Good points! Agreed very much about all protocols growing, and that the ActivityPub fediverse is broader than just Mastodon.
thenexusofprivacy
joined 10 months ago
https://erinkissane.com/mastodon-is-easy-and-fun-except-when-it-isnt is a good overview (not by me!) of issues that the November 2022 wave ran into. What's frustrating is that so many of these are very similar to the issues the April 2017 wave ran into!
Release 4.3 did some work on the recommended accounts, that's good, but the problems start even before that. What instance to sign up to? Most people have better experiences on smaller instances that match either their interests or their geography ... but how to find them? mastodon.social is (for most people) kind of meh -- certainly not the worst, but it's not all that well-moderated, and it's big enough that the local feed isn't useful for finding interesting people or stuff -- and that's now the default. Also it took over a year to get 4.3 out; I get it, they're a small team, some stuff turned out to be a lot harder than expected, and they had to deal with a bunch of security patches in the interim ... still, that means progress is frustratingly slow.
Bluesky certainly provides another option ... when Apartheid Clyde led to Twitter getting shut down in Brazil, there was a small bump in Mastodon's numbers, but a much bigger influx to Bluesky. Then again Bluesky's addressed a lot of problems people coming to Mastodon in 2022 had, and Mastodon hasn't, so if everybody had come to Mastodon instead the pattern would likely have repeated itself and most of them wouldn't have stuck around.
Agreed that there's a difference between funding and other kinds of engagement -- and a difference between initial funding to get them off the ground. Right now it's not exactly clear what funding Meta's contributed and what the longer-term plans are. One of the other polls in the thread was about transparency, and (at least so far) 90% of the respondents are saying that SWF should be transparent about the funding it's getting from Meta. And, another poll zeroes in on funding and has different options for initial and up-front, and whether or not there are any strings attached.
The Bridgy Fed dev didn't get browbeaten into anything, he thinks the opt-in approach is better (and I agree). And he's also said the backlash was probably deserved.
Also SmokeSignal events https://smokesignal.events/
I saw a talk by the peole working on FrontPage last week, they use the Bluesky Relay, filter it down to only see the posts they're interested it, and have their own AppView. It doesn't yet have the same kind of intereoperability with Bluesky that Lemmy does with (say) Mastodon; FrontPage posts are only visible to FrontPage. But, there are discussions on how to get beyond that.
There's a bit more on Mastodon then Lemmy - https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/moving/#migration has the details. But not being able to move posts is a big limitation. And even the functionality that's implemented has some unpleasant surprises -- see https://erinkissane.com/notes-from-a-mastodon-migration
You asked me to help you find the examples and I said no and suggested a technique that might work. It's an answer, it's just one you didn't like. When you told me that you weren't able to apply the technique successfully, I said
Oh well. It sounds like you’ve got some work to do. The revised version of the article has some antiracism resources, so stay tuned.
Yes, I answered your question, you just didn't like my answer.
If you can’t find them, then (like many people) that’s a sign you’re used to an environment where anti-Blackness is normalized. So, imagine a Black person reading this thread who’s been targeted by racism on the fediverse. What comments would they think are dismissive of Black people?
It doesn't make any assumptions about your ethnicity. If you are in fact a Black person who's been targeted by racism on the fediverse but isn't seeing it in that thread, it's still a useful suggestion to step outside yourself and try to reading it as somebody else would,
Oh well. It sounds like you've got some work to do. The revised version of the article has some antiracism resources, so stay tuned.
The revised version of 4 things white people can do to start making the fediverse less toxic for Black people (DRAFT!) will have (or maybe link off to) a list of examples on Lemmy -- that's why I started this thread. But, you don't have to wait! There are multiple examples in this thread and the thread I linked to in the OP.
And yes, there are tools. I'll have more links in the revised version, but one good place to start is Ijeoma Oluo's Welcome To The Anti-Racism Movement — Here’s What You’ve Missed
Yeah, right now the way I think of it is that Bluesky is (conceptualy) a single big instance, connected to the rest of the ActivityPub fediverse via Bridgy Fed (which speaks both AT and ActivityPub). Bluesky's decentralized in a different way, and the broader ATmosphere (apps that use AT protocol) is growing as well, but it deosn't really have the same concept of instance.