“Write a bit about yourself to join this server and if we decide you’re too boring and normal we’ll reject your application and say you’re a spammer afterwards”
Hmm I wonder why normies aren’t flocking to these fediverse platforms, what could be stopping them, couldn’t be the shitty onboarding process could it? Nah asking people to apply is the best onboarding process ever (obvious big ass /s)
Many Lemmy instances are requiring their users to apply for an account.
And that makes it better how?
It doesn’t that was the point of my comment, it is sarcastic, because asking normies to write about themselves then manually determine their worth before they join will exclude the vast majority of them. Applications are how you run exclusive clubs, not a social media platform. Which is the biggest reason the Fediverse sucks for regular people.
I don’t want to join a club, I want to join a regular platform. That’s why I joined discuss.online and not any of the other exclusive club instances.
Yeah. I somehow caught that. I wasn’t responding to you.
Yeah it’s actually a much bigger problem here than it is on Mastodon. Probably will end up slowing adoption of Lemmy in the future. Especially considering Lemmy is one of those platforms that really needs normie content and normie interaction to keep going, something it’s really struggling at currently.
You don’t have to do that when you sign up for mstdn.social, and it’s also not a requirement for mastodon.social And there are more instances where you don’t have to apply like that.
But when it’s asked that you apply to the server, it’s usually to ease the load of moderation, to see if you would fit the vibe of that instance. And/or to protect the more vulnerable people on that particular instance.
You don’t have to do that when you sign up for mstdn.social, and it’s also not a requirement for mastodon.social And there are more instances where you don’t have to apply like that.
Yes, and we need much more like that if we want this platform to be sucessful as a whole. Normies want to join social medias, not clubs.
But when it’s asked that you apply to the server, it’s usually to ease the load of moderation, to see if you would fit the vibe of that instance. And/or to protect the more vulnerable people on that particular instance.
We all know or should know that running a platform like a club where people need to apply and have their worth manually determined is a toxic and unwelcoming environment that does not promote any kind of growth, and the fact that it is common and encouraged is not helpful to the fediverse long term. It just pushes normies away. Because a social media doesn’t ask people to apply, a club does. Most people don’t want to join small exclusive clubs.
Yes, and we need much more like that if we want this platform to be sucessful as a whole. Normies want to join social medias, not clubs.
Why? There’s plenty of general servers aimed at normies that don’t require you to write an essay about yourself.
Let those specialty servers be specialty servers. Some only want artists, some only want neurodivergent people, some only want trans people on their platform. That’s their right! They get to decide who comes on their platform and who doesn’t. It’s not up to you to decide that for them. You need to understand that the people hosting these servers are not gazillionaires that do this out of the kindness of their hearts, they want to foster a certain atmosphere and a certain community on their server, and they do their best to keep disruptive people out. And one way of doing that is by limiting who gets on.
So instead of desperately trying to join blahaj_artists.social, why not join normies.social like mastodon.social or mstdn.social, or mastodon.coffee or any of the other ‘normie’ mastodon servers.
Go here, select “Sign up process: instant” and choose any of the servers on that page, and you’ll get in, without having to write an essay about yourself.
I just created this account. I went to Lemmy.world to make a new one and it said I need to fill out an application. I laughed. Get out of here with that nonsense.
It is bullshit and it will hurt Lemmy and the fediverse greatly in the long term since they’ve effectively crippled the onboarding process and turned their instance into a club.
Mastodon is gatekept to hell and back, the technicalities of federation are exposed to the user for some reason (you already lose half your potential user base right there), infighting between instances means that you won’t see the entire discourse of a post depending on which instance you’re at…
And besides all that, bsky is not as “corpo” as mastodon fanboys make it out to be. They’re on track to open up to privately hosted instances as well, and you can already run most of their backend stuff yourself.
I think a lot of the attitude I saw on mastodon about this like a year ago was one of suspicion that they wanted an open network but didn’t use the fediverse standard
Jumping from one frying pan into the next.
Isn’t Bluesky federated?
Pseudo-federated from what people are saying. Something about the user accounts being centralised but the data being decentralised. I don’t understand but it’s something funded by the previous owner of Twitter and full of other corporate money, so I wouldn’t trust it.
there is a critical ‘relay’ component that only they control. so you can setup your own ‘node’, but only connected to their instance.
only a single instance of the relay exists and they are not releasing that code and a few other pieces. it federates only with itself.
