9 ms·

Threads on Mastodon and the bright future of the Fediverse

139 points by hn1986 3y ago

MrRoyce101 3y ago
I am launching a beta mastodon discovery tool at utoots.com. Still lots of rough edges but gotta kick it out of the nest at some point! I am not much of a frontend developer or UI expert, but hopefully folks find it fun and usable. I had a ball working on it over the past 4 months! Please check it out and let me know what you think.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
v1sea 3y ago
Thanks for investigating the threads federation. With reddit and twitter charging large fees for api access it has felt like one chapter of the web was closing. Now with the federation of threads there are even more people to interact with via a medium we have control over. I'm glad to see someone find value in the open api nature of mastodon(and others). Thank you mastodon and ActivityPub for exposing the internet tubes.
- lxgr 3y ago
  I'm also really optimistic about the federation of Threads. Too many organizations and people were (and still are) using Twitter as a canonical RSS alternative, which we've now painfully learned it decidedly isn't. Any option that makes their posts accessible using open protocols is a win in my view. What's disappointing is the in my view extreme reaction of part of the Fediverse to Threads adopting Activitypub (I have no sense on whether that's a loud minority or general consensus). I get the embrace-extend-extinguish concerns, but there almost seems to be some desire to want to keep Mastodon small and fragmented for various reasons. The same applies to the planned (and heavily criticized) Bluesky-Mastodon bridge: I'd love to be able to have a single place to follow both using a single app and (importantly) using a single handle, and I'm afraid that without, neither protocol will gain critical mass since they're just too similar to be worth replicating every post and keep following people on both.
  - brnt 3y ago
    If Fediversians do not want to interact with people on Threads, they can just ban/block threads.net, no? Why would they not want people to use Activitypub as intended?
    - lxgr 3y ago
      I suppose so, but as somebody that just wants to follow a couple of people/organizations I care about and only post every once in a blue moon, this has somewhat discouraged me from treating any given Mastodon server as a stable place to do that. If I pick the wrong server, it seems like I might become a bargaining chip in some defederation drama any day, not being able to follow or be followed by who I choose (because they happen to be on an "evil" server), and potentially losing my follows and posts because I can't even migrate profiles to "evil" servers after defederation. Meanwhile, self-hosting Mastodon seems like a hassle, and due to how Activitypub works would also make it somewhat tricky to bootstrap a list of people to follow, since discovery and search are non-global. Bluesky seems to have solved that better, but can't currently federate with Activitypub servers, so it is yet another island for now.
    - rakoo 3y ago
      You're assuming that all interactions are equal and calm and it takes little time to organize your comms; It's wrong. If I am a trans person, my content will be shared with a company that has demonstrated it doesn't care about harassment, about racism, about large campaigns of hate that end in genocides. Meta doesn't care. Its accounts will see all I do, and will easily harass me. No, it is not possible to block them one by one, it doesn't scale. The only thing that starts to work is to block the whole instance because morons tend to congregate to the same instances (that's how the group effect works best). But even that is not enough because then other instances have access, and other people in my circle haven't blocked the instance so can also be targets, and it never ends. In short: federation works if each island moderates its people. Meta demonstrably doesn't so it's not going to be a good citizen of the fediverse.
      - brnt 3y ago
- JeremyNT 3y ago
  It's so frustrating that Meta is doing this with Threads while completely walling off Instagram. It's had a login wall that is far worse than X's for as long as I can remember. Perhaps this openness in Threads is a temporary strategy while they grow their user base, and if/when they have a dominant market position they'll just close up shop again and rug pull the third party integration.
Animats 3y ago
"Firstly, the app always defaults to the For You feed." This is, presumably, what Facebook wants to show you, now on Mastodon. Is that correct? That seems to have negative value for Mastodon users.
- emaro 3y ago
  This part is about the Threads app. They do want to show you the 'For You' feed, but on Threads. Mastodon users aren't affected at all.
  - mort96 3y ago
    It's negative value for Mastodon users regardless: Facebook presumably wants to primarily show you content from Threads.
    - loceng 3y ago
      They want to be able to control-direct the narratives that people see - where if they can't fully control it, as part of the censorship-suppression-narrative control apparatus Facebook is party to toeing the line for - they will try to get ahead of the wave and inject what they can. If you know you're beginning to lose control then having people use the "wild west" that is more disordered makes it easier to flood to prevent truths from surfacing as easily or in as high of a concentration, being able to add noise vs. people learning to associate with and use more truth-seeking systems - something like Community Notes being a good start for this.
