soc.octade.net is a Fediverse instance that uses the ActivityPub protocol. In other words, users at this host can communicate with people that use software like Mastodon, Pleroma, Friendica, etc. all around the world.
This server runs the snac software and there is no automatic sign-up process.
So I got an email from Mastodon dt 25/Jul/2026, saying someone accessed a part of my account. Did anyone else get that email? I check my inbox once in a blue moon and lo this is what I see. Lmao. At least they notified me, unlike many other big orgs. Thanks for fixing it. FYI https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/security/advisories/GHSA-hx34-2pfw-2qfj this is what linked in the email. (this is only for mastodon.social domain. So check with your admin.)
#mastodon #snac2 #fediverse #books #watches #privacy #games #youtube
My catch-all email address is getting spam emails for accounts on my self-hosted Mastodon instance. The spam scrappers must be confusing federation email-like user@instance account handles as email. #Mastodon #Spam #ActivityPub #Federation #MastoAdmin Anyone with a catch-all box seeing this? Interested if another instance with two or three dozen or more users on their instance is...
You can control who can see your post by choosing a visibility setting when you publish it. Here's a guide to all the visibility settings and how to use them:
➡️ https://fedi.tips/who-can-see-my-posts-in-mastodon-how-do-i-send-dms-in-mastodon
The guide also answers lots of questions about visibility settings. Let me know if I've missed something!
If you want to restrict who can see your post, choose "Followers Only" (only your followers can see it) or "Only People I Mention" (only accounts mentioned in that post can see it).
Toot.community is shutting down https://social.jorijn.com/@jorijn/statuses/01KYN00AP3NCZXCFB96KQB8GN2
@therealitynetwork Same as we do now (a mix of: text, pics, voice chats=#Jitsi) BUT:
1/ in the direction of #helping (directly) or (indirectly) helping others be open to chat to others.
2 ways to choose & both snowballs it all.
#Listening to a person or some tech problems as the main way.
2/ making time and enjoying it regularly as social time / #donate #time back to #society. NOT just the MEDIA part in #Mastodon "social media".
Listening & speaking is simply most of it + not the tech only.
I joined #Mastodon in August last year. I would like to look up the date of my first post and what it was.
can anyone tell me a quick way to see that without scrolling through 4.8K posts? (wow, that feels like too many for 1yr😅)
Mastodon Collections (functionality) are not an enormous hit? I was hoping to see interesting collections of accounts to follow but so far not in my timeline? 🤔
#Mastodon #Collections #Fediverse
Hey #Mastodon, out of curiosity has anyone living in #Europe #Canada or any other part of the world currently fighting fire storms heard their local mainstream media suggest that we all must immediately stop burning #FossilFuels and bring carbon emissions to an end if we’re to survive these existential threats from #ClimateChange?
Hey everyone! This is the artist formerly on Urusai with my new-ish account. I recently transferred over, so wanted to do a quick re-up of my Introduction.
Who am I? I'm a 40+ year old Dad with 4 kids.
Other descriptors: Christian, enviromancer, leftist, nerd, and a major Animal Crossing / Pokopia enjoyer.
Primary Nonsense I Post: Dad jokes, cozy gaming (ACNH, Pokopia), manga, music, NYT Games (Wordle, Strands, Connections - always behind a spoiler).
Fav Games: Animal Crossing: New Horizons, Pokémon Crystal, Sonic the Hedgehog 2, F-Zero 99, Super Puzzle Fighter, Pokémon Pokopia
Fav Manga: Akane-Banashi, One Piece, Sailor Moon, Fist of the North Star, Blue Box, Donald Duck Visits Japan
#Introductions #Introduction #Music #KPop #DadJokes #AnimalCrossing #ACNH #Manga #Fediverse #Mastodon #Pokemon
Phone users used to see Twitter as a phone app that they loaded from their app store. Mastodon is the only *blogging thing in the Fediverse that they can load from their app store.
This is one reason why just about all Mastodon newbies use the official app and why they're on mastodon.social (it's the default in the official app, and since they don't know what this setting does, they leave it on default).
Mastodon even gets away with an official app that's far from good, much less fully features. All the newbies don't have anything to compare with. If Mastodon is a phone app to them, then the official app's feature set is Mastodon's feature set. If a feature isn't implemented in the official app, then Mastodon doesn't have it. I dare say that well over 80% of all Mastodon users have never in their lives used Mastodon's Web UI.
If someone takes the step and moves from the official Mastodon app to Ivory or Mona or IceCubes or Tusky or Fedilab or something like this, it's almost always the first time in their lives that they use an online service through an app that has a different name than the online service. Many people couldn't even imagine doing that.
This means that if Friendica and Hubzilla want to be more successful, growing beyond Mike's old "if you build it, they'll come" credo and advertising more isn't sufficient. People must be able to load Friendica/Hubzilla onto their phones from their app store. This requires an official app named "Friendica"/"Hubzilla" with a native, up-to-date iOS UI in the Apple App Store and one with a native, up-to-date Android UI in the Google Play Store. The existence of an official phone app in the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store is essential for being considered existent in the first place.
A commonplace attitude on Friendica and even more so on Hubzilla is that both can be installed as a PWA. But seriously, 99.9% of all phone users don't even know that PWAs exist. They don't know what that is. Not to mention that they expect and demand a native mobile UI in the style of their phone OS and not a generic Web UI.
Now, what would this app have to look like?
If the advantages of Friendica and Hubzilla over Mastodon are to be emphasised and underlined, and if this app is to become people's one and only daily driver UI, it will have to be fully featured. Minus the settings for the Web UI (e.g. the theme settings and the PDL editor on Hubzilla), minus stuff that you'll never need if you only ever use the phone app and never the server UI (e.g. Webpages on Hubzilla), but otherwise fully featured. This would also demonstrate just how vastly more powerful Friendica and Hubzilla are than Mastodon.
The obvious downside is that such an app would be a feature monster. Bigger and more feature-laden than any Android e-mail app or OpenStreetMap editor.
