JupiterRowland

joined 1 year ago

Reason #1: It overloads them mentally. It was hard enough to wrap their minds around Mastodon not being the one website they thought it is.

Reason #2: They got so used to their nice and cosy and fluffy and friendly woolly mammoth being the entire Fediverse, and everything they ever interact with being Mastodon, that everything they (might) have to interact with that is not Mastodon is too much of a disturbance. There being something else in the Fediverse other than Mastodon simply feels too wrong.

No idea, I'm not that deeply into it.

The *keys also had many of the features that Twitter migrants complained were lacking from Mastodon. But trying to talk to anyone on Mastodon about platforms that aren’t Mastodon was a total non-starter. Mastodon is a giant Mastodon circle jerk.

If you see someone tell Mastodon users that the Fediverse isn't Mastodon, they're hardly ever on Mastodon themselves. They're most likely on Friendica which suffers the most from obnoxious Mastodon users, and if not, they're likely to be on Firefish or Akkoma or sometimes on Hubzilla.

The most extreme case I've encountered was a Mastodon developer who tried to convince me, a Hubzilla veteran, that Mastodon is literally the only feature-complete project in the Fediverse. Fortunately for him, I didn't ask him about full text formatting support, permissions, nomadic identity, multiple independent identities on one login, WebDAV/CalDAV/CardDAV or a built-in wiki engine.

But the real issue with Mastodon is that it has a significant population of people who believe it’s a sacrosanct cultural space, and that are very vocal about telling anyone coming into it that they need to learn the local customs or GTFO.

Worse yet, "coming into it" is also applied to everything in the Fediverse that isn't Mastodon. After learning that there's, in fact, more than Mastodon in the Fediverse, many Mastodon users still think Eugen Rochko has invented the Fediverse, and everything must have come after Mastodon.

Thus, even Friendica users who have been around since before Mastodon even saw its very first release are being forced to ditch Friendica's own culture, adopt Mastodon's culture instead and stop using all of Friendica's features that Mastodon doesn't have. And Friendica is five and a half years older than Mastodon. It has its own well-defined culture which is very different from Mastodon's because Friendica is so much different from Mastodon.

It's almost like European colonists vs natives, only that the European colonists didn't assume the natives had entered the previously completely uninhabited land after them.

[–] JupiterRowland@sh.itjust.works 16 points 2 days ago (2 children)

Musk-boi could “buy” Mastodon, Spez could buy Lemmy.world and ml, and Zucker-bot could “buy” Pixelfed tomorrow, but that wouldn’t stop anyone from forking those platforms and leaving the main instances.

Or going someplace in the Fediverse that's neither Mastodon nor Lemmy nor Pixelfed.

I think in many cases it was never about Bluesky or Jack Dorsey who never really had a saying on Bluesky proper anyway. It was more about keeping the Fediverse ActivityPub-only or even Mastodon-only.

In that light, I think the only reason why there haven't been any calls for totally Fediblocking all of Hubzilla is because 75% of the Fediverse have never even heard the name, and maybe a few hundred people outside Hubzilla know how it works and what it does. No critical mass to be appalled. And Hubzilla not being based on ActivityPub and technically being bridged to Mastodon via its own per-channel bridges would be only one out of many possible reasons to want it "gone from the Fediverse".

Because nobody knows they exist. Especially not on Mastodon. And even less outside the Fediverse, tech media included.

And truth be told, way too many Mastodon users don't want to know. They want the Fediverse to remain what they thought it was when they joined: only vanilla Mastodon.

Really goes to show that Lemmy is full of tech-curious geeks: Tell a Lemmy user about a Fediverse project that's neither Lemmy nor Mastodon, and it's much more likely for the reply to be something along the lines of, "where public instances."

When /kbin was zerg-rushed after the Reddit enshittification, it wasn't ready yet. It was a public alpha. It had five instances, all official, all experimental, only one of them public. I guess the dev had intended to calmly and orderly develop it until it'd be ready for prime-time. But all of a sudden, it was either developing missing features or removing bugs for those who daily-drove it in this state in expectation of it being a stable point release.

I'm on a (streams) instance on which someone else is following pr0n accounts. That instance is small enough (13 channels, including clones of external channels) to suggest them as contacts to me until I've removed them as suggestions.

Only boobs I saw without searching mastodon.social for non-pr0n hashtags.

Sorting Hat for Lemmy?

But hardly anyone in the Fediverse, next to no-one on Mastodon and literally no-one outside the Fediverse knows that Misskey exists. Not outside of Japan anyway. Or any of the Forkeys, for that matter (if you're a Westerner and neither an otaku nor a weeb, Iceshrimp or Sharkey may suit you better).

For more Mastodon users than not, the Fediverse = Mastodon. And outside the Fediverse, hardly anyone has even heard of the Fediverse.

