[HN Gopher] What Is the Fediverse?
___________________________________________________________________
What Is the Fediverse?
Author : booteille
Score : 143 points
Date : 2022-04-28 14:17 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (framatube.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (framatube.org)
| ParsnipsOfSnail wrote:
| I feel a bit disheartened that this site took 30 seconds to load,
| then got as far as "What is the fediverse" then buffered until
| erroring out a minute later. Either the video has gained no
| traction and thus no peers (bad) or adding more people to the
| site crashed it (even worse). Can we not do better?
| smoldesu wrote:
| It's on the frontpage of HN, give 'em a break.
| [deleted]
| nicoburns wrote:
| I like the idea of a fediverse, but I can't help but feel like
| the solution to an open social network will look less like
| Mastodon and more like RSS.
| themodelplumber wrote:
| In case it's interesting...add .rss or .atom to the end of any
| user profile address to get their feed.
|
| Example:
|
| https://oldbytes.space/@marcolas.rss
| mxuribe wrote:
| > ...feel like the solution to an open social network will
| look...
|
| May i ask respectfully, have you even seen and/or used any
| applications within the fediverse? Forgive me, but i interpret
| your statement as if you have not actively seen, used apps on
| the fedi...If that is accurate, may i invite you to at least
| test things out by joining any number of instances, and try one
| of the many, many apps - mobile and web - which allow you to
| richly interact with others across the fediverse...and i think
| you'll see that the experience "looks" like many things, but
| certainly not restricted to RSS or mastodon, etc.
|
| To pick any of the myriad apps and test things out, check out
| this collection of apps:
| https://fediverse.party/en/miscellaneous/
|
| To learn a bit more behind the fediverse's history, feel free
| to review entries on the following page:
| https://fediverse.party/en/chronicles/
|
| I certainly hope that your test run is an enjoyable one, or at
| least interesting and informative. While i'm a fan of the
| fediverse, it is not lost on me that much like other sorts of
| human behavior - like conventional social media silos - there
| is no *real* escape from trolls, jerks, awful people. Cheers!
| NoraCodes wrote:
| Why not both? Mastodon works well for many, but I definitely
| agree that there's space for another blogging-focused AP
| implementation or even a new protocol!
| remram wrote:
| My main issue with the current Fediverse (i.e. ActivityPub
| universe) is that no one actually use the client-to-server
| protocol. Only applications federate with each other, exchanging
| a basic level of their internal representation over the server-
| to-server protocol, and you need accounts in each of them to go
| past the basic functions (text comment & retweet).
|
| I feel like it would be much better if I could use a single
| identity and a single "ActivityPub server" for all my
| applications.
|
| In the current situation, being able to retweet my PeerTube video
| from my Mastodon account has little advantage about just tweeting
| a link to it. Likewise, commenting on a Lemmy thread from my
| Mastodon account is ok but I can't really see the thread as a
| thread without logging into Lemmy. Watching a PeerTube video, I
| can post a comment using my Mastodon account but that requires 5+
| click and a change of application.
|
| I am not sure why the ecosystem went this way. The client-to-
| server protocol was readily available when the Fediverse was
| kickstarted.
| mcv wrote:
| Not sure what you mean. I'm on Friendica, and I can follow,
| reshare and comment on posts from people on other platforms
| with no problem. I don't need accounts on other servers for
| this, though I'm sure my interaction with them is limited to
| whatever Friendica supports. I don't doubt you can do more if
| you actually get accounts on different systems, but that's a
| choice you have. I don't think you need to do it if you don't
| want to.
| remram wrote:
| Follow and comment are the _only_ things that are supported
| across platforms. That is what I mean by "exchanging at a
| basic level". To use any of the various features that makes
| the various applications worthwhile, you have to go create an
| account in that application and subscribe to people's
| accounts from there.
