Mastodon

[Free]

Have we sunk so low that we are no longer the viper pit?

When you're in the viper pit, you're just with other vipers. So you know, hanging out, getting along.

 

[Essence Lumin]

Where would posts about the Fediverse outside Mastodon go?

Here (inb4 "We only want to talk about Mastodon here")?

A separate thread for the respective project (leading to loads of tiny threads in the long run)?

A separate thread for everything in the Fediverse that isn't Mastodon (>implying the Fediverse is split into a) Mastodon and b) everything else)?

A new Fediverse general, thus abandoning this thread?

As with anything VVO, anyone can post a thread. Sometimes it lasts. Sometimes it doesn't.

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

Mozilla expands its Mastodon investment with beta launch of its own highly moderated server

It's interesting that Mozilla is only just now doing this.

My primary browser is Vivaldi. A month or two ago alongside an update to their browser, Vivaldi launched Vivaldi Social, an optional Mastodon server for its users - even adding a default page to its browser side-panel for it. In the time since that launch - again, it was a month or two ago - Vivaldi Social is already up to 7000+ active users. So it definitely seems like browser users will like this kind of feature.

In some ways it helps simplify onboarding, because one of the biggest hurdles is "Which server do I join?", because no matter how much older Fediusers try and try to tell newbies it isn't that important, it just intuitively feels like it has to be super important, and potential users are anxious about making the "wrong choice". But if your browser just offers a server - like here, here's our ready and available server, it isn't locked to any special "interest", and you can follow anyone on the entire rest of the Fediverse from it whether they're in the same server or not, and maybe we've even built in a special tab or panel into the browser to let you interact with your feed quickly. It's a useful bit of hand-holding, I think. Just get people INTO the Fediverse and using it and they can decide over time if they want to join an actual dedicated server for a particular thing, or not.

 

[Lexxi]

I mostly use Mastodon to like and reshare pictures of otters.

 

[Argent Stonecutter]

one of the biggest hurdles is "Which server do I join?", because no matter how much older Fediusers try and try to tell newbies it isn't that important, it just intuitively feels like it has to be super important,

Yeh, it is important, I had to switch when mastodon.lol went down and all my followers got moved and dook.business set up links back to mastodon.lol but mastodon.lol just wasn't there so my old posts aren't hosted anywhere. I kind of have them if I wanted to re-upload them but where?

I was only there a short time and I don't think I have more than a handful of followers so I'm not inclined to figure that out, but if it happens after you've really gotten established that's going to hurt.

 

[Argent Stonecutter]

I mostly use Mastodon to like and reshare pictures of otters.

Happy world otter day! Have some otters! (h/t /r/mustelids)

 

[Jupiter Rowland]

Everyone else uss "Mastodon" to refer to the whole fediverse, why not us?

At the risk of making everyone's worldviews crumble to dust:

This is pretty much why I have at least 80% of my Hubzilla followers. They've learned this from me, and they follow me so I can teach them more about the Fediverse that they don't know.

Let's forgo the blue pill that leaves you with the belief that all of the Fediverse is Mastodon and only Mastodon and wondering why some toots look weird and do stuff that Mastodon can't do, like strange-looking mentions or embedded links or over 500 characters. Let's go straight to the red pill that shows you how deep the rabbit hole commonly known as the Fediverse goes.

→ tl;dr ←

Pleroma is not Mastodon, nor is it a Mastodon fork. (In fact, it's 3½ weeks older than Mastodon.)
MissKey is not Mastodon, nor is it a Mastodon fork. (In fact, it's some 2 years older than Mastodon AFAIK.)
Akkoma is not Mastodon, nor is it a Mastodon fork. (It's a Pleroma fork.)
The project still known as CalcKey is not Mastodon, nor is it a Mastodon fork. (It's a MissKey fork.)
Mitra is not Mastodon, nor is it a Mastodon fork.

And that's just the most important Twitter-like projects. All of them have features that people on Mastodon are craving for.

Friendica is "Facebook in the Fediverse". And six years older than Mastodon. It's from 2010. And it has outclassed Mastodon feature-wise without even breaking a sweat back in summer 2010 already when it was still named Mistpark.