Exactly why most Germans only had a @t-online.de address back in the day. The only exceptions were those who needed an e-mail account before they had their own home and their own landline connection.

 

I've noticed that there isn't a single Lemmy community, Mbin magazine etc. for Fediverse memes.

Is that because 99.9% of the Threadiverse came directly from Reddit, almost all Lemmy communities and *bin magazines are outposts of subreddits, and Reddit doesn't meme the Fediverse because hardly anyone on Reddit knows the Fediverse in the first place?

Is it, in addition, because especially Lemmy is too detached from the rest of the Fediverse to know what's memeable and to really understand memes about the Fediverse outside Lemmy?

Or is it simply because Fediverse memes go into other, more general communites/magazines where they simply drown in the flood of other threads?

I mean, I barely see any memes about the Fediverse anywhere on Mastodon. That may be either because your typical Mastodonian is not cut from meme-maker wood, or your typical Mastodonian doesn't know enough about the Fediverse beyond Mastodon, or next to nobody hashtags their meme posts. so they're impossible to find.

And so I thought that this is more common in the Threadiverse, seeing as how meme-happy Reddit is.

 

I'm asking because it is really difficult to find a place for discussing accessibility in Fediverse posts beyond the limits of any one Fediverse server application.

I'm looking for something

  • in the Fediverse
  • with technology that supports discussions
  • where users know the Fediverse beyond whatever software that particular place is running on
  • where users know something about how and why to make Fediverse posts accessible for e.g. blind users
  • where users take this topic seriously instead of seeing it as a gimmick
  • where it's likely enough for someone to reply to posts

Mastodon takes accessibility very seriously. But Mastodon users never look beyond Mastodon. Every other Mastodon user doesn't even know that the Fediverse is more than only Mastodon. Most of those who do have no idea what the rest of the Fediverse is like, including what it can do that Mastodon can't, and what it can't do that Mastodon can. Many Mastodon users even reject the Fediverse outside Mastodon, and be it because it "refuses" to fully adopt Mastodon's culture and throw its own cultures overboard. This would include using features that Mastodon doesn't have. You're easily being muted or blocked upon first strike if you dare to post more than 500 characters at once.

I myself am mostly on Hubzilla. Not only is Hubzilla vastly more powerful than Mastodon, it is also vastly different, and being older than Mastodon as well, it had grown its own culture before Mastodon came along. Still, three out of four Mastodon users have never even heard of the existence of Hubzilla, and many who do are likely to think it's basically Mastodon with a higher character count, extra stuff glued on and a clunky UI.

If you try to discuss Fediverse accessibility on Mastodon, you end up only discussing Mastodon accessibility with exactly zero regards, understanding or interest for what the rest of the Fediverse is like.

Besides, Mastodon has no good support for conversations and no real concept of threads. It is impossible to follow a discussion thread or to even only know that there have been new replies without having been mentioned in these replies. Thus, any attempt at discussing something on Mastodon is futile.

Hubzilla itself is great for discussions. It even has had groups/forums as a feature from the very beginning. In practice, however, it has precious few forums. The same applies to (streams) even more.

Discussing Fediverse accessibility is completely futile on both. They don't "do accessibility". To their users, alt-text is some fad that was invented on Mastodon, and Hubzilla and (streams) don't do Mastodon crap, full stop. In fact, their users hate Mastodon with a passion for deliberately, intentionally being so limited and trying to push its own limitations, its proprietary, non-standard solutions and its culture upon the rest of the Fediverse. At the same time, they don't really know that much about Mastodon, and they aren't interested in it.

Most of this applies to Friendica as well, but Hubzilla and (streams) users sometimes go as far as disabling ActivityPub altogether to keep Mastodon and the other ActivityPub-based microblogging projects out, and they don't care if Friendica ends up collateral damage. They hate the non-nomadic majority of the Fediverse that much.

If you try to discuss Fediverse accessibility on Hubzilla, nobody would know what you're even talking about, and nobody would want to know because they take it for another stupid Mastodon fad. They probably don't even understand why I accept connection requests from Mastodon in the first place.

Here on Lemmy, I've seen a number of dedicated accessibility communities. But they seem to be only about accessibility on the greater Web and in real life and not a bit about accessibility in the Fediverse specifically. I'm not even sure if Lemmy itself "does accessibility" in any way. And I'm not sure how aware Lemmy is of the Fediverse beyond Lemmy, /kbin and Mastodon.

Besides, these communities aren't much more than the admin posting stuff and nobody ever replying. So I guess trying to actually discuss something there is completely useless. If I post a question, I'll probably never get a reply.

The reason why I'm asking here first is because this community is actually active enough for people to reply to posts. But I'm not sure if it's good for discussing super-specific details about making non-Threadiverse Fediverse posts accessible.

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