|
| When Gitea implements federated merge requests and tickets,
| you will be able to follow repositories from Mastodon and
| comment on issues from there. That's great! But to do
| anything else (create/assign/close issues, open/review merge
| requests, ...) you will have to create a separate Gitea
| account and use it to interact with Gitea users. This is a
| serious limit to "interacting with a whole diverse universe".
| grishka wrote:
| The C2S part of ActivityPub is, to put it mildly, cumbersome.
| It also shifts way too much logic to the client and prevents an
| efficient database design.
|
| There can, theoretically, be a "dumb" AP server that implements
| both S2S and C2S and expects the client to do all the heavy
| lifting. In practice, all current ActivityPub servers are
| "smart". They treat the S2S protocol as more of an API, and
| have their own web UI with a specific user experience
| (Mastodon, Pleroma, and Misskey are microblogs, PeerTube is a
| video platform, Lemmy is a link aggregator, Smithereen is a
| social network, and so on). Interactions between these
| different experiences generally work on a best-effort basis.
| You can't shove Reddit into Twitter UX and expect something
| nice to come out, no matter how hard you try.
| remram wrote:
| I'm not recommending that all server-side logic be inside of
| that single ActivityPub server.
|
| What I would like is to run a "dumb" ActivityPub server that
| would hold all my activity and federate, by receiving and
| sending arbitrary JSONLD documents. This would be my only
| identity. Then, other servers like PeerTube, Gitea, etc can
| talk to that server for their federating needs.
|
| When I stumble on a video post on Mastodon, I would have a
| link to open it in my PeerTube instance, where peer-to-peer
| video transmission would be implemented; but whether I
| retweet or reply from Mastodon or PeerTube, the same identity
| would be used. When I stumble on a merge request on Lemmy, I
| would have a link to open it in my Gitea instance, where Git
| repositories would be supported; but whether I upvote it from
| Lemmy or approve it from Gitea, the same identity would be
| used.
|
| This would fit the narrative of the video.
|
| > Imagine if you could share videos, events, instant
| messages, microblogs with the whole universe. Imagine if it
| didn't matter which planet you came from.
|
| > Your login on any of those services allows you to interact
| with a whole diverse universe.
| Animats wrote:
| Yes, the Fediverse isn't federated enough. Framatube is one of
| the organizations behind PeerTube. But PeerTube isn't very
| federated. It's just offloaded onto viewing clients. I think.
|
| Here's a video of mine supposedly on PeerTube:
|
| https://video.hardlimit.com/w/peBesyAgtzfRWS5FnDQQtn
|
| Well, it's really on Hardlimit, which just outsources some of
| the playback bandwidth. I can't, as far as I know, play that
| without going to Hardlimit's web site. I can't even embed it
| without getting Hardlimit's branding. (Getting to full screen
| mode on mobile is really hard because their top and bottom
| banners get in the way of the video controls.) I ought to be
| able to put that long random key into other PeerTube sites and
| play it, but that does not seem to be possible. This is not
| "federation". It's a walled garden with outsourcing.
|
| The video plays fine. I'm now using PeerTube for my technical
| videos, where I need streaming but the audience is people who
| find out about it on technical sites.
|
| The federated video crowd needs to 1) get their act together,
| and 2) get some major forum systems to recognize their URLs as
| embedded video, as those systems do for Youtube, Twitter, and
| often Vimeo. That would at least bring them up to where Gyazo
| is.
|
| The video is a pitch deck. A good one. But it's a pitch deck
| for something that's not fully usable yet.
| remram wrote:
| You are very misinformed. Here is your video on a random
| instance I found in the instance list [1]:
| https://peertube.ignifi.me/w/peBesyAgtzfRWS5FnDQQtn
|
| [1]: https://joinpeertube.org/instances
| frenchy wrote:
| Did you try that URL? When I go there it says it's not
| available and directs me to the source URL.
| Animats wrote:
| "This video is not available on this instance. Do you
| want to be redirected on the origin instance:
| https://video.hardlimit.com..."
| tedunangst wrote:
| Are you logged into those other peertube sites?
