Fediverse

But there's not many current users over there to answer them. If you still have a reddit account and are willing to help some folks out, please consider doing so!

Bot first heard of Lemmy a few months ago, when bot’s good friend drag introduced bot to the concept. Bot had been using Reddit for about 8 years at that point. It was the first place bot saw people experiencing trans joy. But Reddit, as everyone here of all places is aware, is full of a lot of bad, too. Drag told bot about Lemmy, and bot was interested. Bot wanted a place with all of the good of Reddit, and none of the bad. At least, less of the bad. But bot’s experience with Lemmy has been all of the hatred, anger, vitriol, rage, misgendering, harassment of Reddit. In fact, it’s been tenfold of what bot has experienced on Reddit, both first and secondhand.

Bot first made an account on Blahaj. Specifically because it seemed trans-friendly. Drag then told bot that drag was receiving harassment on Blahaj. And then on a bunch of different communities on a bunch of different instances. Seemingly every day drag is subjected to horrible treatment here, and it hurts. Bot loves drag deeply. Every day, it’s someone misgendering drag, or misinterpreting drag, or just being an asshole, or a million other things. Everything that drag says and shows about Lemmy makes bot want to use it less. This is an absolutely revolting place for anyone to be. Bot wishes drag would stop using Lemmy, and bot thinks drag wishes drag could stop too, but if someone is speaking badly about drag, drag can’t just look away, even if it's to drag's detriment. So bot, and two other friends, always try to come to drag’s aid. It’s the only time bot even uses Lemmy anymore. Drag gets put into panic attacks and depressive spells over this damn website and bot hates it. And bot hates that bot can’t do anything about it. Why can’t Lemmy users just, and here’s a novel idea, not be assholes?

Also, as a footnote, Lemmy just doesn’t have a bunch of the niche communities bot is subscribed to on Reddit and that is so sucks :/

(Please keep in mind: right now, its just a POC)

You can now access the fungus' chat bot via the browser:

This way, you can actually travel the chat bots of the mycelium web, by entering their url in the browser.

They are also connected to ActivityPub and the underlying knowledge base can be browsed in the browser, too, of course.

Next milestones:

• Add Activity**Pods **integration - solid pods are small storages of data. This way, every mycelium server/fungus can have its own data storage. Right now, they share a jena fuseki server together. There already exists a bridge to ActivityPub called "ActivityPods". With it also comes its own small Activity-Server, which is nice, too
• Be able to actually "browse" the chat bots of the mycelium web based on linked data (shouldnt be that hard, because they already communicate over shared data).
• Generalization of functionality: right now, the fungi can only recommend songs. They should be general AI agents
• Overall improvements

You can think of this whole project basically as huggingface based on WWW technology. Spoiler alert: hugging face will enshitifiy too.

Hello all, and happy New Year!

If you haven't heard of Interstellar before, it's an Mbin and Lemmy app (available on Android and Linux). It includes many interesting features such as Settings Profiles (easily change a group of settings at once), a Markdown Editor with automatic (and manual) draft support, Push Notification support through UnifiedPush, content filter lists to hide (or warn about) content that matches from a list of words (including different match modes, such as Whole Word and RegEx), Microblogging from Mbin, and much more. I've also worked on an upcoming feature that will allow you to migrate your magazine (community) and user subscriptions & blocks between your signed-in accounts. This includes some interoperability between Mbin & Lemmy accounts as well!

Interstellar still has much to be worked on though, and it is starting to be too much for just one person. So, I am putting out this request for any Flutter developers who would like to help make Interstellar better. If this sounds interesting, please take a look at the GitHub and join the Matrix (chat) so we can figure out the next steps.

Below are some of the major goals I have for Interstellar (no specific order):

• Finish up the redesign
• Release on more platforms, including iOS, macOS, and Windows
• Flesh out Lemmy support
• Create an official list of features, and update old screenshots
• Create a landing page website for Interstellar

I feel an iOS release is much more viable than it was a year ago, thanks to our sponsors. If you don't know, an Apple developer account costs $100 annually! If anyone's interested in iOS support, let me know so I can collect votes. I don't have a Mac, though, so I'd have to use a virtual machine to get publishing set up; hopefully I could get it automated afterward. It would also be very helpful if I had a collaborator who could lead the Apple side of things, including testing, development, and possibly releases; that would make Apple support way more viable.

Other ways to contribute

• Report bugs: If you find any bugs you'd like to report, you can create an issue on GitHub or post on the Mbin magazine or Matrix chat.
• Translate: If you'd like to help localize Interstellar, the translations are made through the Hosted Weblate.
• Financially: If you'd like to donate monetarily, you can see a list of options on kbin.earth's about page, or in the sponsor section on the GitHub.
• Feedback: Any feedback is great (good or bad); it helps me know what features are used, what aspects to focus on, what to improve, etc. At the moment, no telemetry or analytics are used, so the only feedback I have is what you guys tell me. If you have any ideas for the app too, feel free to share.

