7 ms·

Boy I was wrong about the Fediverse

177 points by wrxd 7mo ago

_wire_ 7mo ago
Puff piece with 1000+ words that doesn't ever assert anything in particular that the author was wrong about. But if you enjoy a babbling endorsement. However you will be left hanging about what corner of the largely inscrutable "fediverse" the author is bleating about. Make no mistake, mastodon feeds are prone to shameless promotions, scams, and attention whoring that infects all social media, but it's still marginal and so seems quaint. To get a sense of this skim sfba.social which is a feed of trending posts with a U.S. west coast vibe.
- jaggs 7mo ago
  Thank you for your opinion.
- phaser 7mo ago
  Yeah, the choice of title is indeed strange. But it does convey a personal point of view about the platform very well. Largely inscrutable? Compared to what?
- bigthymer 7mo ago
  > Puff piece with 1000+ words that doesn't ever assert anything in particular that the author was wrong about His article mostly talks about other things but I think his title is sufficient. He says that he never thought that the news would become so unreliable that he would end up getting his news from randos on Bluesky who simply share what they know without an intention to monetize it.
- dekken_ 7mo ago
  For me, having been on fedi for like 7 years now, there are cool places, and there are not so cool places. I might be more lucky than most in that I barely need to curate my time there, cause I follow cool people, and so I just see what they like too
  - Imustaskforhelp 7mo ago
    > cause I follow cool people, and so I just see what they like too Maybe offtopic but I was reading something on hackernews and thought about something like this yesterday as the world starts getting more brand-ed and corporate-y that perhaps its up to the average person to share the list of cool people/things they know. But I don't think that a follow itself might be the largest indicator of showing others what cool people are. Yesterday, I tried linkhut (https://ln.ht https://ln.ht) and added it to my profile. It just has cool things that I found online and I have written minor notes below it on why I think the things are cool or not. I am curious to know but can some idea like this take off within the fediverse community/ say personally for you? Can you have a linkhut profile that I can just see which can have cool people that you found and why you think that they are cool? And if I think that you are cool, then I can have some of that coolness be transferred to people you think cool too? I used to be on fediverse and I think that there are some very cool people on fediverse, its just very hard to find them sometimes.
    - dekken_ 7mo ago
      > as the world starts getting more brand-ed and corporate-y... I gravitate toward what I consider authenticate/consistent people which for me at least has seemed to work out as I also try to be that way. > Can you have a linkhut profile... It doesn't really work that way, you can see other peoples public conversations to see how they interact, as a metric for their personalities, which, might be more work. It's network effects moreso. as for https://ln.ht https://ln.ht, I can see it working for some people, but personally I think there's a bit too much going on, sensory overload.
      - Imustaskforhelp 7mo ago
        > as for https://ln.ht https://ln.ht, I can see it working for some people, but personally I think there's a bit too much going on, sensory overload. I do understand the sensory overload aspect. I personally don't use the social aspect of it that much. Essentially the idea that I want to say was that even the people that I follow (say on bluesky) etc. sometimes I don't know why I follow them exactly either or any idea of giving this info to the world for that matter. The idea of linkhut interests me especially with their note section: I can have a profile of cool things/people I found and I can share it to world and I can try to explain the "why cool?" so that people can judge things on that aspect and it gives more info, that's all. Unfortunately even for fediverse/ all social media. You really can't end up writing the exact reason you follow someone as a comment everytime you follow someone. Sometimes sure but not always and those comments can get muddled up with other comments that you write while using the platform itself. > It doesn't really work that way, you can see other peoples public conversations to see how they interact, as a metric for their personalities, which, might be more work. It's network effects moreso. I suppose so. But I think the idea to me for using something like linkhut isn't for people to offload searching how people interact/the metric as you mention but rather the fact that we are unable to find these people/products in the first place! There has been too much stuff going on in the world in social media that there are genuinely cool people/projects that you don't even see. My point is similar to outlinks in the sense of sharing some visibility to those who don't have such visibility in the darkness of internet sometimes. I only sort of found it yesterday so but that's my take on it. I am curious to hear yours though.
- gzread 7mo ago
  He asserts to being wrong about the Fediverse being as bad as all the rest, because the Fediverse is full of real people instead of corporatized bullshit.
- AJ007 7mo ago
  Very much the puff piece of someone living in a social media bubble. The real problem is how the fediverse is going to survive the onslaught of laws related to social media age verification, data retention, data privacy, data not-privacy (breaking e2e encryption and retaining data for a really long time to spy on users), etc. There are a lot of problematic laws right now, but the velocity of new laws is alarming. One can make an argument that compliance is possible -- but it isn't free. I don't see how small, independent websites will survive. Operators chose not to follow the laws (which sometimes conflict with each other.) As long as you don't scale too much or the operators or anonymous they can probably get away with it. I use Mastodon. I use Twitter. Twitter is still fine as long as you keep your follow list clean. That means unfollowing people who post noise, which somehow people haven't figured out 17 years later?? Only view the chronological feed. Could this all have just been RSS feeds? Probably.
- kgwxd 7mo ago
  The win for mastodon is that it's a choice to view those feeds at all. Some have none by default (e.g. librem.one), you only see who you follow. Same with bluesky. "Discover" is there by default, but can be removed. It's a tad annoying in some places, like when your feed is "empty", they still show it at the bottom, but it's a big banner which, for me, is a perfect indicator to stop scrolling. You can also hide "Trending Tooics".
- 8organicbits 7mo ago
  > mastodon feeds are prone to shameless promotions, scams, and attention whoring My mastodon feed contains only the users I follow. If they post unwanted things I unfollow them. Mastodon doesn't force you to see content from people you don't follow. The sfba trending list has engagement-bait, but you shouldn't look there (on any social media site) if you don't want that sort of content.
- Synaesthesia 7mo ago
  >sfba.social Seems pretty cool TBH
sn0n 7mo ago
[flagged]
DeathArrow 7mo ago
Why would I be interested in random people's opinions on various things? I wasted a few minutes of my life reading this rant. It was a total loss. I haven't been entertained by it and I couldn't find anything useful in it. Just the ramblings of a bitter person with which the Internet is filled.
- izacus 7mo ago
  Ok random person with opinion on a thing.
- pandini 7mo ago
  Says the person commenting on a site where random people give their opinions about various things..
- Imustaskforhelp 7mo ago
  > Just the ramblings of a bitter person with which the Internet is filled. https://mirror.forum https://mirror.forum [0] [0]:(I recently bought it and it was idling around, your comment made me think what I should add on it so I did. I hope you evaluate that you were being bitter in your comment as well) > Why would I be interested in random people's opinions on various things? Sadly, if you are asking such question, I don't think that the blog post was intended for ya.
- grosswait 7mo ago
  “So when Twitter was accidentally purchased by a fascist high on ketamine” was enough to predict the rest of
boriskourt 7mo ago
I’ve had an awesome experience the last five years running instances for me and friends. So many nice interactions. I recommend running an instance for people you know well. It can still connect to everyone else, but you have your own little corner to feel more connected in.
- cykros 7mo ago