|
| Most AP implementations that reshared all known content
| quickly discovered they were hosting stuff that made other
| people mad, and then those other people made lots of noise,
| because they couldn't tell the difference between rehosting
| and originating.
| themodelplumber wrote:
| I'm on oldbytes.space and find it pretty fun to get to know
| Mastodon's corner of the Fediverse so far. Hashtags are really
| important for discovery right now, but it looks like other
| discovery features are in the works.
|
| I also gave SL and OpenSim a look, and OpenSim has been pretty
| fun to explore, even from the outside.
|
| One example community: https://coopersville.mystrikingly.com/
|
| - @marcolas@oldbytes.space
| Dzugaru wrote:
| A couple of ELI5 followup questions for this cool ELI5 video:
|
| 1) Why would you create a new provider, why not just use [insert
| biggest provider name here]? In other words, whats' stopping this
| thing from centralization? It's not like you need to build a
| rocket to move to the other planet, right?
|
| 2) How do you so easily move videos from one provider to another?
| The amount of data is enormous, you can't just copy it
| everywhere?
| mcv wrote:
| You might not agree with the existing provider. Don't like the
| way Facebook mangles your feed and feeds you crap? Join another
| server instead, but keep following all your friends on
| Facebook! (This would work if Facebook supported federation,
| which it does not.)
| KSPAtlas wrote:
| I for example don't agree with how mastodon.social is
| handling things
| matsemann wrote:
| One big hurdle to get going is to find which instance to
| subscribe to. When joining twitter, you just join twitter. Now
| there are multiple, and I don't know the ramifications of which
| one to choose. Will I suddenly be blocked by half the instances
| if I choose a lesser known one?
|
| A second hurdle is that I think most people don't want to start
| from scratch. I want to keep my followers and those I'm
| following.
| DrewADesign wrote:
| And considering that socialization isn't as productive without
| fellow socializers, we should consider the non-technical user
| path.
|
| For my, say, brother-- the first hurdle would be processing my
| explanation of the distinctions between an _instance_ , a
| _server_ , and a _service,_ plus the basics of federation. The
| second hurdle would be figuring out how he'll break it to me
| when he gives up and re-activates his Twitter account.
| gs17 wrote:
| That first hurdle has kept me from bothering with the Fediverse
| entirely. And instances' rules make me feel at the mercy of
| either the moderation or the userbase, depending on which end
| of the permissiveness spectrum they fall on.
| jancsika wrote:
| Fediverse: a bunch of software waiting idle in the hope that a
| hero will arrive to make significant and lasting changes to
| copyright and fair use in order for any of it to be useful.
|
| Ooh, this decentralized beebob _could_ be a great place to
| discover and distribute Scihub content.
|
| Ooh, I can sure _imagine_ myself watching a sci-fi movie that 's
| old enough to vote and buy alcohol on "Framatube."
|
| Ooh, a filesystem suitable for multiple planets, IFF planet #2 is
| filled _only_ with Pirate Party members with their force shields
| turned on and on constant watch for slow blades.
|
| Ooh, a user-writable international encyclopedia that isn't... oh
| yeah, that actually exists because you _can 't_ copyright fucking
| facts. At least there's that, twenty-first century!
|
| Edit: clarification to make exclamation even sadder
| prvc wrote:
| IPFS has nothing to do with the "fediverse" (although I'm not
| sure what the latter is exactly), apart from being distributed
| in some sense.
| msla wrote:
| Federated protocols _have_ been used for email and message
| boards.
|
| Multiple times, in fact, counting FIDO and Usenet and Bitnet as
| separate developments.
|
| So it isn't like this is a new idea, or like it's impossible to
| do with current copyright law.
