Sure it would give Mastadon the power to pick and choose who it wants to host, but if you want to go join a different instance you are more than welcome to.
It would just substantially streamline the process for your mainstream user.
Mastodon? It's a dictionary word, so it as that going for it—and yet, people see it a hundred times and still often misspell it. The pronunciation's just a bit too far from the spelling, at least in American English. Most folks say it as if it were spelt "mastadon", especially if they're not trying to enunciate carefully & precisely and (perhaps) don't know the correct spelling.
(I'm not weighing in on whether that's some kind of serious problem for Mastodon, but I do think it's worse than all your other examples, as far as likelihood of misspelling even after significant exposure—then again, web search smooths over most of that, for anything sufficiently popular)
You see the same thing with other words that have "o"s that function similarly. You'll hear Americans turning "o" into "uh" in Tyrann-o-saurus, p-o-tato, etc.
Especially if we're talking about an Internet thing: you've seen it in written form more often than you have heard it enunciated out loud. And seems like the iOS text prediction is also able to spell it the right way.
I don't care honestly, but as a non native English speaker I've never understood why natives make an enormous amount of banal spelling errors.
Relays serve this purpose. I use one on my personal one-user instance.
https://joinfediverse.wiki/index.php?title=Fediverse_relays&...
Worked as an interesting relay solution to my small instance. I relayed most of the instances which contain profiles I've subscribed to and it filled out my timeline considerably. Replies to remote posts aren't downloaded by default and this solved that problem.
I mean, isn't any instance in the federation already offering a proxied cache of the content of all other instances you access through it?
You can just register/login in mastodon.social website the same way you can register/login in Twitter, and then access cached copies of content from the entire fediverse compatible with Mastodon.
HN is pretty decent at that, despite it (IIRC) being only Dan (u/dang) doing the moderation work. (Maybe it helps that both the HN tech and the general community itself don't make it easy to post dank memes like on the other social networks)
Reddit/NH/Twitter/Youtube/Google all default to favoring freshness. I believe this design assumption to be a mistake.
A lot of what gets posted would be better served by some hybrid of a wiki+chatroom/forum. For example, Ill just pick a thread that gets posted every week. In the what else will I like subreddit, there is constantly a "post your best mindfuck movies". That kind of question and answer is best served by some kind of static wiki like page that allows voting on individual database entries. It is better served by someone bumping the topic, maybe creating a new chatroom for the day, having the best parts of the chat post to the forum, for archival and historical purposes. As new movies come out, they can be added to the list. Maybe filters exist that allow you to show the results only showing votes from the last year, to help rank newer entries against historical ones.
In a TV/Speaker/Hometheater subreddit, constantly "what's best" belongs in the wiki. But the wiki is some singular document fairly separate from the discussion pages. Wiki page components dont rearrange by voting. The wiki is fairly well hidden in the interface.
When some kind of funny video gets reposted, it shouldnt start a new conversation. The comments page needs a better design to combine/isolate old comments, with today's discussion.
tldr: reddit, like a lot of social media, has a deduplication problem, that they choose to ignore in favor of focusing on "engagement" where engagement is just repetition and regurgitation. social media needs to rediscover bumping instead of reposting.
But i think this misses the point. Like MMOs around WoW there was a lot of small games, eve, everquest, runescape, UO etc... Each had it own special thing and small community. Just like how forums and other small communities existed online. WoW came and just swallowed up everything and then some, introducing tons of new people to the genre. This is what Reddit did to forums. We could make a better Wow maybe, but nothing happened after wow in MMOs. WoW slowly died off in popularity and people moved on to new genres or left entirely leaving a new generation to disover their own games. I guess I expect this to happen to Reddit, a slow death from now on from bad decisions and boredom.
In 5 years someone will come along and make reddit classic, we'll poke around a bit and get a kick out of the nostalgia and forget about it again.
