I don’t want to follow random people though? Twitter was useful as a way to follow specific companies and people to know when say, a service goes down or an update is released.

These people and companies aren’t on Mastodon.

But the issue is that the temporary surges are not even followed by stability, they’re followed by decline. That’s not a recipe for sustainability.

You mean after a surge there’s less active users than before?

There’s just not many people on there. And I already never used Twitter except to read in-time updates from people and companies, so naturally with many of them being on Threads or Bluesky, that’s where I’d go to get that information.

I mean it’s just normal to have a “social” part to social media, no?

From a privacy perspective it’d be annoying if the default weren’t one-identity-per-website, though. That’s how it ought to work. If the user then wants to instead use a single one (akin to how OAuth logins allow you to use a single identity for auth purposes) that’s on them, but it should not work that way without explicit enabling.

Yeah I was going to say, is there a tool for keeping multiple of these pods around so I can use different identities for (some) different sites?

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Yeah it’s a weird internal problem. It has to exist for understandable reasons, but also naturally makes it so that nobody will want to join any but the very largest instance, automatically centralizing it all again.

In fact, the very reality of there being a three hour video of someone talking (as in, in written text this’d be a maximum of 10 minutes of reading, for a slow reader) about a supposed onboarding problem with the fediverse is irony at its finest.

Yeah… sure… if you always expand 10 minutes of content into 180 minutes using a wrong format, you might fuck up getting anybody to do anything. You seem to not want them to get what you’re trying to teach, maybe.

Ah, sorry if that wasn’t clear, the entire second half was theoretical about a better way of doing this.

A type of federation where there is no “home” for a community any more. It exists equally on all servers, so any being removed would have ~0 effect.

I mentioned that basically because I feel that’s a much better solution to the problem than shared ownership + locked registrations. Sorry if that wasn’t clear, not my primary language.

Now it makes even less sense.

So instead of one admin being able to take it all down we have multiple, and we also don’t allow local users. But we have multiple admins, so these instances would be uniquely able to process very large numbers of users on account of having more than one admin? There’s still the problem of course of how to handle someone being an admin on a technical level, and I don’t see a solution to that. Could go and notarize shared ownership of a bare metal server I suppose?

But still, what’s the point? It doesn’t improve anything, in fact it actively makes it worse. If you want communities to be resistant to server removal, you’d need a way to… federate the community. So that even if the original instance is gone, everyone keeps interacting with their local federated community-copy and these keep federating to each other (copy). As in, there’s no original any more, but good luck keeping all of that consistent. 😅 In particular because that still doesn’t solve the problem because now you got people able to either moderate each others copy (good luck with that power trip bonanza) and no central admin to remove the mods, or they cannot moderate each other, in which case good luck figured out how to block on a per-post basis depending on laws in your particular country getting the content federated over.

From the “privacy nightmare” “article”:

If you have any objection at all to your posts and profile information being potentially sucked up by Meta, Google, or literally any other bad actor you can think of, do not use the fediverse. Period.

It’s on the internet. Public. Got it. It’s almost as if, and hold on to your hats here, the whole point of posting on something like Mastodon or Lemmy or so is to have a public discourse, as you cannot know who will be replying anyways. It’s almost as if, and this is getting wild, I know, read-access being public is intentional and explicitly part of the design.

Sorry, but this always make me rage. It’s like these people are discovering in 2024 that public access means anyone can read it, not just 2000 individual tech bloggers. It’s like in 2024 they’re discovering that, but aren’t technicallly skilled enough to open a forum to have their closed-of discussions in.

Sigh.

No wonder the tech sphere is going to shits if this is the modern discourse around it. :(

Sorry, rant over.

Just checked, they call it football. Like everyone with half a braincell.

Also, if we assume that the entire idea is to have more than one admin, then what change does that actually include?

You now have 3-4 people that can go and randomly delete the whole server instead of 1? Do you know that right now, only 1 person has the credentials to the admin account of whatever server you’re talking about?

The whole point of federation is to let people join communities even when they don’t have an account in the same server.

[citation needed], because it disagrees with the “whole point” I can find

Why?

That just locks communities off. Wh ich you could readily do before Lemmy, just host a forum. Discourse is a pretty damn cool software for it. Close registrations, close visibility, and allow users in on a per-user basis. That’s also a lot how Tildes works, and I remember people here don’t like that very much.

Yeah, not unlikely. Can’t truly know ahead of time of course, but it feels like that would eventually happen. I wish governments in particular had jumped harder onto Mastodon, slowly moving attention there.

But it’s probably also difficult to justify, because from their perspective it’s just one “someone else’s solution” vs another. They’d have to first make their own twitter like fediverse software I bet.

No I mean it seems to work better as an alternative. Quite a few smaller companies, content creators and so on I want to see enws from are on there, so it somehow seems to work better for them. 🤷‍♀️

How do you mean? It’s majorly US centric, and that was part of why Mastodon worked better as a Twitter-replacement here in the EU at first.

But as always, something like Reddit or Twitter benefits from centralization, as far as user interactions go. So slowly, people drift to whatever the single largest alternative is when they leave the current status quo, and in alternative-Twitter-land, this seems to be either Threads or Bluesky, and their cases are fairly incomparable.

Doesn’t make it the perfect solution, but like always in Engineering, the perfect solution is rarely the best one.

Yeah it’s no wonder as Bluesky seems to work better as an alternative.

Ah yes of course. Both Meta and Bluesky have far outrun any federated-short-blogging effort of the Fediverse, and as a result companies will rather want to monetize those. But this is also the paradoxical situation of people in here who both want “the Fediverse to succeed” and “keep corporate interests out of the Fediverse”: Either won’t happen.

Right now it looks more like this’ll remain a hyper-specialized place for specific discussions, Mastodon more so. You can go there for false dichotomies in regards to browser development feedback for example, or for dejected Youtube actual-content-creators getting yelled at for engaging with their community.

But it seems it’ll stay at that. However, this also keeps any monetary interest away from it, so that’s good. Of course, should this ever change and the Fediverse grows more welcoming and that works and it grows bigger, of course the moment users move in (in numbers), advertisers, astroturfers and all will move in with them. That’s just a given.

And partially why I hate this “Just block’em!”-approach to Threads: It assumes the stick-your-fingers-into-your-ears-and-ignore-the-issue approach would ever be an actual solution to any problem. And then when you run into an issue you cannot avoid that way, you have fuck all experience doing something actionable about it, as you’ve never tried before.