  Everyone else, as long as they don't defederate your server as petty tyrants. Which has always been the drawback of the Fediverse. Nostr has delivered what I had hoped to get from the Fediverse: actually decentralized, censorship proof social media (and then some), wherein you actually maintain full ownership of your own identity (as it's a keypair, not an account). Where if you get banned from one relay or other, you just move to a new one, and everything comes with you. Where if nobody wants to platform you, you can literally run your own relay on your PHONE and stay connected to the network. And yea, there is at least one bridge between Nostr and Mastodon (Mostr), so you don't even have to give up on talking to your Mastodon buddies. That it also does so much more than social media is icing on the cake. Really leverages its existence as a protocol rather than a platform to use the Internet as it was always meant to be.
  - boriskourt 7mo ago
    Then I don’t really care about them if they don’t want to hang out with me. It works as intended.
dgellow 7mo ago
Love that writing. I didn’t expect a full size blog post like that based on the title. That makes me very nostalgic of the old blog era
- archagon 7mo ago
  There’s a good chance that era will come back. With the overwhelming amount of AI slop coming down the pipeline, I think many people will seek content unapolagetically written by real people.
tamad 7mo ago
> We all need pointless hobbies, but I care about YouTube stars like I care about distant stars dying. It’s interesting to someone somewhere but those people don’t talk to me. I mostly use social media as a place to waste time, not a platform to form para-social relationships to narcissists. I prefer my narcissism farm to table. I’d rather dig a grave with a rusty spoon than watch a Twitch “star”. I don’t really care about the substance of this article, but the style is entertaining. Curious for anyone who writes in a similar style - do people actually compose like this breathlessly, or are these kinds of lines wrought over several revisions? I know everyone’s different, but I can’t imagine writing like this on a first pass.
- 0ckpuppet 7mo ago
  AI? I just read it and remembered how I got busted for writing papers for friends. Style and voice are tangible and I'm getting an uncanny valley creepy crawlies from the opening of this article. edit, maybe some AI segments, I would guess the author is young and will write differently in a few years.
  - beepbooptheory 7mo ago
    Weird sentiment to have for some guy that says "uncanny valley creepy crawlies." Did you get your friends good grades??
- nailer 7mo ago
  It’s a British newspaper columnist style. Read anything from AA Gill if you like it.
- alance 7mo ago
  There are probably parallels with rap artists. There are those that improvise and flow. (the rest of us edit and re-edit)
- beepbooptheory 7mo ago
  If you grew up writing (and reading) a lot, it's quite natural to have a "voice." It makes sense too: it's akin to having spent a lot of time with a certain person. Although, I do not know if this is really that shining of an example of anything, although a fine blog post! If you are surprised, I wholeheartedly recommend just reading more. Something clicks after 1000 pages of Swann's Way, or Infinite Jest, or even the Gnus manual where you simply must reckon with a certain kind natural voice that can be cultivated and exhibited without exertion, without even a "thought." And I know the implication here is maybe underhanded, and that you feel its "entertaining" as a party trick is; where one compensates for content with flowery prose. That might be fair, but I see this charge more and more, and I just worry one day everyone is just going to deem reading and writing itself as a waste, as a compensation for some unnamed other thing we should all be doing (optimizing productivity). Which is why I must defend every labored, silly metaphor I read now to my death from all yall editors that popped up three years ago.
AreShoesFeet000 7mo ago
> If the American press had given me 20 minutes of airtime I could have convinced everyone they don’t want to get involved with Greenland. On one hand the author recognizes the scope of the “protocol wars” as a rational thing being irrelevant in the actually relevant time span. On the other hand, the author swears that they can bring rationality to a deeply emotional matter through discourse.
- dathinab 7mo ago
  you are aware that he doesn't actually believe that he "[...] could have convinced [..]" it's a manner of speech a instrument of telling a story a way to express how completely absurd "US getting involved into Greenland" is for anyone who understands the land (geography/weather) and people even unrelated to geopolitical aspects like alienating allies
  - AreShoesFeet000 7mo ago
    My argument stands whether the author meant to be read literally or not. Below the surface it’s still about the tension of rationality and irrationality within social settings.
jonathanstrange 7mo ago
This is nicely written but I found some of the views strange. The most disturbing one to me is that the author wants news from social media and claims they have troubles getting news (e.g. criticizing the Washington Post). Not only is it obviously problematic to attempt to get news from social media and everybody knows that, it's also very bold to insinuate that there is lack of access to news. Maybe US citizens get this impression from TV news infotainment, which is indeed abysmal. Okay, I get that. Nevertheless, there are plenty of other sources, we're being swamped with news and know more about what's happening in the world than ever before. Normally, people also complain about the opposite, that they get anxiety from too much exposure to news. So I don't get that point.
- nailer 7mo ago
  I want to know exactly how far the Iranians have gotten against the IGRC in the last 24 hours. I subscribe to WSJ but they don’t have that details. X and Reddit do, with some obvious caveats (I do find Community Notes on X very good though).
  - Synaesthesia 7mo ago
    Iranians are not rebelling against the IRGC because why would they? Generally an outside attack makes the government more popular, not less.
    - jfengel 7mo ago
      They're not popular, but going outside in a flurry of missiles isn't good for your health. It's not like the US has coordinated with anyone on the ground to plan a revolt. They seem to have just imagined one will materialize. They still don't love the regime but today they share a common enemy.
      - lyu07282 7mo ago
        This reminds me of the US soldiers after the Iraq invasion not understanding why the population didn't celebrate them as liberators. Even young Iraqis initially optimistic about the future were quickly disillusioned by the reality. Two full decades in Afghanistan "liberating" the Afghani people from the Taliban, when you left it took less than a day to undo with zero resistance, that's how much the population appreciated your efforts to "bring them liberal democracy". I suppose it's because the US public never had to reconcile their fantasies with reality in quite the same way as them.
satisfice 7mo ago
I just tried to check out the Fediverse and found utter confusion. I'm not saying its bad-- I'm saying I am bewildered. There are communities I can join, but I can't tell how I should choose a community. I could find no way to search for communities that might be a fit. Apparently there are a lot of different kinds of social media under the broad banner of the Fediverse. How should I choose, and what are the implications of choosing? I suppose I could pick a random community. But what's the point? I don't know.
- throwaway1492 7mo ago
  This is a big turn off for me too. I don’t want to “figure it out for myself”. That’s why I became catholic as an adult. With the fediverse I have an overwhelming fear of missing out if I pick the wrong communities. I feel like it needs aggregation which defeats the purpose.
  - cassepipe 7mo ago
    Are you not afraid of having picked the wrong community when choosing Catholicism ?
- threetonesun 7mo ago
  It’s a little wild to read comments like this because this was just how the Internet worked before Twitter got popular. I still get “happy birthday” emails from forums I joined 20+ years ago.
  - Gareth321 7mo ago
    Communities used to be themed. Honda forums. Programming. Gardening. Video games. Etc. We've been spoiled in the era of Reddit where all these communities could be found in the same place. Lemmy tried to replicate that experience by having a video games community in every instance. This has caused a lot of confusion and fragmentation. It's very difficult to figure out where to discuss video games (or any other topic). I think it would have made a lot more sense to theme instances instead of making instances Reddit clones.
