 +0100 zuletzt bearbeitet: Thu, 11 Jan 2024 04:49:23 +0100

Scott M. Stolz

scott@biztechtonics.net

@Cătă I think that having different diverse communities is actually an important feature of the fediverse that we should embrace, but at the same time, we should still strive for interoperability. But instead of communities based on a platform, I would like to see more communities based on interests.

For example, developer communities, content creator communities, open source communities, entrepreneur communities, cooking & recipes communities, etc. And with the power of the fediverse and protocols like ActivityPub, Zot, and OpenWebAuth, people can join multiple communities using one social identity if they want. And with WordPress supporting ActivityPub, people can even follow blogs now according to their interests.

I think that fediverse identity providers (i.e. any platform that let's you create a fediverse social media account) need to recognize that a user's inbox isn't just for their platform... it is a fediverse inbox with diverse content from a variety of platforms.

You are still going to have the issue that Mastodon is going to want you to post short text posts, and PeerTube is going to want you to post videos, et cetera, so people may wind up with multiple fediverse channels anyway. But that is okay as long as we maintain interoperability between platforms, since you can follow channels on multiple platforms.

Thu, 11 Jan 2024 10:55:48 +0100

Jupiter Rowland

jupiter_rowland@hub.netzgemeinde.eu

@Cătă

Well, Lemmy is pretty much established right now and growing as well, despite being something different. Right now, this seems the biggest competitor to Mastodon in a way. But the limitation of Lemmy accounts not being able to follow other accounts (and only communities instead) makes it a bit of an outsider. Like, you can follow users from Friendica, Mastodon, even Hubzilla I think, and see their activity (comment, post), but they cannot see yours.

This also leads to the creation of a more specific culture, with people that are also unaware of other platforms and capabilities (albeit less pronounced, as the devs did a better job of keeping the whole ecosystem decentralized). For example, some users are surprised to hear that you can see their upvotes on other platforms.

The latter is mostly because the vast majority of Lemmy users didn't come from Mastodon but from Reddit. They weren't told much about the existence of a Fediverse, only that there's a thing called Lemmy which is many copies of Reddit before its enshittification, and these are connected with each other. That's all that many know. Just like many Mastodon users think the Fediverse is only Mastodon.

It doesn't help that Lemmy barely gets any interaction from other projects. Mastodon is huge, and Mastodon users should be all over Lemmy. But many Mastodon users have never heard about Lemmy. Those who have may find it too inconvenient to follow a Lemmy community because that involves using the account search and copy-pasting. Don't forget that the huge majority of Mastodon users is on phones. And those who do manage to follow Lemmy communities say that the interaction between Mastodon and Lemmy is too limiting.

For the record: I do have Lemmy followers.

Kbin and Mbin could have brought a solution to this issue, as they do support following users, even those from *blogging platforms, but because the projects are younger and less stable - and more so at the time of the Reddit migration - they failed to gain the required traction (i.e. more servers, user numbers more spread out across them) until now. There is still activity on these, they are still growing (people are joining them mostly because they are dissatisfied with the political leanings of the Lemmy devs, as well as their moderation policy on .ml which is subjective to say the least), but you can clearly see a bigger culture formed around Lemmy as of now.

/kbin made bidirectional *blogging-style following possible only by bolting microblogging onto a Reddit clone. Lemmy is a more purist Reddit clone, it doesn't support domestic *blogging, so users of *blogging projects can't follow Lemmy users in the traditional sense.

As for lemmy.ml, that instance doesn't matter that much anymore. Even lemmy.world has been surpassed as the biggest instance.

There seems to be something similar happening to Pixelfed, with user numbers growing month after month, and I am sure something similar will happen to Peertube when YouTube will flop badly again and PeerTube will be mature enough, or with Bookwyrm, Friendica, Hubzilla etc.

Pixelfed could become big if Instagram was enshittified so tremendously that everyone except the biggest attention whores ("But muh followers, but muh fame") will start looking for alternatives. The advantage of Pixelfed for Instagram users over Mastodon for Twitter users is that Pixelfed allows direct imports of Instagram accounts with all content.

I'm not so sure about PeerTube, not only because that'd require gigantic amounts of hard drive space, but also because many users are on YouTube for the money, and PeerTube won't pay them a penny. If they moved to PeerTube, they'd lose a source of income. Also, fewer YouTube users have ever heard of PeerTube than ? users have heard of Mastodon.

BookWyrm would be easier, but I can't see right now how Goodreads could be enshittified enough to cause a mass migration. Maybe, however, BookWyrm becomes interesting for people who don't even know Goodreads and its whole concept, and they find out about BookWyrm before they find out about Goodreads.

Friendica tried to take a chance long ago, back in the early 2010s. It even tried to facilitate the transition of whole social circles from Facebook by federating with Facebook by means of a cross-poster. It didn't work out. People didn't want to leave their "friends" behind, not to mention that the average Facebook user was even less technologically adept than the average Twitter user a good decade later. Even trying to mimic Facebook's UI didn't help.