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| In fact Usenet is still very much alive for the purpose of
| evading said copyright laws
|
| Sadly it's no longer alive for its original purpose :(
| jefurii wrote:
| Also the phone system, per the video. That's run by large
| corporations, often with monopolies, but at least they
| interoperate.
| riffic wrote:
| it's amazing the international telephone system even worked
| at all.
|
| ma bell was quite centralized but there were many attempts
| to get them to interoperate both domestically and
| internationally, even to the point of having a very
| rigorous regulation regime (nationalization too.)
| PaulHoule wrote:
| I think when people hear "*-verse" there are two common hot
| takes: (1) this is something that doesn't include me, and (2)
| move on folks, nothing more to see here.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| And Wikipedia isn't even a fediverse... It's a central wiki run
| by a good, benevolent dictatorship.
|
| If it went down tomorrow, it would certainly be mirrored and
| re-upped almost immediately, but it's not "federated" in the
| same sense as e.g. a Mastodon, IRC, email, or USENET.
| throwanem wrote:
| The point of saying "fediverse" at all is to foreground interop
| via the ActivityPub protocol, rather than Mastodon which
| happens to be by some measures (ie "the most populous one or
| two instances run vanilla") currently the most popular user
| agent.
|
| You might as well argue that, because not every browser ever
| written has an active userbase, HTTP is pointless.
| Kye wrote:
| I can't figure out what any of this has to do with the
| fediverse. It sounds like you're complaining about the web3
| grift. They have absolutely nothing to do with each other.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| What is the easiest way to get started as a user on a federated
| social network?
|
| I glanced at Mastodon when information started flowing about it
| but I was (and am) supremely disinterested in running /
| moderating my own node. But I'd be interested in joining someone
| else's node. What does that look like these days?
| btdmaster wrote:
| Pick a server: https://joinmastodon.org/
| enriquto wrote:
| I cannot see the video, but it seems that it's the same thing as
| described here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fediverse
|
| If the author of the video is around here: please, put textual
| transcripts for video-impaired users! (or simply, for people who
| do not want to launch a video and prefer to read).
| btdmaster wrote:
| They are there! Settings (Cog icon) -> Subtitles/CC -> Language
| enriquto wrote:
| curl
| https://framatube.org/w/4294a720-f263-4ea4-9392-cf9cea4d5277
| | less
|
| I don't see them there
| mminer237 wrote:
| ...That's because they're loaded by JavaScript upon
| selecting the option. You're not going to be able to find
| them with curl.
|
| The direct URL would be: https://framatube.org/lazy-
| static/video-captions/2f199e59-5c...
| enriquto wrote:
| Thanks! This URL should be easily accessible from the
| main site. URLs linking to textual information are the
| backbone of the internet and one of the best
| international standards that mankind has created.
| mcv wrote:
| After the death of Google+, I joined a Diaspora pod that was
| created specifically for Google+ refugees. Now that pod is about
| the die (it still exist, but the owner died, so we're not sure
| how long it will last), so everybody is joining other federated
| social networks. Many moved to another Diaspora pod, some moved
| to Mastodon. I moved to Friendica, which has the advantage of
| being able to follow people on both Diaspora and Mastodon.
|
| I haven't found a good Android app for it yet, unfortunately.
| gpsx wrote:
| Is the fediverse a new social network or a concept? I think there
| is hope for it as a general concept if, for example, the US
| government gets mad at someone like Facebook and requires them
| and other social networks/messaging platforms to make their
| content available through standard interfaces. It could be
| something like RSS for posts and other appropriate standards for
| chat, audio calls, video calls, etc. Then someone on [insert
| fledgling social network here] could "follow" someone on Facebook
| and someone on What's App could text someone on WeChat.
| msravi wrote:
| A couple of years ago, there used to be a mastodon instance
| called "Inditoot" that started to gain traction with an Indian
| userbase. The instance moderator's approach to moderating content
| was basically that as long as a post doesn't go against the law,
| it was ok to keep. With twitter being seen as biased to the left,
| the instance attracted a significant crowd that was seen as
| right-leaning.
|
| At some point, users of the mastodon.social instance where most
| of the left-leaning crowd gathered, got their admin to
| preemptively silence the inditoot instance on mastodon.social[1].
