Fediverse

Mastodon and the fediverse are not perfect, but we do value privacy and provide better moderation overall.

That’s it that’s the post

Trying to pitch the Fediverse on its technology backend to non-technical people is a bad approach, but so is trying to pitch it in terms of digital detox or "better" culture.

The backend is for the tech people, and the rest is your regular messy people. There are as many good pockets of the Fediverse as bad, because that's the internet.

In light of that, it's questionable to what extent the Fediverse should be pitched as a distinct thing in a similar vein as those platforms some Fediverse software emulates. Fediverse, open social web, whatever you want to call it is of main relevance more to those working on it and trying to promote it among developers.

To those of us using these platforms, it's probably better to simply invite those to our respective instances/sites as simply another site/app without all the jargon and background.

Forget Lemmy/Mastodon/Pixelfed/etc. except insofar as it's in the URL or needed to search apps. Ultimately they're backends, and many weren't going around inviting people to their sites or enthusiast forums talking up apache or phpbb or the like.

The Fediverse is an emerging subset of the open web with improved interconnectedness, and so what's more important than it is reinvigorating the spirit of the open web by reminding people there's more beyond the closed web by inviting and encouraging them to visit our open spaces alongside their own. It's closed web/walled garden thinking to discourage visiting a variety of sites and using a variety of apps.

The open web thrives, enduring, enveloping and eroding the enclosures despite their efforts to ward off its persistent being.

I have seen many comments saying that lemmy.world sucks, and sh.itjust.works is good. I have seen that lemmy.world apparently has a very poor reputation among other instances. Why? After a quick look, sh.itjust.works doesn't look much different to me. Can anyone explain?

Edit: many good replies. the conclusion I'm drawing is that for my purposes it doesn't really matter. I appreciate everyone who responded

Welcome to a new era of interconnected content discussion with PieFed – a link aggregator, a forum, a hub of social interaction and information, built for the fediverse. Our focus is on individual control, safety, and decentralised power.

---

Like other platforms in the fediverse, we are a self-governed space for social link aggregation and conversation. We operate without the influence of corporate entities – ensuring that your experience is free of advertisements, invasive tracking, or secret algorithms. On our platform, content is grouped into communities, allowing you to engage with topics of interest and disregard the irrelevant ones. We utilise a voting system to highlight the best content.

• Source Code (Codeberg)
• Roadmap
• Comparing network utilization of Lemmy, Kbin and PieFed
• Instances

Video introduction the codebase

Edit: After reading your comments, and testing some more, I must say that I've misunderstood how it all works.
I should've thought of Mastodon users like separate Lemmy communities...but not exactly. What confused me is the fact that you could look up a profile on a remote instance and see their posts, but they would be very delayed. On Lemmy, if your instance hasn't "discovered" a community, you wouldn't see it at all.

I followed a random user (whos posts were last synced many days ago), and it started syncing normally (it took ~1h for it to start, but it seems like it worked and now it's syncing their posts "in real time").

~~By accident I noticed that one instance had more japanese posts in the all feed than the other one. I thought maybe the other instance has certain languages filtered or they might be defederated from certain instances, but neither was the case. I found out that the other instance just fetches the posts from other instances much slower (days).~~

~~Then I decided to open 10+ (popular to fairly popular) instances and compare how quickly or slowly they sync with each other.~~

~~It's really bad and really random. Some instances sync perfectly with each other, some take hours, some take days, some take months...
I do not use Mastodon but if I did, finding that out would just make me not want to use it.~~

~~It reminds me of that time when there was a bug in Lemmy which made the federation broken, and that was very annoying, but we knew that there was a bug and that it was being worked on, and it was fixed fairly quickly.~~

~~But on Mastodon, from what I've seen, it doesn't even depend on the version the server is running, it truly just seems random.~~

~~It just seems odd to me that Mastodon (more popular and older software than Lemmy) would have such a glaring issue.~~

~~Wouldn't that be the first priority of every federated platform? For federation to work properly, because if it doesn't, then it can't compete with the centralized ones at all.~~

A popular feature of BlueSky that really gets new users' feeds going is their Starter Packs.

Mastodon Migration Blog is replicating this good idea for the Fediverse with follow packs. These are csv files that can be downloaded and imported into Mastodon to follow a bunch of users around a topic.

Loops aims to be an open Fediverse alternative to TikTok, Snapchat, and Vine. We take an early look at the app, and talk about what it's like!