I joined this site because I thought it would break that gamified social interaction loop by being tied to a particular topic. But actually, I’ve realized I speculate about my comment scores even here while making them. I think this one would have done well, it sort of begrudgingly admires Reddit while also saying negative things about it, and social media in general. People here like talk in the abstract about social media, I think because it plays into the hope that maybe we’re somehow outside it. This comment is also self-depreciating and, I think, fairly relatable (since I’m sure most of the commenters here have some history with using Reddit, and possibly quitting it). Of course, now that I’ve mentioned the points for this comment, it will almost certainly be downvoted to oblivion, because that’s like rule 0 of this game. Unless I can save it by being sufficiently meta, maybe…
Not necessarily more, but I feel like I haven't truly found a community I am comfortable with for the specific kinds of topics I want to talk about. Most are too small, and the big ones are arguably too big (i.e. it becomes a lot of noise and not a lot of conversation). On one end I get no more discussion than me sitting alone in my room. On the other end I inevitably fall into pace with the anger and feel worse off as a result.
Goldilocks issues, I suppose.
>do i really want this all again in my life?
If I could find suitable physical alternatives I'd never look back. But THAT search is even sadder and more embarrassing than a search for an internet community. I just accepted that making friends as an adult is extremely hard and you gotta rely on places you're forced to meetup at. i.e. Work.
(1) poor discovery
(2) if I am on one mastodon site, I can not just retweet that post, I have to go to my server and then cut-and-paste a link to that other site.
(3) no quote tweeting, important for vitality.
(4) and most importantly, no ranked/AI-managed feed. Thus it is filled with noise.
In many ways, Mastodon is a purposely janked product because people don't want to make things easy to go viral. But that reduces engagement and interest.
Most people consume Toots by going through their feed, retweeting is just a button away, just like on Twitter.
Quote tweet is definitely lacking, and thankfully is coming up soon according to their CEO and lead developer.
And yes, poor discovery, the search is awful. It's quite a lot better with hashtags and following hashtags in your feed (great feature IMO), but they need to work on that.
Personally I find that while there are flaws, they are smaller than having to endure the amount of spam, ads and garbage I see on twitter. Conversations with people are good and insightful. It's just better for my mental health as well, less of AI generated outrage takes showing up.
> 2. & 3. Mastodon is just one implementation. It happens to be the most popular, but it isn't the most full featured. I use Misskey, another implementation, and it supports all of the things mentioned here. see below.
>4. This is the main reason i prefer "fediverse" to stuff like facebook. I don't want to be gamed, i just want to read stuff as it comes in. If someone seems interesting, or a thread seems interesting, i can just click and read their profile or the thread.
Misskey has some faults. The admin experience, at least to me, is opaque. Me and a few other Misskey admins are looking for alternatives that aren't GNUSocial or Mastodon. We're hoping that someone develops a compiled implementation of activitypub to link against or use with an API; barring that i think we were debating if plemora was a good one to try.
And additionally, on point 2 above, mastodon supports what you say, it just opens a small window, which you may be blocking - however i admit that i may be misunderstanding this part. The window that opens says "what account would you like to use to <...>?"
To #2, a browser extension to help with this would be great, and wouldn't be hard. I'd expect that to come sooner or later.
I agree re: QT, and some Fediverse software has it already. It's coming.
Ranked/AI managed feeds are very much possible to do with Mastodon/Fediverse. You just can't expect it to get built into the main Mastodon UI. However you could do this w/external software that produces an ActivityPub actor that you can consume either by following it or by adding it to a list. It's on my list (sorry) of things to play with, but I hope someone beats me to it (and frankly, it's a space that's wide open for a variety of variations, going from shared up/downvoting a la reddit, to simple bayesian network over your own activity, to a more complex machine learning model or crazy stuff like asking the openai API questions about whether the content matches whatever profile you want.
There appears to be one for Chrome too here (not tested it yet):
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/graze-for-mastodon...