Hubzilla is a combination of a whole lot of stuff in the Fediverse from Facebook to Google Cloud Services. It started out as a Friendica fork by Friendica's own creator. And it's four years older than Mastodon. From 2012. Built around a protocol designed by the same guy in 2011. And it offers loads and loads of features that Mastodon users couldn't possibly even dream of having on Mastodon plus lots of features that many are still waiting for Mastodon to offer. Hubzilla had nomadic identity in productive use a decade before Bluesky claimed to have invented the concept without ever having delivered.

Hubzilla is where I am.

(streams) is the code repository of, well, a fork of a fork... (it's complicated™) ...of a development version of Hubzilla. Still from the same creator. It's slimmed down again, dramatically so, it's mostly made for tinkerers which is why it doesn't have a defined brand, and it's said to be more modern than Hubzilla. After all, it was launched last year.

I'm still not done yet.

Pixelfed is Instagram in the Fediverse.
PeerTube is YouTube with a side of Twitch in the Fediverse.
Owncast is Twitch in the Fediverse.
Funkwhale is SoundCloud/Bandcamp/iTunes/... in the Fediverse, just without commercial mainstream artists. Or commercial artists, full stop.
Castopod: ditto, but specialising in podcasts.
Lemmy and /kbin are Reddit or Hacker News in the Fediverse.
WriteFreely and Plume are Medium in the Fediverse. Oh, and WordPress has a Fediverse plugin, too, that has just recently gone official.
BookWyrm is GoodReads in the Fediverse.
Mobilizon is Doodle in the Fediverse.

"But wait," you'll say, "aren't these all centralised and isolated silos all for themselves? What do they even have to do with Mastodon?"

Okay, here comes the really exciting shit. For one, every last one of these is at least as decentralised as Mastodon. Actually even more because they don't have lighthouse instances like mastodon.social where they try to railroad every last newcomer.

Besides, they all speak a common language. The same language that Mastodon speaks. ActivityPub.

What does that mean?

It means they're all connected to each other. Instances of all these are connected to instances of all the others. Like, you can be on Mastodon and communicate with people on, what, CalcKey or Hubzilla or use public forums on Friendica as if it's all Mastodon. Only that it isn't all Mastodon.

Again, I'm on Hubzilla. Over 90% of my followers are on Mastodon. The rest is all over the place. A growing number of CalcKey users, some of the few MissKey users whose first language isn't Japanese, Akkoma, Friendica, Hubzilla, (streams), FoundKey, even someone on /kbin has managed to follow me.

So if you come across a toot on Mastodon that does wicked shit that Mastodon toots shouldn't be able to do, maybe it isn't a toot, maybe it doesn't come from Mastodon after all.

 

[WolfEyes]

 

[Khamon]

Does Khamon have a Hubzilla account? I think he might. One shall investigate.

 

[Argent Stonecutter]

At the risk of making everyone's worldviews crumble to dust.

I still have my old Diaspora account and I was on Friendica in the before times, and Friendica kicks Mastodon's coarse-haired butt. But all the operating Friendica servers either have 3 users and a projected lifespan in months or they're so bogged down that posting involves having enough time after you post to make a cup of coffee before you can get back to browsing... like you were compiling the kernel on a PDP-11.

 

[Jupiter Rowland]

I remember the days when public Friendica nodes had to close their registration at fewer than 150 users. All that federation used up CPU resources like nobody's business. And the most popular nodes were those with Facebook federation where everyone and their dog mirrored their entire Facebook timelines with hundreds of "friends" to Friendica.

AFAICS, this has improved dramatically, not only because Facebook federation has been removed long ago. Friendica has become an important group/forum platform for the Fediverse. Like, there are public Friendica forums where almost everyone is on Mastodon actually, and almost the whole rest is on CalcKey or whatever it'll soon be named.

 

[Noodles]

I think the federation still takes a lot of respources. Its probably better but I know many Mastodon instances were limiting users when people started to fleet to them.

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

Lemmy and /kbin are Reddit or Hacker News in the Fediverse.

Just boosting this a little bit, due to the recent dickery that's going on with Reddit.

