4 ms·

I don't know much about pleroma, I will definitely check. But when you self host your Mastodon, aren't you losing the benefit of local. What is the point of lo

I don't know much about pleroma, I will definitely check. But when you self host your Mastodon, aren't you losing the benefit of local. What is the point of local if I will be alone there?

TheJoYo 6y ago
I have a single user pleroma instance and I don't check local or federated timelines. I think I even disabled them. If I want to discover new content or users I go to the instances that interest me and explore their timelines.
- bluesign 6y ago
  Actually that was exactly my point, you managed to separate identity and content by using your own instance. But for average user this will be pretty hard.
  - riffic 6y ago
    A lot of people can put themselves onto the Fediverse with little more than a WordPress site and an ActivityPub plugin. You're right though, it goes beyond an average user's technical capability to do so at the moment. Perhaps Automattic (the current owner of Tumblr) can shoehorn the ActivityPub protocol into Tumblr and find a way to market that system to your average Joe.
  - TheJoYo 6y ago
    That isn't an option for average users on any social network.
  - rglullis 6y ago
    It's a cultural issue, not a technical one. When Mastodon started to take off, one of differentiating factors was about the sort of people they wanted to attract. It's very easy to market to a tribe and appeal to their identity, so it started to stick. One of my goals with communick is to get rid of this idea, actually. I try to make the point that an instance does not say anything about who you are or who you should follow.
rglullis 6y ago
Local timelines are at best an attempt to help with content discovery and really too overrated. If the instance is too big, it feels like reading from the firehose and if the instance is too small it is better to just browse the directory and find the profiles that seem interesting to you. To me local timelines only make sense if the instance has a very clearly defined group with some kind of shared access, e.g, a company that has an instance for use by its employees, or a club or organization have some kind of membership. Unfortunately Mastodon's culture seems to about aggregating around instances with a very loose sense of "community" - e.g, "photographers", "open source developers", "lgbtq allies". To me this is - quite frankly - stupid. Not a day goes by on /r/mastodon where someone asks "is there an instance for X?" thinking that Mastodon instances works like subreddits.
- bluesign 6y ago
  yeah I replied in sibling thread, mostly topic based instances and federation is the problem. (when identity is bound to host) When I first saw Mastodon and topic based servers, I was thinking "photography" hosts will federate between each other, "developers" between each other etc. If you are a photography liking developer, you will have 2 accounts, one in "photographers in SF" instance, another one "developers in SF" maybe.
  - andrewzah 6y ago
    I do agree that because mastodon became focused around specific niches per host, it made things much more complicated for new users. Do I join mastodon.social? Do I join bsd.network? Do I join writing.exchange? Etc. What I realized was I should have been asking: Do I care about the federated timeline? Do I care if my host blocks other hosts at random? Do I care if my host allows certain things (I.e. pornography with or without a NSFW tag, or at all). Do I know who the host is and can I trust them with my private messages and to not randomly ban me? I personally like seeing the federated timeline as I have discovered some accounts through it. But my host absolutely needs to do some filtering because some hosts will allow -anything-. I never really found much use for the local timeline. So for me, hosting was clearly the best option. I do try to get my friends to consider joining the fediverse, and I offer hosting to them to solve this issue.

I don't know much about pleroma, I will definitely check. But when you self host your Mastodon, aren't you losing the benefit of local. What is the point of local if I will be alone there?

TheJoYo 6y ago

I have a single user pleroma instance and I don't check local or federated timelines. I think I even disabled them. If I want to discover new content or users I go to the instances that interest me and explore their timelines.

bluesign 6y ago
Actually that was exactly my point, you managed to separate identity and content by using your own instance. But for average user this will be pretty hard.
- riffic 6y ago
  A lot of people can put themselves onto the Fediverse with little more than a WordPress site and an ActivityPub plugin. You're right though, it goes beyond an average user's technical capability to do so at the moment. Perhaps Automattic (the current owner of Tumblr) can shoehorn the ActivityPub protocol into Tumblr and find a way to market that system to your average Joe.
- TheJoYo 6y ago
  That isn't an option for average users on any social network.
- rglullis 6y ago
  It's a cultural issue, not a technical one. When Mastodon started to take off, one of differentiating factors was about the sort of people they wanted to attract. It's very easy to market to a tribe and appeal to their identity, so it started to stick. One of my goals with communick is to get rid of this idea, actually. I try to make the point that an instance does not say anything about who you are or who you should follow.

rglullis 6y ago

Local timelines are at best an attempt to help with content discovery and really too overrated. If the instance is too big, it feels like reading from the firehose and if the instance is too small it is better to just browse the directory and find the profiles that seem interesting to you. To me local timelines only make sense if the instance has a very clearly defined group with some kind of shared access, e.g, a company that has an instance for use by its employees, or a club or organization have some kind of membership. Unfortunately Mastodon's culture seems to about aggregating around instances with a very loose sense of "community" - e.g, "photographers", "open source developers", "lgbtq allies". To me this is - quite frankly - stupid. Not a day goes by on /r/mastodon where someone asks "is there an instance for X?" thinking that Mastodon instances works like subreddits.

bluesign 6y ago
yeah I replied in sibling thread, mostly topic based instances and federation is the problem. (when identity is bound to host) When I first saw Mastodon and topic based servers, I was thinking "photography" hosts will federate between each other, "developers" between each other etc. If you are a photography liking developer, you will have 2 accounts, one in "photographers in SF" instance, another one "developers in SF" maybe.
- andrewzah 6y ago
  I do agree that because mastodon became focused around specific niches per host, it made things much more complicated for new users. Do I join mastodon.social? Do I join bsd.network? Do I join writing.exchange? Etc. What I realized was I should have been asking: Do I care about the federated timeline? Do I care if my host blocks other hosts at random? Do I care if my host allows certain things (I.e. pornography with or without a NSFW tag, or at all). Do I know who the host is and can I trust them with my private messages and to not randomly ban me? I personally like seeing the federated timeline as I have discovered some accounts through it. But my host absolutely needs to do some filtering because some hosts will allow -anything-. I never really found much use for the local timeline. So for me, hosting was clearly the best option. I do try to get my friends to consider joining the fediverse, and I offer hosting to them to solve this issue.