malermeister 3y ago
Panphy looks excellent! It wasn't on my radar yet, thanks for sharing!
crimsoneer 3y ago
Ooh, I hadn't heard of Phanpy and I'm sold.
pixxel 3y ago
[flagged]
serial_dev 3y ago
The amount of irrelevant gifs in this article is too damn high.
- euroderf 3y ago
  Animated, too. Distractions.
- anotherevan 3y ago
  Yep. Soon as I saw the second one, I bailed.
Vinnl 3y ago
If you use Mastodon, I'd really urge you to try Phanpy. It's not just a great Mastodon client - it has a few genuinely innovative interaction patterns that work really well. Really hard to believe that it's pretty much made by one person, given how polished and full-featured it is: https://mastodon.social/@cheeaun https://mastodon.social/@cheeaun
- RNAlfons 3y ago
  After the loss of Tweetdeck, which made Twitter/X quite useless for me, I switched over to https://mastodeck.com/ https://mastodeck.com/. It works quite well for me.
- Aissen 3y ago
  Phanpy is extraordinary, and my main client. Unfortunately, it pushes mobile browsers to the limit. The scroll performance in Firefox for Android is abysmal, and deep threads can make Chrome choke on rendering. Despite all that, I keep using it for lack of better alternative.
  - Vinnl 3y ago
    Odd, it works really smoothly for me, on Firefox for Android as well. Which is not to discount your experience, but just to emphasise that people will probably have to try for themselves to see what it'll be like on their device.
    - Aissen 3y ago
      Did you try on both Firefox and another chromium-based browser to compare? If it works similarly for you, I might take more time to investigate why it's janky here. Edit: I tested with nightly (so a new profile), and performance is similar: lower on Firefox than Chrome, even on already-loaded content. I don't think it was fair to call Firefox's performance "abysmal", but this is definitely not 60fps scrolling; but then I have no idea how to measure that.
      - 3y ago
KoftaBob 3y ago
If you like Phanpy (it's pretty awesome), feel free to try out a fork of it I'm working on called Agora: https://agorasocial.app https://agorasocial.app It's got a few additions/modifications: - You can log in to a Mastodon, Bluesky, or Nostr account on Agora and it'll pull in your following/followers list from that account, while still allowing you to view/interact with posts from the other 2 protocols using bridges behind the scenes. - "For You" tab that uses the open source FediAlgo library to discover interesting posts you haven't seen, based on which accounts you and your follows interact with. - Search page also has a "suggested friends" feature that integrates the open source FollowGraph library. It looks up all the people you follow, and then the people they follow. Then it sorts them by the number of mutuals, or otherwise by how popular those accounts are. - Integrated bridges into the search, so that if you search for a Bluesky handle like aoc.bsky.social or a nostr users hex code, it'll automatically know to use the relevant bridge for those protocols and find the bridged profile. - When you follow a hashtag like #linux, it'll automatically follow the corresponding Lemmy community for that topic in your feed. - Automatically loads your instance's version of a post so that you can like/boost/comment on it without having to think about what instance it's on.
- prmoustache 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - CaptainFever 3y ago
    Works on Firefox Android on first glance.
    - pitkali 3y ago
      You get this error on all the browsers I tried on desktop, including Chrome and Firefox.
  - KoftaBob 3y ago
    That's odd, what part of the app says that? I didn't specifically build it for Chrome/Edge, especially considering my disdain for those two browsers.
czottmann 3y ago
Pro tip: Phanpy has a crackerjack conversation/thread view which works even if you're not logged in. `https://phanpy.social/#/$link_to_mastodon_post?view=full https://phanpy.social/#/$link_to_mastodon_post?view=full` Example: - Original: https://sauropods.win/@futurebird/112252137266020755 https://sauropods.win/@futurebird/112252137266020755 - Phanpy convo/thread view: https://phanpy.social/#/https://sauropods.win/@futurebird/112252137266020755?view=full https://phanpy.social/#/https://sauropods.win/@futurebird/11...
weebull 3y ago
Threads on Mastodon, but... > 1. Threads users can't reply to Mastodon comments or see them in Threads. > 2. Threads users can be followed by Mastodon accounts but they will not be notified nor can they follow back. > 3. Likes from Mastodon are not counted toward your Threads like count ...it's not Masterdon on Threads.
pipeline_peak 3y ago
For a bright future, I don’t see much adoption outside of tech people. Also, Mastodon is an awful name. Twitter sounds goofy but at least it’s friendly. Mastodon is too bookish, doesn’t really resonate with cool.
methuselah_in 3y ago
Once they left xmpp. What these companies can't compete they just put their work onto them and suck up whatever and users and then move on. Well no longer interested to see bloody adds on mastodon those who create my profiles. Facebook shall cease to exist ,

