Matt

Yes, because I want my friends (who aren’t tech orientated) and interest groups (which aren’t tech orientated) to be on the Fediverse.

They’re always complaining about this, that, and the other about the big platforms but they have so many hang ups regarding Fedi software, so they don’t use them.

A lot of it is perception, but you have to try and make it so people don’t have those perceptions or break them.

I’d really love to see the conservatives completely collapse like this, although I suspect it isn’t going to happen. One can dream though.

Problem: Who is Mastodon for, and what is the goal of Mastodon?

From my perspective, the issue is that Eugen made something, a certain community and culture ended up forming (not Eugen’s goal, but it is what it is), and now that a different community and culture is starting to take notice, the old community and culture wants to preserve what it always was.

However, I think Eugen wants Mastodon to be for everyone, and Mastodon doesn’t exist in a vacuum, so sometimes you do have to override the opinions of those who are already there. You’re hearing the voices of those already there directly, but you’re not hearing the voices of the people who aren’t there. (and in my opinion, they should be on Mastodon / Fediverse, we’re all aware of why centralised social media is bad)

There’s a lot of opinions and views on Mastodon, and while “the users” are important, if Eugen wants Mastodon to have reach, sometimes he has to do different things. An example write-up of why Eugen could be making the decisions he is currently can be seen in this blog post: https://erinkissane.com/mastodon-is-easy-and-fun-except-when-it-isnt

And lastly, my final point: Whatever Mastodon itself becomes, users and administrators are still in control, so does this really matter? With the code being open source, with the ability to federate and defederate freely, ability to turn off features easily with toggles and options, Mastodon is not being compromised. The question comes down to what the default experience should be, and the Fediverse gives people control to still keep the community and culture they want, just somewhere else.

Problem is, like 80% of people are on Mastodon, and many features (quote posts being the most obvious one) require the people you’re posting to to have the same interaction with the post.

Using the quote post one for an example: If Mastodon never implements quote posts, what’s the point? Most people will only see you posting links and it ruins the whole interaction you’re looking for, so using another piece of software isn’t going to help.

In regards to people disagreeing with decisions that Mastodon makes (such as full text search like this), it’s a bit more complicated. Depending on the feature as well, it’s possible for the things you don’t like about a feature to still affect you, even if your instance doesn’t have it implemented. A LOT of people complained about universeodon.com having full text search, and there was nothing they could do about it (other than just blocking universeodon.com).

I’m personally of the opinion that Mastodon should use its success and mindshare to be a little more like what people expect to get people on decentralised services (within reason - we still want good privacy controls and anti-abuse tools), and then other platforms (or instances!) can then take it further when it comes to things like no search, no quotes, etc. for insular and private communities that people want.

There’s no rules for the Fediverse, all it means is that they utilise the ActivityPub protocols to be able to federate with other websites that also use it (there’s others, but basically irrelevant now).

Mastodon requires OAuth2 for apps to get access to your account because it was designed that way, and Lemmy wasn’t, it’s as simple as that. Any platform can be part of the Fediverse (including Reddit, Twitter, Facebook etc if they really wanted to), which also means that platforms can also do anything they want.

This is what I think should happen too - having multiple of the “same community” is a feature, but most of the time, I would suspect most people don’t want to create another and would rather join the existing one. If they still want to create another, they’ll obviously be able to just hit “No, create community” or whatever (for example, politics@sweden and politics@netherlands would understandably be different despite the same name).

That’s my take on it as well - GDPR is for the individual instances to deal with, as they’re the ones who hold the data on their users and anything coming to them.

The software, of course, can have some design which purges data automatically or whatever, but ultimately the control is whoever is hosting Lemmy so no matter what Lemmy does, people can override it (though some sane defaults are always good, of course).

Hard to say exactly what Mastodon does, but mastodon.social’s privacy policy should give you some direction in how they handle data: https://mastodon.social/privacy-policy

As mastodon.social is based in Germany, they will know about GDPR and have to follow it to the letter.

As an aside, linking to comments appears to be bugged and only shows any replies to it and not the main comment, like so:

Might be worth copy/pasting the content for now, I assume it’s a bug in Lemmy UI. Unfortunately hitting show context just refreshes the page.