Maybe it was for the better. Typical server hardware that Friendica ran on back in the day could barely handle over 130 accounts on one node. The notoriously power-hungry Facebook connector cut a dozen or two out of this number. Many public Friendica nodes with the Facebook connector on closed their registrations at a bit over 100 accounts. I think not even the biggest root servers would have given you a four-digit capacity.

It would simply have been impossible to accommodate a flood of Facebook refugees on Friendica. Even if Friendica users with Facebook contacts had started their own private nodes, most of them would have needed multiple nodes to even have space for a fraction of their Facebook "friends".

As for Hubzilla, it'll first need a lot of polish. And then I can't see from where people would come flooding to Hubzilla. Facebook refugees would rather pile onto Friendica, the traditional more-powerful-than-Diaspora* Facebook "clone", or maybe (streams), the Fediverse champion in permission control.

Hubzilla could be something for companies, for organisations, for political offices, for journalists, for scientists etc. I could even see modern and progressive left-wing parties use it; Pirate Parties, anyone? They wouldn't have to worry about hub capacities because they could either use specialised hubs, e.g. for journalists, or they'd run their own hubs anyway, just like they run their own Mastodon instances now. In fact, if that thicket of instances run by German public broadcasters was Hubzilla instead of Mastodon, everyone could go nomadic without having to use general-purpose hubs for their clones.

But getting them from something as dead-simple as ? to the Leatherman of Fediverse projects is difficult, to say the least. Even from Facebook.

And private persons will only really tackle Hubzilla and stick with it if they're geeks enough.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Lemmy #kbin #/kbin #Pixelfed #PeerTube #BookWyrm #Friendica #Hubzilla #FediverseMigration

Sun, 14 Jan 2024 09:41:03 +0100

Scott M. Stolz

scott@biztechtonics.net

@Jupiter Rowland

The latter is mostly because the vast majority of Lemmy users didn't come from Mastodon but from Reddit.

That makes sense. Mastodon is only this popular because millions of people fled Twitter. A boon for Mastodon and the fediverse, but not everyone got the same recognition as a result. It would make sense that Reddit users would just go straight to Lemmy.

Sun, 14 Jan 2024 09:42:03 +0100

Cătă

petrescatraian@libranet.de

@Jupiter Rowland

The latter is mostly because the vast majority of Lemmy users didn't come from Mastodon but from Reddit. They weren't told much about the existence of a Fediverse, only that there's a thing called Lemmy which is many copies of Reddit before its enshittification, and these are connected with each other. That's all that many know. Just like many Mastodon users think the Fediverse is only Mastodon.

It doesn't help that Lemmy barely gets any interaction from other projects. Mastodon is huge, and Mastodon users should be all over Lemmy. But many Mastodon users have never heard about Lemmy. Those who have may find it too inconvenient to follow a Lemmy community because that involves using the account search and copy-pasting. Don't forget that the huge majority of Mastodon users is on phones. And those who do manage to follow Lemmy communities say that the interaction between Mastodon and Lemmy is too limiting.

I think that's what I was trying to point out as well :D it just seems to be the same situation as with Mastodon in the initial phases of the migration. Probably this is the reason why some of these platforms seem disconnected to each other - Lemmy is just technically disconnected to the rest of the Fediverse, while Mastodon is simply too big for anyone to encounter users from somewhere else. Maybe time will fix everything. :D

/kbin made bidirectional *blogging-style following possible only by bolting microblogging onto a Reddit clone.

People still seem to use the feature though, so it is something.

As for lemmy.ml, that instance doesn't matter that much anymore. Even lemmy.world has been surpassed as the biggest instance.

You're probably referring to alien.top, right?

The thing is, with this type of platform, that it is not just as important where the users are, but where the discussions are going (and this is where .world wins). But it's still great that the Lemmy devs managed to ensure a plurality and ensure choice, instead of trying to make things easier for the newbies by directing them to a large default server.

Pixelfed could become big if Instagram was enshittified so tremendously that everyone except the biggest attention whores ("But muh followers, but muh fame") will start looking for alternatives. The advantage of Pixelfed for Instagram users over Mastodon for Twitter users is that Pixelfed allows direct imports of Instagram accounts with all content.

100% agree with this.

I'm not so sure about PeerTube, not only because that'd require gigantic amounts of hard drive space, but also because many users are on YouTube for the money, and PeerTube won't pay them a penny. If they moved to PeerTube, they'd lose a source of income. Also, fewer YouTube users have ever heard of PeerTube than ? users have heard of Mastodon.

I think I heard about peertube before hand, it was something like a YouTube alternative that was more p2p or something for video broadcasting? Not sure exactly or if that was the case, and not sure if they're still doing it. But it's great they're here.

And yes, the only way to monetize your videos on PeerTube seems to be Patreon or similar external platforms, which is not ideal for certain creators.

