7 ms·

It's extremely rough around the edges but getting into fediverse content (mastodon, kbin, lemmy, etc) has been extremely rewarding to me. It's like twitter and

It's extremely rough around the edges but getting into fediverse content (mastodon, kbin, lemmy, etc) has been extremely rewarding to me. It's like twitter and reddit but 15 years ago (and by that I mostly mean it's janky and full of bugs. Just like the web was 15 years ago!)

seanthemon 3y ago
I tried it but I just can't get into the flow of things, it doesn't feel like a lot happens during the day, but maybe i'm on the wrong server? I just want to expel my bowels and doom scroll bad funny memes
- zulban 3y ago
  Maybe if nothing is happening then nothing is happening and you should do something else ;)
- thinkmassive 3y ago
  Maybe try bluesky
  - FridgeSeal 3y ago
    The vaguely detailed, unclear, NIH’d corporate rip-off version that already has privacy concerns (public block list issue) that’s even less developed?
- rchaud 3y ago
  > it doesn't feel like a lot happens during the day, but maybe i'm on the wrong server? We are oriented to think that way after ~15 years of the algorithmic engagement-maxi world of Twitter. It always looks like there's a lot happening all the time but look deeper and it's a bunch of people offering their weak takes on hot topics to build their brand. What was the last thing you remember being must-see sfuff on Twitter?
  - seanthemon 3y ago
    My vice was reddit, I could spend a lot of time on different subreddits for different topics and usually always find something new. But I do agree with you, being away from the noise has been really freeing for my mind
  - bandyaboot 3y ago
    > What was the last thing you remember being must-see sfuff on Twitter? The Russia circus last weekend made for some pretty good near real-time intrigue. That being said, I don’t care what crazy thing is happening…I’m not creating an account to hear what’s being said on “The Global Town Square ™”
    - Geee 3y ago
      My experience of it was actually opposite. I first started from Twitter, trying to piece together something from the chaos of tweets, but then I went to an actual news site which had a nicely packed timeline with latest action and had more accurate and more up-to-date information. In theory, Twitter should be that real-time news feed from these kind of events, but it doesn't actually work. Signal-to-noise ratio is just very low.
  - troupo 3y ago
    > We are oriented to think that way after ~15 years of the algorithmic engagement-maxi world of Twitter. I never cared about algorithmic engagement. Before (and during) the engagement Twitter: - has everyone you needed there, centralised - has search, where you can find people and topics you care about Mastodon has none of that: you have to know which server to join and how to find people and topics. Centralization always beats distribution in convenience.
    - rchaud 3y ago
      You may not care about algorithmic engagement, but that doesn't mean that the content you are looking is free of the incentives created by said algorithmic engagement. I use Twitter search too, but it's full of hot takes, because that's what the network rewards. It's kinda like the "I don't care about politics" stand. You might not care, but the institutions you interact with every day certainly do.
YetAnotherNick 3y ago
How does fediverse intend to pay for server/developer cost? For new technologies many smart people work for free as long as it excites them and when it just comes to maintenance and fixing bugs it wouldn't be cheap for any technology with so many moving parts. Also, early adopters donate with much higher probability than when the masses arrive.
- pierat 3y ago
  I pay $10 a month to my masto instance. They do a superb job. Is that the best way? No clue. But I'm glad to chip in.
- kibwen 3y ago
  Coming of age in the late 90s/early 00s we had plenty of forums to choose from, hosted by hobbyists, with nary a monetization scheme in sight. And this was in the era when the tech was far less accessible and the hardware far more expensive. Sure, maybe a modern $5/month VPS running basic forum software isn't going to handle 100,000,000 active users, but it sure will handle 10,000 active users, and that's more than enough to have a healthy community. (Note: I'm of the opinion that fediverse-style federation in the context of forums is merely a nice-to-have; the web is already naturally federated, and people should not feel bad if they want to save money/tech complexity/administration complexity by settling for ordinary self-hosted forums.)
  - YetAnotherNick 3y ago
    You are off by 2 orders of magnitude. Plans for 10k active users on managed instance generally seems to be in the range of $250-450[1][2]. [1]: https://toot.io/pricing.html https://toot.io/pricing.html [2]: https://masto.host/pricing/ https://masto.host/pricing/
    - kibwen 3y ago
      This is specifically why I call out the federated model as a nice-to-have, not a requirement. ActivityPub is way, way more demanding of CPU and transfer than a simple forum, and as a result it's extremely difficult to self-host at scale. You can easily service 10,000 daily active users on a VPS serving lean, statically-rendered forum pages.
Terr_ 3y ago
For me the main barrier is that I want to have portable/roaming control over my IDENTITY, even if the content hosting is (for now) entirely through a system administered by someone else. If I control the identity, I can at least keep local copies and rehost/repost content later. Instead, it feels like the current Fediverse demands that I make a blind choice to entrust not merely a copy of my content but also my whole future identity to whatever of these current instances looks the most stable/trustworthy at first glance, hoping my choice will be good for 1-5-10-15 years. It's stressful, and then I look into self-hosting, and then I put the whole thing off for another week... AFAICT I would need to set up a whole federated node of my own in order to get that level of identity-control. Serious question: Is there any technical limitation preventing the admin of an instance from just seizing an particular account and permanently impersonating the original owner? In contrast, I was hoping/expecting some kind of identity backed by a private asymmetric key. Even if signing every single message would be impractical, one could at least use it to prove "The person bob@banana.instance has the same private key that was used to initialize bob@apple.instance."