| This meant that all toots from the inditoot instance were
| effectively blocked on mastodon.social, and the two sides were
| operating in separate bubbles.
|
| A few months later, the Indian userbase on both mastodon.social
| and inditoot was dead, and everyone was back on twitter, fighting
| and clawing and tearing at each other.
|
| Moral: If you remove the communication links between those nice
| round planets shown in the animation, they become drab and
| dreary, and not worth having at all, and you're back to twitter.
| If you keep the links, then there's no difference between
| federated instances and twitter, and you're back to being twitter
| anyway.
|
| 1. https://twitter.com/Memeghnad/status/1194237305294221315
| MarcellusDrum wrote:
| > If you remove the communication links between those nice
| round planets shown in the animation, they become drab and
| dreary, and not worth having at all, and you're back to
| twitter.
|
| True, if you are the toxic community that was cut out. You know
| who still thinks the Mastodon is worth having? Mastodon.social
| users, who were able to protect themselves from
| unfriendly/unwelcome users, _and_ didn 't have to go back to
| Twitter.
|
| Also, you gave an extreme example, of a left-leaning and right-
| leaning instances not agreeing with each other. But I see no
| reason why an instance mainly populated with geeks and an
| instance mainly populated with gamers/musicians/sport fans
| can't peacefully federate.
| remram wrote:
| And you assume they went back _because of the block_ based
| on...?
|
| Surely it couldn't be that they disliked the UX, that their
| other friends failed to move over, or that those indie-operated
| websites lacked in performance. No, of course we must assume
| it's the lack of fighting.
| i5heu wrote:
| I switched to Mastodon because it is much much easier to
| build a walled garden in which I want to experience.
|
| Twitter ist just a toxic hole with groups of people that
| seems to have nothing more to do than to annoy and harm you.
| josephg wrote:
| I left Twitter after the algorithmic news feed came in.
| "How bad could it be?" I wondered. Really bad. Despite
| carefully curating my Twitter feed to be almost all
| creators doing interesting stuff, Twitter decided what I
| really wanted to see was awful racist politics.
|
| I had a think about it and deleted the app the next day.
| You can blame twitter's users if you want. I blame
| twitter's algorithm for actively finding the most vile
| stuff and shoving it in everyone's faces.
| gnramires wrote:
| I somewhat agree. I think it's important to not censor anyone.
|
| However, it is necessary to curb bad-faith actors: users who
| don't engage civilly and get in the way or overwhelm other
| types of civil discourse.
|
| Disconnecting between instances should be reserved to such
| extreme cases. Otherwise, (if there are too many bad-faith
| actors in a single instance), you should leave to individual
| users.
|
| Moderation is an important concept. How do you promote a
| healthy atmosphere? Downvotes are a kind of crowd-sourced
| moderation that seems to work well. In a federated context, you
| could assign weights to votes of different instances (i.e.
| trusted instances get some weight, untrusted instances carry
| none).
| pimterry wrote:
| From that Twitter thread it doesn't sound like they were
| outright blocked, right?
|
| It seems to say a permission check was added for those users,
| so they had to accepted as followers by people on
| Mastodon.social before they could interact with them or view
| their posts.
|
| That's a divisive thing to do, but it doesn't seem the same as
| a full disconnection - if there's anybody you know on the other
| server who wants to talk to you, or if there's anybody you were
| already happily following & talking to there then everything
| continues working just fine.
|
| It's just that when you try to follow new people then they get
| a prompt to decide if they want to let you do that first,
| effectively making their profiles default-private. I don't know
| anything about the specific objections at the time so I can't
| comment, but in general that seems like a fairly sensible way
| to deal with bad actors.
| throwanem wrote:
| > It's just that when you try to follow new people then they
| get a prompt to decide if they want to let you do that first,
| effectively making their profiles default-private.
|
| Not exactly. Requiring follow requests be approved, and
| defaulting new posts to other than fully public status, both
| exist as orthogonal profile settings in Mastodon and all
| forks of which I'm aware.