darqis 7mo ago
The Fediverse has one problem, concentration of users on few instances, mastodon.social being the largest. And cancel culture. Highly politically motivated cancel culture. What right do they believe to have to dictate to their users what the can and can't read? That should be solely in the user's hand. The irony of writing this in HN is ... whatever the right word is Also, fragmentation and visibility. It's neigh impossible to find interesting content if you're not on the main big instances.
- onion2k 7mo ago
  What right do they believe to have to dictate to their users what the can and can't read? That should be solely in the user's hand. Are they choosing what people can read, or are they choosing what they're willing to federate? No one is stopping people writing and publishing things on federated services. People are only choosing what they're willing to broadcast over the part of the service they run.
  - Angostura 7mo ago
    Exactly. Each instance is deciding who to federate with and each user is deciding which instance to join
    - deleted 7mo ago
      [deleted]
    - xigoi 7mo ago
      Despite that, Fediverse promoters love to say “It doesn’t matter which instance you join”.
      - neogodless 7mo ago
        I think it should be ever so slightly more nuanced than that. It doesn't matter which instance you join if you're just getting started, and don't know enough to make a meaningful decision about which instance to join. After a week or a month, you might understand how it works a bit better, and also which communities exist, and might have an informed opinion about which community you resonate with.
Synaesthesia 7mo ago
>I want news I don’t want your endless meta commentary on the news. I want commentary on the news. We should be critiquing the news and it's way more interesting that just uncritically accepting mainstream narratives.
- brabel 7mo ago
  News used to be mostly neutral delivery of facts that occurred recently. It was not supposed to be following a narrative or whatever. But that is boring for many people and the American media found out they could make news much more interesting by adding their spicy takes on it, and it worked. Now people watch the news as a form of entertainment. I find that horrifying, the reason you should be informed about the world is so that you can participate in it effectively. News today is much more propaganda than information, and that gives the opposite effect of making you a more effective citizen.
- DauntingPear7 7mo ago
  Pretty much all US news is just blindly stating “what’s happening” which lends credence to the current admins (seemingly) illegal/poor behavior. Just accept that the president can start a war, no notes.
  - Leno1225 7mo ago
    Pretty much all US news is the exact opposite of a broad and bare presentation of the facts. It’s a narrow set of facts presented through either a partisan lens or a purely business context, the difference is in what base facts are chosen to work from and none of the news agencies do a good job presenting even most of the relevant facts on any issue.
ArchieScrivener 7mo ago
Reads like an intro to a Portlandia remake, only its 2010 nostalgia mixed with heavy handed Reddit-tier remembrances and jibes. Your 'social media' purity is still some network engineers bastardization of bits. Forums, Usenet, irc, email groups,... Lamenting what was or what could have been is useless when there is still work to be done directing the outcome. Vent. Move on.
amelius 7mo ago
> If the American press had given me 20 minutes of airtime I could have convinced everyone they don’t want to get involved with Greenland. We’re not tough enough as a people to survive in Greenland, much less “take it over”. Greenlandic people shrug off horrific injuries hundreds of kilometers from medical help with a smile. I watched a Greenlandic toddler munch meat from the spine of a seal with its head very much intact. We aren’t equipped to fuck with these people, they are the real deal. Wow.
- dionian 7mo ago
  The US has long since wanted to purchase Greenland, not "fight" them, for strategic reasons. I'm not sure why there is this fantasy that the US is going to fight the Greenland people? Honestly.
  - DFHippie 7mo ago
    Because the US was threatening to take over Greenland by force maybe? There's a reason Denmark rushed soldiers there.
  - deleted 7mo ago
    [deleted]
  - jfengel 7mo ago
    “But we need it really for international, for world security, and I think we’re going to get it. One way or the other, we’re going to get it,” -- Donald Trump, March 4, 2025
  - buster 7mo ago
    https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cwyg1jg8xkmo https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cwyg1jg8xkmo https://edition.cnn.com/2026/01/10/politics/us-will-take-greenland-the-hard-way-if-it-cant-do-it-the-easy-way-trump-says#:~:text=%E2%80%9CI%20would%20like,fan%2C%E2%80%9D%20Trump%20said https://edition.cnn.com/2026/01/10/politics/us-will-take-gre...
  - madjo80 7mo ago
    The president of the United States literally said that they were going to get Greenland, one way or another. If I were to say "I'm going to get Dionian's house, one way or another" would you not prepare yourself for an invasion?
zaps 7mo ago
Holy shit that’s a lot of windows
znpy 7mo ago
> So of course media corporations became bargaining chips for the oligarchs' actual businesses. I stopped reading here. This line shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the world and essential blindness to author’s own biases. Media corporations ALWAYS have been bargaining chips to the oligarchs’ actual business, whoever the current politician in power is.
- lyu07282 7mo ago
  It's a bit ironic that I want to point people so badly to Edward S. Herman and Chomsky's work on the propaganda model to explain why the current war propaganda in the west in support of Operation Epstein's Fury is nothing new. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_model https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_model
trentnix 7mo ago
[flagged]
- kemotep 7mo ago
  But Elon Musk literally made the website unusable because now it no longer shows profiles in chronological order and posts are now essentially just screenshots. 12 years of using twitter without an account and in a few months he made the site completely unusable. Ignoring anything else this is a massive change that was implemented shortly after he took over and now I cannot use the site anymore.
  - trentnix 7mo ago
    That's not been my experience at all. I only view the "Follow" list because I don't care about the "algorithm". I keep my follow list pretty tight and am pretty aggressive about removing people that post too frequently or without focus. It works just fine for me, but I'm very casual in my usage.
    - kemotep 7mo ago
      I don’t have a follow list because I never had a twitter account. Over 12 years of using the site without an account and now that isn’t possible.
  - eudamoniac 7mo ago
    > Elon Musk literally made the website unusable If it's literally unusable, how are millions of people still using it?
    - kemotep 7mo ago
      I used Twitter for over a decade without an account and now you essentially are unable to do so without jumping through significant hoops. That is how he made the website unusable. Like a billion people have Facebook/Instagram accounts but Facebook is equally unusable without an account.
j3th9n 7mo ago
[flagged]
- DaSHacka 7mo ago
  sadly many such cases, I think some are just predisposed to it more than others
PKop 7mo ago
> I want news I don’t want your endless meta commentary on the news. And you expected to find this on a decentralized social media platform?
smitty1e 7mo ago
> See I had forgotten the one golden rule of capitalism. To thrive in capitalism one must be amoral. Now you can be wildly sickeningly successful with morals but you cannot reach that absolute zenith of shareholder value. Either you accept a lower share price and don’t commit atrocities or you become evil. There is no third option. A platinum rule might be that everything has a lifecycle. Trading the morals for gold might drag out the demise by buying some time, but the real point is to preserve the morals and re-invent the tech, or take the money and run and let, e.g., an Elon Musk assume the Slim Pickins position and ride the tech to its detonation.
kkfx 7mo ago
