Matt

Yes, because I want my friends (who aren’t tech orientated) and interest groups (which aren’t tech orientated) to be on the Fediverse.

They’re always complaining about this, that, and the other about the big platforms but they have so many hang ups regarding Fedi software, so they don’t use them.

A lot of it is perception, but you have to try and make it so people don’t have those perceptions or break them.

Problem: Who is Mastodon for, and what is the goal of Mastodon?

From my perspective, the issue is that Eugen made something, a certain community and culture ended up forming (not Eugen’s goal, but it is what it is), and now that a different community and culture is starting to take notice, the old community and culture wants to preserve what it always was.

However, I think Eugen wants Mastodon to be for everyone, and Mastodon doesn’t exist in a vacuum, so sometimes you do have to override the opinions of those who are already there. You’re hearing the voices of those already there directly, but you’re not hearing the voices of the people who aren’t there. (and in my opinion, they should be on Mastodon / Fediverse, we’re all aware of why centralised social media is bad)

There’s a lot of opinions and views on Mastodon, and while “the users” are important, if Eugen wants Mastodon to have reach, sometimes he has to do different things. An example write-up of why Eugen could be making the decisions he is currently can be seen in this blog post: https://erinkissane.com/mastodon-is-easy-and-fun-except-when-it-isnt

And lastly, my final point: Whatever Mastodon itself becomes, users and administrators are still in control, so does this really matter? With the code being open source, with the ability to federate and defederate freely, ability to turn off features easily with toggles and options, Mastodon is not being compromised. The question comes down to what the default experience should be, and the Fediverse gives people control to still keep the community and culture they want, just somewhere else.

Problem is, like 80% of people are on Mastodon, and many features (quote posts being the most obvious one) require the people you’re posting to to have the same interaction with the post.

Using the quote post one for an example: If Mastodon never implements quote posts, what’s the point? Most people will only see you posting links and it ruins the whole interaction you’re looking for, so using another piece of software isn’t going to help.

In regards to people disagreeing with decisions that Mastodon makes (such as full text search like this), it’s a bit more complicated. Depending on the feature as well, it’s possible for the things you don’t like about a feature to still affect you, even if your instance doesn’t have it implemented. A LOT of people complained about universeodon.com having full text search, and there was nothing they could do about it (other than just blocking universeodon.com).

I’m personally of the opinion that Mastodon should use its success and mindshare to be a little more like what people expect to get people on decentralised services (within reason - we still want good privacy controls and anti-abuse tools), and then other platforms (or instances!) can then take it further when it comes to things like no search, no quotes, etc. for insular and private communities that people want.

Hard to say exactly what Mastodon does, but mastodon.social’s privacy policy should give you some direction in how they handle data: https://mastodon.social/privacy-policy

As mastodon.social is based in Germany, they will know about GDPR and have to follow it to the letter.

Not sure how I feel about this being a standalone app, it already feels like there’s so many vying for attention, with IRC, XMPP and Matrix being federated already. While Signal exists, I’m not sure how I feel about it being a walled garden despite being open source.

I do love the idea of it hopefully being added to Fediverse platforms though - even though it makes sense to use an actual messaging app for messaging, it’s user expectation that you can just message people on any platform you’re on easily, it’s something Mastodon desperately needs.

Edit: Really though, what I want to see is an interoperable protocol being picked (Signal is actually one of them, FWIW, the Foundation just doesn’t federate with its flagship app due to “user experience and innovation” per Moxie), and then people make their platforms on that, just like how ActivityPub has become the standard for interoperable social media.

They really exist! Open source communities can be… interesting, to say the least.

It’s actually just all your Mastodon follows, not people on Pixelfed. Due to the federation, pixelfed and Mastodon accounts can interact how you’d expect.

Sports is definitely hard to have take off in these sorts of spaces, since sports are generally talked about much more amongst regular/casual users, than the more tech-savvy crowd who are willing to try these things out.

It’s the same on the biggest ActivityPub platform (Mastodon) - the really popular regular subjects such as sports and cars just don’t have a presence there.

Open the sidebar, tap settings, tap user settings, and it’s part of that screen.

If you don’t see it, you’ll need to update.