- twicetwice 3y ago
  This is basically the entire point of the Authenticated Transfer Protocol (AT Protocol), which powers Bluesky. I think it does a ton of stuff right, including portable identity backed by solid cryptography (no blockchain or "crypto"!) and has a lot of promise. It's still in development, but I am hopeful that it will live up to its promise.
  - gcr 3y ago
    can't a malicious bluesky admin steal/MITM users' private keys by messing with whatever frontend javascript users interact with?
    - Retr0id 3y ago
      In theory, kinda, but you can bring-your-own client, and "the" web client is decoupled from the back-end instance. "bsky.app" works as a web client for the official "bsky.social" instance, but it also works with the instance I self-host (or any other spec-compliant instance). Likewise, 3rd party clients work with the official instance, and also with 3rd party instances. However, no key-stealing could possibly happen right now in any case because... the PDS ("instance") holds your signing key - the client never even sees it. Having the server hold your signing keys is very user-friendly, but of course not ideal for security and identity self-sovereignty. In general, the security model involves trusting your PDS (just as you trust your mastodon instance admin, or twitter dot com - the improvements are centered around making it easier to jump ship if you change your mind). Client-signed posting is something that's not even possible right now, but I believe it's somewhere on the roadmap. If it doesn't happen some time soon I'll be implementing it myself. (I'm writing my own PDS software)
havnagiggle 3y ago
Finding communities is the toughest part.
- hiepph 3y ago
  It's still at the early days, so give it some times. But there are already some lively communities and, IMO, they are generally better in terms of quality since Fediverse is more niche and has higher barrier of entry.
bozhark 3y ago
Fediverse doesn’t feel like a solution
javajosh 3y ago
Public service announcement: the only good thing on twitter, massimo, has at least one mirror on mastodon. https://mastodon.social/@rainmaker1973@birdsite.miisu.net https://mastodon.social/@rainmaker1973@birdsite.miisu.net
- JdeBP 3y ago
  However, BirdsiteLive instances come with their own information for the public. * https://jdebp.uk/FGA/fediverse-third-party-mirrors.html https://jdebp.uk/FGA/fediverse-third-party-mirrors.html
esalman 3y ago
This. Twitter is doing what they can to drive people to mastodon. I've held off closing my Twitter account but I need to get better familiar with mastodon. I was wondering if there are accounts like NWS <location> (weather updates) over there, or so they plan to have some soon. Also from brief exposure, servers like mastodon social reads like left wing echo chambers which is also cringe.
- brabel 3y ago
  What kind of annoyances have you had on Twitter, as a user, that makes you want to leave? I have been using Twitter more often lately as I really don't care about what they do to their APIs or whatever, and it's honestly improving lately.
  - esalman 3y ago
    The main reason is I followed a lot of scientists in my field of research who left the platform. Plus there's been subtle (and some not so subtle) changes to the algorithm and the software. Most of the people I followed before were clearly left wing. After Musk takeover a lot of them left the platform. Plus the algorithm now pushed more right-wing content in the home page. I wouldn't mind if it were real people discussing valid talking points. The problems are 1) they are all coming from blue check mark accounts, 2) most of it are clearly misinformation, and 3) you can tell most of these tweets and replies are troll and bot accounts. It's just annoying. Musk boosting his own tweets in the feed was annoying. Had to unfollow him. I use Twitter via mobile website, and it breaks more frequently than before. Overall, it's become like Musk's other product, Tesla. It over promises and under delivers. It's not reliable anymore. As a 2x Toyota owner I cannot stand products that are results of crappy engineering. So there you go. Edit: one more thing: it used to be that I could go to the trending hashtags and get latest news in a second. It's not the case anymore. Case in point: yesterday France was trending. I saw the tweets and got the impression that some member of minority community has committed mass stabbing or rape again. Because the Twitter results were brigaded by right wing blue check mark accounts spewing anti immigration propaganda. It was not until I read a BBC article that I realized what happened was complete opposite, police executed an immigrant at a traffic stop. Twitter has lost almost all of its core values under Musk. It's just sad.
SemioticStandrd 3y ago
Agree. https://beehaw.org https://beehaw.org in particular is great
marvin 3y ago
The main problem with the fediverse is that none of the people I want to read, post there. And they never will, because they are disparate sociopolitical demographics and the fediverse by design keeps them in separate instances that I at some level need to think about. The majority use-case requires centralization, which is subject to the network effects that constitute 95% of Twitter's value. Great that it works for you and some others, but it cannot work for most.