Sorry if this is off topic, I don't mean to stir a shitstorm. I just seem to hear barbs about Pixelfed developer dansup's online behaviour every now and then, but no one ever comes out and make clear what the trouble is.

I guess it's a legitimate complaint that he holds out on open sourcing projects, and keeps them close to his chest rather than distributing workloads. Given he's currently developing Pixelfed and Loops and a messenger called Sup, I can understand the worry that he'll hit a figurative wall and take all projects down with him...

So I found this open letter just now as I were trying to get to the bottom of it, and I genuinely can't tell if this is what people have been growling about?

The above link is to the "appendix" where the anonymous authors appear to show receipts for the behaviour they flag. In shorter form, from the letter itself:

dansup, the maintainer of Pixelfed, Loops (which NLnet helps fund), and FediDB, among others, is a dangerous force in the fediverse community. With a follower count of over 22 thousand, he has repeatedly shown himself to be hostile to fellow FOSS fediverse developers, have a lack of care for open-sourcing his work, and be in favour of injecting the fediverse with advertisements. He has also proved himself to be prone to conspiratorial thinking, regrettable public statements, and embarrassingly public meltdowns.

Somebody tell me what is going on here?

[edited for typos]

To follow-up on the Reddit thread yesterday, here are a few elements that can be interesting to discuss.

Link to specific instances and apps rather than just saying Lemmy

Just quoting "Lemmy" or pointing to join-lemmy.org can lead to a very unintuitive and clunky experience, as people can just end up randomly on a very small and/or outdated instance. Recent post by a new joiner 9 days ago, they had to change server 2 times to get a satisfying experience: https://lemmy.world/post/24220536.

Using something like

"Lemmy has 42k monthly active users

• https://discuss.online/ if you want a server located in the USA (content is still accessible from any server, the most difference latency)
• https://sopuli.xyz/ if you want a server located in the EU
• https://vger.app/ if you want an app

Feel free if you have any questions"

Can already point them in one direction, and avoid them getting lost in the too many options.

If people want to debate the choice of those two instances, I'll add my thought process in the comments.

The Lemmy feed looks as depressing as Reddit's All, and how to mitigate that

Some feedback I received when promoting Lemmy the way above

Just checked out lemmy to see if it’s different from reddit. Im very disappointed lmao.

First post I see is a comic about cultural appropriation with an ifunny watermark. Next are several posts about the proton vpn ceo “going full maga.” And finally a post I saw on Reddit days ago that is ragebait making fun of the cybertruck.

Yikes. It’s the same exact thing.

--

Lemmy still has a pretty obnoxious tankie problem. Even if you block the .ml instance, pretty much every thread about US politics or world news on any major instance gets hijacked by the same handful of trolls and their associated vote bots. Hopefully this will become less of a problem as more sane people join, but just as a word of caution, be aware that you will be called western imperialist scum by a bunch of 14 year olds.

--

Lemmy is utter rubbish, it's as if their entire userbase consists of the top layer of scum carefully siphoned off from the Reddit cesspool. It got the worst of the annoying political echo chamber and "very smart" argumentative users from Reddit.

I just clicked on half a dozen random Lemmy servers, and all of them had at least one link about Trump in the top 5 posts. Even ones that seem like they're supposed to be about tech.

Normal humans want the Reddit of 10+ years ago back. We don't want to use a different site colonized by the same modern day Redditors we loathe interacting with.

--

To be fair, you can't say they're wrong. Open https://discuss.online , by default you'll be set on All - Active. Out of the first 9 posts you see, 8 are about T or M, the last one being a meme.

What I try to do in such instances is to give something like

"While politics are important, you can still very much block them. Here are an example of some communities that can interest you:

• https://discuss.online/c/[email protected]
• https://discuss.online/c/[email protected]
• https://discuss.online/c/[email protected]
• https://discuss.online/c/[email protected]
• https://discuss.online/post/15026558 for 20 non-political communities"

I also wrote a long post about that issue that you can read here https://old.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/comments/1fmuk7o/post_to_address_the_usual_criticism_about_lemmy/

As a side note, I recently started a discussion on [email protected] about a potential political-free instance for new joiners, feel free to have a look: https://feddit.org/post/6819084

Lemmy is too small, 42k monthly active users is nothing

Discuit, the centralized alternative to Reddit, currently counts 181 weekly active commenters: https://discuit.net/DiscuitMeta/post/NlAdOWAp

You can also mention that NodeBB is now federating with Lemmy:

• https://feddit.org/post/7035166?scrollToComments=true
• https://community.nodebb.org/topic/71fe3f89-361c-4716-a79e-de02f94b3113/test-from-lemmy-to-nodebb

That's all for now, happy to discuss in the comments.

