Pixelfed is having its moment in the spotlight - on the Apple app store it’s currently getting more downloads than Facebook, Bluesky or Instagram.

Of course, it’s helped along by the fact that people don’t have it installed already. But still fun to se the Fediverse represented in the list of popular apps. I think similar things are happening on Android in many countries.

That’s on the Mastodon side - having bluesky opted in by default would be less problematic, and would solve a lot of problems. The main reason it’s not done yet is for reasons of scale.

I feel like a lot of what “Free Our Feeds” is trying to achieve has already been done by @snarfed.org@snarfed.org with @bsky.brid.gy@bsky.brid.gy. Supporting Bridgy in order to make all Bluesky accounts open for bridging by default would leap us pretty fast towards achieving these goals, by making any microblogging platform on the fediverse a genuine alternative.

Instead they need $30 million to develop yet another thing.

If Bluesky users want to fund this, it should at least safeguard that Bluesky remains committed to leaving AT Proto running. As long as they keep that running, a bridge between the Fediverse and Bluesky remains possible. Which is all I personally need, so it’s all fine by me.

But what a waste of $30 million it would be.

I think often people find it easier to write their own code than to make changes to other people’s projects, so it’s not necessarily very easy to change the Bluesky app to work with the Mastodon API rather than the Bluesky one.

That said, I don’t think it’s a dumb idea. Bluesky has a lot of money to pump into UX development, so making sure Mastodon users could benefit from this wouldn’t be a bad thing. Personally I am perfectly happy with the alternatives already out there (Phanpy is better than anything else that has ever existed), but it’s all about choice. :)

Social media platforms were always badly positioned - they are failing by design. They have been able to grow in order to outrun their problems, but this cannot be sustainable because the flaw is fundamental.

I think the idea is effectively conveyed in the intro:

In the game of Go, bad shape is the term for configurations of stones on the game board that are inefficient in achieving their offensive goal (territory capture) and unlikely to achieve their defensive goal (the state of “life”). You can extend a bad shape in a fruitless attempt to make it better, but you’ll generally be wasting your time.

The idea I keep coming back to is that the big platforms, like Marley, were dead to begin with, and are now something particularly bad, which is dead on their feet. Not because they’re been abandoned by users (yet) but because they’re structurally incapable of governing the systems they made, and most of the things they try to do about it introduce more and weirder problems.

What a nightmare to find yourself in. Poor guy.

Manslaughter charges on Baldwin never made sense to me. Who the fuck gives a loaded gun to an actor on set, and how the hell is he supposed to know.

That’s beautiful! Love the perspective.

Also I guess it makes sense that they’ve been too busy with everything else to have a timely release of a perfectly crafted annual report.

It would be nice to have a report earlier because I’m interested, but in terms of transparency needs this is fine.

If a team of three full time employeesand a limited budget had plenty of time to write up reports, that would maybe be a bit of a red flag as well.

I meant that this “critical analysis” didn’t seem to offer any substantial critiques of ActivityPub or its use, but merely a bunch of critiques of this petition itself on points that seem not extremely relevant.

It might be interesting for people who are invested in this specific debate, but I outside of that context it doesn’t seem to have all that much to add to anything.

Not saying the petition is unsubstantial, I just struggled to find any substance to this critique of it.

I started reading, and it seems to criticize some Polish proposal, rather than anything substantial?

Like, paraphrasing, “the proposal says it worked well in context A, but that doesn’t mean it’ll work well in context B”. I mean, sure, whatever. But not very juicy.

Maybe there’s good points in there, but if they had valid criticism they should have spilled the beans right away. If not I’ll keep thinking ensuring digital sovreignity and embracing open web standards are good things.

As much as I think AI will make everything worse, I think it’s just a symptom of the real problem in the industry.

I think it boils down to two things:

1. Major studios are pure capitalists with no artistic interest, with newcomers like Apple and Amazon not even having a culture for authenticity in any part of their operation
2. Marvel made too much money

So what they’ve learned is that there’s no point in making movies - if they want to make money they need to make a franchise. So they keep investing in anything they can possibly milk into a soulless franchise that sucks in consumers and leaves them hooked.

There’s no room for artistic authenticity in this process. It will produce worthless garbage by design. It’s consumerism turned into cinematography.

Thank god some are rebelling against it.

I cannot wrap my head around the fact that apparently, except that god-awful character design, everything else in the movie was apparently fine.

Like, how can anyone with any sense of producing anything good accept anything that awful?

If it wasn’t for the stories going around about the team hired to do the new graphics I would have thought it was just a publicity stunt.