If you're in control of your feed, and your feed is filled with noise, I wouldn't call that a Mastodon issue.
Without a ranked/AI-managed feed I'm not truly in control of my feed - without it, I'm forced to curate who I follow based on different criteria to what I want.
It sounds to me like you are describing the opposite: being more in control than you would like.
The latter point of view is the one that is actually useful to me, and so the one I choose to take: I want to be able to see limit subsets of content from people that they label poorly (so following tags is insufficient) and without having to see everything else they post.
I'm perfectly fine with people preferring chronological too - the two can coexist. It doesn't even require any changes to Mastodon to do what I want; just a tiny ActivityPub server that processes my timeline and emits boosts to an outbox that I can put in a list is sufficient.
Fediverse isn't just Mastodon. There are other implementations of ActivityPub compatible with each other. For example I can use Friendica and comment or retrweet posts from Mastodon and vise versa.
> if I am on one mastodon site, I can not just retweet that post, I have to go to my server and then cut-and-paste a link to that other site.
It was simpler in past versions of Mastodon but they removed that feature for some reason. https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/pull/19306 Previously it was "remote interaction" dialog. Other implementations like Pleroma may have kept it.
> no quote tweeting, important for vitality.
Twitter can not do like this https://telegra.ph/file/9ea3a6f4f0e3a5c5fa06e.png
Rhetorically: What are you willing to do for it?
How are you willing to change?
The way reddit was offered in its early days was a bait and switch. It wasn't real.
I'm ok with those people existing and even having their own lil sub, but not so much that if I'm just looking for news I get peppered with memes about jews being evil.
Reddit was good for like 6-7 years (I was a member back when there was only one 'subreddit'). Turning point was the redesign into a web 3.0 mess that broke stuff like 'find in page' or the back button. Then the gradual monetization, app prompts and SEO that made the side less and less usable. I don't know if it was profitable, but there are definitely alternate paths they could have taken rather than completely gutting and selling out the site for maximum engagement and user figures.
Everything turns to crap when developed for profits. This happens all the time but no one realizes it because we're accustomed to think about the symptoms and not the sickness. "Micro-transactions this", "ads that", "censorship this", "privacy that", when in reality its just the natural development of platforms under capitalism.
>Which brings me back to my point. A few hoops to jump through and a few initial challenges to adoption can go a long way as a filter for who can show up and interact. Of course we would want Lemmy to be welcoming to anyone who will make the community better, brighter, more fun, and more useful… But we can take our time cracking open the floodgates. Maybe that’s for the best.
Opinion: lobste.rs sucks because you need to be one of the chosen people to post there, and you're only chosen if you think like someone already in there. The posts there are very high quality, but it might as well be a hivemind's blog. Why would I read someone else's comments when I could make my own, on a different website with the same links posted?
But you don't want to end up like reddit, with their facebook tier front page and repetitive, bot(-like ?) comments. Reddit sucks now is because they let anyone post anything, and the admins want to capture the stream of quick, digital trash coming out of tiktok and the likes. That's what the shareholders want, more users to sell ads. Who cares what the peons babble about, make sure whoever visits the site doesnt have an ad blocker and stick around a long time.
Having a small community lets you specialize more and, in my opinion, specializing a website is much healthier. Discussions are much more pleasant when you go to traffic-forum or chair-forum dot com to discuss traffic tech or leather chairs. You go to reddit, or facebook, or whatever, and see mounds of unrelated videos and pictures flooding your screen. The moderators don't do their job because when you allow everything, you only have to do the bare minimum.
You should read some of the threads of lobste.rs users reacting poorly when a technical article happens to be posted by an author with a furry or anime avatar.
It's just like some Hacker News threads. Indistinguishable.
Meaning apparently, no your opinion, that people don’t want to be confronted with controversial opinions all day long was a unwanted opinion from the local hivemind. Or was I missing something here?