seanthemon 3y ago

I tried it but I just can't get into the flow of things, it doesn't feel like a lot happens during the day, but maybe i'm on the wrong server? I just want to expel my bowels and doom scroll bad funny memes

zulban 3y ago
Maybe if nothing is happening then nothing is happening and you should do something else ;)
thinkmassive 3y ago
Maybe try bluesky
- FridgeSeal 3y ago
  The vaguely detailed, unclear, NIH’d corporate rip-off version that already has privacy concerns (public block list issue) that’s even less developed?
rchaud 3y ago
> it doesn't feel like a lot happens during the day, but maybe i'm on the wrong server? We are oriented to think that way after ~15 years of the algorithmic engagement-maxi world of Twitter. It always looks like there's a lot happening all the time but look deeper and it's a bunch of people offering their weak takes on hot topics to build their brand. What was the last thing you remember being must-see sfuff on Twitter?
- seanthemon 3y ago
  My vice was reddit, I could spend a lot of time on different subreddits for different topics and usually always find something new. But I do agree with you, being away from the noise has been really freeing for my mind
- bandyaboot 3y ago
  > What was the last thing you remember being must-see sfuff on Twitter? The Russia circus last weekend made for some pretty good near real-time intrigue. That being said, I don’t care what crazy thing is happening…I’m not creating an account to hear what’s being said on “The Global Town Square ™”
  - Geee 3y ago
    My experience of it was actually opposite. I first started from Twitter, trying to piece together something from the chaos of tweets, but then I went to an actual news site which had a nicely packed timeline with latest action and had more accurate and more up-to-date information. In theory, Twitter should be that real-time news feed from these kind of events, but it doesn't actually work. Signal-to-noise ratio is just very low.
- troupo 3y ago
  > We are oriented to think that way after ~15 years of the algorithmic engagement-maxi world of Twitter. I never cared about algorithmic engagement. Before (and during) the engagement Twitter: - has everyone you needed there, centralised - has search, where you can find people and topics you care about Mastodon has none of that: you have to know which server to join and how to find people and topics. Centralization always beats distribution in convenience.
  - rchaud 3y ago
    You may not care about algorithmic engagement, but that doesn't mean that the content you are looking is free of the incentives created by said algorithmic engagement. I use Twitter search too, but it's full of hot takes, because that's what the network rewards. It's kinda like the "I don't care about politics" stand. You might not care, but the institutions you interact with every day certainly do.