I find microblogging is a really hard format to work with. Being short is super important - the default for Mastodon is 500 characters, on Bluesky it’s 300. On Twitter it might be even less, who cares.

So you need to try to get your message across super efficiently. Even if you can write longer in mbin, people might not have the attention span to read long texts. So watch the character counter.

Some other things:

Getting attention

On Mastodon there are two ways of getting attention to your post. The first is by getting followers; the second is by getting boosts. Until you have your own following, the best you can hope for is that people reading your post thinks it’s worth promoting and then boost it. Hashtags can also be moderately effective - it’s certainly good for discovering content - but you’re probably not going to reach very far by shooting things into the void with an hashtag attached if you have no followers.

What helps is to interact with other users. Follow them, boost interesting content you see from them, favourite/upvote their content as a “compliments to the chef”, and leave a comment when you have anything to say. Doing this, they might follow you back, which will dramatically increase your reach on the fediverse.

Hashtags

There are two general ways of using hashtags. First, you can add it to some word in your post that nicely summarizes what you’re talking about. This is not too distracting, and common practice in most parts of the #fediverse. We don’t expect it in forum-style content of course, so for some users it’ll look a bit out of place.

The second way of doing it is by listing hashtags at the bottom of your post. Mastodon has a way of hiding these a little, so that they don’t get in the way.

As for which hashtags to use, you can of course get creative. But some hashtags are more common than others. When drafting in Mastodon the interface tells you how many people visible from your instance are using the hashtag, which is useful. We sadly lack that on Mbin. In general, maybe include some general and some more specific ones, but don’t over-do it.

Mentions / @s

Mentions play a very specific role in the Fediverse. Inherently they’re of course simple enough - @user@example.com - but they play a fundamental role in how different Mastodon instances are stitched together.

Of course, they can be used to notify someone - if I tag you (@unknown1234_5@kbin.earth), you’ll probably be notified that I did so. But more importantly, it serves the same purpose as an address on an envelope. If you respond to someone on a different instance without @ing them, your post might never reach them, as your post wasn’t told it needed to travel to their instance. This is a bit weird and not very intuitive, but that’s the reason why Mastodon users always tag each other like crazy in the comments.

@s are also useful to point people towards a specific account, or to include someone in a conversation that might not have been aware of it.

Not sure if that’s helpful, but at least it’s something!

A couple of fun things as a bonus:

• If you follow @bsky.brid.gy@bsky.brid.gy, your microblog posts will all be sent to Bluesky as well. I have been testing this a little, and it works: if you search for Aasatru on Bluesky, you’ll find my Mbin account. I don’t really microblog much from here though.
• If you get followers on Mastodon, everything you boost will pop up in their feed. So if you see a comment you find to be particularly fun or insightful, and that ideally also works well as a free-standing text, you can boost it to give it attention on Mastodon and similar sites. Sometimes random comments can “escape” this way and get much more attention than the post they are responding to.

As long as he doesn’t end up subscribing to the Chicago school of economics, but I have the impression that the University of Chicago has moved on and that even there it’s only subscribed to by the loonies these days.

But whenever someone says they studied economy in Chicago I still get suspicious.

Ironically, the influence of the Chicago school is probably why tuition is so expensive. Supply and demand, baby.

Huh. Seems pretty expansive - @dansup@mastodon.social, any comment?

Get them on Signal, I’d say. :)

I don’t think there’s any need to be rude. Just tell him you appreciate that he wants to make sure you’re alright, but that you’re just not a very talkative person and you quite enjoy silence. You can say it’s nothing personal, but that’s just who you are and you’ll let him know if one day for whatever reason you are not fine. If you’re feeling generous you can ask him to do the same, but that is a potential commitment.

She’s not interested in using any social media at all, she just wants a place to toot about her publications because it’s part of the job. So some Mastodon instance specific to her field is pretty much as good as it gets for her usecase. As an academic the domain-specific Mastodon instances are pretty great.

I like Mbin a lot though! :)

As an academic, there are several users on Bluesky I would like to follow. Sadly very few are bridged for now. Hopefully all Bluesky accounts will be open for bridging at some point.

Another advantage is that thanks to Bridgy I can convince my partner to join Mastodon instead of Bluesky to promote her work, as the reach is the same on either platform.

Of all the nerdy things I’m excited about, the prospekt of making bug reports to FOSS git projects through my Mbin or Mastodon accounts is certainly on the list. I have so many accounts I made just for a single bug report. This will be great if/when it takes off.