139 points by hn1986 3y ago

I am launching a beta mastodon discovery tool at utoots.com. Still lots of rough edges but gotta kick it out of the nest at some point! I am not much of a frontend developer or UI expert, but hopefully folks find it fun and usable. I had a ball working on it over the past 4 months! Please check it out and let me know what you think.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

v1sea 3y ago

Thanks for investigating the threads federation. With reddit and twitter charging large fees for api access it has felt like one chapter of the web was closing. Now with the federation of threads there are even more people to interact with via a medium we have control over. I'm glad to see someone find value in the open api nature of mastodon(and others). Thank you mastodon and ActivityPub for exposing the internet tubes.

lxgr 3y ago
I'm also really optimistic about the federation of Threads. Too many organizations and people were (and still are) using Twitter as a canonical RSS alternative, which we've now painfully learned it decidedly isn't. Any option that makes their posts accessible using open protocols is a win in my view. What's disappointing is the in my view extreme reaction of part of the Fediverse to Threads adopting Activitypub (I have no sense on whether that's a loud minority or general consensus). I get the embrace-extend-extinguish concerns, but there almost seems to be some desire to want to keep Mastodon small and fragmented for various reasons. The same applies to the planned (and heavily criticized) Bluesky-Mastodon bridge: I'd love to be able to have a single place to follow both using a single app and (importantly) using a single handle, and I'm afraid that without, neither protocol will gain critical mass since they're just too similar to be worth replicating every post and keep following people on both.
- brnt 3y ago
  If Fediversians do not want to interact with people on Threads, they can just ban/block threads.net, no? Why would they not want people to use Activitypub as intended?
  - lxgr 3y ago
    I suppose so, but as somebody that just wants to follow a couple of people/organizations I care about and only post every once in a blue moon, this has somewhat discouraged me from treating any given Mastodon server as a stable place to do that. If I pick the wrong server, it seems like I might become a bargaining chip in some defederation drama any day, not being able to follow or be followed by who I choose (because they happen to be on an "evil" server), and potentially losing my follows and posts because I can't even migrate profiles to "evil" servers after defederation. Meanwhile, self-hosting Mastodon seems like a hassle, and due to how Activitypub works would also make it somewhat tricky to bootstrap a list of people to follow, since discovery and search are non-global. Bluesky seems to have solved that better, but can't currently federate with Activitypub servers, so it is yet another island for now.
  - rakoo 3y ago
    You're assuming that all interactions are equal and calm and it takes little time to organize your comms; It's wrong. If I am a trans person, my content will be shared with a company that has demonstrated it doesn't care about harassment, about racism, about large campaigns of hate that end in genocides. Meta doesn't care. Its accounts will see all I do, and will easily harass me. No, it is not possible to block them one by one, it doesn't scale. The only thing that starts to work is to block the whole instance because morons tend to congregate to the same instances (that's how the group effect works best). But even that is not enough because then other instances have access, and other people in my circle haven't blocked the instance so can also be targets, and it never ends. In short: federation works if each island moderates its people. Meta demonstrably doesn't so it's not going to be a good citizen of the fediverse.
    - brnt 3y ago
JeremyNT 3y ago
It's so frustrating that Meta is doing this with Threads while completely walling off Instagram. It's had a login wall that is far worse than X's for as long as I can remember. Perhaps this openness in Threads is a temporary strategy while they grow their user base, and if/when they have a dominant market position they'll just close up shop again and rug pull the third party integration.

Animats 3y ago

"Firstly, the app always defaults to the For You feed." This is, presumably, what Facebook wants to show you, now on Mastodon. Is that correct? That seems to have negative value for Mastodon users.

emaro 3y ago
This part is about the Threads app. They do want to show you the 'For You' feed, but on Threads. Mastodon users aren't affected at all.
- mort96 3y ago
  It's negative value for Mastodon users regardless: Facebook presumably wants to primarily show you content from Threads.
  - loceng 3y ago
    They want to be able to control-direct the narratives that people see - where if they can't fully control it, as part of the censorship-suppression-narrative control apparatus Facebook is party to toeing the line for - they will try to get ahead of the wave and inject what they can. If you know you're beginning to lose control then having people use the "wild west" that is more disordered makes it easier to flood to prevent truths from surfacing as easily or in as high of a concentration, being able to add noise vs. people learning to associate with and use more truth-seeking systems - something like Community Notes being a good start for this.

malermeister 3y ago

Panphy looks excellent! It wasn't on my radar yet, thanks for sharing!

crimsoneer 3y ago

Ooh, I hadn't heard of Phanpy and I'm sold.

pixxel 3y ago

[flagged]

serial_dev 3y ago

The amount of irrelevant gifs in this article is too damn high.

euroderf 3y ago
Animated, too. Distractions.
anotherevan 3y ago
Yep. Soon as I saw the second one, I bailed.