Let's say that for news we need the "economic web", meaning no more "newspapers", but independent reporters with their own blogs and followers who micro-pay for individual articles by downloading and truly spreading them from a human to another instead of "many humans toward a network hub". This would solves the censorship problem, as you have thousands of scattered sources that are impossible to control or corrupt all at once, and it generates pluralism where the background noise is mitigated by personal scoring, like the WoT of GNUPG back in the day or Nostr now. The FLOSS foundation guarantees neutrality, while distributed sources like Radicle ensure it can't be censored. But... for this to succeed, you need LOADS of participants; otherwise, the small amount of compensation collected isn't enough to live on or even maintain as a side hustle. It still works to some extent as long as people doing other things have their say in an interesting way, but it doesn't take off. To get a lot of people, you need to attract a lot of people. Increasing censorship in recent times has made people migrate from Reddit and Discord to other things, but honestly, the alternatives out there are a bit of a mess. Personally, I set up Matrix for family and friends, only because XMPP doesn't seem to attract anyone, and both Matrix and XMPP are largely a pain to self-host properly if you want to include audio/video calls. The "fragmentation" of other tools is total. To attract people, you need a single, slick go get -able, cargo build -able, pip -able (and so on) application that does pretty much everything without a ton of dependencies. That way, someone discovers it, it's easy, they come for one or two features and discover others, providing enough mass to kickstart the spread. The Fediverse model does not offer that so far, Nostr is only a little bit better, ZeroNet is dead, ... It seems that recent/young developers can't grasp this, so caught up as they are in what they do at work, the "zero barrier to entry" of living on someone else's servers, which hamstrings every FLOSS project. Creating countless separate applications useful for selling services in a commercial model, but it's a recipe for failure in FLOSS. No idea to integrate client and server in a single app to solve even if DHT and alike are there since decades... The mind is one, so the application must be one and integrated to cover the bulk of needs in a single environment. Emacs understood this a long time ago, Smalltalk workstations even earlier; today, it seems most people still can't wrap their heads around it...
skybrian 7mo ago
I'm glad he found interesting people to follow, but since he didn't make any recommendations, it's not really actionable for anyone else. They would be starting from scratch. Results will vary.
- anotherevan 7mo ago
  True, although I wonder if that was one of the points he is trying to make. In any case, you could go to his Mastodon account listed at the bottom of the article and check out who he is following.
sqrtminusone 7mo ago
Yeah, no, getting out of the Fediverse was my best decision, or perhaps second only to getting out of Twitter. I think the model itself of following people (instead of, e.g. following topics) is basically irredeemable, you either: a) follow only people with whom you 100% agree, which is very dangerous; b) follow only people who post cat pictures or anything else as unobjectionable; c) get a lot of negative emotions from all the nonsense in the feed. It was the latter for me, I still have nightmares from having to ban the #NixOS tag from my feed, from my entire feed approving of the murder of some random insurance CEO, from the endless "AI is scam" takes, etc., etc... And I can't really unfollow someone who posts 75% of nonsense if they post 25% of interesting technical stuff. Because then my entire feed is gone. You can /technically/ follow topics on Mastodon, but that doesn't really work as it should. Besides: > So in this complete breakdown of the press came in the Fediverse. It became the only reliable source of information I had. Like, no. Getting news from social media is a dead end, is this not obvious just from looking at people who get their news from Twitter? In the very best case one might follow reliable journalists, but then one should follow the places they work. What's more likely is that the author has found a very comfortable bubble. I have hope that there can be some actual truth-seeking information aggregation algorithm that can finally replace the very imperfect media system, but so far it's not even close. It's very ironic that "a fascist high on ketamine" has, against all odds, managed to produce Community Notes, which is the best attempt so far, but it's like, a few orders of magnitude off being capable of replacing the so-called "legacy media".
- timbit42 7mo ago
  Why do you follow people on the Fediverse? You can follow hashtags instead, or some mix of that. That's what I do. That way I get what I'm looking for without getting all the unrelated cruft of following people who post on a wide variety of topics.
jauntywundrkind 7mo ago
Mastodon is extremely technologically stagnant, with one and only one player controlling the entire technical ecosystem. There is a huge lack of interesting apps or innovation. The protocol is very narrowly defined, and does not have any Postel's Law characteristics. You have to use the limited API offered in the Mastodon form. There is starting to be some interest from ActivityPub in defining their own client APIs. But this gathering together of people is only just starting, and it's unknown where that effort will go or when it will see traction in adoption. It also sucks being moderated by whatever Fedi you are on. And the very poor state of account portability sucks. There's also internally a very aggressive culture, against devs doing fun and interesting things with the social media data. The social rules of engagement seem to be that you can only enjoy Mastodon as a feed that goes by, and you cannot download or analyze deeply. You can't index or search, except with strong carved out cases. People building search or indexing tools are harassed and abused. I strong recommend this excellent write up, which does a far better treatment than I could offer, on Mastodon: https://connectedplaces.online/reports/fr156-share-where/ https://connectedplaces.online/reports/fr156-share-where/ Atproto has none of these issues, and has a rich ecosystem of devs building neat tools like RSS readers (skyboard), writing (greengale), book reading (bookhive), trail making (side trail), annotations (margin.at), events (smoke signal), chat (roomy), social/research bookmarking (semble), video streaming (Streamplace), media watching (pop feed), key attestation (keytrace), git (tangled), and yes, devs: containers (atcr). I'm sorry but Mastodon is a dead end, a bad design, going no where, bereft of interesting dev engagement, with data that is hard to share & make interesting use of, data that is extremely narrowly constrained in shape/form. I am envious of the dev-centric culture there. But it astounds me that devs would choose to exist on a place that is so technologically unalive & so low potential.
- archagon 7mo ago
  It’s weird that you think a social network needs to have some sort of technological drive or entrepreneurial spirit to be relevant. If anything, this will lead to its inevitable enshittification, as you can plainly see in Twitter and Facebook.
  - jauntywundrkind 7mo ago
scoofy 7mo ago
I feel like there just something about "this thing is slightly difficult to get started using" that keeps normies out and keeps the place reasonable. It's the only way to prevent the Eternal September of a popular social network. I felt a similar experience to this on a trip to Scotland recently. My partner and I visited Iona, and it was just amazing. I suspect it was such a pleasant experience because, while the place is about tourism, it's somehow not cliche shit. I suspect the difficult in accessing the island plays a big role.
- krapp 7mo ago
  [flagged]
  - BugsJustFindMe 7mo ago
    > The only people I've ever heard complain about the slight difficulty are techies Because everyone else has never heard of mastodon or this fediverse shit. Of course you don't hear complaints from people who don't know what it is. > I'll take normies over There are no "normies" as you call them using federated services. They don't want to need to think about server to server federation rules. They want a global central feed.
    - krapp 7mo ago
      I've seen plenty of "normal" and non "techie" people on Mastodon. And the point is the complaints about the "complexity" of Mastodon - which isn't really that complex you can literally join an instance as easily as signing up for a subreddit - are disingenuous coming from this crowd.
      - BugsJustFindMe 7mo ago
        People don't want to join "an instance". People don't want to care about what "an instance" is which also means being asked to be aware of things like instance-specific moderation rules. And I don't know what it's like now, but cross-server following used to be quite annoying.