There has been some talk about building an official Hubzilla phone app. Some Hubzilla users have proposed an app that only offers the very basics. However, their idea behind this is not to make the app easier for newbies to use, but to make it easier for the developers to build. They're often still stuck in the early 2010s when phone apps for websites were considered gimmicks. They think that people will only use the app when they're out and about, and when they're back home, they'll sit down behind their computers and use the Web interface. Thus, phone apps only need the most basic features implemented.
But 2026 is not 2011. The huge majority of Mastodon users only use Mastodon through a phone app. Even when they're at home. As I've said: If the app doesn't have a feature, the whole product doesn't have the feature, regardless of whether or not the feature is implemented in the server backend and even in the Web frontend.
Besides, even Friendica's basic features that you'll need all the time are a lot. Hubzilla's basic features that you'll need all the time are even more numerous.
Shall people be limited to posting in public when they're on a phone because the phone app doesn't have any permission settings?
Shall people be limited to posting to their contacts when they're on a phone because someone decided that support for groups would make the phone app too complex?
Shall people wait until they're home, and they've got some time to fire up a computer, open a Web browser and log onto the Web interface to accept connection requests because the phone app doesn't have any connection settings? What if they don't have a computer?
Let's face it, social networking itself is a complex thing. And I mean actual social networking. Not misusing glorified SMS as a social network. Real social networking. Facebook-level social networking. Google+-level social networking. MySpace-level social networking.
Thus, a social networking phone app with all features necessary for real social networking has to be complex. This isn't a Friendica/Hubzilla issue. Don't believe that the official Facebook apps are simple.
This is also why so many prefer 𝕏 over Facebook. Facebook is complex. Facebook isn't just register, follow, post. 𝕏 is much more simple. 𝕏 is glorified SMS. 𝕏 is literally just register, follow, tweet. Facebook is rocket science whereas 𝕏 is for dumb-dumbs.
And it's because Mastodon is so lacking that it's for dumb-dumbs by Fediverse standards. In fact, if you don't read those panicky "it's too complicated because you have to know what a server is" posts, if you just load the app and create an account, Mastodon, through the official app, is for dumb-dumbs by all standards.
However, those who actually are on Facebook are willing to put up with something more complex. They need something more complex than glorified SMS for dumb-dumbs. They need the extra features that Facebook has that 𝕏 doesn't, even if these are the very features that deny Facebook the "for dumb-dumbs" attribute.
Send them to Mastodon, and they'll be irritated and even repelled because this feature isn't there, and that feature isn't there, and that feature is cut down beyond recognition, and they can't find any interesting people (not because Mastodon is decentralised, and the interesting people are on other servers, but because Mastodon's directory sucks arse in comparison with Facebook's), and what's with that stupid character limit?
On Friendica and Hubzilla, this feature and that feature have been there for longer than Mastodon itself, that feature is even more powerful than on Facebook proper, interesting people are being shoved into their faces once they've filled out their profile, even more so once they've got some connections, and there is no character limit worth speaking of.
But as long as Friendica and Hubzilla don't have official, fully daily-driveable phone apps named "Friendica" and "Hubzilla" respectively, they simply don't exist.
Granted, there's another obstacle. Many Mastodon users say the Fediverse needs a Facebook alternative. If you tell them about Friendica and its descendants, some will be very thankful because they've genuinely never heard of any of these.
Others will tell you that they know Friendica and maybe even Hubzilla. But they also say that none of these are Facebook alternatives. For when they say, "alternative," what they really mean is, "1:1 clone, just with a different name and decentralised and with ActivityPub and without spying and without the recent enshittification and without the evil CEO, otherwise absolutely identical."
One big aspect of this is that, as they say, the Fediverse needs an alternative to Facebook Groups. Friendica groups are exactly that because they were designed to be exactly that. Hubzilla forums, (streams) groups, Forte groups, all just that. But according to these people, they don't count because they aren't handled in precisely the same way as Facebook groups. Facebook groups aren't separate accounts. And different equals bad.
What really has me shake my head is that those who want a 1:1 Facebook clone continue to use Mastodon as a Facebook alternative. Even though Friendica and its family are vastly closer to Facebook regardless. Even though Mastodon not only doesn't have groups at all, but it doesn't even have any support for external groups. Is shouting into the void with a bunch of hashtags and hoping the right people will hear you really that much better than a Friendica group or a Hubzilla forum or maybe a PieFed community?
By the way: Just how faithful a Twitter clone is Mastodon really, seeing as Misskey and the Forkeys have the odd Twitter feature that Mastodon still lacks, seeing as even Mastodon gradually becomes more complex than 𝕏, much more so than when-it-still-was-good Twitter?
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #CharacterLimit #CharacterLimits #CharacterLimitMeta #CWCharacterLimitMeta #Fediverse #Mastodon #Friendica #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #Forte #Misskey #Forkey #Forkeys #PieFed #Privacy #Permission #Permissions #Groups #FediverseGroups #FediGroups #App #PhoneApp #iPhoneApp #iOSApp #AndroidApp #SocialNetwork #SocialNetworking #Twitter #𝕏 #Facebook #FacebookGroups
Thinking about a new domain+project...
Anyone have the TL;DR; on self hosted fediverse software?
Mastodon vs Snac vs Pleroma vs ?
I'm looking for something that is super low maintenance and lightweight / easy on resources but as full featured as practical within those constraints.
Something easy to tune re: post lengths and media types would be cool too. A "text first" platform is desired.
I've run Mastodon in the past and it's like fishing with nukes for this use case.
What's out there?
We have the winner of our Fediverse Asshole of the Year award.
This sorry excuse of a human being has made a list of all the people who are verified to be from Gaza and facing genocide. Why? So you can block them.
If you ever wonder who your jailers are going to be in the coming age of fascism, it’s going to be psychopaths like this son of a bitch right here.
@jon, are genocidal assholes like this welcome on @Vivaldi’s server. Does this go against your terms of service? Will you be taking any action against this account?
