kbal

It’s still operating for now, right? Because if I look at random government pages in a browser that profile that doesn’t block the social media widgets I can see links to facebook, twitter, instagram, whatsapp, youtube, and threema. There seems to be no mention anywhere that a mastodon server exists.

They’re complaining about the low number of users. Did they bother to tell people that it exists?

As I’ve only just recently written here, blog comments are not social media, and I think such things should remain separate.

So it’s definitely not social media but it is the social web? I don’t see any comments section at all over there. Some of these “indieweb” guys are pretty weird.

It is a fair position in the sense that it’s technically within their legal rights to do whatever the fuck they want, but it is a feeble sham compared to the full and well-behaved fedi interoperability they should’ve had from the start since that was how it was sold from to their users from the beginning.

If they some day get there, I would still be open to considering federating with it. For now “it’s an ongoing process” as they carefully tweak things to find out how far they can go with the strictly limited access to the outside world they allow, while still keeping all their users captive.

If you were a threads user, you’d be unable to reply to this even if you did somehow see it. I welcome any of them to do so and prove me wrong.

37% of them went so far as to get a mastodon account and mention it in their twitter profile, and then maybe one third of those put some substantial effort into making it work. That’s ~90% who didn’t bother. In the one small-ish academic field where I followed some of the new arrivals on mastodon when they got there, it very much appeared to me that the failure had nothing to do with the decentralized nature of the platform. It was simply that the small number who made the transition did not add up to enough to form a critical mass and get the discussion going. Some few of them did give it a good try.

sign in to websites using your personal web address, without having to use your e-mail address.

What is the point of that? For convenience, email addresses are much easier to come by than is web hosting. For being securely anonymous it’s also much easier to do through email — but not by so much that requiring a website rules it out, if that’s the intention.

Maybe I don’t want the “normies” around, whoever they are, but personally I would like to see a lot more people joining in such as Go players, Skyrim modders, situationists, auto mechanics, British panel show enthusiasts, death metal guitarists, discordians, card sharks, magicians, acid heads, skydivers, xylophonists, and amateur zookeepers. This part of fedi has more than enough politics and computers and too little everything else.

Actually, I guess they’re carefully probing to find out exactly what level of freedom they can give their users before they start losing people to the real fediverse. As soon as they find it they’ll make things just slightly worse than that.

According to another report:

Threads users can like the replies from other servers, but they can’t yet reply to them, as the feature is still in beta and under development.

It’s like they’re trying to find out how slowly they can go while still convincing enough people that they’re going to get there some day.

Oh right, I forgot there’s a setting you may need in order to show only ‘subscribed’ stuff by default.

It’s sort of confusing. I usually just navigate directly to fedia.io/sub/newest as my starting point and then the microblog link at the top goes to /sub/microblog/newest.

They appear in the “microblog” tab. To see them it’s necessary to get in the habit of clicking on that occasionally. Seems worth it. The rest of the fediverse is maybe two orders of magnitude larger than lemmy, there’s lots of stuff to be seen out there.

It’s much easier to follow people from e.g. mastodon from here than I remember it being on lemmy.

Okay, sorry! Still a long way to go before the idea becomes sufficiently well-specified to make much sense to me though. Perhaps an examination of yacy could provide you a concrete example of the ways in which such things are complicated. One would need to do much better to end up with a suitable replacement for the ways many of us use searx.

It was wanting to use ActivityPub and the “I fail to see any downside” which led me to read the rest of your post in a way that might’ve been overly pessimistic about its merits.

Ah, I wondered if something like that had been tried before. Looks like it is maybe still running: https://yacy.net/

The demo isn’t giving me useful search results.

I think you are not a computer programmer. Trying to build an index of the web by querying other search engines is not an efficient or sensible way to do things. Using ActivityPub for it is insane. Sharing query results in the obvious way might help a little during events where everyone searches for the same thing all at once, but in a relatively small pool of relatively sophisticated Internet users I don’t think that happens often enough to justify the enormous amount of work and complexity.

On the other hand a distributed web crawler that puts its results in a free and decentralized database (one appropriate to the task; not blockchain) might be interesting. If the load on each node could be made light enough and the software simple enough that millions of people could run it at home, maybe it could be one way to build a new search engine. If that needs doing and someone has several hundred hours of free time to get it started.

Further searching turns up the information that “federated” Bluesky PDS instances are limited to ten user accounts each, and API usage limits which may constrain things further. So that would explain why there aren’t any big ones.

So far as I can tell they do all still “federate” through the central server, not directly with each other. So there being not much point in it may also explain why it hasn’t caught on.

Almost as bad as Threads, really.

Well, what’s a popular server? Are there several big ones? Sorry, but I really don’t understand why the answer isn’t turning up in web search results.

PS: Are you sure it isn’t just people who’ve done the “set your domain as your handle” thing but even so are still on the central one? Because even if they have made some small progress towards decentralization they absolutely have not gone so far that there isn’t still a central one.

Is it really? Seems hard to find out. Anyone have a list of Bluesky servers other than the central one with open signups?

tl;dr: Here’s everything you need to know about the fediverse, assuming you’re never going to use it. Mastodon, Bluesky, Threads, Friendica. Now, back to our regular coverage of all the biggest social companies, including TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat and Reddit, as well as funding and acquisitions of new social startups.

I’d not yet call it failed, but it’s not yet fully succeeded either. To my mind, one impediment is something that lemmy.world shares with today’s reddit: If you look at the front page it’s 99% memes and images. That’s the first impression people get, and it probably drives away a lot of people who might want anything else. We need those people to make more text-based communities come alive, if it’s to evolve into anything like the old reddit.

I mean obviously there are lots of people who do mostly want to see memes and that’s fine, but I think it’s getting to the point where it might be useful to have an option that filters out all posts that are just a title and an image.

They want one baseball brand. One football brand. One basketball brand. One twitter. One facebook. One instagram.

Why’s everything need to be so complicated, anyway? Can’t we just have on sportsballgame and one twitgramface?