YetAnotherNick 3y ago

How does fediverse intend to pay for server/developer cost? For new technologies many smart people work for free as long as it excites them and when it just comes to maintenance and fixing bugs it wouldn't be cheap for any technology with so many moving parts. Also, early adopters donate with much higher probability than when the masses arrive.

pierat 3y ago
I pay $10 a month to my masto instance. They do a superb job. Is that the best way? No clue. But I'm glad to chip in.
kibwen 3y ago
Coming of age in the late 90s/early 00s we had plenty of forums to choose from, hosted by hobbyists, with nary a monetization scheme in sight. And this was in the era when the tech was far less accessible and the hardware far more expensive. Sure, maybe a modern $5/month VPS running basic forum software isn't going to handle 100,000,000 active users, but it sure will handle 10,000 active users, and that's more than enough to have a healthy community. (Note: I'm of the opinion that fediverse-style federation in the context of forums is merely a nice-to-have; the web is already naturally federated, and people should not feel bad if they want to save money/tech complexity/administration complexity by settling for ordinary self-hosted forums.)
- YetAnotherNick 3y ago
  You are off by 2 orders of magnitude. Plans for 10k active users on managed instance generally seems to be in the range of $250-450[1][2]. [1]: https://toot.io/pricing.html https://toot.io/pricing.html [2]: https://masto.host/pricing/ https://masto.host/pricing/
  - kibwen 3y ago
    This is specifically why I call out the federated model as a nice-to-have, not a requirement. ActivityPub is way, way more demanding of CPU and transfer than a simple forum, and as a result it's extremely difficult to self-host at scale. You can easily service 10,000 daily active users on a VPS serving lean, statically-rendered forum pages.

Terr_ 3y ago

For me the main barrier is that I want to have portable/roaming control over my IDENTITY, even if the content hosting is (for now) entirely through a system administered by someone else. If I control the identity, I can at least keep local copies and rehost/repost content later. Instead, it feels like the current Fediverse demands that I make a blind choice to entrust not merely a copy of my content but also my whole future identity to whatever of these current instances looks the most stable/trustworthy at first glance, hoping my choice will be good for 1-5-10-15 years. It's stressful, and then I look into self-hosting, and then I put the whole thing off for another week... AFAICT I would need to set up a whole federated node of my own in order to get that level of identity-control. Serious question: Is there any technical limitation preventing the admin of an instance from just seizing an particular account and permanently impersonating the original owner? In contrast, I was hoping/expecting some kind of identity backed by a private asymmetric key. Even if signing every single message would be impractical, one could at least use it to prove "The person bob@banana.instance has the same private key that was used to initialize bob@apple.instance."

