I like to ask a variety of questions, sometimes silly, serious, and/or strange. Never asking in an attempt to pester or “just asking questions” stuff.

I’m generally curious and/or trying to get a sense of people’s views.

  • 12 Posts
  • 21 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 29th, 2023

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  • Another big, lingering question is why Meta wants to do this in the first place. Lambert says Meta wants to give users more control over their posts and followers, with easier avenues to engage across platforms.

    So will they be implementing a method to export this data in ways that could be imported to other platforms? Otherwise I don’t see where federation fits in here all that much.

    Extending reach isn’t really the same as control imo.







  • There’s really no reason for them to prefer the Fediverse over the centralized corporate platforms that basically cater to their use-case.

    Wouldn’t a couple, maybe niche admittedly, reasons be less advertiser-influenced rules/moderation and in certain cases more control? E.g. YouTube’s notorious for its algorithms affecting views abruptly & near inexplicably, whereas something like PeerTube (or for streaming, Owncast) lacks those and enables less restricted content (fewer worries about automatic ContentID noise).

    Similar situation with Pixelfed instances not having to fret over folks post nudity 'cause advertisers supposedly don’t like their adverts next to nudity in some regions. Don’t get me wrong, I see where you’re (and they’re) coming from on this, you go where the audiences are & where, give or take, certain features play to your benefit (i.e. recommendation algorithms), but I’ve also seen so many creators also chafing against the awkward antics of the corporate platforms, be it YouTube, Twitch, Instagram, Twitter, Reddit, etc.


  • I’m a little surprised across the responses so far that there’s been no mention of the adoption of or migration to a fediverse platform of some prominent creatives or communities.

    It’s understandable why they haven’t given many of the issues already mentioned thus far, but in terms of others jumping in to federated services, among the least technical stumbling blocks by far is probably the absence of those (or those communities) they’d like to continue following (or participating in) here. Some of that may fall under discoverability/onboarding & content or critical mass mentioned, but it still caught my eye that it wasn’t specifically mentioned.

    I suppose by its lack of specific mention this mightn’t be seen as being as much of an issue?


  • For me, aside from picking initially between kbin and Lemmy and then picking an instance (and the whole concept of instances), it was not having an algorithmically created feed. It took a bit to wrap my mind around since all of the social media apps and sites I was used to (and still use) provides this.

    This is kind of an interesting one to me, not because I disagree or anything, but because at least personally, when I’ve tried to use corporate social media, I felt like I also had to do a lot of manual feed building/curation to get it to be worth anything. However, I do think where some of the algorithmic stuff helped a little was in the suggestions of similar or related pages/users, albeit somewhat rarely.

    More than the algorithms it was simply the fact that it was a single platform where you knew they might be & so could search for them, so maybe it was a mixture of those details for you too?


  • Even if it doesn’t really matter which instance you begin with, the experience will be different, and there’s a sense of “pressure” at the point of signup, which doesn’t exist outside of the Fediverse.

    Would you not say it’s more like it doesn’t exist to the same degree? Not that that diminishes your point, mind, only that in my experience online I’ve found similar when it comes to other online communities, say when deciding different Discord servers to join and some requiring waiting, reacting to be able to chat, or more rarely, have 2 factor authentication enabled of all things.

    Before that, and more a sign of my age I guess, it would have been different forums, different chat rooms, and the like. Each similar in basic functionalities, but different experiences and a different sense of “pressure” to each.



  • If we want people from the microblog fedi to participate we (collectively) need to up our moderation game. (And in my personal opinion instances like .world have grown too large to accomodate any reasonable expectation of moderation, except for select individual communities set up there)

    Improved moderation tools would help, however are you familiar with the filtering/muting tools available on Mastodon/Firefish/Misskey? These, coupled with an ability by individual users to block entire instances, help relieve some of the need for more moderators to help by enabling individuals to essentially self-moderate/curate their experiences as desired.

    I think both improved moderation and individual filtering/muting tools would help greatly both to encourage microblog folks to join in, and make the experience better for those already here.