#israel #genocide #ethnicCleansing #apartheid #settlerColonialism #vivaldi #mastodon #fediverse #StopIsrael #StopTheGenocide #Gaza #Palestine #FreePalestine @NetscapeNavigator https://social.vivaldi.net/@NetscapeNavigator/116987332249412310
Yesterday, during a social ride, I talked with a guy who was working in Borland back in the days (~30 years ago). He mentioned that Open Source killed a lot of software business at that time.
Our talk reminded me that often it's better to pay for Free and Open Source Software despite it being free (as in a free beer).
https://trop.in/blog/pay-for-software-that-respects-you
#foss #floss #opensource #linux #grapheneos #fdroid #mastodon
@elsua54 That "tribe" you keep mentioning doesn't exist or isn't like a peice of wood somewhere I can just go find.
It's individuals keeping it alive much like a #individual #samurai keeps it alive - and frankly samurai's are all but dead as a bred species.
Like #Animals and #humans pushed out by cutting their #trees, concreting, asphalting it all - #tribes do not exist much.
Try not to think of my species as common like #Mastodon's #Tech & #Caturday core.
Strong #principles #morals = rare.
@elsua54 I see us more as #individuals - all "stuck in our ways" a bit. But it's ok!
Individually we plug a few together and we enable more, even if a person does only 1 thing alone.
e.g. Mastodon gives a few people a "testing" badge & chance. We do some circle chats & people report how it went.
We increment some credibility, #trust, whatever, and that's it!
#Mastodon doesn't need to know social 100%, just #enable it / test the existing great #people like adding pieces of a #puzzle together.
Underlying "social" needs to provide #training to the masses.
#Mastodon currently doesn't #facilitate that and is therefore limited to #software mainly (good things come but same-same persists).
Mastodon could help us come together from afar (as we already) towards incrementing #trust & principles people.
Re-designing social itself as #emotional and #ethical #learning.
Not only 1-way posts or regurgitation.
#Centralisation / Re-learning a new type of social !
Are you ready ? Yes / Not sure
There are two common misconceptions on Mastodon about Mastodon. The first one is that Mastodon is the only free, non-commercial, non-corporate, decentralised social anything. Once Mastodon users are over this, they still think Mastodon is the best free, non-commercial, non-corporate, decentralised social anything.
I've seen Mastodon being advertised by users as a Fediverse alternative to literally everything, including Reddit (because, like, you can communicate, right?) and even YouTube (because, like, you can upload videos, right?).
But again, let me be honest: The only thing that Mastodon can hope to be an alternative to is 𝕏. Because it's a Twitter clone. A purist Twitter clone whose developers intentionally reject feature requests because the requested features don't fit into their image of purist, minimalist, old-school, original-gangsta microblogging. They want to keep Mastodon a slightly more glorified SMS than 𝕏.
Mastodon isn't even the only microblogging server application in the Fediverse. It isn't even the best at that. 80-90% of Mastodon's users don't and probably will never realise that Mastodon is an intentionally crippled resource hog. Many believe that Mastodon is the fully-featured be-all, end-all of social networking.
By the way, even the Mastodon developers claim that Mastodon is fully featured. I've had a Mastodon dev try hard to convince me that Mastodon is fully featured although I've told him that I'm on Hubzilla. He essentially tried to tell me that Mastodon has every last feature that Hubzilla has plus even more on top.
In reality, Mastodon isn't the fully-featured be-all, end-all of social networking. It isn't even a social network. It's social media, just like 𝕏 is social media. It's designed for pumping out content and being followed because it's designed as a Twitter-like microblogging application. And it isn't even the best at microblogging.
Almost everyone on Mastodon is fully convinced that Mastodon has to be the best. After all, it's the biggest. It's what everyone chose.
No.
Mastodon is the biggest because everyone who wants to leave 𝕏 or Threads or Bluesky is railroaded to Mastodon. It's the biggest because all the newbies are only told about Mastodon. It's the biggest because none of the newbies even learn upon on-boarding that other 𝕏 alternatives exist in the Fediverse, that anything else exists in the Fediverse other than Mastodon. It's the biggest because mainstream media, tech media and even Fediverse activists only ever talk about Mastodon, Mastodon, Mastodon. (Granted, it's also the biggest because it's the only one with an official phone app in the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store. Even though that app sucks.)
All these Mastodon users who claim that Mastodon is the best choice don't realise that they themselves did, in fact, not choose Mastodon. They didn't know they had a choice. All they were told about was Mastodon. Seriously, if they'd had a choice, they'd probably be on Sharkey now and not on Mastodon.
I've read what people had to say who moved from Friendica to Misskey. Or to now defunct Calckey/Firefish. Or to Sharkey. Or to Akkoma. All these are microblogging server applications in the Fediverse. But none of them are intentionally crippled to stay close to Twitter, at least not to such a degree as Mastodon.
It was nothing short of eye-opening to them. Only by daily-driving something else than Mastodon did they realise what the non-Mastodon Fediverse can be like. And how crippled Mastodon actually is. That Mastodon is far from being the absolute pinnacle in decentralised social media.
They no longer had only 500 characters. They had thousands of characters. They would have had thousands of characters on every server running that software without having to ask around which one has more than 500 characters. It felt like a restraint being removed which they had never considered a restraint, at least not that much of it.
They saw text formatting which they considered technologically absolutely impossible in the Fediverse when they were on Mastodon. In fact, they had considered text formatting entirely impossible while on Mastodon until they had come across the first message from outside with text formatting. Actual text formatting, not Unicode trickery. Now they suddenly saw a lot of the stuff that Mastodon's HTML sanitiser removes. And they themselves could use it!
If they were on one of the *keys, they no longer had a timeline of single-message piecemeal. For the first time ever, they experienced what it's like to have something else than single-message piecemeal. Namely entire conversations right in front of them, right away. Without having to dig for them first.
They had features which they had always wished the Fediverse may introduce. They never knew that the Fediverse does have these features, only Mastodon doesn't. They had features that were completely unimagiable to them in the Fediverse.
