I can certainly tell you that Lemmy wont blindly follow what Mastodon is doing.
Good to hear.
They arent doing a good job for the Fediverse, for example they make zero effort to improve compatibility with other projects. Instead others are left to reverse engineer their federation logic.
Yeah. Plus, the sheer size of mastodon.social and the monoculture of Mastodon-based instances is just unhealthy. I wrote about it at length.
Wonderful!
This Tech Won’t Save Us podcast episode makes a very important point: any movement that does not have a structure and some form of leadership can easily be taken over by anyone willing and able to fill that kind of power vacuum.
Fediverse currently does not have a structure nor a form of leadership other than perhaps “whatever Mastodon is doing”. That’s problematic. I hope that we recognize this and do something to fix it, before that power vacuum gets filled by… someone we might not like.
I do see that the researchers involved in the OP link are Erin Kissane and Darius Kazemi. That’s fantastic. They are truly fedi old guard, deeply engaged, very knowledgeable, and generally wonderful human beings.
Fair point, edited.
I am still hoping beyond hope they do revive it, there seems to be others that do as well.
Will we get tabbed/grouped windows finally again? Been waiting for this for half more than a decade.
Actually, if we’re nit-picking, it means “Personal Computer”, but the colloquial meaning has shifted somewhat since the good old IBM times to first mean desktop computers (as opposed to laptops), and then to mean non-Apple computers (including laptops), which for most people means “a computer that runs Windows.”
Which is the basis of my heavy sigh.
I don’t think it is anymore.
The vast majority of the instances in that screenshot have known jumps from 1~50 users to tens of thousands in less than a day. T
I think that’s taking it too far and jumping to conclusions. I cannot think of a single instance of an instance admin inflating their numbers with bot accounts or in any other artificial way, and I’ve been on fedi before it was called fedi.
This is almost certainly external bad actors taking advantage of captcha-less open signups.
Yeah. Another thing that can’t really happen on fedi: nymwars.
Obviously there are also threats, but they are different threats than those that apply to centralized platforms. One of the threats, in fact, is centralization itself — if people flock to a few gigantic instances, that creates a central point of failure, potentially.
But there are currently ~20k independently run fedi instances. Some had been running for a decade or longer.
As I said, we’re here for the long run.
If the Fediverse just wants to exist stabely, even be mentionable in size, it is not. But to take over from the Big Tech SNSs, it is. People are where other people are. And that’s what the topic was about, replacing Big Tech SNSs.
Fediverse existed before Google+, then came Google+, then Google pushed it hard (including forcing YouTube users to have Google+ accounts), then Google killed Google+.
Fediverse is still here.
So while yes, it would be nice to have more people out of walled gardens, let’s keep stuff in perspective.
Well, an imgur alternative does not need to be federated, if it’s to be used to only host large content. Imgur does not have any real social features, as far as I understand, either.
So any simple image/video hosting tool should do. I mean, you could also just use imgur!
And that’s a good thing, in your opinion?
Mastodon grew, but only took a tiny slice of Twitter
Growth is not the only, nor even main, metric to measure success of fedi. Fedi is not a VC-funded startup that needs to grow exponentially to remain viable (consider how that worked for Twitter and Reddit…).
Building a resilient, safe, longterm-viable communities is the metric to measure fedi by. That takes more time, than hooking people on endorphin/noradrenalin high and slick interfaces.
half of Mastodon are bots or people who crosspost to both.
This is false. I follow a couple of thousand people and have an interesting, diverse, funny, and informative timeline. Very few accounts I follow crosspost.
There is no recommendation algorithm so your timeline is what you make of it. It takes a bit more time to curate, but you end up with your own thing that suits you — if you put in the tiny bit of effort required.
You forgot about Google+, which Google was pushing hard (forcing YouTube users to have Google+ accounts even!) and then shut down. 😄
Fun fact: Google+ started after the early version of Fediverse, and shuttered years ago. There is continuity on fedi with some instances running continuously since before Google+ was a thing. 👈
This will help:
The source is well-worth visiting and taking the time to read, plenty of additional info!
Not fedi-compatible? Welp. 😞
Well duh. “PC” means “Windows”, obviously.
sigh
I think throwing around vague but scary-sounding terms like “compromised” is a very bad idea.