Which do you think is the better microblogging platform? Why?

Your help would be greatly appreciated!

tl;dr

We need 20 people to test Raccoon app, but wait there is more, from now on Google requires you to test any app for at least two weeks prior to release. More about this here.

So if you're up for the challenge, send an email or a private message to developer (click here), and provide the email you are using on Play Store and we'll add you to the testing group.

And if you are getting this app via Obtainium or directly from GitHub, consider enrolling for "Google's mandatory app testing" or otherwise we won’t be able to publish this app on Google's Play Store.

Thanks for reading!

Whoever is in charge of that instance, STOP.

It's an instance that crossposts posts from Reddit, except it also makes a new user for each Reddit account it came from. So if /u/hello123 made a post, it makes that post under a new account called hello123. That makes it impossible to block posting bots.

Not only that, it makes posts look like they're posted by real people, with many question and text posts being copied as well. I was very confused as to what these posts were until I realized they're crossposts.

Examples:

https://alien.top/post/263029

https://lemm.ee/u/[email protected]

https://lemm.ee/u/[email protected]

https://lemm.ee/u/[email protected]

I strongly believe Lemmy isn't the place for mirroring content from other websites. You can host your own alternate Reddit frontend like LibReddit, there's no reason to spam the posts to everyone using Lemmy just because 5 people asked for it. Not to mention there are already enough instances mirroring posts, this is getting obnoxious.

Tl:dr: Remember the human, even if the project doesn't work, it wasn't as useless as it may seem, resources consumption may be concerning

Also disclaimer: I have no involvement in the Fediverser project other than following it from afar and discussing with the creator in a few comments.

Hello everyone,

As the other thread is already quite active and I guess my comment would probably be drown there, I open this new to bring an alternative perspective on the project.

Remember the human

First of all, could we please try to limit the hostility against the project creator? It's fine to disagree, to block, to defederate, but wording such as "hate", "screw the person" don't seem to align with "remember you will be interacting with actual, real people" and "Be respectful of others."

Now that this is out of the way, a few considerations to take into account:

The Network Effect - the issue that Fediverser is trying to solve

As most of you probably know, the network effect prevents most of the users of an existing platform to switch to another one. "Why would I go there where there will be no one, when all the people I want to interact with are here?"

It was the case for Mastodon until Twitter started to really become mediocre, and Signal still hasn't convinced most of the Whatsapp userbase to make the switch. Matrix is struggling to be a full Discord replacement, but has the benefits of having bridges with most of communication platforms (https://matrix.org/ecosystem/bridges/)

Those bridges can ease potential reluctant users to at least try out Matrix, as they can still access their previous network.

That was the whole idea behind Fediverser. I remember the initial plan being a two-ways bridge between Lemmy and Reddit, allowing people to see content from Reddit from Lemmy, interact with it, and having people on Reddit seeing responses too.

Added with all the Lemmy pros that we know (third-party clients, alternative front-ends, etc.), it could be a huge helper into bringing more people into Lemmy. Which brings us to the next question.

Do we need more users?

I know this is highly debatable, but I will try to bring some perspective on this.

I have been an active user on Lemmy for a few months now. I like it here, great apps, nice people, interesting discussions.

But still, I still to go Reddit too.

Why? Network effect. As much as Reddit sucks today, there is still content that is only posted there, and sometimes I just want to read that content. And I'm not talking about niche topics like obscure fandoms. Parenting, personal finance, relationship advice, fashion advice are topics that aren't very popular on Lemmy. And probably won't become anytime soon due to the network effect. Which is fine for me.

But the issue I see is that overtime, the migration might never really happen. We might be in a "next year is the year of the Linux Desktop" or a "Chrome vs Firefox" situation rather than a "Digg to Reddit migration". And I'm taking examples where the alternative is still widely used. Lemmy could actually become Diaspora, as over time, more and more people just think that the convenience of a Revanced third-party client is better than having to browse two platforms.

But to be fair, the future doesn't even matter that much. What I wanted to say here was that I understand why the Fediverser creator wanted to avoid that scenario, and tried to accelerate the process.