That pretty much sounds centralised. But I guess people don’t care if they don’t have to worry about “picking a server” which is “too complicated” 🤷
i think the new paradigm of the distributed fediverse is going to take a long time to propagate to the masses. its going to be lots of platforms advertising their corner of the 'verse and the features they permit… but we really need to get the idea of the ‘fediverse’ into their heads that its content accessible by any of those platforms.
the thing ive noticed is no one cares about ‘sites’ anymore… the kids all want ‘apps’ which is drivin me bonkers. spent decades building mobile-friendly, dynamic viewports only for them to get ignored cuz kids dont want to type in a URL/domain.
My impression is that it hasn’t been users that have pushed everything into apps, it’s been publishers. This is all a part of a general trend where software has become much less about what it can do for the user, and much more about what data it can extract from a user for the publisher. Websites generally have a lot more protections against such data scraping, meanwhile you can put who knows what code into an app.
If you look at how RSS fell from use, there were two major issues. On the user side, users had to go out to find content as there wasn’t an inherent way to search for content within the system. On the creator side, creators had to deal with advertising themselves to users and they had to handle the monetization by themselves.
Social media created the algorithm to find content and developed some revenue sharing with creators.
If federated media takes off, it will probably look like Threads or Truth Social, where control of a front end monetizes development of the platform.
OT, but most of my students in their 20s can barely use keyboards. It really stresses them out and they get mad about it. Papers are either copy-paste then AI filtered a few times, or speech-to-text with a quick grammerly scan. Drives me bonkers too. Just to say, I’m sorry your work isn’t appreciated.
“The Digital Native generation are technological geniuses because they can usually intuit which icon to click. Let us praise them and give them as much screentime as we can.” - All the news pieces and academic articles from 2000-2010ish
That’s exactly what people want: no brainer alternative without the fediverse’s fragmentation
you pick a server with bluesky
Jack Dorsey has nothing by to do with Bluesky and hasn’t for a while now.
I believe it’s sort of tacked on and not exactly federated at the moment. Also it’s corporate run
In theory, yes. In practice, it’s a bit different. At the very least for now.
well, until they release all the code, and allow full federation its not a federating platform. end of story.
It calls itself federated, but it’s false advertising.
In theory, yes / kind of.
In practice, no, not really.
It uses a different protocol (AT protocol) than the Fediverse ActivityPub protocol, which is what lemmy and mastadon and pixelfed are all built on, so it is not natively interoperable with ActivityPub based Fediverse.
To do that you have to use bridging software of some kind.
Also, as others have pointed out… even if you do make the approximate equivalent of your own instance, a PDS… all of these still go through ‘Relays’, which BlueSky controls.
So… it is technically federated in the sense that it allows for anyone to make their own instance/PDS… but ultimately it is actually totally centralized.
Instead of a web or weave of many to many connections of independent admins/maintainers, the structure much more resembles a top down hierarchy that is ultimately all controlled by a profit driven corporation.
If the Relays go down, everything goes down.
If BlueSky decides they don’t appreciate your instance, they have unitary power to delist or block it, from everyone.
As compared with the Fediverse, where many different instances and communities can all pick and choose for themselves which other instances and communities they do and do not federate with, and where an outage particular to one community/instance only bricks that particular community/instance.
Nope. It’s unambiguously not federated. It maybe could be, if you take their words at face value
I think there might be some adapters bridging the distance… But the short answer is no, the long answer is not really
I just looove how ppl believe that switching from one VC-funded centralised corpo platform to another VC-funded (slitghly less) centralised corpo platform is a good thing /s
Just because it’s (partially) OSS doesn’t make it good. The corp still holds all the power and might sell out, but at least they got free volunteers to program for them so the C-level could get more money!
(Now don’t tell me that Bluesky is “federated”. They still hold all the power over site rules and moderation. The only little concession you get is that you are allowed to host your own data)
Apparently virtue signaling about pseudofederation is enough for libs to “get hope for the future of the internet” while they happily lick the boot of yet another centralized “trust me bro this isn’t going to enshittify itself, not this time” corp
The only little concession you get is that you are allowed to host your own data)
Nah, that’s not even a concession. You just pay for a portion of their server costs at no gain in influence.
Problem with Masto though is that the technological leadership is really bonkers, hardly anything meaningful happened over the past 2 years with lots of serious issues not getting fixed
Nice profile picture!
uuu thx
After initially hesitating, I decided to join Bluesky after having previously tried Mastodon and permanently leaving Twitter. While I was initially reluctant because Jack Dorsey had sold Twitter to Elon Musk, I still created a Bluesky account. I later came across Jason Koebler’s article on 404 Media, which validated my choice. His arguments aligned with my own reasons for preferring Bluesky over Mastodon. Link to the article: The Great Migration to Bluesky Gives Me Hope for the Future of the Internet.