177 points by wrxd 7mo ago

Puff piece with 1000+ words that doesn't ever assert anything in particular that the author was wrong about. But if you enjoy a babbling endorsement. However you will be left hanging about what corner of the largely inscrutable "fediverse" the author is bleating about. Make no mistake, mastodon feeds are prone to shameless promotions, scams, and attention whoring that infects all social media, but it's still marginal and so seems quaint. To get a sense of this skim sfba.social which is a feed of trending posts with a U.S. west coast vibe.

jaggs 7mo ago
Thank you for your opinion.
phaser 7mo ago
Yeah, the choice of title is indeed strange. But it does convey a personal point of view about the platform very well. Largely inscrutable? Compared to what?
bigthymer 7mo ago
> Puff piece with 1000+ words that doesn't ever assert anything in particular that the author was wrong about His article mostly talks about other things but I think his title is sufficient. He says that he never thought that the news would become so unreliable that he would end up getting his news from randos on Bluesky who simply share what they know without an intention to monetize it.
dekken_ 7mo ago
For me, having been on fedi for like 7 years now, there are cool places, and there are not so cool places. I might be more lucky than most in that I barely need to curate my time there, cause I follow cool people, and so I just see what they like too
- Imustaskforhelp 7mo ago
  > cause I follow cool people, and so I just see what they like too Maybe offtopic but I was reading something on hackernews and thought about something like this yesterday as the world starts getting more brand-ed and corporate-y that perhaps its up to the average person to share the list of cool people/things they know. But I don't think that a follow itself might be the largest indicator of showing others what cool people are. Yesterday, I tried linkhut (https://ln.ht https://ln.ht) and added it to my profile. It just has cool things that I found online and I have written minor notes below it on why I think the things are cool or not. I am curious to know but can some idea like this take off within the fediverse community/ say personally for you? Can you have a linkhut profile that I can just see which can have cool people that you found and why you think that they are cool? And if I think that you are cool, then I can have some of that coolness be transferred to people you think cool too? I used to be on fediverse and I think that there are some very cool people on fediverse, its just very hard to find them sometimes.
  - dekken_ 7mo ago
    > as the world starts getting more brand-ed and corporate-y... I gravitate toward what I consider authenticate/consistent people which for me at least has seemed to work out as I also try to be that way. > Can you have a linkhut profile... It doesn't really work that way, you can see other peoples public conversations to see how they interact, as a metric for their personalities, which, might be more work. It's network effects moreso. as for https://ln.ht https://ln.ht, I can see it working for some people, but personally I think there's a bit too much going on, sensory overload.
    - Imustaskforhelp 7mo ago
      > as for https://ln.ht https://ln.ht, I can see it working for some people, but personally I think there's a bit too much going on, sensory overload. I do understand the sensory overload aspect. I personally don't use the social aspect of it that much. Essentially the idea that I want to say was that even the people that I follow (say on bluesky) etc. sometimes I don't know why I follow them exactly either or any idea of giving this info to the world for that matter. The idea of linkhut interests me especially with their note section: I can have a profile of cool things/people I found and I can share it to world and I can try to explain the "why cool?" so that people can judge things on that aspect and it gives more info, that's all. Unfortunately even for fediverse/ all social media. You really can't end up writing the exact reason you follow someone as a comment everytime you follow someone. Sometimes sure but not always and those comments can get muddled up with other comments that you write while using the platform itself. > It doesn't really work that way, you can see other peoples public conversations to see how they interact, as a metric for their personalities, which, might be more work. It's network effects moreso. I suppose so. But I think the idea to me for using something like linkhut isn't for people to offload searching how people interact/the metric as you mention but rather the fact that we are unable to find these people/products in the first place! There has been too much stuff going on in the world in social media that there are genuinely cool people/projects that you don't even see. My point is similar to outlinks in the sense of sharing some visibility to those who don't have such visibility in the darkness of internet sometimes. I only sort of found it yesterday so but that's my take on it. I am curious to hear yours though.
gzread 7mo ago
He asserts to being wrong about the Fediverse being as bad as all the rest, because the Fediverse is full of real people instead of corporatized bullshit.
AJ007 7mo ago
Very much the puff piece of someone living in a social media bubble. The real problem is how the fediverse is going to survive the onslaught of laws related to social media age verification, data retention, data privacy, data not-privacy (breaking e2e encryption and retaining data for a really long time to spy on users), etc. There are a lot of problematic laws right now, but the velocity of new laws is alarming. One can make an argument that compliance is possible -- but it isn't free. I don't see how small, independent websites will survive. Operators chose not to follow the laws (which sometimes conflict with each other.) As long as you don't scale too much or the operators or anonymous they can probably get away with it. I use Mastodon. I use Twitter. Twitter is still fine as long as you keep your follow list clean. That means unfollowing people who post noise, which somehow people haven't figured out 17 years later?? Only view the chronological feed. Could this all have just been RSS feeds? Probably.
kgwxd 7mo ago
The win for mastodon is that it's a choice to view those feeds at all. Some have none by default (e.g. librem.one), you only see who you follow. Same with bluesky. "Discover" is there by default, but can be removed. It's a tad annoying in some places, like when your feed is "empty", they still show it at the bottom, but it's a big banner which, for me, is a perfect indicator to stop scrolling. You can also hide "Trending Tooics".
8organicbits 7mo ago
> mastodon feeds are prone to shameless promotions, scams, and attention whoring My mastodon feed contains only the users I follow. If they post unwanted things I unfollow them. Mastodon doesn't force you to see content from people you don't follow. The sfba trending list has engagement-bait, but you shouldn't look there (on any social media site) if you don't want that sort of content.
Synaesthesia 7mo ago
>sfba.social Seems pretty cool TBH

sn0n 7mo ago

[flagged]

DeathArrow 7mo ago

Why would I be interested in random people's opinions on various things? I wasted a few minutes of my life reading this rant. It was a total loss. I haven't been entertained by it and I couldn't find anything useful in it. Just the ramblings of a bitter person with which the Internet is filled.

izacus 7mo ago
Ok random person with opinion on a thing.
pandini 7mo ago
Says the person commenting on a site where random people give their opinions about various things..
Imustaskforhelp 7mo ago
> Just the ramblings of a bitter person with which the Internet is filled. https://mirror.forum https://mirror.forum [0] [0]:(I recently bought it and it was idling around, your comment made me think what I should add on it so I did. I hope you evaluate that you were being bitter in your comment as well) > Why would I be interested in random people's opinions on various things? Sadly, if you are asking such question, I don't think that the blog post was intended for ya.
grosswait 7mo ago
“So when Twitter was accidentally purchased by a fascist high on ketamine” was enough to predict the rest of

boriskourt 7mo ago

I’ve had an awesome experience the last five years running instances for me and friends. So many nice interactions. I recommend running an instance for people you know well. It can still connect to everyone else, but you have your own little corner to feel more connected in.