Resources consumption

The list of instances part of the Fediverse project can be found here: https://communick.news/c/communick_news_network. I had a look at two, https://level-up.zone/ which replicated a gaming sub, and https://selfhosted.forum/. While they are quite active, they don't seem to be that active (most of the threads have less than 5 comments, there are a few that high the hundreds, but they are quite rare).

I have seen several admins complaining about the system resources consumed by alien.top instances, "as much as the largest instances". Does that mean that if tomorrow reddit.old dies, we double or triple the number of users on Lemmy, instances would have to be shutdown? Can we afford a growth this large? The scalability issues have been mentioned since June, and it seemed that things had improved on that side, but should we be worried that Lemmy will hit a scalability ceiling at some point?

However, to be fair, I guess this point is mainly assessed as a "low return on investment" for the resource consumption. Which brings us to the previous point "What what Fediverser trying to solve".

As a conclusion, I hope this perspective might help people see why this project was made, and that maybe it does not deserve all the hostile reactions from the other thread.

That's it, thank you if you made it to the end. Looking forward having a discussion in the comments.

Have a good day.

Edit: I noticed I didn't mention the copyright issues in the comments, but to be fair I'm far from being knowledgeable on the question. It might however have a Streisand effect of having Reddit sue a single person over comments that are made for free by Reddit users. Is that worth being sued by them, I don't know (also, what about alternative front-ends like LibReddit, or archive websites?)

Mike McCue - Hello Fediverse. I'm posting this tonight from my federated Flipboard profile! We're now testing our #ActivityPub integration starting with my account. You can follow me here to see all the stories I'm curating about things like startups, photography and of course, the #Fediverse. Curious to hear your thoughts on how this is working. We’ll incorporate your feedback as we make more progress on federating Flipboard. Stay tuned for lots more soon.

Mastodon has the responsibility to promote diversity in the Fediverse

I love the Threadiverse. Compared to the microblogging Fediverse’s sea of random thoughts, Lemmy and kbin are so much easier to navigate with the options to sort posts by subscribed, from local instances or everything federated. You can also sort by individual community, and then there are the countless ways to order the posts and comments (which are stored neatly under the main post, by the way). That people can more easily find the right discussions and see where they can contribute also means that the discussions tend to be more focused and productive than elsewhere. Decentralisation also makes a lot of sense, since it is built around different communities. All that’s needed is users.

Things were going quite well for a while when Reddit killed third-party apps, prompting many to leave and find the Threadiverse. However, it is quite difficult to entertain a crowd that has grown accustomed to a constant bombardment of dopamine-inducing or interesting content by tens of millions of users, if you only have a couple hundred thousand people. This is causing some to leave, which of course increases this effect. The active users have more than halved since July, according to FediDB. The mood is also becoming more tense. Maybe the lack of engagement drives some to cause it through hostility, I’m not quite sure. Either way, the Threadiverse becoming a less enjoyable place to be, which is quite sad considering how promising it is.

But what is really frustrating is that we could easily have that userbase. The entire Fediverse has over ten million users, and many Mastodonians clearly want to engage in group-based discussion, looking at Guppe groups. The focused discussions should also be quite attractive. Technically we are federated, so why do Mastodonians interact so little with the Threadiverse? The main reason is that Mastodon simply doesn’t federate post content. I really can’t see why the platform that federates entire Wordpress blogs refuses to federate thread content just because it has a title, and instead just replaces the body with a link to the post. Very unhelpful.

The same goes with PeerTube. There are plenty of videos on there that I am quite sure a lot of Mastodonians would appreciate, yet both views and likes there stay consistently in the tens. Yes, Mastodon’s web interface has a local video player, but in most clients it is the same link shenanigans, may may partly explain the small amount of engagement. This is also quite sad, because Google’s YouTube is one of the worst social network monopolies out there, if not the worst.