404 is just mad because we mocked them relentlessly for not using content warnings on their goatse posts.
Mastodon is social media where no one comments or likes anything.
It’s like a modern art masterpiece.
maybe when I first started 15 years ago it was like this.
now I have a community that will follow me on whatever bullshit instance I create because I got a clever domain name.
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Twitter’s already served its purpose. People slagging it off because it’s losing money really don’t understand that it won a country.
Seriously, seizing the means of mass communication means you own democracy, you own the governement, you own everything. Twitter, while it remains how the cultural elites communicate, is worth basically 30 trillions.
why the fuck does no one change the trashass looking shadowed white impact font default text treatment on the meme generator
That takes effort and would invalidate it as a shitpost.
Readability > style
I don’t understand what anyone uses twitter, bluesky or mastodon for anymore. I used twitter to follow companies (like CoffeeStain) or YouTubers/Artists.
Bluesky has some of that, meanwhile mastodon is just a circle pit of yelling and also the same stuff I see on Lemmy.
I don’t understand what people use it for. There’s no information to follow like company game accounts for games I play, and when I tried to do goofy shitposts like old twitter i got a grand total of 0 likes.I use masto for myself, not for likes. I use it to get SilentSunday and Mosstodon photos and to goof around with people I meet in the online space.
Sure it’d be nice to see a like or a response to a shit post, but for that you need to be followed by people who share your sensibilities, as there’s no algorithm boosting your stuff into other people’s timelines. Unless you use a relevant hashtag that’s being followed by others.
If the userbase of mastodon is even remotely similar to that of lemmy, I sure as fuck am glad I joined Bluesky instead
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You’re not, though. Reddit is Bots Only
Everyone something something bot
Reddit’s core business model from day one was to fake engagement. This isn’t calling your nan’s IMs a cyber attack. We’re talking about a community that’s been outted repeatedly for hosting artificial content.
I did. The userbase in most of the subs there is warmer, not hostile, and much, MUCH less gatekeepy.
If lemmy ever wants to grow and actually succeed, I don’t see it happening with people acting like they are acting now.
I’ve had less toxic experiences on reddit. Here I’ve had people use my post history to insult me and I even had some jackass respond to me 3 months later after some change Firefox did to “prove” he was right. Even though he was still wrong. Not to mention the tankies and other troll instances. I deleted my account on reddit years ago due to the toxicity there and I still find it less toxic now than Lemmy whenever I lurk there. Lemmy is dying because of the toxicity here. My subscribed feed used to have at least an hour or two of content to look at but it’s slowly been less and less, and mostly just automated bot posts now. I spend less than 10 minutes a day here now because there’s just nothing here. And I know someone is going to be a dick when replying to this and I’ll just have to block 2 or 3 people again.
When Reddit happens to pop up on Google search results for something, I sometimes check my old account inbox. There have been two separate accounts replying to a years old anti-pseudoscience post of mine saying that if I don’t believe the moon is plasma, then I won’t be right with Jesus. Yes, really. Only one of them knows how to properly capitalize sentences, so it’s definitely two separate people.
At least on Lemmy, blocking two instances cuts out most of the tankie crap and the experience becomes immediately better.
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I assumed people don’t trust Meta compared to Bluesky.
I don’t really under the hate towards BlueSky, did they do something really unacceptable that I am missing out on?
The idea is that these social media sites always become monopolies. That occurs because no one can communicate with each other across platforms, which eventually leads to a majority of users migrating to a single platform over time. Once that happens, the social media group no longer has to try and the media site enshittifies slowly over time. On top of this, the insane amount of users also cripples the centralized system’s ability to self-moderate properly, leading to user-based enshittification as well.
With federated social media, that barrier doesn’t exist, and, in theory, the subsequent conglomeration of users doesn’t happen. Additionally, federated instances can be self-hosted and sport much smaller userbases which can make self-moderation much simpler.
The joke in the video is that rather than switching to federated social media like mastodon and lemmy, twitter users chose to go to yet another centralized social media site (which while having a federation protocol, is unlikely to have users utilizing that defederation). Essentially, Billy is abandoning twitter to go to another site which will potentially have the same downward trend as twitter did before.
You can run your own relays, the obstacle is that each relay takes up many terabytes. But it’s fully open.
https://github.com/bluesky-social/pds
https://whtwnd.com/bnewbold.net/entries/Notes on Running a Full-Network atproto Relay (July 2024)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42094369
https://docs.bsky.app/docs/advanced-guides/firehose
https://docs.bsky.app/docs/advanced-guides/federation-architecture#relay