There are users who have moved from Mastodon to something "minimalist" and lightweight like snac or GoToSocial, often on self-hosted, single-user, private servers. Even they suddenly had features they didn't have on Mastodon. Mind you, while not missing a single Mastodon feature (except maybe for a built-in Web UI).
And that's just the microblogging side of the Fediverse. None of this is actual social networking. You know, what Facebook does.
First of all, if it's about following and being followed, it's social media. A social network doesn't have followers. In case you don't know, Facebook doesn't have followers. It has "friends". Bidirectional connections. Not 𝕏/Mastodon-like mutuals which are two connections, one in each direction, but one connection that goes both ways.
Besides, there are even more important social networking features missing from the microblogging side of the Fediverse.
Where are the contact suggestions? Where does Mastodon suggest new contacts based on how many contacts you have in common with them? Where does Mastodon suggest new contacts based on what profile information you have in common with them?
Oh, right, the latter is impossible because Mastodon doesn't have profile fields with defined purposes. In fact, where are these? Every good social network has them! But Mastodon only gives you four all-purpose profile fields (just like Mastodon only gives you four of everything, four file attachments, four options in polls...).
Where is the list of unread posts, unread comments and other unnoticed actions? How are you to make sure you really catch everything your friends do? Because you can't do that if all you have is a timeline to scroll through until you no longer see new stuff. If you manage to scroll down that far. And only absolute newbies can do that on Mastodon because they hardly follow anyone.
Where are groups? Seriously, I've lost count of how many times Mastodon users said "the Fediverse" must introduce something like Facebook Groups. The huge majority of Mastodon users is fully convinced that the Fediverse does not have groups in any shape or form because Mastodon doesn't have them.
Where are all these things? In the Fediverse, no less? Where are they?
I'll tell you where they are.
Friendica. Hubzilla. (streams). Forte.
The actual social networking side of the Fediverse (although Hubzilla is more like a social CMS or a "social Swiss army knife" that you can also use as a Facebook-like social networking application). I mean, I've already explained that Friendica was created in 2010 as a Facebook alternative. Not a faithful Facebook clone, though, but better than Facebook.
Mike Macgirvin took over from Facebook what social networks really need. And Farmville isn't that, and spying on your users and passing that data on to the NSA and selling it to the highest bidder isn't that, so he didn't take over that. He didn't want to build a clone that also adopts the bad sides just to be as close to the original as possible.
He took over the detailed profiles with profile fields with dedicated purposes. He took over profile privacy settings. In general, he took over a lot of privacy features. He took over advanced user discovery and connection suggestions. He took over bidirectional connections, only without that silly name "friends". He took over groups with moderation, only that a group on Friendica is just another account with a special automated reposter. He took over enclosed threaded conversations with one post at the top and otherwise only comments. He took over a "timeline" of full conversations as the default. He took over the event calendar. And so forth.
Instead, he added useful stuff on top. He gave Friendica all the posting features to make it fully capable of long-form blogging with all bells and whistles. No character limit (except for in the database, but I think that was over 65,000 back in the day already). All HTML text formatting features (only that Friendica only used BBcode back then; now it can optionally also use Markdown). A post/thread title. Summaries. Embedded images and other media with no limit in number. He even added a spoiler tag like in forums that can hide parts of a message.
He took care of privacy beyond what Facebook had to offer. He introduced a permissions system. Friendica got multiple profile per account, only one of which is public, so that you can show different sides of yourself to different connections.
Now, if you want to embed images or other media in your messages, you have to store them somewhere. And not everyone could be expected to set up a little file space somewhere. So he built a file space into Friendica, one that can even be used as a Dropbox alternative, all the way to restricted access to certain directories.
Mike also added a content warning system that automatically generates content warnings on the reader's side, based on a keyword list. If you need something behind content warnings, add the keywords to the list, and you'll have the respective content warnings, but the next user receiving the self-same post or comment does not have these content warnings if they don't need them.
One important part of what makes Friendica Friendica is being able to connect to a whole lot of stuff. For example, Friendica could federate with StatusNet via the OStatus protocol from the get-go; this is also how it immediately federated with Mastodon when the latter was launched. Mastodon generates an RSS feed, something that many users don't know. Friendica not only generates an Atom feed, but it can subscribe to feeds. Friendica can "federate" with e-mail. Over time, more and more connection features were added, including Tumblr, Twitter (!), Facebook (only for a few years before Facebook crippled it) and a WordPress cross-poster.
Lastly, he made it possible for third parties to add extra features by implementing an add-on system.
I dare those who are fully convinced that Mastodon is the best Facebook alternative possible to use Friendica for a year. Not only dip one toe in to the water, but use it as their one and only daily driver for everything they've used Mastodon for. Not scratching the surface and using it like Twitter while ignoring any and all features the Twitter they remember didn't have, but going all in. In fact, I dare those who are fully convinced that Mastodon is perfect and fully-featured to do the same.
And then there's Hubzilla. It came to exist by Mike forking Friendica in 2011, then forking that fork the same year, then rewriting that fork of a fork in 2012, then repurposing, rebranding, repositioning and greatly expanding it in 2015. Long story.
Hubzilla adds even more stuff on top. Most importantly, it introduced nomadic identity (https://joinfediverse.wiki/Nomadic_identity) in 2012.
Hubzilla, or its 2012 prototype form named Red, became the first decentralised social software that uncoupled the identity from the login. This was necessary for nomadic identity, but it also introduced the option to have multiple independent identities, basically what's an account elsewhere, on the same account, the same login. This makes sense, given the many different roles and purposes a Hubzilla channel can have. The big advantage over having multiple separate accounts is that you can switch between the channels on your account without logging out and back in.
Hubzilla, or its 2012 prototype form named Red, got an even more advanced and fine-grained permissions system. Hubzilla has 17 individual permissions on three levels, channel level, contact level, content level. At channel level, each one has seven or eight permission options to choose from, depending on whether or not it makes sense to give a permission to everyone on the Internet.