Because I also think, that it is fine, if people do their thing in their groups. There are enough other public (online) places, where you do get confronted with other peoples realities. Is that really a flagworthy opinion?
I see it happen and it disturbs me as well. The other variant would be, you are shadowbanned? But it doesn't seem like it.
The ease of use point is almost true. For the average user, you're not supposed to be manually subscribing to remote communities. You'd be expected to be exposed to communities you're already federated with and then just click subscribe.
And who's going to pay for it?
I think a lot of other people would, as well.
I could spin up a bulletin board on a $5 VPS for a few thousand of my closest internet friends easily enough, but there's something to be gained from a single, well-known site with a well-designed interface (not reddit!), a large existing userbase, and useful discovery tools.
I should probably stand up a lemmy instance.
There's nothing intrinsically slow about this model. There are some reasons a lemmy instance might be slow — such a prejudiced attitude to the best way to monetize such sites and hence not enough money for servers, but there's no intrinstic reason.
> difficult to use
The link complains about it being hard to follow remote communities. Of course, without federation, there's no way to follow remote communities at all. If you discover a subreddit you like you can't follow it from within HN.
There are ways which would work without extensions too. E.g. a DHT mapping <some fingerprint> -> instance url. It doesn't even need to be perfect. Worst case you need to fill in the correct instance hostname.
But you can follow a subreddit in a feed reader- even HN. https://www.reddit.com/r/hackernews.rss
What is the Reddit bullshit?
Maybe speak for yourself?
I rather see the problem with money. It costs a lot to develope a stable communication plattform and run it. Decentralizing is even harder to do right.
But people expect things to be free on the internet and just working. Those who donate and put in effort are a small minority.
So this is why reddit will only be replaced by the next reddit financed by ad tech, that will act exactly the same in a few years. Unless people will start to take the base of their communication and information flow serious. Maybe this is a good start, but lemmy really does not seem to be an adequate technical alternative in its current shape.
Many pseudo-redditors are only on the site because of its small communities. The niche stuff. What used to be forums dedicated to one craft, which have kind of re-gathered on Reddit because it's easier to just create a micro-community like this than to bother setting up your own forum/instance/whatever. Same reason Facebook groups are popular.
But also, smaller communities benefit from a much healthier signal-to-noise ratio. Tildes (https://tildes.net/) for example is invite-only and has remained a healthy, high quality discussion & content platform through the years because of exactly this.
HN is also kind of in that boat -- and people tend to complain how the HN community growing degrades the quality. I do see it as well, though the fact it has two full-time paid and incredibly dedicated moderators helps a LOT. I believe the rugged UI also helps.
On the plus side, reddit does have some blanket site wide content moderation that targets some of the most egregious and illegal content. I think that's good, and I don't think "leaving it up to individual server admins to blacklist" is sufficient.
On the negative side, the way subreddits and mastodon instances are moderated is a huge problem. Being the first to create a community shouldn't necessarily give you 100% control over the content. That sort of thing can be an option, but to me reddit has made it clear that for major and large communities there needs to be some more democratically inspired form of governance.
Yes, this is a hugely difficult problem, but unless we want an endless cycle of new sites that become toxic or problematic once they grow to a certain size, it's a problem that needs a lot of attention.
r/Winnipeg, which is my hometown and still a city I drive into on the regular, is controlled as an echo chamber by a group of elite admins. It doesn't matter what kind of echo chamber, except to say, it's my viewpoint that dominates the echo chamber.
Nonetheless, my tone (which on Reddit was very similar to my tone on here) was enough to get me shadowbanned. If I have no voice in the sub dedicated to my community based on an arbitrary decision by an unknown admin and which I wasn't even supposed to know about, let alone appeal the decision... that's a garbage platform, you ask me.
r/GratefulDead is likewise run by a tiny dictator. In theory there's other admins that could take action, but they don't.
In theory this is all fine and within Reddit's rules, which are clearly garbage. If they are positioning themselves as the de facto public square, you can't have arbitrary and anonymous censorship.