And I know some might say that Mastodon is a microblogging platform and that it makes sense only to have microblogging content, but the problem is that Mastodon is the dominant platform on the Fediverse, its users making up close to 80% of all Fedizens. It has gone so far that several Friendica and Hubzilla users have been complaining about complaints from Mastodonians that their posts do not live up to Mastodon customs, and of course, that people frequently use “Mastodon” to refer to the entire Fediverse. This, of course, goes entirely against the idea of the Fediverse, that many diverse platforms live in harmony with and awareness of each other.

The very least that Mastodon could do is to support the content of other platforms. Then I’d wish that they’d improve discoverability, by for instance adding a videos tab in the explore section, improving federation of favourites since it is the dominant sorting mechanism on many other platforms, and making a clear distinction between people (@person@instance) and groups (!group@instance), but I know that that is quite much to ask.

P.S. @feditips , @FediFollows , I know that you are reluctant to promote Lemmy and its communities because of the ideology of its founders, but the fact is firstly that it’s open source and there aren't any individual people who control the entire project, and that the software itself is very apolitical. In fact, most Lemmy users both oppose and are on instances that have rules against such beliefs, so I highly encourage you to at least help raise awareness on the communities. Then, of course, there’s kbin, which isn’t associated with any extremism at all. As a bonus, it has much better integration with the microblogging Fediverse, but it is a lot smaller and younger, and still very much under development.

Anyways, that was a ramble. Thanks for hearing me out.

@fediverse #fediverse #threadiverse #mastodon #lemmy #kbin

Hello everyone,

Books are still one of the most important sources of information we have as a human species. However, the media on which this information has been stored has changed considerably over time and with it its accessibility and influence on our society.

Nowadays you can find an enormous range of books and texts online. Most of the time, however, access to them is extremely fragmented, difficult to find, subject to a fee, incompatible with the software platform of your choice or, in the worst case, goes under with its provider over time.

To counteract this, annas-archive was founded to make the knowledge stored in the texts and books openly accessible and to preserve it for future generations. On the other hand, there are platforms such as Goodreads that aim to simplify the joy of reading and the exchange of information, as well as the review and discussion of books and texts.

Unfortunately, Goodreads is a centralized, proprietary solution that in addition also happens to be owned by Amazon. BookWyrm is a decentralized, open source alternative in the fediverse that steps in right here.

Now here's the kicker: what if we combined the power of both platforms? What if we combined the enormous book database of annas-archive with the fediverse, i.e. BookWyrm? Annas archive could benefit from reviews and discussions about the books and BookWyrm could expand its still very limited database many times over.

From my point of view, this would be the perfect combination of two already great projects. What do you think?

TL:DR What do you think about combining annas-archive with the fediverse (BookWyrm)

https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/stats&months=6

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.giftedmc.com/post/78146

Hi folks! Today I have asked myself if I could login with one (no, not google or apple or micosoft) account in all the (30 I think) forums that I have to use as a FOSS admin. Nextcloud Forum, Ubuntu Forum, Mint forum, Makemkv Forum, Papermc Forum, linux.org, etc.

We obviously are on a forum-like social platform but we cant make people use this as their forum I suppose. Ideally, I'd like to federate "all forums" so to speak but that would probably take a shit ton of work. https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/does-this-forum-use-activitypub/2545/2

If not federate the content, maybe federate the logins. So that the profiles federate from one place to the next and you can login anywhere without having 30 different passwords for one "service" (forum in this case).

The next step down would be a foss SSO solution. There seem to be some but I hardly see any pages mention them possibility at all. https://sennovate.com/best-open-source-single-sign-on-solutions/

Am I missing something or is this still in the distant future?

Thanks for reading. Have a good one.

cross-posted from: https://feddit.de/post/6258115

New story, I hope you like it. Feedback always welcome.

I think there's a need for a social media platform that allows users to create multiple customizable feeds tailored to their specific, fluid interests over time.

On sites like Twitter or Mastodon, you mainly just have one feed based on the people or tags you follow. The problem is, to get a whole new customized feed, you'd need to make an entirely new account on these platforms.

On sites like Reddit or Lemmy, there are a few feeds predefined for each community, new, hot, top, etc. This doesn't offer anything in terms of individual user customization.