Mike added optional features to Hubzilla that were previously unseen on social anything, features that you'd rather expect from a CMS and maybe not even from that. Non-federating long-form articles. Planning cards that are based on these articles. Wikis that can be formatted with BBcode or Markdown. Webpages that can be formatted with BBcode, Markdown or HTML, that can include dynamic content from elsewhere on the channel, and that can add extra content to the channel pages.
Hubzilla can even act as groupware. It has a CalDAV calendar server; the event calendar can double as a crude UI for the CalDAV calendars. It has an optional CardDAV addressbook server. Its built-in file storage can be accessed via WebDAV, so you theoretically even have some cloud file space you can mount as a network drive. Rather recently, there was even a way found to tie Collabora Office into Hubzilla.
If you should ever read about Bonfire: Bonfire is Hubzilla ordered from Wish.com. Whatever Bonfire promises to have or to introduce has been available as a rock-solid stable feature on Hubzilla for over a decade. Bonfire only gets away with what it's trying to do because nobody knows Hubzilla.
I think it's safe to say that those who "chose" Mastodon didn't choose it over the rest of the Fediverse because it's better. They "chose" it because they didn't even know they have a choice.
As for your post, the technology for redeveloping socialising is there. And it certainly isn't Mastodon, and it never will be Mastodon. Mastodon can't be that due to its design philosophy, due to it being a Twitter clone, due to its own developers intentionally crippling it.
If you want to move on from 1-way interaction, you have to move on from 1-way connections. Move on from Twitter followers to Facebook friends.
You have to offer better options for the users than shouting into the void, attaching a bunch of hashtags and hoping that some of their followers or someone who is following one of the hashtags happens to be bothered to scroll down their timeline far enough.
You have to make sure that people don't miss content due to basic design and philosophy decisions. You have to make sure that people don't miss content because they simply never know that this content is there in the first place, because they can't scroll down far enough their timelines until they reach that content. You need something else than a timeline of single messages to scroll down with the user not having an idea just how far down that timeline goes. You have to tell the user how much unread content there is, what it is, where it is, and take the user directly to that unread content.
You have to stop presenting content to users as a long list of single posts and more single posts with only tiny details telling them that these posts are, in fact, part of a longer conversation which they don't see. Where they have to click or tap themselves through various UI pages to see that post in its context. Users must see the whole conversation Right. Off. The bat.
You need groups. Not kluged onto something that had no group support whatsoever two seconds earlier, not intentionally crippled, not crippled by the technology they're built upon, not intentionally re-invented to be incompatible with whatever already exists (and this is how Mastodon would do them). But fully functional, on an appropriate base, interoperable, user-moderated, optionally private, optionally hiding from directories.
If you want to go "social", you really have to go social. You have to go Facebook, not Twitter.
Users must find other users based on common interests. Or users living close to them. Or users with lots of contacts in common with them. Not by being on the same local/regional server of the same server about a certain topic. Not by searching for hashtags in the main profile text. But by examining specialised profile fields and the contacts.
Users must have such users suggested to them as new connections. Users must have such users at the top of their directory. This is how Facebook does it. And this is one thing that Facebook has always done right.
Again, Mastodon will never offer any of this. But that doesn't mean that you'll have to compromise and lower your expectations. Because you don't have to. There are server applications in the Fediverse, fully federated with Mastodon, that offer literally all of that. They exist right now. And some of them have existed for longer than Mastodon.
If you need something better than today's Mastodon, stop wishing for a better Mastodon. Instead, use something that's better and more appropriate for the job than Mastodon right now. For it exists right now.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #CharacterLimit #CharacterLimits #CharacterLimitMeta #CWCharacterLimitMeta #500Characters #CW #CWs #CWMeta #ContentWarning #ContentWarnings #ContentWarningMeta #Fediverse #Mastodon #MastodonFediverse #NotOnlyMastodon #FediverseIsNotMastodon #MastodonIsNotTheFediverse #Friendica #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #Forte #Privacy #Permission #Permissions #Groups #FediverseGroups #FediGroups #NomadicIdentity #MastodonCentricity #MastodonNormativity
From "Social Media" to Social Movements...
Social #Movements are more than just Tech or Software:
#Mastodon you've done great work for social media but we need help to redevelop socialising itself:
- not only as media or storage.
- help move on from 1-way #interaction.
At some peak level of software we jump from a #tech tree of development to a #social tree of development:
To Develop:
How to socialise / #increment #trust.
How not be #afraid of others.
To achieve a Techno-Social balance!
Too much Tech > Develop Social / Society » 🌐
@collective_truth@mastodon.social
#Open #protocol called #Oscar (from #AIM #Messanger) still lives and maybe could be integrated to #Mastodon #activitypub ! :)
1/ Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OSCAR_protocol
#AIM #Messenger #Pidgin #XMPP #Trillian, #PsiIM, #Gajim #ICQ #Mastodon #Jitsi etc
2/ GitHub: https://github.com/mk6i/open-oscar-server
This was far from being the first time I've read this very demand or similar demands. It just was the most recent time.
Where this comes from? Well, it has two sides.
Some of these newbies think Mastodon is the network because they've never heard of the Fediverse. Others think the Fediverse is Mastodon and nothing else.
My estimation, and not only mine, is that more than 50% of all Mastodon users think the Fediverse consists of nothing else than Mastodon. A great deal of the rest thinks the Fediverse doesn't extend beyond Mastodon, Pixelfed and PeerTube. Not much anyway.
It doesn't help that Mastodon, unlike other Fediverse server applications such as Misskey, the Forkeys, Friendica, (streams) or Forte, does not tell its users which server app a message came from. It doesn't help either that Mastodon "sanitises" away quite a few things that'd make non-Mastodon messages a dead giveaway. So the huge majority of Mastodon users believe that if they see it on Mastodon, it came from Mastodon.
So these people are dropped into a network which they think is nothing but a purist, minimalist microblogging service with no more than 500 characters, and whose only differences from Twitter are the name, that it isn't just one website, that it isn't owned by Elon Musk, and that it isn't overrun by fascists.
They get used to it. They get used to only having a maximum of 500 characters. They get used to the CW field being the CW field. They get used to Mastodon's entire culture which they see as the be-all, end-all of online culture.