Note that setting up a Revolt instance means it will literally only be you that you can talk to, and others that sign up on your instance.

Revolt is not federated (and most likely never will be). You might be aware of this though, but it isn’t like Lemmy or Mastodon at all.

Unique usernames cause issues with having to come up with wildly “creative” names to be able to be called the same thing everywhere if the platforms get big enough, or start adding loads of numbers to everything. Unique usernames also create prestigious names, which people most certainly care about, especially for branding or clout.

The discriminator system was clever, as it let people just pick names that they felt resonated with them better, while also keeping everyone equal - you didn’t have a prestigious name like “adam”, and everyone else who just wanted to go by adam on the internet had to add extras to it. Instead, everyone was given the extra numbers so nobody was special.

Now obviously, the username in itself is not that special, and nobody really goes by their username, but a lot of people do assign some value to their online identities and handles, and Discord just sidestepped that by putting everyone on the same level.

There were issues with the username system, but I don’t think the 4 numbers were it. You absolutely do memorise your 4 numbers if you’re adding people constantly for some reason, and if you’re not, it’s not exactly a major inconvenience.

From my experience, people who are happy with the new system already go by somewhat unique names, so this makes it easier for them.

I only game on Linux and I haven’t really had any major issues. I use Lutris as well, but I’m also not really playing any games which get updates either.

While I’d love something like a Steam client for GOG, I doubt it’s ever going to happen, and personally I don’t really like Valve/Steam either so I just don’t use Steam.

There’s no way I’ll actually use the platform, but I personally have no qualms with federating with it on my instances so I can communicate with friends who may be using it that haven’t made the jump to the current fediverse.

Whether we like it or not, this is most likely the best chance for regular people to be introduced to the Fediverse and hopefully gain a good understanding of it, providing that Meta doesn’t hide it from people too much or make it complicated enough that people are “encouraged” to use their platform instead.

Love GOG, definitely the best storefront for PC games by far due to their principles. They’re not perfect, but I personally don’t buy if it’s not on GOG.

Looks like I can pick up Cold Steel 3/4 and Ys 8/9 for good prices this sale, so I know what I’m getting come pay day.

I’m using Startpage and it’s been mostly fine. The biggest issue is that the “nested” results that come from Google (e.g. a forum and related posts) don’t show in Startpage, it will only show the main result.

I really wanted to use something like SearXNG, but I get basically zero results whenever I use an instance, no idea if I’m missing something in how they work.

There’s not really anything bizarre about it, people discover things by word of mouth, and people also like to try things out they see other people doing / playing.

It’s like trying to stick it to an F2P game by just “not paying”, it doesn’t work because players are content and encourage other people to spend more time on them, and some of those people will end up paying money. You stick it to them by just not playing at all and reducing awareness by not even discussing it, even if it might be small in the big picture.

They’re just different softwares that communicate over ActivityPub. They’re both link aggregators, so they’ll be similar in functionality.

For an easy comparison using established names: One is Reddit, one is Digg, but they can communicate with each other and show each other the same content, and you can just pick which one you want to use.

There will be more differences than this, however I haven’t really used kbin much to know what makes it different to Lemmy fully.

The Fediverse allows people to just choose the platforms they prefer, and then talk to everyone else on the Fediverse regardless, instead of having to create multiple accounts all over the place to talk to specific people.

It’s hard to predict - because despite the bad decisions from platforms like Facebook, Twitch, and Reddit, they are still always going to be immensely more popular than Fediverse / FOSS equivalents due to the network effect.

Despite all the bad moves from YouTube, Twitch, and Reddit, the vast majority of people aren’t interested in another platform, they just want the current platform to not be rubbish, so they don’t lose their current communities and contacts.

While I’d like for all the Fediverse platforms to become relatively “mainstream” that people will sign up for them, I don’t think it’s ever going to happen any time soon, but I’d love to be proven wrong.

I suspect support will be axed eventually - chances are many people will flock to these exempt apps to still get their 3rd party client fix, and that will put them on the radar for Reddit to find a way to justify pulling the rug out under them too (e.g. “Our app is now accessible!”).

It’s a shame that Reddit went like this.