I envision a platform where each user can make as many different personalized feeds as they want based around interests that might change over time and the feed would change accordingly without having to start from zero. This could work only for people who opt-in since there are people who dislike this kind of algorithms.

I'm curious to hear any ideas or suggestions people have about how to implement customizable, evolving feeds for each person. And how many resources would it require, would it work on a federated network made of personal computers or would it require a large server?

Announcement post here: https://discuit.substack.com/p/df5f002f-e27a-46a6-b30d-7641b266bd65

https://discuit.net/

For those unfamiliar, Discuit is another Reddit alternative that's been floating around for a while. I was unable to find a MAU count, but I am honestly more interested in their software than their communities. Particularly curious what you all think of this stack. A consistent complaint around Lemmy is that a Rust backend makes contribution difficult, will a Go backend contribute to a lower overall barrier of entry?

Hey there! Figured I'd share here since my main instance, Lemmy.ml, seems to be really broken right now. I published an article today focusing on some of the myths and misconceptions Mastodon users have spread over the last few years, with some critical analysis and debunking.

Let me know if you like it!

I'm talking about what they say at 8:20:

Bulletin boards, forums, blogs. The main difference to today was twofold:  

For one there were no algorithms fighting to keep you online at any cost – at some point you were done with the internet for the day, as mind blowing as this may sound.

But more importantly: The old internet was very fractured, split into thousands of different communities, like small villages gathering around shared beliefs and interests.

These villages were separated from each other by digital rivers or mountains. These communities worked because they mirrored  real life much more than social media:  

Each village had its own culture and set of rules.  Maybe one community was into rough humour and soft moderation, another had strict rules and banned  easily.

If you didn’t play by the village rules,  you would be banned – or you could just go and move to another village that suited you better.

So instead of all of us gathering in one place, overwhelming our brains at a townsquare that in the end just leads to us going insane, one solution to achieve less social sorting may be extremely simple:

go back to smaller online communities.

cross-posted from: https://communick.news/post/419975

When building out the database of recommended Lemmy communities, I think it makes the most sense to prioritize the communities that belong to instances focused on a specific topic over communities that are based in a "general" instance, even if currently the community is smaller in the topic-specific instance.

For example, for an user coming from reddit and signing up via a "fediversed" instance (like alien.top) it would make more sense if they see that the anime subreddits are on ani.social, the rpg/board games are on ttrpg.network, the programming communities are on programming.dev, the basketball ones are on nba.space, the NSFW communities are on lemmynsfw, etc, etc...

This will also avoid the issue that I am currently seeing where some communities have multiple entries in the recommended database due to the initial migration where each user was just trying to replicate their favorite subreddits in their own server they signed up for.

about mastodon. i love centralized social networks because you can search for any post, regardless of the date of its creation, any person, any community. in mastodon, however, this does not work.

when you register on a small instance, people's profiles are empty, there are no posts, hashtags do not work.

if you register on a medium-sized instance, it's already better, but there are still people who are not subscribed to from someone from your instance and their profiles are empty, and even if someone is subscribed, only posts which are shown are ones that were created after the subscription of person from your instance, older are not, and the person may have been maintaining this account for a lot longer, post history preservation is broken. hashtags are already available, but still not all of them, because not all posts are available too (hashtags work like a filter for post).

if you register on a large instance, small ones will defederate from you and you will see neither their hashtags, nor interesting people, nor their posts.

there is a feeling of distortion of reality, which is a nasty feeling in itself.

I was SOOOO WAITING for the Fediverse name drop considering how MUCH they were implying this at the end of the video.

Let me start by thanking everyone that has joined https://fediverser.network and the ones who are already helping to categorize and create a map between subreddits and the recommended Lemmy alternatives. Y'all are amazing and I hope we can keep it up.

To keep in mind that the main goal of this whole project is to help people on reddit to migrate quickly and effortlessly to Lemmy, I was thinking on what could be done once we have the majority of the niche subreddits mapped out. I thought about the idea of creating "Community Ambassadors", which would be basically people interested in "turning" other redditors from their specific communities to Lemmy.