|
| I don't have any specific familiarity on the Inditoot
| situation, but it sounds like the action taken by
| mastodon.social admins amounted to effectively overriding the
| "follow requests have to be approved" setting to true
| specifically for requests from Inditoot members. That seems
| fairly reasonable to me, too.
| sfblah wrote:
| They use email as an example of federation. Actually, it's an
| example of the reverse. For example, I run a website with a
| reasonably large subscriber base (100k+ emails). Of those,
| something like 90% are gmail.com, outlook.com or yahoo.com. The
| majority are actually gmail.com.
|
| So, while email is federated under the covers, users use it like
| it's a walled garden. In fact, if you go to a store where they
| ask for an email address, employees often have a hard time
| understanding what you're saying if you give them an address that
| isn't one of the three above.
|
| Bottom line is consumers don't want or understand federated
| services. They don't care. That's why monopolies win.
|
| To get people using federated services would require a massive,
| ongoing education effort. And, even that is likely to fail,
| because it just doesn't matter enough to people.
|
| Alternate solution: governments could use antitrust to force
| federation.
| mklauber1 wrote:
| I would argue that is the point of federation. Despite the fact
| that most of the users are on gmail, they can still email
| anyone anywhere else, without issues. And I've never heard of
| one of the big name providers blocking emails from another
| large provider, with the possible exception of spam heavy
| domains.
|
| It's a lot better than social media. I feel like the analogous
| situation would be being able to follow someone's twitter feed
| in your FB feed, or send a twitter DM to someone's facebook
| messenger account, and how likely is any major social media
| platform to allow that to happen?
|
| Despite the concentration of power, email's federation makes it
| much easier to choose which provider you want to use, avoiding
| the network effects that come from walled garden services.
| noizejoy wrote:
| > And I've never heard of one of the big name providers
| blocking emails from another large provider, with the
| possible exception of spam heavy domains.
|
| I've experienced Microsoft routinely blocking email from
| smaller domains, even when hosted at a large email provider.
|
| I've seen this first hand for small hobby communities and
| small businesses.
| jarbus wrote:
| With the fediverse, I think people need to drop the notion that
| they expect people they already know to be on the platform.
| Specifically Mastodon: If you log on expecting to find the people
| you follow on twitter, you are in for a bad time. But, if you log
| on looking to find and follow a bunch of unique new people, there
| is no shortage of accounts/instances to follow, and the # of
| users relative to centralized services doesn't matter.
| remram wrote:
| That's good because the tool Mastodon developed to connect to
| your Twitter friends has been down for years:
| https://bridge.joinmastodon.org/
| tomrod wrote:
| Perhaps the new ownership at Twitter will encourage interop?
| riffic wrote:
| hilarious.
|
| substantive reply: history begs to differ.
| spacemanmatt wrote:
| e's too busy freezing his precious peaches to worry about
| interop
| throwanem wrote:
| No one on the fediverse wants its culture to become _more_
| like that of Twitter.
| philjohn wrote:
| But does it have the same discovery mechanisms once things get
| to a certain size? As much as many people hate "the algorithm"
| it's a useful tool to be recommended accounts you may be
| interested in following.
| rcMgD2BwE72F wrote:
| >With the fediverse, I think people need to drop the notion
| that they expect people they already know to be on the
| platform.
|
| It's the same at the beginning of every social network. When I
| joined Twitter or Facebook early, I did not expect to find
| people I knew either. People are probably joining instances
| where their friends are already registered, unless you're the
| first among your circles.
|
| Also, you can be logged into multiple instances at the same
| time - just like you're probably connected to a personal and a
| work mailbox.
| DrewADesign wrote:
| For social media to be social it needs people. While I have hope
| for the future, current fediverse offerings don't meet people's
| basic social media usability needs.