And then they come across a message with a whole lot over 500 characters for the first time. Something which, to their best knowledge, shouldn't exist in the Mastodon Fediverse. Something which mustn't exist in the Mastodon Fediverse.
Some don't have any idea how it could be possible to "toot" more than 500 characters "on Mastodon", and they ask how one can do that. Others believe that all these "long toots" come from hacked Mastodon servers. Either way, they often demand that these Mastodon users adhere to Mastodon's culture and Mastodon's unwritten rules and act like all good Mastodon users shall act. Including not "tooting" more than 500 characters "on Mastodon".
Both are being told that these "toots" aren't "toots" because they don't come from Mastodon. That the Fediverse is, in fact, not only Mastodon. That there's other server software in the Fediverse that has always been able to post way more than 500 characters.
That changes nothing for them. They still demand everyone in the Fediverse adhere to Mastodon's culture and Mastodon's unwritten rules and only to these, and that everyone in the Fediverse use whatever they use exactly like vanilla, unmodified Mastodon.
And they feel absolutely justified. According to their gospel, Gargron invented the Fediverse when he created Mastodon. And everything in the Fediverse that isn't Mastodon (once they discover that there is such stuff) has either been designed as an add-on glued onto Mastodon (Pixelfed, PeerTube), or it's an evil, savage intruder (everything that's capable of largely doing the same thing as Mastodon without being Mastodon).
The Fediverse is to Mastodon users what the ancient world was to the Romans. Mastodon is the Roman Empire. Literally the only place that has got something like culture. A few places have voluntarily joined the Roman Mastodon Empire. All the rest consists of primitive, savage, culture-less barbarians whose lands need to be conquered by force to bring them culture.
To non-Mastodon users, the Fediverse feels like the New World when the European conquerors and settlers arrived. They demanded the natives adopt European culture and convert to Catholic Christianty or face death. The natives actually already had cultures. Cultures that suited them and their surroundings much more than the culture lived in European cities. But the Europeans didn't acknowledge the natives' cultures as such, nor did they care.
From non-Mastodon users' point of view, Mastodon users act to them like the Europeans acted to the natives in their colonies-to-be.
A very good example, also because it's such an extreme example, has to be Friendica. In case you don't know, Friendica (https://friendi.ca; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friendica; https://joinfediverse.wiki/Friendica) is a free, open-source, decentralised, federated Facebook alternative that first came out as early as May, 2010. Friendica developed a wholly different culture from Mastodon's because it's vastly different from Mastodon.
Mastodon's culture was mostly coined in mid-2022 by those who escaped from Elon Musk's announcement to buy out Twitter in February/March, 2022.
Friendica's culture was coined by its early users in 2010 already.
Mastodon users are mostly used to living in a Mastodon-only network with no connection to anything that isn't Mastodon. They believe that Mastodon and the Fediverse were designed as such, and that Friendica is an illegitimate intruder.
Friendica users are used to being able to connect to everything that moves, including Mastodon, including the whole Fediverse, no matter which iteration of the Fediverse, including diaspora*, and the some. That's because Friendica was designed from the ground up to be able to connect to a whole lot of stuff. It's part of its concept.
Mastodon users believe that Mastodon was there before anything.
Friendica users know that Friendica was there long before Mastodon, even before diaspora*, and that Friendica still wasn't the first.
Mastodon users are used to only having 500 characters. They still consider that a lot in comparison with Twitter's 280 characters.
Friendica users are used to not having any character limit whatsoever. Friendica's actual technical character limit is imposed by the maximum size of the message text database field, and that's over 16.7 million characters.
Mastodon users are used to chopping long posts into threads. It's what they expect. Actual long posts irritate them.
Friendica users are used to posting long post in one piece. It's what they expect. One and the same post being chopped up into itty-bitty bits irritate them.
Mastodon users are used to putting CWs in a dedicated CW field.
Friendica users are used to the self-same text field actually being a summary field (Friendica calls it "abstract"). While Mastodon got that field in 2017 as a pull request from a user, Friendica had it from the get-go, i.e. since 2010. And Friendica actually adopted it from Evan Prodromou's decentralised Twitter alternative StatusNet from 2008 with which Friendica was able to federate with from the get-go as well.
Mastodon users "know" that Gargron invented the CW field.
Friendica users actually do know for a fact that they've had the same field as a summary field since long before Mastodon was even made. There are still enough Friendica veterans around from before 2016.
This also means that Mastodon users are used to poster-side CWs which all readers get just the same.
Friendica users are used to CWs being automatically generated on the reader's side, individually for each reader, by an optional text filter.
In fact, Mastodon can do the same. But nobody knows, it came way too late to become part of Mastodon's culture (Mastodon 4.0 in October, 2022), it's too tedious to use, it probably isn't supported by that many phone apps, and next to nobody uses Mastodon's Web interface. In the meantime, Friendica has had this feature for some twelve years longer, and it's only an on-off switch and one editable keyword list.
Mastodon users are used to only having up to four images and to images always only being file attachments dangling below a post.
Friendica users are used to being able to embed a virtually unlimited number of images to a post. And to actually embed them, as in, with text above the image and text below the image and another image below that text and more text below that image. Theoretically, they could insert tiny images into lines of text. By the way, Mastodon refuses to display embedded images. It also rejects any file attachments beyond the first four. And up to version 4.0 from October, 2022, it didn't support any kind of text formatting and "sanitised" all message texts down to plain text.
This also means that Mastodon users are used to only having plain text or mucking around with Unicode characters for bold type and italics.
Friendica users are used to being able to not only see, but also post all sorts of text formatting that HTML is capable of.
Mastodon users are often deadly afraid of quote-posts because they only know quote-posts as a means of harassment and dogpiling on Twitter.
Friendica users, their entire culture being entirely unfazed by whatever has ever happened on Twitter, are absolutely used to always having had quote-posts at hand and to using quote-posts as a means of forwarding content. They had what Mastodon calls "quotes" years before they had what Mastodon calls "boosts" (and what many Mastodon users refer to as "retoots").