cykros 7mo ago
Everyone else, as long as they don't defederate your server as petty tyrants. Which has always been the drawback of the Fediverse. Nostr has delivered what I had hoped to get from the Fediverse: actually decentralized, censorship proof social media (and then some), wherein you actually maintain full ownership of your own identity (as it's a keypair, not an account). Where if you get banned from one relay or other, you just move to a new one, and everything comes with you. Where if nobody wants to platform you, you can literally run your own relay on your PHONE and stay connected to the network. And yea, there is at least one bridge between Nostr and Mastodon (Mostr), so you don't even have to give up on talking to your Mastodon buddies. That it also does so much more than social media is icing on the cake. Really leverages its existence as a protocol rather than a platform to use the Internet as it was always meant to be.
- boriskourt 7mo ago
  Then I don’t really care about them if they don’t want to hang out with me. It works as intended.

dgellow 7mo ago

Love that writing. I didn’t expect a full size blog post like that based on the title. That makes me very nostalgic of the old blog era

archagon 7mo ago
There’s a good chance that era will come back. With the overwhelming amount of AI slop coming down the pipeline, I think many people will seek content unapolagetically written by real people.

tamad 7mo ago

> We all need pointless hobbies, but I care about YouTube stars like I care about distant stars dying. It’s interesting to someone somewhere but those people don’t talk to me. I mostly use social media as a place to waste time, not a platform to form para-social relationships to narcissists. I prefer my narcissism farm to table. I’d rather dig a grave with a rusty spoon than watch a Twitch “star”. I don’t really care about the substance of this article, but the style is entertaining. Curious for anyone who writes in a similar style - do people actually compose like this breathlessly, or are these kinds of lines wrought over several revisions? I know everyone’s different, but I can’t imagine writing like this on a first pass.

0ckpuppet 7mo ago
AI? I just read it and remembered how I got busted for writing papers for friends. Style and voice are tangible and I'm getting an uncanny valley creepy crawlies from the opening of this article. edit, maybe some AI segments, I would guess the author is young and will write differently in a few years.
- beepbooptheory 7mo ago
  Weird sentiment to have for some guy that says "uncanny valley creepy crawlies." Did you get your friends good grades??
nailer 7mo ago
It’s a British newspaper columnist style. Read anything from AA Gill if you like it.
alance 7mo ago
There are probably parallels with rap artists. There are those that improvise and flow. (the rest of us edit and re-edit)
beepbooptheory 7mo ago
If you grew up writing (and reading) a lot, it's quite natural to have a "voice." It makes sense too: it's akin to having spent a lot of time with a certain person. Although, I do not know if this is really that shining of an example of anything, although a fine blog post! If you are surprised, I wholeheartedly recommend just reading more. Something clicks after 1000 pages of Swann's Way, or Infinite Jest, or even the Gnus manual where you simply must reckon with a certain kind natural voice that can be cultivated and exhibited without exertion, without even a "thought." And I know the implication here is maybe underhanded, and that you feel its "entertaining" as a party trick is; where one compensates for content with flowery prose. That might be fair, but I see this charge more and more, and I just worry one day everyone is just going to deem reading and writing itself as a waste, as a compensation for some unnamed other thing we should all be doing (optimizing productivity). Which is why I must defend every labored, silly metaphor I read now to my death from all yall editors that popped up three years ago.

AreShoesFeet000 7mo ago

> If the American press had given me 20 minutes of airtime I could have convinced everyone they don’t want to get involved with Greenland. On one hand the author recognizes the scope of the “protocol wars” as a rational thing being irrelevant in the actually relevant time span. On the other hand, the author swears that they can bring rationality to a deeply emotional matter through discourse.

dathinab 7mo ago
you are aware that he doesn't actually believe that he "[...] could have convinced [..]" it's a manner of speech a instrument of telling a story a way to express how completely absurd "US getting involved into Greenland" is for anyone who understands the land (geography/weather) and people even unrelated to geopolitical aspects like alienating allies
- AreShoesFeet000 7mo ago
  My argument stands whether the author meant to be read literally or not. Below the surface it’s still about the tension of rationality and irrationality within social settings.

jonathanstrange 7mo ago

This is nicely written but I found some of the views strange. The most disturbing one to me is that the author wants news from social media and claims they have troubles getting news (e.g. criticizing the Washington Post). Not only is it obviously problematic to attempt to get news from social media and everybody knows that, it's also very bold to insinuate that there is lack of access to news. Maybe US citizens get this impression from TV news infotainment, which is indeed abysmal. Okay, I get that. Nevertheless, there are plenty of other sources, we're being swamped with news and know more about what's happening in the world than ever before. Normally, people also complain about the opposite, that they get anxiety from too much exposure to news. So I don't get that point.

nailer 7mo ago
I want to know exactly how far the Iranians have gotten against the IGRC in the last 24 hours. I subscribe to WSJ but they don’t have that details. X and Reddit do, with some obvious caveats (I do find Community Notes on X very good though).
- Synaesthesia 7mo ago
  Iranians are not rebelling against the IRGC because why would they? Generally an outside attack makes the government more popular, not less.
  - jfengel 7mo ago
    They're not popular, but going outside in a flurry of missiles isn't good for your health. It's not like the US has coordinated with anyone on the ground to plan a revolt. They seem to have just imagined one will materialize. They still don't love the regime but today they share a common enemy.
    - lyu07282 7mo ago
      This reminds me of the US soldiers after the Iraq invasion not understanding why the population didn't celebrate them as liberators. Even young Iraqis initially optimistic about the future were quickly disillusioned by the reality. Two full decades in Afghanistan "liberating" the Afghani people from the Taliban, when you left it took less than a day to undo with zero resistance, that's how much the population appreciated your efforts to "bring them liberal democracy". I suppose it's because the US public never had to reconcile their fantasies with reality in quite the same way as them.

satisfice 7mo ago

I just tried to check out the Fediverse and found utter confusion. I'm not saying its bad-- I'm saying I am bewildered. There are communities I can join, but I can't tell how I should choose a community. I could find no way to search for communities that might be a fit. Apparently there are a lot of different kinds of social media under the broad banner of the Fediverse. How should I choose, and what are the implications of choosing? I suppose I could pick a random community. But what's the point? I don't know.

throwaway1492 7mo ago
This is a big turn off for me too. I don’t want to “figure it out for myself”. That’s why I became catholic as an adult. With the fediverse I have an overwhelming fear of missing out if I pick the wrong communities. I feel like it needs aggregation which defeats the purpose.
- cassepipe 7mo ago
  Are you not afraid of having picked the wrong community when choosing Catholicism ?
threetonesun 7mo ago
It’s a little wild to read comments like this because this was just how the Internet worked before Twitter got popular. I still get “happy birthday” emails from forums I joined 20+ years ago.
- Gareth321 7mo ago
  Communities used to be themed. Honda forums. Programming. Gardening. Video games. Etc. We've been spoiled in the era of Reddit where all these communities could be found in the same place. Lemmy tried to replicate that experience by having a video games community in every instance. This has caused a lot of confusion and fragmentation. It's very difficult to figure out where to discuss video games (or any other topic). I think it would have made a lot more sense to theme instances instead of making instances Reddit clones.