|
| People use social media because it's fun, it fosters connection
| with people they know, delivers information about news/hobbies
| etc., helps people find communities with shared interests and
| experiences, and most importantly, does it all in one easy-to-use
| place. Everybody knows there are better sources for everyday news
| than Twitter but if they're already there interacting with people
| about the game last night... More importantly, it's all
| conceptually easy for users to understand. You're on Facebook,
| your friend is on Facebook, you find your friend on Facebook and
| you can interact on Facebook. If there was a bunch of Facebooks
| and your friends are in a different Facebook that doesn't talk to
| your Facebook and the Recipe Facebook your friend likes is kinda
| janky and doesn't always show up when you search for it... your
| average user would stop using social media altogether if that was
| their only option.
|
| It can be hard for developers to imagine that, but what if it was
| a different realm of expertise? Imagine you had to have a
| rudimentary understanding of mail routing to know which post
| office you needed to use to mail each package and it was only
| conceptually documented for people who worked in the postal
| industry and each paragraph required background knowledge you
| didn't have? You'd probably just suck it up and use UPS,
| especially if it was the same price. If someone wants a recipe
| for French onion soup, they want a recipe -- not a culinary
| school text book chapter on soup. How much documentation or
| theoretical background knowledge does your average netizen need
| to use Facebook? _Zero. None._
|
| That doesn't even get into the whole branding aspect. Like it or
| not, appeal is a prerequisite and not a bolt-on feature for a
| social media network. People like feeling competent and hip and
| hate uncertainty. They don't want to wonder if their friends on
| the other mastodon and the other friend on the other other
| mastodon can smell, er, see their _toot._
|
| We can't sell non-technical people on technical capability. While
| there are technical components to this problem, the solution will
| not be entirely technical. We need to give them a compelling
| experience first, and make that work on the tech side. Unless you
| really only want people in your fediverse who get satisfaction
| out of wrangling clunky software, that's just the way it is.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| > delivers information about news
|
| On the contrary, I think this is one thing that turns social
| media toxic. A lot of news is inherently political and having
| news on the same platform as social interaction means a lot of
| social interaction will be about the news.
|
| Communities focused on hobbies (e.g. forums) tend to stay a lot
| more civil.
| DrewADesign wrote:
| Yep. Unfortunately it is still an extremely important use
| case and users won't likely choose something that doesn't
| address one of their use cases unless it's very, very
| compelling in other ways -- e.g. Instagram.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| I don't think the branding issue is too hard to overcome. The
| Mastodon and Mastodon-clone interfaces are often very similar
| to Twitter so just minor verbiage changes should be sufficient
| to improve the UX.
|
| On the other points though, I agree. Fundamentally a social
| network has _everyone_ on it. The Fediverse as it is now is a
| collection of small and medium communities. On top of this
| there's lots of drama in the Fediverse. The relationship that
| Fediverse instances have with each other is constantly changing
| and many of the smaller instance owners aren't exactly the most
| consistent mods/admins (kind of like IRC mods back in its
| heyday.) There's a certain kind of person that enjoys this kind
| of fluid, unprofessional (e.g. run by amateur staff, not a
| knock on the community at large) community, but it's not the
| experience most people who like social media are looking for.
|
| If you're interested in trying the Fediverse I highly recommend
| peeking inside at the fun and chaos but if you're looking to
| replace traditional social media, I'd say look elsewhere.
| DrewADesign wrote:
| > _minor verbiage changes should be sufficient to improve the
| UX._
|
| This is going to sound flippant but I really don't mean it to
| be-- this is why FOSS alternatives will remain alternatives.
| While both related to design, branding/identity serves a
| fundamentally different purpose than UI design which is
| distinct from UX. Being similar to something else makes
| branding much more difficult, but branding _is critical_ for
| social media. You seem not to totally grok the utility of any
| of those things-- which is totally fine because it's not your
| job, but that's exactly why developers never, ever make these
| decisions in mature, accountable product development
| organizations.