It may not matter that much for a sub dedicated to a niche topic, but hopefully its clear that subs that are supposed to represent cities, countries, and similar should somehow managed in a "democratic" like way. There is clear value in the names of these subs.
While mastodon doesn't have "subs" per-se, having some sort of moderation that is "democratic" and implemented by a diverse group of people would be good to see. Having each instance owner have ultimate moderation power is not a plus in my book. Why should moderation and choice of content be biased towards those tech savvy enough to setup an instance? That's not what I want in a social media platform.
as the overused quote goes, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.
If you join a platform that's run by a large profit driven entity you're going to get squeezed sooner or later. Another relevant example, Twitch today passed some rather draconic rules on branding and ads run by users.
You can say you're okay with the bullshit, but "we just want reddit but without the bad stuff" doesn't work. The bad stuff is baked in. If you want genuine control you're going to have to do some work.
Users? The user is the one watching. And from what I see Twitch is preventing people on their platform from making it a streaming billboard service.
I think this is a broken clock corporate policy. I only watch but one or two people on the platform and they don't really do ads, but something has to keep the cancerous adtech game in check.
Hopefully google bans sponsorships next.
The entire point of this is the same as Reddit's, to take away direct revenue agreements between creators and third parties, so they can take a cut on every transaction made. How can anyone on earth hope that internet monopolists ban independent revenue channels for content creators? Google is also an advertisement business. They will never ban sponsorships, they will just force everyone to use their APIs.
There is no need for anyone to moderate this for the very simple reason that you, as the watcher, can simply turn the stream off if you don't like what the streamer shows you.
The concatenation of niche content markets that Reddit grew on is giving way to decision making that will favor the center rather than the edge. Almost everyone will buy vanilla and be satisfied. Very few will buy anchovy, and those that do LOVE it... but at scale you have to favor the vanilla buyer.
Also they're holding everything in a single large SQL database which doesn't seem to scale great, and could do well to have some kind of batch queuing process (with some redis magic?) to handle multiple large requests
Not sure if this is problem since Reddit's UI is massively laggin.
Choosing a server wouldn't be a huge issue if you knew for certain you could still access the posts/content on any other server. Currently what you can access depends entirely on the whims of your (and their) local BOFH.
The choice should be individual, I don't want them making choices for me of who I should or should not interact with.
How is it difficult to sign up? I signed up to mastodon.gamedev.place because i learned about it from someone else and the process took me a few minutes. After that i was able to follow people pretty much the same way as in Twitter and some of them are from other instances.
IMO the main reason Mastodon doesn't have as many users is because in practice there isn't much of a reason to switch to Mastodon when Twitter does the work good enough.
I want this. I want this because it's a sustainable way to have Reddit without the ads. The bad UX is an acceptable tradeoff for a platform that doesn't go to shit.
We ended up launching sooner than we really planned after a reddit post last friday got more attention than we expected, so things are not polished and we are missing features, but we are developing quickly.
We're actually targeting something a bit different than reddit longer term with a more tag based curation system and a (medium term) reputation graph that we are hoping will give some new solutions to seeing things that are more trustworthy/relevant (helping with the eternal September problem, shills, and whatnot).
Check us out and tell us about post something good, let us know if you have requests or comments, we're actively integrating things people ask us for as fast as we can.
Will you be adding comments sections for each post?
Inline previews of the links, and usernames on each post, would be helpful.
What is the ellipsis to the right of each post for? It doesn't seem to do anything.
What is the integer to the left of each post? They don't seem to be in any apparent order.
I actually rather like the interface. I feel like a lack of shininess and rounded corners keeps away the 'unwashed masses' that tend to ruin forums. A different background color would be an improvement, however.
* Yes, we are working on comments sections for posts. Hoping to deploy this week.