Mastodon users are used to conversations being loosely tied together from toots and to having to visibly mention all those whom they want to receive a reply.
Friendica users are used to having enclosed threaded conversations with only one post and otherwise only comments. They're also used to everyone in the conversation, i.e. everyone who has received the original post, automatically receiving every single last comment. They're used to always seeing the entire thread immediately as opposed to single-message piecemeal.
Mastodon users are used to shouting into the void with hashtags attached if they want to talk about a certain topic. It's the only way for them to do so.
Friendica users are used to having groups. Oh, and full-text search.
Mastodon users keep demanding that everyone else in the Fediverse live by Mastodon's culture and Mastodon's rules and only by these.
Mastodon users who have joined in 2026 keep ordering Friendica veterans who have joined in the early 2010s (before there was any Mastodon) to act like they're on Mastodon.
They demand these Friendica veterans fully adopt Mastodon's culture (which isn't even geared towards Friendica's set of features).
They indirectly demand these Friendica veterans give up their own culture (because they cannot comprehend that there can be any other culture in the Fediverse than Mastodon's, as in, that what Friendica has is a culture, even though it's different from Mastodon's).
They directly demand these Friendica veterans give up some 40% of the features they've been using for a decade and a half and indirectly demand they give up another 40% of these features.
They demand these Friendica veterans stop posting more than 500 characters at once.
They demand these Friendica veterans put CWs into their abstract field. (Again, they think that Gargron has invented this field from scratch as a CW field,)
They demand these Friendica veterans use their abstract field only for CWs.
They demand these Friendica veterans stop "spamming" hashtags that clearly aren't there for content discovery. (They cannot comprehend that these hashtags are there to trigger automatic reader-side CWs because the entire concept is completely alien to them.)
And so forth.
These Friendica veterans have been in the Fediverse for about a decade and a half. And suddently, these Mastodon newbies appear and tell them how to use Friendica.
Of course, these Mastodon newbies don't know a thing about Friendica. They think the Friendica veterans are Mastodon users, and they're telling them how to use Mastodon.
So the Friendica users tell them, no, they aren't on Mastodon. They're on Friendica which has got absolutely nothing to do with Mastodon.
Then the Mastodon newbies will believe that someone has created this weird Friendica thing after Mastodon was made (it can't possibly be any other way, right?9 and illegally hacked this Friendica thing into the Mastodon Fediverse. And whoever made Friendica omitted to make Friendica just like Mastodon.
Okay, now the Friendica users tell them that Friendica was launched in 2010, how long before Mastodon that was, and that they themselves have been around for much longer than Mastodon, too.
Now, either the Mastodon newbies will fail to comprehend that there can be anything in the Fediverse made before Mastodon if Gargron has invented the very technology. Or they think that the Fediverse was still created with Mastodon, and that Friendica still illegally intruded into the Mastodon Fediverse.
Either way, the Friendica veterans will have to adapt and act entirely by Mastodon's standards. This is the Mastodon Fediverse, Mastodon is the biggest software (if only by monthly active users, by the way), Mastodon has defined "the Fediverse culture", and thus it's the Mastodon users and only the Mastodon users who get to say how people have to act and behave in the Fediverse.
And then the Mastodon users wonder how there's so much Mastodon hatred on Friendica (and there actually is). How Friendica users complain about Mastodon users trying to force them to use Friendica like Mastodon. How Friendica users complain about Mastodon users chopping long posts into small bits. As if they had a choice. How Friendica users complain about CWs in whatever that abstract field is supposed to be. And so forth.
How dare the Friendica users complain? The Mastodon users are the good guys! It's them and only them who have a culture, who have rules, who know how to use the Fediverse!
By the way: It gets even worse between Mastodon and Lemmy.
Mastodon's culture is an idealised version of pre-Musk Twitter's culture with bits of Tumblr's SFW culture mixed in. That's because just about everyone on Mastodon originally came from Twitter, and most of them escaped from Elon Musk. They want Mastodon (and the Fediverse) be a better Twitter. It helps that Mastodon is still trying hard to be a Twitter clone.
Lemmy's culture, on the other hand, is a carbon copy of Reddit's culture. Lemmy is a Reddit clone that shares next to no features at all with Mastodon except for ActivityPub support. Next to all Lemmy users are former Redditors who left Reddit when Reddit started charging $20,000,000 for its client API, effectively killing off all third-party Reddit apps. They saw no reason in changing their culture because it wasn't the culture that drove them away. Hardly any of them were on Twitter, and almost none of them have ever been on Mastodon. Many think the Fediverse is Lemmy. Of the rest, many think the Fediverse is Lemmy with a side of PieFed.
Mastodon lives on hashtags even more than Twitter. Lemmy has zero support for hashtags because Reddit doesn't have any either, and neither does Hacker News.
Mastodon requires mentions to get replies to their recipients. One visible mention per recipient. Lemmy doesn't need mentions for this at all. Mentions on Lemmy only serve to, well, mention someone. Just like on Reddit.
And so forth.
It's actually easy to spot threads on Lemmy that were started by Mastodon users: The title is in the post text, or there's no title at all because the Mastodon users did as they always do: mention in the first line, then a new line because that looks prettier. Of course, there's a mention in the post text. And there's a bunch of hashtags strewn across the post text even though they don't even work. If you're very lucky, the hashtags are at the bottom, but most Mastodon users don't waste any of their 500 characters on that.
I hope you get a rough idea how much headbutting there is between Mastodon users who think that the Mastodon users rule supreme over the whole Fediverse and Lemmy community owners who do rule over the Lemmy communities which these Mastodon users have just posted into.
On Mastodon's side, there are very few single users who block every single non-Mastodon server they come across.
Countermeasures on the non-Mastodon side vary. They start with single users who block each Mastodon user who doesn't behave like they want them to behave, e.g. they block everyone who chops a long post into a thread at first trike.