Vinnl 3y ago

If you use Mastodon, I'd really urge you to try Phanpy. It's not just a great Mastodon client - it has a few genuinely innovative interaction patterns that work really well. Really hard to believe that it's pretty much made by one person, given how polished and full-featured it is: https://mastodon.social/@cheeaun https://mastodon.social/@cheeaun

RNAlfons 3y ago
After the loss of Tweetdeck, which made Twitter/X quite useless for me, I switched over to https://mastodeck.com/ https://mastodeck.com/. It works quite well for me.
Aissen 3y ago
Phanpy is extraordinary, and my main client. Unfortunately, it pushes mobile browsers to the limit. The scroll performance in Firefox for Android is abysmal, and deep threads can make Chrome choke on rendering. Despite all that, I keep using it for lack of better alternative.
- Vinnl 3y ago
  Odd, it works really smoothly for me, on Firefox for Android as well. Which is not to discount your experience, but just to emphasise that people will probably have to try for themselves to see what it'll be like on their device.
  - Aissen 3y ago
    Did you try on both Firefox and another chromium-based browser to compare? If it works similarly for you, I might take more time to investigate why it's janky here. Edit: I tested with nightly (so a new profile), and performance is similar: lower on Firefox than Chrome, even on already-loaded content. I don't think it was fair to call Firefox's performance "abysmal", but this is definitely not 60fps scrolling; but then I have no idea how to measure that.
    - 3y ago

KoftaBob 3y ago

If you like Phanpy (it's pretty awesome), feel free to try out a fork of it I'm working on called Agora: https://agorasocial.app https://agorasocial.app It's got a few additions/modifications: - You can log in to a Mastodon, Bluesky, or Nostr account on Agora and it'll pull in your following/followers list from that account, while still allowing you to view/interact with posts from the other 2 protocols using bridges behind the scenes. - "For You" tab that uses the open source FediAlgo library to discover interesting posts you haven't seen, based on which accounts you and your follows interact with. - Search page also has a "suggested friends" feature that integrates the open source FollowGraph library. It looks up all the people you follow, and then the people they follow. Then it sorts them by the number of mutuals, or otherwise by how popular those accounts are. - Integrated bridges into the search, so that if you search for a Bluesky handle like aoc.bsky.social or a nostr users hex code, it'll automatically know to use the relevant bridge for those protocols and find the bridged profile. - When you follow a hashtag like #linux, it'll automatically follow the corresponding Lemmy community for that topic in your feed. - Automatically loads your instance's version of a post so that you can like/boost/comment on it without having to think about what instance it's on.

prmoustache 3y ago
[flagged]
- CaptainFever 3y ago
  Works on Firefox Android on first glance.
  - pitkali 3y ago
    You get this error on all the browsers I tried on desktop, including Chrome and Firefox.
- KoftaBob 3y ago
  That's odd, what part of the app says that? I didn't specifically build it for Chrome/Edge, especially considering my disdain for those two browsers.

czottmann 3y ago

Pro tip: Phanpy has a crackerjack conversation/thread view which works even if you're not logged in. `https://phanpy.social/#/$link_to_mastodon_post?view=full https://phanpy.social/#/$link_to_mastodon_post?view=full` Example: - Original: https://sauropods.win/@futurebird/112252137266020755 https://sauropods.win/@futurebird/112252137266020755 - Phanpy convo/thread view: https://phanpy.social/#/https://sauropods.win/@futurebird/112252137266020755?view=full https://phanpy.social/#/https://sauropods.win/@futurebird/11...

weebull 3y ago

Threads on Mastodon, but... > 1. Threads users can't reply to Mastodon comments or see them in Threads. > 2. Threads users can be followed by Mastodon accounts but they will not be notified nor can they follow back. > 3. Likes from Mastodon are not counted toward your Threads like count ...it's not Masterdon on Threads.

pipeline_peak 3y ago

For a bright future, I don’t see much adoption outside of tech people. Also, Mastodon is an awful name. Twitter sounds goofy but at least it’s friendly. Mastodon is too bookish, doesn’t really resonate with cool.

methuselah_in 3y ago

Once they left xmpp. What these companies can't compete they just put their work onto them and suck up whatever and users and then move on. Well no longer interested to see bloody adds on mastodon those who create my profiles. Facebook shall cease to exist ,