BookWyrm would be easier, but I can't see right now how Goodreads could be enshittified enough to cause a mass migration. Maybe, however, BookWyrm becomes interesting for people who don't even know Goodreads and its whole concept, and they find out about BookWyrm before they find out about Goodreads.

For me, Bookwyrm is already a better version of Goodreads for 3 reasons (two of them being not too technical for the average user to understand at all):

2FA support;
Dark mode;
The ability to add book editions yourself (the latter no longer seems possible and I discovered it the hard way, hence why I joined).

The only problem that I see here is that you can hardly find the books you're reading. You have to hope they're on other people's servers and import it from there, or create the book (version) from scratch and make sure you filled all the fields correctly. Again, it will take some time, but I'm proudly doing my part. :D

Interesting story about Friendica, but yea, back then I had just joined Facebook myself, so the chances of me looking for an alternative at that point were rather low. And the dumb fucks (sic) like me weren't exposed to the huge political scandals of 2015 like Cambridge Analytica just yet. I wasn't even politically involved back then.

I think the advantage of Facebook over alternative platforms is the discovery feature - which is privacy invasive indeed. And not something people here would like to see implemented (me myself included). The fact that you could easily find and keep contact with your real life contacts was what some people were brought to social media in the first place.

Not sure how Friendica would cope with that.

As for Hubzilla, it'll first need a lot of polish. And then I can't see from where people would come flooding to Hubzilla. [...] Hubzilla could be something for companies, for organisations, for political offices, for journalists, for scientists etc.

Interesting. Yea, probably after some polish you could see e.g. social.kernel.org switching to Hubzilla. But again, time will tell. :D

Sun, 14 Jan 2024 10:34:35 +0100

Jupiter Rowland

jupiter_rowland@hub.netzgemeinde.eu

@Scott M. Stolz

It would make sense that Reddit users would just go straight to Lemmy.

Only that they weren't presented a list of all Fediverses projects and then picked Lemmy.

Early on, some were shown both Lemmy and /kbin, but nothing else. Some were shown a list of Lemmy instances. Others were simply given lemmy.ml as "the Lemmy website" similar to mastodon.social, thus ignoring and bypassing decentralisation altogether.

In the second phase, Redditors were told by their subreddit admins where the subreddit had moved or opened a branch on Lemmy or /kbin. Since they often didn't know anything about either, they went to that self-same instance and opened an account there. So when popular subreddits decided to move to kbin.social, the /kbin devs really had a problem with people piling up on an experimental instance of an unfinished project.

Sun, 14 Jan 2024 10:48:56 +0100 zuletzt bearbeitet: Sun, 14 Jan 2024 11:00:49 +0100

Scott M. Stolz

scott@biztechtonics.net

@Jupiter Rowland I think that is how the fediverse will grow. People will be invited to a place, and then they will learn about the fediverse afterwards.

In fact, that is my strategy for attracting people to Hubzilla. Build content and community websites that attract users, and once they are a member of the community, they start learning about the fediverse. They came for the content, stayed for the local community, and then reached out to the fediverse.

I see this as a natural progression, regardless of how they are introduced to the fediverse.

Sun, 14 Jan 2024 11:11:06 +0100

Jupiter Rowland

jupiter_rowland@hub.netzgemeinde.eu

@Scott M. Stolz The major downside of letting people discover first decentralisation and then the greater Fediverse is that they get too used to their first impression of wherever in the Fediverse they land, they adjust their action to this first impression, and they may end up deeply disturbed when they find out what the Fediverse really is.

I've seen it all the time during the second wave of Twitter-to-Mastodon migration.

After spending one to three months on mastodon.social or wherever they've been railroaded, new Mastodon users discover that Mastodon is decentralised, like many big and little Twitters that are separate but connected to each other.

All of a sudden, Mastodon becomes very complicated. But they don't mind much. After all, it's working for them.

After spending three to six months on Mastodon, they discover that the Fediverse is, in fact, not only their beloved and oh-so-cosy Mastodon. They usually find it out the hard way when they come across the first post or comment from something that's very much not Mastodon, and that does totally weird things that they thought are impossible on Mastodon.

For not exactly few, this is too much. It's like an intruder in their beloved new home. They got used to the Fediverse only being Mastodon and Mastodon only being connected to more Mastodon and nothing else that they find this discovery deeply disturbing.

I think there have been dozens of Mastodon newbies who started following me because they needed Twitter-style background noise in their timeline, and who blocked me without unfollowing me when my freaky, so much non-Mastodon-like posts started tainting their timeline.

Sun, 14 Jan 2024 17:11:33 +0100

Scott M. Stolz

scott@biztechtonics.net

@Jupiter Rowland

The major downside of letting people discover first decentralisation and then the greater Fediverse is that they get too used to their first impression of wherever in the Fediverse they land, they adjust their action to this first impression, and they may end up deeply disturbed when they find out what the Fediverse really is.

But until the fediverse gets adopted into society's consciousness (similar to how the "internet" is a concept most people have heard of), I think that most people who join the fediverse will have to learn as they go along. It may not be the best way, but that is how I see it playing out.