Basically that would require you to signup to Fediverser to indicate what community you are focusing on and how many people you are willing to reach out per day. The system could then collect the top posts of that subreddit every day and let you trigger a (custom, personalized) DM to the people telling them about the alternative Lemmy community that exists with a link to alien.top's portal to make one-click migration.

If a human posted every 5 min, got 0 upvotes for 20 posts straight, we would ban them for spam. If bots would limit themselves to posting once a day, or once a week, and only post the top-voted non-duplicate post of that timeframe, it would be a dramatic improvement. For once, we might actually see real-lemmy posts along side bot posts, instead of the community being exclusively bots (or 99% bot posts) or exclusively Lemmy users.

I would tell the bot creators myself, except I don't know how to get in contact with them. Is there a consistent way to contact a bot creator?

Sometimes it feels like the about pages/sidebars across the fediverse are underappreciated to the point of being underused, so I thought it might be nice to see what some most appreciate in those abouts/sidebars that are used.

For me personally? If it's something kind of niche or obscure, or even something basic but kinda ambiguous, I dig a concise little description like "[blank] is a [genre/type] [band/game/tv show/etc.], [additional relevant info]".

Although if it catches my interest enough I will just post and ask because how else might I figure out the secret arcana of the Deep Hobbies?

I like Lemmy. Active development, lots of third party apps, active community, etc but what other Fediverse projects are worth getting into like this one?

For microblogging (Twitter), I know Mastodon is really popular but there are so many other microblogging options like Pleroma, Misskey, FireFish, etc that I don't know which one is really worth getting into (as a user, dev, or admin). Are any of these on par with Lemmy?

For video, there's PeerTube. The content isn't great at all and most servers struggle to pay bills. I think the YouTube replacement is a looong way to go.

Is smth up? They both have decent uptimes?

I think it's a cool idea, and it could be the best way to help users on Reddit learn about Lemmy and migrate over.

I have some concerns though

What I like:

If you go to communities like [email protected], you can see what I mean. Lemmy commenters are generally more helpful, more detailed, and get to the posts a lot faster than Reddit users.

If I understand correctly, once the network is implemented:

1. Reddit user signs up on Fediverser
2. Reddit user posts on a subreddit that has a Lemmy equivalent
3. Post is crossposted to Lemmy
4. When a Lemmy user replies to the post, that comment is reposted by a bot on Reddit

Users on the Reddit post will:

• learn about Lemmy
• see the good quality reply (if the reply is good, Reddit mods won't ban the bot)
• get a direct link to a community/instance relevant to them

Users in the Lemmy community will

• get more content from people that are already curious about Lemmy

That would be really cool!

HOWEVER

Right now, the network isn't fully implemented. Instead, in communities like [email protected], there is a flood of ALL content that is posted in the respective subreddit.

This is bad because:

• Lemmy users don't know that no human will see their replies, and the helpful Lemmy users are just talking to a wall. This will make them... less helpful in the future
• Because ALL content is being mirrored, this spams out the actual Lemmy posts
• Reddit users have no idea, and no control, over whether their posts are mirrored. I only noticed on the datahoarder community, but there are more sensitive subreddits where I would want control over where it is posted. I would also need a way to delete the content from Lemmy, and right now the users can't do that.

Proposed fixes

• Don't mirror all content, only the stuff from Reddit users that sign up. There is already an incentive for signing up (more replies, better replies, better reach). If a user doesn't sign up, their post will not be mirrored, and they will not get the benefit.
• If two communities WANT full mirroring, let them decide and have them contact directly (ex. from Modmail). Encourage them to talk to their communities before deciding
• Any automated post NEEDS a note saying so
  • Posts to Lemmy should have a link to the Reddit user, the Reddit post, and an "about" page for Fediverser
  • Comments to Reddit should have a link to the Lemmy comment, an "about" page for Fediverser, and a link to some "what is lemmy"/"new to lemmy" article.
• If it's not being implemented like the above, maybe change it up to consider the points about user control

As it is, reposting everything is damaging to Lemmy and potentially harmful to Reddit users that don't know their stuff is being mirrored.