darqis 7mo ago

The Fediverse has one problem, concentration of users on few instances, mastodon.social being the largest. And cancel culture. Highly politically motivated cancel culture. What right do they believe to have to dictate to their users what the can and can't read? That should be solely in the user's hand. The irony of writing this in HN is ... whatever the right word is Also, fragmentation and visibility. It's neigh impossible to find interesting content if you're not on the main big instances.

onion2k 7mo ago
What right do they believe to have to dictate to their users what the can and can't read? That should be solely in the user's hand. Are they choosing what people can read, or are they choosing what they're willing to federate? No one is stopping people writing and publishing things on federated services. People are only choosing what they're willing to broadcast over the part of the service they run.
- Angostura 7mo ago
  Exactly. Each instance is deciding who to federate with and each user is deciding which instance to join
  - deleted 7mo ago
    [deleted]
  - xigoi 7mo ago
    Despite that, Fediverse promoters love to say “It doesn’t matter which instance you join”.
    - neogodless 7mo ago
      I think it should be ever so slightly more nuanced than that. It doesn't matter which instance you join if you're just getting started, and don't know enough to make a meaningful decision about which instance to join. After a week or a month, you might understand how it works a bit better, and also which communities exist, and might have an informed opinion about which community you resonate with.

Synaesthesia 7mo ago

>I want news I don’t want your endless meta commentary on the news. I want commentary on the news. We should be critiquing the news and it's way more interesting that just uncritically accepting mainstream narratives.

brabel 7mo ago
News used to be mostly neutral delivery of facts that occurred recently. It was not supposed to be following a narrative or whatever. But that is boring for many people and the American media found out they could make news much more interesting by adding their spicy takes on it, and it worked. Now people watch the news as a form of entertainment. I find that horrifying, the reason you should be informed about the world is so that you can participate in it effectively. News today is much more propaganda than information, and that gives the opposite effect of making you a more effective citizen.
DauntingPear7 7mo ago
Pretty much all US news is just blindly stating “what’s happening” which lends credence to the current admins (seemingly) illegal/poor behavior. Just accept that the president can start a war, no notes.
- Leno1225 7mo ago
  Pretty much all US news is the exact opposite of a broad and bare presentation of the facts. It’s a narrow set of facts presented through either a partisan lens or a purely business context, the difference is in what base facts are chosen to work from and none of the news agencies do a good job presenting even most of the relevant facts on any issue.

ArchieScrivener 7mo ago

Reads like an intro to a Portlandia remake, only its 2010 nostalgia mixed with heavy handed Reddit-tier remembrances and jibes. Your 'social media' purity is still some network engineers bastardization of bits. Forums, Usenet, irc, email groups,... Lamenting what was or what could have been is useless when there is still work to be done directing the outcome. Vent. Move on.

amelius 7mo ago

> If the American press had given me 20 minutes of airtime I could have convinced everyone they don’t want to get involved with Greenland. We’re not tough enough as a people to survive in Greenland, much less “take it over”. Greenlandic people shrug off horrific injuries hundreds of kilometers from medical help with a smile. I watched a Greenlandic toddler munch meat from the spine of a seal with its head very much intact. We aren’t equipped to fuck with these people, they are the real deal. Wow.

dionian 7mo ago
The US has long since wanted to purchase Greenland, not "fight" them, for strategic reasons. I'm not sure why there is this fantasy that the US is going to fight the Greenland people? Honestly.
- DFHippie 7mo ago
  Because the US was threatening to take over Greenland by force maybe? There's a reason Denmark rushed soldiers there.
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
- jfengel 7mo ago
  “But we need it really for international, for world security, and I think we’re going to get it. One way or the other, we’re going to get it,” -- Donald Trump, March 4, 2025
- buster 7mo ago
  https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cwyg1jg8xkmo https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cwyg1jg8xkmo https://edition.cnn.com/2026/01/10/politics/us-will-take-greenland-the-hard-way-if-it-cant-do-it-the-easy-way-trump-says#:~:text=%E2%80%9CI%20would%20like,fan%2C%E2%80%9D%20Trump%20said https://edition.cnn.com/2026/01/10/politics/us-will-take-gre...
- madjo80 7mo ago
  The president of the United States literally said that they were going to get Greenland, one way or another. If I were to say "I'm going to get Dionian's house, one way or another" would you not prepare yourself for an invasion?

zaps 7mo ago

Holy shit that’s a lot of windows

znpy 7mo ago

> So of course media corporations became bargaining chips for the oligarchs' actual businesses. I stopped reading here. This line shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the world and essential blindness to author’s own biases. Media corporations ALWAYS have been bargaining chips to the oligarchs’ actual business, whoever the current politician in power is.

lyu07282 7mo ago
It's a bit ironic that I want to point people so badly to Edward S. Herman and Chomsky's work on the propaganda model to explain why the current war propaganda in the west in support of Operation Epstein's Fury is nothing new. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_model https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_model

trentnix 7mo ago

[flagged]

kemotep 7mo ago
But Elon Musk literally made the website unusable because now it no longer shows profiles in chronological order and posts are now essentially just screenshots. 12 years of using twitter without an account and in a few months he made the site completely unusable. Ignoring anything else this is a massive change that was implemented shortly after he took over and now I cannot use the site anymore.
- trentnix 7mo ago
  That's not been my experience at all. I only view the "Follow" list because I don't care about the "algorithm". I keep my follow list pretty tight and am pretty aggressive about removing people that post too frequently or without focus. It works just fine for me, but I'm very casual in my usage.
  - kemotep 7mo ago
    I don’t have a follow list because I never had a twitter account. Over 12 years of using the site without an account and now that isn’t possible.
- eudamoniac 7mo ago
  > Elon Musk literally made the website unusable If it's literally unusable, how are millions of people still using it?
  - kemotep 7mo ago
    I used Twitter for over a decade without an account and now you essentially are unable to do so without jumping through significant hoops. That is how he made the website unusable. Like a billion people have Facebook/Instagram accounts but Facebook is equally unusable without an account.

j3th9n 7mo ago

[flagged]

DaSHacka 7mo ago
sadly many such cases, I think some are just predisposed to it more than others

PKop 7mo ago

> I want news I don’t want your endless meta commentary on the news. And you expected to find this on a decentralized social media platform?

smitty1e 7mo ago

> See I had forgotten the one golden rule of capitalism. To thrive in capitalism one must be amoral. Now you can be wildly sickeningly successful with morals but you cannot reach that absolute zenith of shareholder value. Either you accept a lower share price and don’t commit atrocities or you become evil. There is no third option. A platinum rule might be that everything has a lifecycle. Trading the morals for gold might drag out the demise by buying some time, but the real point is to preserve the morals and re-invent the tech, or take the money and run and let, e.g., an Elon Musk assume the Slim Pickins position and ride the tech to its detonation.