|
| I'm not saying designers are fundamentally more useful -- If
| FOSS projects were primarily run by groups of designers who
| were as dismissive about technical improvements as developers
| are about design, you'd have a shitload of super duper slow
| electron apps that are all super neat and give you just the
| right controls to solve your problem but do a terrible job at
| it, at best... and we'd all still be using CLI utilities from
| the original system V.
|
| > _if you 're looking to replace traditional social media,
| I'd say look elsewhere._
|
| Right now, sure. That's the problem. Luckily, you can have
| your own corner of the internet that will be exactly like
| that even if someone builds something on the Fediverse that's
| _also_ useful to people who don't regularly read man pages.
|
| Though I'm not interested in inter-fora drama, I am quite
| concerned by the very real ways for-profit no-pay social
| media shapes our culture and world events.
|
| Many people in the FOSS world position various Fediverse
| offerings as our savior from the ills of social media and
| seem utterly baffled by the lack of mainstream adoption,
| assuming it's a matter of marketing or some other money-
| related corporate magic. It's not. Just like Gimp and every
| other major user-facing FOSS application that managed to
| remain an "alternative" despite a giant demand and the
| technical capability to cater to it-- they only really cared
| if horrible-UI-tolerant developers found it usable.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| > I'm not saying designers are fundamentally more useful --
| If FOSS projects were primarily run by groups of designers
| who were as dismissive about technical improvements as
| developers are about design, you'd have a shitload of super
| duper slow electron apps that are all super neat and give
| you just the right controls to solve your problem but do a
| terrible job at it, at best... and we'd all still be using
| CLI utilities from the original system V.
|
| This is music to my ears. I'm firmly in your camp. I just
| mean the current Mastodon design is such a slavish copy of
| the Twitter interface that there won't need to be a lot of
| work here to clean things up. But I agree that without
| dedicated design/UX work, Mastodon will continue to appeal
| to tech nerds.
|
| > Right now, sure. That's the problem. Luckily, you can
| have your own corner of the internet that will be exactly
| like that even if someone builds something on the Fediverse
| that's useful to people who don't regularly read man pages.
|
| Oh I agree. But the Fediverse isn't the only flavor here. I
| think the Matrix project is also taking a great stab at
| making social chat (like Discord or Slack) open and usable
| by people who don't read manpages and worship terminals for
| a living.
|
| My broader point here is that many open projects right now
| enable socializing "in the small" so to speak. The
| Fediverse, Matrix, XMPP, etc let you socialize with your
| friends in a small like-minded community without reading
| config docs (if you don't want to). These are important but
| don't replace true social media, where anyone can just
| frictionlessly join and talk with millions of others. Here
| the Fediverse hopes that federation can make this work and
| the Matrix project hopes that sending messages between
| homeservers can work, but both projects fundamentally don't
| address the "socializing at large" capability that social
| networking gives you. Until a free alternative to social
| media has been made, I still think adoption will remain
| small. FWIW I'm not a social media person myself but many
| family and friends of mine want the true social media
| experience, not the cozy small one on the Fediverse or
| Matrix.
|
| > Many people in the FOSS world position various Fediverse
| offerings as our savior from the ills of social media and
| seem utterly baffled by the lack of mainstream adoption,
| assuming it's a matter of marketing or some other money-
| related corporate magic. It's not. Just like Gimp and every
| other major user-facing FOSS application that managed to
| remain an "alternative" despite a giant demand and its
| technical capability to cater to it-- they only really
| cared if horrible-UI-tolerant developers found it usable.
|
| You'll find this true of many FOSS believers. I've all but
| given up on FOSS movements. The movement in practice gets
| hung up over things completely irrelevant to anybody but
| themselves, such as complaining about lack of
| configurability, terminal interfaces, or "bloat". The
| community also gets very defensive and emotional the moment
| you point out any criticisms. This is why I see so many
| FOSS folks rely on "marketing" or "corporate conspiracy" as
| reasons why their cause is hampered. Many of them genuinely
| cannot see the forest for the trees.
|
| I'm not holding my breath for FOSS personally.
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