The Letterbook team have published some research into moderation tooling & strengths+weaknesses thereof on the Fediverse. It contains some great analysis and recommendations, check it out!

No matter which sort you use (except for new), content is recommended to you by activity. Depending on the sort (active, hot, top) it uses a slightly different mixture of votes/comments/time since post to determine the order.

The only exception is scaled, which boosts a little bit midsized communities, but still doesn’t manage to improve visibility of niche ones.

If lemmy is to truly start having active hobbyist communities instead of being 95% lefty US politics, Shitposts, and some tech stuff, it needs a sort that takes into account the user’s engagement.

For example, if I upvote / comment often in a community, there should be an option to have posts from the community be boosted in my feed, even if it’s a tiny community. 

Let’s say I’m subscribed to !world@lemmy.world and !news@lemmy.world because I want to occasionally see news. However, I’m also subscribed to a couple hundred other communities, some of them who don’t manage to get more than a couple upvotes on their biggest posts. And whenever I see them I’m replying/upvoting because I’m passionate about that topic. 

My feed shouldn’t be 95% c/news and c/world because those are the most upvoted and commented. I shouldn’t have to scroll down hundreds of posts to find “big” posts in small communities I interact with at any opportunity I get. 

That’s why I think it would be beneficial to lemmy if the sort/algorithm took into account your engagement in a way.

It doesn’t have to be complicated, you can have a single number “engagement score” for every community calculated with a basic formula, and that number is used as a boost to the community. 

I’m aware that there are some examples of successful niche communities on lemmy. But that’s mainly because either a significant chunk of the lemmy userbase is into that niche (let’s face it the lemmy community is not a representative sample of the world population, we tend to be very similar people), or because the posts on it are simplified image/video type posts which appeal to people who don’t know much about the subject.

The Great Twitter Exodus of 2022 is still happening. It's just a little...fractured. A lot of X power users migrated to Bluesky early on, which paved the way for a flood of folks to join that service in 2024. Meanwhile, a lot of technically inclined individuals are still hanging out on Mastodon (at least, that's where I hang out).

Bluesky and Mastodon are both decentralized services, in theory, but users of one service can't really talk to users on the other—or it wasn't possible before Bridgy Fed, anyway. It's a beta service that makes it possible for Bluesky and Fediverse-compatible applications, such as Mastodon, to interact.

...

This is where Bridgy Fed comes in. With this service, individual users of either service can opt in to "bridging" their accounts. I tested this out with my friend and Lifehacker alumni Eric Ravenscraft, who hangs out on Bluesky more than me. It worked well—we can now see each other's posts, like each other's posts, and even talk to each other, cross-network.

...

While this solution works well, there are a few hangups. Chiefly, it only functions if both people bridge their accounts. This means I can't see any comments from Bluesky users unless they also are bridged, and vice versa: During our little test, a few other Mastodon users responded to my conversation with Eric, but Eric could not see those replies. This make sense if you know how the system works—only comments from bridged users are bridged—but it's hardly ideal, and can lead to asymmetrical conversations. Unfortunately, the opt-in nature of the bridging service makes this inevitable.

If you are already using Bridgy Fed, how is it working out for you?

if anyone wants to create a game that implements ActivityPub, I am happy to support

This might mean that he may help Prismic implement it (if he's aware) and others

A little procedure I follow to help noobs get seen by others. I used to do what most people do and boost their # introduction posts, but I think most people want to see more natural engagement and sort of glaze their eyes over when they see the intro tag, so here's what I do:

1. Create a list called "noobs," hidden from home timeline.
2. Go to # introduction
3. Follow every poster with fewer than say 25 followers and add them to "noobs" 
4. Periodically browse "noobs" for interesting* toots, boost them
5. Periodically unfollow accounts in "noobs" (do not remove from list! That puts them in your main stable of follows!)
6. Repeat

I don't consider it spam-following, because I'm actually giving these accounts a good deal of attention and a good shot at being seen by a few hundred more people. Often I'll genuinely like an account and remove them from the list instead of unfollowing them. I haven't really tested this method's effectiveness, but I thought I'd put it here for others to consider.

*I have a fairly eclectic profile, so I'll boost just about anything that's not asinine.

I recently started using Bluesky and noticed something interesting. Under the "Getting Started" section, it says things like "Teach our algorithm what you like." Bluesky is supposed to be decentralized, so why does it even have an algorithm? Isn’t the whole point of decentralization to avoid centralized control, including things like content algorithms? Is this algorithm centralized, or is it designed to run locally within the decentralized structure (like on individual servers)?