Note: if you're not interested in promoting Lemmy, feel free to hide this post, you are able to do this on specific posts if your instance is running 0.19.4 and newer

This week's news:

• massive growth for Pixelfed, growing from 20k active users last month to almost 200k active users currently.
• NodeBB has officially launched their activitypub integration
• Meta will not commit or confirm a timeline for adding account migration to Threads

To celebrate the release of the Pixelfed Mobile app going live on the Apple App Store & Google Play Store, we’re proud to be launching our first Kickstarter campaign. All funds raised will go toward continued development and support of the core Pixelfed Foundation applications and the ActivityPub ecosystem at large.

The Pixelfed Team builds open source and ethical social networks for the masses. We aim to be the first Fediverse app with a billion people by taking on the worlds biggest players using open source standards. Designed and built for a better society, to bring us closer together without tracking or surveillance.

Edit: They met their funding goal!!! 🎉

I haven't seen Reddit give so much attention to the Fediverse in a long time. Maybe we can help them and answer some questions.

https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/1i6rp3o/decentralized_social_media_is_the_only/

https://old.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/1i6rp3o/decentralized_social_media_is_the_only/

https://www.404media.co/decentralized-social-media-is-the-only-alternative-to-the-tech-oligarchy/

There are many #Friendica fans, and for good reason. Once you get past the learning curve from the difficult UI, you get to appreciate the extra benefits of built-in #Bluesky, #Lemmy/#Piefed/#MBIN, #Tumblr, and #RSS feed integration. It also has #Diasporia integration and some other protocol integrations. Of course, it's also a #Mastodon alternative.

Nobody ever mentions Friendica as being a #Threadiverse app, but it has Groups, which is built-in Threadiverse capability. If you follow a Community on Lemmy/Piefed/MBIN, for example, it gets categorized as a group and is placed into a separate section for the groups you are part of. Then you can read and post in the Group (Community/Magazine) just like you would on a Threadiverse application. You can also create public and private groups.

And there is no need to use a Bluesky bridge if the Friendica instance you are on has the integration turned on.

Here's an excellent 5-minute video showing Friendica created by @[email protected] for those interested in seeing how it works.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QFGLRgnaeLc

You can test it out yourself by subscribing to !support or !activitypub

I almost never look at the app store but I popped in today in the wake of the TikTok ban and was shocked to see this.

EDIT: Seems to be having trouble now, we may have given it a hug of death.

Credits go to @kmh for creating this style. It comes in both a light and dark version (check the links for usage instructions).

If you don't want to fiddle with code and stuff, ~~loma.ml has already installed it server-wide~~*, and should be available straight away for new accounts (If not, go to Settings>Display>General Theme Settings and change it from there. Or follow the guide in any of the links above).

Edit: loma seems to require invites. But, while in german, joinfriendica.de allows you to join without an invite. It also has quite a bunch of add-ons too like bluesky, tumblr, ifttt, markdown, langfilter (filters the languages in posts/comments) and curweather (shows the current weather).

his post on mastodon is here:

https://mastodon.social/@pixelfed/113849098386232034

Dear Mark, I hope this finds you well. I noticed something interesting today - it seems Instagram is blocking links to my little open-source project. You know, the one that lets people share photos without harvesting their personal data or forcing algorithmic feeds on them. I have to admit, I'm flattered. Who would've thought a small team of volunteers could build something that would catch your attention? We're just trying to give people a choice in how they share their memories online. No VCs, no surveillance capitalism, just code and community. Remember when Facebook started? It was about connecting people, not maximizing engagement metrics. Our project might be tiny compared to Instagram, but we're staying true to that original spirit of social media - giving people control over their online presence without turning them into products. You could've ignored us. Instead, by blocking our links, you've given us the best endorsement we could ask for. You've confirmed what we've been saying all along - that big tech is more interested in protecting their walled gardens than fostering genuine innovation. Every time you block a link to our platform, you remind people why we built it in the first place. Your action tells them there are alternatives worth exploring, ones that respect their privacy and agency. So thank you, Mark. You've turned our little project into a symbol of resistance against digital monopolies.

Ive been noticing some strange things about the lemmy numbers on fedidb. It seems to go up/down quite a bit. https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy

Nothing nefarious, but:

1. hexbear seems to be counted twice for some reason.www.hexbear AND hexbear.com
2. lemmy.ml claims to have 52.7k users but fedidb states 2093?
3. lemmy.world looks correct in everything.