twicetwice 3y ago
This is basically the entire point of the Authenticated Transfer Protocol (AT Protocol), which powers Bluesky. I think it does a ton of stuff right, including portable identity backed by solid cryptography (no blockchain or "crypto"!) and has a lot of promise. It's still in development, but I am hopeful that it will live up to its promise.
- gcr 3y ago
  can't a malicious bluesky admin steal/MITM users' private keys by messing with whatever frontend javascript users interact with?
  - Retr0id 3y ago
    In theory, kinda, but you can bring-your-own client, and "the" web client is decoupled from the back-end instance. "bsky.app" works as a web client for the official "bsky.social" instance, but it also works with the instance I self-host (or any other spec-compliant instance). Likewise, 3rd party clients work with the official instance, and also with 3rd party instances. However, no key-stealing could possibly happen right now in any case because... the PDS ("instance") holds your signing key - the client never even sees it. Having the server hold your signing keys is very user-friendly, but of course not ideal for security and identity self-sovereignty. In general, the security model involves trusting your PDS (just as you trust your mastodon instance admin, or twitter dot com - the improvements are centered around making it easier to jump ship if you change your mind). Client-signed posting is something that's not even possible right now, but I believe it's somewhere on the roadmap. If it doesn't happen some time soon I'll be implementing it myself. (I'm writing my own PDS software)

havnagiggle 3y ago

Finding communities is the toughest part.

hiepph 3y ago
It's still at the early days, so give it some times. But there are already some lively communities and, IMO, they are generally better in terms of quality since Fediverse is more niche and has higher barrier of entry.

bozhark 3y ago

Fediverse doesn’t feel like a solution

javajosh 3y ago

Public service announcement: the only good thing on twitter, massimo, has at least one mirror on mastodon. https://mastodon.social/@rainmaker1973@birdsite.miisu.net https://mastodon.social/@rainmaker1973@birdsite.miisu.net

JdeBP 3y ago
However, BirdsiteLive instances come with their own information for the public. * https://jdebp.uk/FGA/fediverse-third-party-mirrors.html https://jdebp.uk/FGA/fediverse-third-party-mirrors.html

esalman 3y ago

This. Twitter is doing what they can to drive people to mastodon. I've held off closing my Twitter account but I need to get better familiar with mastodon. I was wondering if there are accounts like NWS <location> (weather updates) over there, or so they plan to have some soon. Also from brief exposure, servers like mastodon social reads like left wing echo chambers which is also cringe.

brabel 3y ago
What kind of annoyances have you had on Twitter, as a user, that makes you want to leave? I have been using Twitter more often lately as I really don't care about what they do to their APIs or whatever, and it's honestly improving lately.
- esalman 3y ago
  The main reason is I followed a lot of scientists in my field of research who left the platform. Plus there's been subtle (and some not so subtle) changes to the algorithm and the software. Most of the people I followed before were clearly left wing. After Musk takeover a lot of them left the platform. Plus the algorithm now pushed more right-wing content in the home page. I wouldn't mind if it were real people discussing valid talking points. The problems are 1) they are all coming from blue check mark accounts, 2) most of it are clearly misinformation, and 3) you can tell most of these tweets and replies are troll and bot accounts. It's just annoying. Musk boosting his own tweets in the feed was annoying. Had to unfollow him. I use Twitter via mobile website, and it breaks more frequently than before. Overall, it's become like Musk's other product, Tesla. It over promises and under delivers. It's not reliable anymore. As a 2x Toyota owner I cannot stand products that are results of crappy engineering. So there you go. Edit: one more thing: it used to be that I could go to the trending hashtags and get latest news in a second. It's not the case anymore. Case in point: yesterday France was trending. I saw the tweets and got the impression that some member of minority community has committed mass stabbing or rape again. Because the Twitter results were brigaded by right wing blue check mark accounts spewing anti immigration propaganda. It was not until I read a BBC article that I realized what happened was complete opposite, police executed an immigrant at a traffic stop. Twitter has lost almost all of its core values under Musk. It's just sad.

SemioticStandrd 3y ago

Agree. https://beehaw.org https://beehaw.org in particular is great

marvin 3y ago

The main problem with the fediverse is that none of the people I want to read, post there. And they never will, because they are disparate sociopolitical demographics and the fediverse by design keeps them in separate instances that I at some level need to think about. The majority use-case requires centralization, which is subject to the network effects that constitute 95% of Twitter's value. Great that it works for you and some others, but it cannot work for most.