I am suspecting this is related to issue 2030.

I suspect they mean blocking instances at the user level - Mastodon allows this.

Not sure how I feel about this being a standalone app, it already feels like there’s so many vying for attention, with IRC, XMPP and Matrix being federated already. While Signal exists, I’m not sure how I feel about it being a walled garden despite being open source.

I do love the idea of it hopefully being added to Fediverse platforms though - even though it makes sense to use an actual messaging app for messaging, it’s user expectation that you can just message people on any platform you’re on easily, it’s something Mastodon desperately needs.

Edit: Really though, what I want to see is an interoperable protocol being picked (Signal is actually one of them, FWIW, the Foundation just doesn’t federate with its flagship app due to “user experience and innovation” per Moxie), and then people make their platforms on that, just like how ActivityPub has become the standard for interoperable social media.

I would suspect at some point it will come into contact with other matter but yea… That could take a very, very long time.

They’re extremely different to whatever you imagine Taylor Swift to be, these are much more “lowkey” (for lack of a better term) and I think she pulls them off brilliantly, but compared to the rest of her discography nobody really talks about them as they’re not really upbeat or radio songs.

This one is hard, but currently I think I’d have to go with folklore or evermore by Taylor Swift, which I’m sure is going to be very different to most suggestions you’ll get!

I’m not really a Taylor Swift fan, but her alternative / country albums from 2020 blew me away, as I’m very much about that style of music. Shame she went back to doing standard pop, I was hoping she’d continue that way.

I’m late - it’s Friday after all - but I’ve been trying to look for jobs to get away from where I currently am, but just can’t find anything worth it that I could do.

I’m a minimum wage admin worker, at a job where they don’t offer WFH, and I’m in an office from 9 to 6 every day.

I just want something with a bit more money, or a bit more time, or something like hybrid remote, but it feels like anything that offers anything beyond the minimum requires extremely specialised qualifications or experience, but I don’t have any of this stuff, I’ve just been a grunt worker my entire life.

I’d love to learn something or pick something up but I’m always at work so feels like I don’t have the time to do it - I’m already falling behind on just looking after my house! Job market and career progression seems messed up, but I have no real idea what to do about it.

That’s “so few”!?

I’ve never subscribed to a large amount of things on any platform (whether it’s one where you follow people or communities) and I always feel like it gets unwieldy after like… 20 subs. 🤣

I have no idea how you’d manage such a huge list as I already feel like I don’t see a lot of content I’d want to see!

Well, when it comes to Matrix, they can’t really “compromise” in a way that other platforms may be able to, as their protocol is designed to be as private and secure as possible first, then the features come later.

While “nobody cares about privacy” and features are king, I personally have a lot of respect for the Matrix developers for sticking true to their vision instead of compromising for the sake of adoption. Matrix and Element DO want to be feature-rich, but they will only accept things if they work with their principles.

Furthermore, the Matrix team aren’t the ones “complaining” about adoption, they’re actually quite happy with how much adoption there is - it isn’t insignificant as there’s over 80 million known accounts, which is much bigger than the ActivityPub social media platforms, and many people use Matrix independently which they can’t track.

Rained all day Sunday, caused a serious flood in my house, landlord says that nobody will be able to look at it until Friday.

It’s scheduled to rain most of the day Wednesday and Thursday, really no idea what I can do here.

Not really - Mastodon is specifically about socialising with people you know, not content groups.

Closest thing is probably https://getstarted.social/, although it looks like the person who runs this site hasn’t posted to Mastodon since December so…

Not officially - but they’ll be adding groups in one of their future updates (not 4.2, unfortunately). That will work exactly as you’d expect.

However in the meantime, people use Guppe Groups (https://a.gup.pe/), which are a type of “user” which boosts all posts sent to it to other people following it. For example, I could follow @bikes@a.gup.pe and anytime anyone mentions @bikes@a.gup.pe, the post will be boosted to all other users following @bikes@a.gup.pe.

The above is how Lemmy communities work when followed from Mastodon, as well.