kkfx 7mo ago

Let's say that for news we need the "economic web", meaning no more "newspapers", but independent reporters with their own blogs and followers who micro-pay for individual articles by downloading and truly spreading them from a human to another instead of "many humans toward a network hub". This would solves the censorship problem, as you have thousands of scattered sources that are impossible to control or corrupt all at once, and it generates pluralism where the background noise is mitigated by personal scoring, like the WoT of GNUPG back in the day or Nostr now. The FLOSS foundation guarantees neutrality, while distributed sources like Radicle ensure it can't be censored. But... for this to succeed, you need LOADS of participants; otherwise, the small amount of compensation collected isn't enough to live on or even maintain as a side hustle. It still works to some extent as long as people doing other things have their say in an interesting way, but it doesn't take off. To get a lot of people, you need to attract a lot of people. Increasing censorship in recent times has made people migrate from Reddit and Discord to other things, but honestly, the alternatives out there are a bit of a mess. Personally, I set up Matrix for family and friends, only because XMPP doesn't seem to attract anyone, and both Matrix and XMPP are largely a pain to self-host properly if you want to include audio/video calls. The "fragmentation" of other tools is total. To attract people, you need a single, slick go get -able, cargo build -able, pip -able (and so on) application that does pretty much everything without a ton of dependencies. That way, someone discovers it, it's easy, they come for one or two features and discover others, providing enough mass to kickstart the spread. The Fediverse model does not offer that so far, Nostr is only a little bit better, ZeroNet is dead, ... It seems that recent/young developers can't grasp this, so caught up as they are in what they do at work, the "zero barrier to entry" of living on someone else's servers, which hamstrings every FLOSS project. Creating countless separate applications useful for selling services in a commercial model, but it's a recipe for failure in FLOSS. No idea to integrate client and server in a single app to solve even if DHT and alike are there since decades... The mind is one, so the application must be one and integrated to cover the bulk of needs in a single environment. Emacs understood this a long time ago, Smalltalk workstations even earlier; today, it seems most people still can't wrap their heads around it...

skybrian 7mo ago

I'm glad he found interesting people to follow, but since he didn't make any recommendations, it's not really actionable for anyone else. They would be starting from scratch. Results will vary.

anotherevan 7mo ago
True, although I wonder if that was one of the points he is trying to make. In any case, you could go to his Mastodon account listed at the bottom of the article and check out who he is following.

sqrtminusone 7mo ago

Yeah, no, getting out of the Fediverse was my best decision, or perhaps second only to getting out of Twitter. I think the model itself of following people (instead of, e.g. following topics) is basically irredeemable, you either: a) follow only people with whom you 100% agree, which is very dangerous; b) follow only people who post cat pictures or anything else as unobjectionable; c) get a lot of negative emotions from all the nonsense in the feed. It was the latter for me, I still have nightmares from having to ban the #NixOS tag from my feed, from my entire feed approving of the murder of some random insurance CEO, from the endless "AI is scam" takes, etc., etc... And I can't really unfollow someone who posts 75% of nonsense if they post 25% of interesting technical stuff. Because then my entire feed is gone. You can /technically/ follow topics on Mastodon, but that doesn't really work as it should. Besides: > So in this complete breakdown of the press came in the Fediverse. It became the only reliable source of information I had. Like, no. Getting news from social media is a dead end, is this not obvious just from looking at people who get their news from Twitter? In the very best case one might follow reliable journalists, but then one should follow the places they work. What's more likely is that the author has found a very comfortable bubble. I have hope that there can be some actual truth-seeking information aggregation algorithm that can finally replace the very imperfect media system, but so far it's not even close. It's very ironic that "a fascist high on ketamine" has, against all odds, managed to produce Community Notes, which is the best attempt so far, but it's like, a few orders of magnitude off being capable of replacing the so-called "legacy media".

timbit42 7mo ago
Why do you follow people on the Fediverse? You can follow hashtags instead, or some mix of that. That's what I do. That way I get what I'm looking for without getting all the unrelated cruft of following people who post on a wide variety of topics.

jauntywundrkind 7mo ago

Mastodon is extremely technologically stagnant, with one and only one player controlling the entire technical ecosystem. There is a huge lack of interesting apps or innovation. The protocol is very narrowly defined, and does not have any Postel's Law characteristics. You have to use the limited API offered in the Mastodon form. There is starting to be some interest from ActivityPub in defining their own client APIs. But this gathering together of people is only just starting, and it's unknown where that effort will go or when it will see traction in adoption. It also sucks being moderated by whatever Fedi you are on. And the very poor state of account portability sucks. There's also internally a very aggressive culture, against devs doing fun and interesting things with the social media data. The social rules of engagement seem to be that you can only enjoy Mastodon as a feed that goes by, and you cannot download or analyze deeply. You can't index or search, except with strong carved out cases. People building search or indexing tools are harassed and abused. I strong recommend this excellent write up, which does a far better treatment than I could offer, on Mastodon: https://connectedplaces.online/reports/fr156-share-where/ https://connectedplaces.online/reports/fr156-share-where/ Atproto has none of these issues, and has a rich ecosystem of devs building neat tools like RSS readers (skyboard), writing (greengale), book reading (bookhive), trail making (side trail), annotations (margin.at), events (smoke signal), chat (roomy), social/research bookmarking (semble), video streaming (Streamplace), media watching (pop feed), key attestation (keytrace), git (tangled), and yes, devs: containers (atcr). I'm sorry but Mastodon is a dead end, a bad design, going no where, bereft of interesting dev engagement, with data that is hard to share & make interesting use of, data that is extremely narrowly constrained in shape/form. I am envious of the dev-centric culture there. But it astounds me that devs would choose to exist on a place that is so technologically unalive & so low potential.

archagon 7mo ago
It’s weird that you think a social network needs to have some sort of technological drive or entrepreneurial spirit to be relevant. If anything, this will lead to its inevitable enshittification, as you can plainly see in Twitter and Facebook.
- jauntywundrkind 7mo ago

scoofy 7mo ago

I feel like there just something about "this thing is slightly difficult to get started using" that keeps normies out and keeps the place reasonable. It's the only way to prevent the Eternal September of a popular social network. I felt a similar experience to this on a trip to Scotland recently. My partner and I visited Iona, and it was just amazing. I suspect it was such a pleasant experience because, while the place is about tourism, it's somehow not cliche shit. I suspect the difficult in accessing the island plays a big role.

krapp 7mo ago
[flagged]
- BugsJustFindMe 7mo ago
  > The only people I've ever heard complain about the slight difficulty are techies Because everyone else has never heard of mastodon or this fediverse shit. Of course you don't hear complaints from people who don't know what it is. > I'll take normies over There are no "normies" as you call them using federated services. They don't want to need to think about server to server federation rules. They want a global central feed.
  - krapp 7mo ago
    I've seen plenty of "normal" and non "techie" people on Mastodon. And the point is the complaints about the "complexity" of Mastodon - which isn't really that complex you can literally join an instance as easily as signing up for a subreddit - are disingenuous coming from this crowd.
    - BugsJustFindMe 7mo ago
      People don't want to join "an instance". People don't want to care about what "an instance" is which also means being asked to be aware of things like instance-specific moderation rules. And I don't know what it's like now, but cross-server following used to be quite annoying.