* Usernames on posts are coming soon. They interact a bit with some things we are doing differently at Sift, so there's some complexity: * Sift tries not to to show you duplicates (the same url maps to the same node in our database for all submissions), and we don't actually privileged "submission" relative to any other person saying it is good. * We trying out a different privacy model where posts don't have to be publicly attributed. Right now we are effectively in the everything is anonymous world, we will be adding the option for public attribution (hopefully this week, maybe next) and at that point we will begin showing usernames of people who are willing to be shown.
* I've deleted the ellipsis. It was an artifact of us trying to communicate that you can click on posts to expand ui interactions, that looks like it was doing more harm than good.
* The integers next to the post are a score. * They should be in descending order in the Explore tab. * In the library tab things are time ordered by when you saved/preferenced them * in the tag tab things are time ordered by their first submission. We'll add more sorting options eventually but it's further down the roadmap. If given that understanding things still look out of order, that's probably a bug, please report it with the feedback button (which captures information about what you are seeing).
We've gotten a lot of feedback on reddit from people wanting a more modern interface, so we're going to have to make someone unhappy. We're planning on integrating tailwind css soon and doing a bit of ui uplift.
However, we're also racing forward on implementing our trust/reputation/"probability that this user will want to see that user's stuff" model that we are really hoping will allow you to keep your good community even as 'unwashed masses' descend. We'll likely post more about that before too long on sift and/or https://www.reddit.com/r/siftquest/
* If you choose reddit you are choosing reddit's server.
* If you choose ycombinator, you are choosing ycombinator's server.
* If you choose facebook, you are choosing facebook's server.
Just because those are not federated doesn't mean the user doesn't have to deal with the bullshit of having to choose to create and manage an account in one (or more) of them. Or possibly having to look for other alternatives (like many are doing now apparently).
You can just enter lemmy.ml or mastodon.social in the browser, press "create an account" in each of them and you'd never even need to know or care whether those federate among themselves or not.
Federation is optional from a user perspective. You could still have separate accounts in beehaw.org, mastodon.org.uk, veganism.social and mastodon.social if you wanted. You are not forced to look for content outside your instance. The same as you can have an account in reddit, another one in facebook and another one in ycombinator without ever mixing them up.
The difference is that in the fediverse you can merge them if you want to. Even if all new users exclusively used mastodon.social resulting in more de-facto centralization, I still don't think that's a big deal, personally. Just the fact that federation is possible at all as an option still provides more software freedom than Twitter, even if you don't care for federation or even know what it is.
Do you think that email being federated makes it less attractive for the average user? do they find it more complicated? ...I don't think the average user cares at all, all they know is they have a gmail or hotmail account.
Lemmy.ml is the largest instance, but it's already straining under the weight of a few thousand users (https://lemmy.ml/post/1147770?scrollToComments=true). I think what is needed now is someone with a big budget to purchase some server space and delete any mention of federation from the UX. It's just unclear how they will recoup their investment.
Using lemmy though, it seems a lot more intuitive to me than mastodon. I can find topic communities on other servers easily, and the community-server match issue seems like a better fit than mastodon in some ways. Mastodon never has quite clicked with me, but lemmy does, maybe even more so than reddit itself.
The limits to me using lemmy right now are content not ux. Mostly I use reddit for relatively obscure topics.
But already I'm seeing cat photos of the sort I'd see on the main page of reddit so maybe it's a time thing.
Nobody wants a first party Reddit app with a terrible user interface, algorithmic timelines, and obnoxious advertising.
Here's a guide to help reddit users find popular lemmy communities and subscribe to them across different instances
* https://tech.michaelaltfield.net/2023/06/11/lemmy-migration-...
It's the same issue with Mastodon. Mastodon is down over 1 million users since last December, and I bet that's related to how difficult it is to sign up and to find other users on the platform.
https://searchengineland.com/mastodon-shows-declined-growth-...
Don't take my word for it either:
https://lemmy.ml/post/1149624