If you use Reddit at all you're almost certainly aware of this already; but on July 1st, Reddit is going to start charging "reasonable" "common sense" fees for access to its formerly-free data API by third-party applications. Numerous independent parties have run the figures though, and for the number of API calls that third-party apps make the fee becomes astronomical along the lines of Musktwitter; far far in excess of what any developer is capable of paying. As a result, most (in fact, I think all really) third-party Reddit apps, like Apollo and Bacon Reader, are ending service on July 30.

But it isn't just mobile apps for users that are affected, though. Many third-party apps offered tools that are heavily relied upon by many subreddits to run their automoderator bots, and these tools or equivalent options are simply not available on the official web platform or mobile apps at all; so a concentrated trolling or brigading of a subreddit could feasibly overwhelm moderators who will have no choice but to deal with the situation manually. Other interactive bots that are generally liked and used by the Reddit community likewise will not work anymore.

Lemmy and kbin are works in progress but they are the things analogous to Reddit in the way that Mastodon is analogous to Twitter; instances can be based around a particular topic and users can post threads with nested comments. And being fediversed means that you can subscribe to Lemmy or kbin instances from your already-existing Mastodon account if you wish to do that. So as Reddit quickly goes the way of Twitter, just keep in mind that there ARE alternatives available, the communities just need to be grown.

 

[Jupiter Rowland]

Well, to be honest, both have their downsides.

/kbin is a very early alpha. The whole thing was started from scratch five months ago. Also, it lacks capacity. Before the recent land rush happened, there probably were only the five official test instances, four of which are in Polish. New instances are being launched, but again, they aren't exactly many.

As for Lemmy, you must not have a problem with the devs being tankies.

Edit, this could be interesting for some of you: a list of all (known) Lemmy communities.

Oh, and by the way: It's possible to both start new threads and reply to threads on both Lemmy and /kbin from all over the Fediverse. You can participate in Lemmy threads with a Mastodon account.

 

[Erich Templar]

As for Lemmy, you must not have a problem with the devs being tankies.

tankies? Not a term I'm familiar with.

 

[Monica Dream]

tankies? Not a term I'm familiar with.

In theory, radical far left people who worship Stalin. People so far left, they've turned right.

The impression I have is that they're usually alt-right folx who LARP as what they imagine leftists to be.

 

[Veritable Quandry]

In theory, radical far left people who worship Stalin. People so far left, they've turned right.

Roger Waters is a prime example.

 

[Monica Dream]

Roger Waters is a prime example.

More like a past his prime example I think The pink floyd biography I have he says he was a socialist (?) and felt bad about making so much money but decided to keep it anyway ...pretty much sums up him. Also "desperate to see his name in print" does too.

 

[Bartholomew Gallacher]

In theory, radical far left people who worship Stalin. People so far left, they've turned right.

This here is an official tankie:

Meet Horst Mahler, born in 1936 and a lawyer. In his younger years he was extreme left, and one of the founders of the Rote Armee Fraktion (RAF), which was a West German terrorist group in the 1970s. He was a left wing terrorist.

At the end of the 1990s he made a 180 degree turn, and became right wing extremist. He joined for a while the NPD, and started to publish right extreme stuff, like denial of the holocaust and other things. So people like this do exist.

 

[Jupiter Rowland]

In theory, radical far left people who worship Stalin. People so far left, they've turned right.

The impression I have is that they're usually alt-right folx who LARP as what they imagine leftists to be.

Just check out lemmygrad.ml, an instance run by the Lemmy devs which shares the same IP address with the "lighthouse instance" lemmy.ml.

☭★ СФММꙠИЇꙄТ СФМЯДDЭꙄ ★☭

Stalinists. Maoists. People who are firmly convinced that

• Russia is still the Soviet Union
• Russia is still communist
• Putin is the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union
• yes, Ukraine is ruled by drug-addled Nazis who are nothing but puppets, remote-controlled by the evil capitalist U.S. imperialists
• oh, and China is still really, actually, definitely communist, too

That, or it's 50% satire and 50% serious communists who refuse to understand that it's satire. Because at least over here, we definitely have people of the latter kind.