Then there's Hubzilla, reworked from a fork of a fork of Friendica by Friendica's own creator. Hubzilla has always been based on its own protocol, Zot6 (Friendica's creator calls it an older version of Nomad). ActivityPub support is optional, on by default on new servers and off by default on new channels. The current devs won't change anything about that. Not only doesn't Hubzilla's technology allow for moving it to ActivityPub as its base protocol, but ActivityPub being optional is seen as a last-resort "drawbridge" for those to whom Mastodon has become unbearable.
Nowadays, Friendica's creator is working on two other applications in the same family. (streams) is a fork of a fork of three forks of a fork (of a fork?) of Hubzilla, and Forte is a fork of (streams). Both have an admin-side user agent filter. It can block entire Fediverse applications without having to hassle around with a URL list. It was mainly created and advertised as a means to permanently lock Threads out, even if Threads should change URLs. But it's also being advertised as being capable of blocking all of Mastodon, all present and future servers. Mastodon being intentially made barely compatible with the rest of the Fediverse is only one reason for this.
(streams) and Forte also have another admin-side filter which, when turned on, locks everything out that doesn't support enclosed threaded conversations. That's because server applications like Mastodon mess with the way that (streams), Forte and their ancestors handle conversations. Granted, when this is activated only to get rid of Mastodon, it causes quite a bit of collateral damage.
Generally, (streams) and Forte are very similar. The main difference is that Forte is entirely based on ActivityPub whereas (streams) is based on the current version of Nomad with ActivityPub still being optional. The reason why (streams) is kept around is for there to still be one of these applications with the same protocol-level "drawbridge" as Hubzilla. And in fact, the most important (streams) group used to have ActivityPub off with the intention to keep Mastodon out.
I guess there are still Mastodon users who absolutely defend and support Mastodon's way being forced upon the non-Mastodon Fediverse, and who are irritated or upset about non-Mastodon users being very defensive of their own non-Mastodon ways and refusing to adopt Mastodon's (allegedly much superior) culture instead of embracing it.
And I guess there are Mastodon users who feel absolutely entitled to get to every last Hubzilla and (streams) and Forte user unhindered and force them to use Hubzilla/(streams)/Forte exactly like Mastodon in every way possible.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #CharacterLimit #CharacterLimits #CharacterLimitMeta #CWCharacterLimitMeta #500Characters #CW #CWs #CWMeta #ContentWarning #ContentWarnings #ContentWarningMeta #Hashtag #Hashtags #HashtagMeta #CWHashtagMeta #Fediverse #Mastodon #MastodonFediverse #NotOnlyMastodon #FediverseIsNotMastodon #MastodonIsNotTheFediverse #Friendica #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #Forte #Lemmy #MastodonCulture #FediverseCulture #MastodonCentricity #MastodonNormativity
@Beggarmidas Is it a good idea to appeal to social engine developers like #Mastodon to make it part of their integral mission / roadmap / a department towards integrate working with it's people / users at the same time as the software development ?
Developing people and not just developing software ?
We had similar #Mastodon #Loops #ICQ #Forums #phpBB #Torrent #Email #IRC #Jitsi / #WebRTC #ICQ etc...
...since 2000's but never really worked directly as developing how we actually socialise ?
@elsua54 They / #Mastodon / #Loops / #GNU etc all "have to" incorporate / tend to the needs of their users (beyond just software) otherwise they die / get taken over / stagnate.
Maybe no one foresee's the baby-sitting of users / fans or even partnering but that's the natrual life-cycle which weirdly in the end maybe comes back to "survival of the fittest" where we need to form a mass herd and defend all types of perimeters, else we get eaten and assimilated into those that do form groups/corps.
@elsua54
What am I looking for + want to help create?
- for them to use us more directly.
- to use their own software - not just the #software #roadmap loop - but towards the art of #communication #roadmap / loop.
"Developing people not just developing computers mostly" would be my tagline / short version.
Whatever meaning to each to try get AND give ourselves to each other.
#Mastodon, #Loops, #Jitsi can actually huddle us together. These circles are literally the revolution + better #loop.
lia, a bun type creature
[she/they · sie/ihr oder es/deren/denen] » 🌐
@lianna@micro.webgarden.click
It's been said a lot that tech people tend to think that every problem can be solved with a tech solution, and that that is often a wrong approach that ignores social dynamics and systemic causes.
That's true, but I can think of at least one problem here on the Fediverse that really, really needs a tech solution!
That being hashtags.
The whole point of hashtags is that you can tag your content with concepts it relates to, so that others who are interested in said concepts can discover your content.
Ideally, a hashtag should therefore contain all posts relating to the concept, and should not contain any posts unrelated to the concept. This is not the case.
The problem is that hashtags are plain text only. This causes two kinds of issues:
Common examples for false positives are homonyms (seating bank vs. financial bank, video games vs. board games), abbreviations (CNC, BBC, MTF), and multilingual issues (German handy vs. English handy).
False negatives are much, much more common, even. You're missing out on synonyms (horses vs. equines), grammatical and regional variations (colouring vs. coloring, horse vs. horses) and scope issues (gaming vs. games vs. video games) at least. Also, the whole thing about 'dogsOfMastodon' versus 'dogs'.
If you add to it that the Fediverse is multi-lingual, this is getting exponentially worse. If a German account posts about dogs using the hashtag 'Hund' (or Hunde, Hundes, Hunds, Hundi, Wauwau, Köter, Welpe, Welpen...), someone subscribed to the English hashtag 'dogs' should probably also see that post.
Rather than plain text which has all of these issues, a hashtag should therefore point at an individual unique ID of a concept, unique and unambiguous across all languages and grammatical forms.
Someone should be able to subscribe to the concept of a horse – the equine animal – and not just the letters 'horse' in that order!
That might sound daunting – who has a database of all concepts in the world? – but structured data actually is a super old problem that has been talked about for ages! The semantic web has it figured out.
Wikidata is an open data source for unique concepts, doing exactly what we'd need. Obviously it's easier said than done, but 'all' that the Fediverse needs to do is replace or extend hashtags with a system that allows you to link a Wikidata concept by UUID. And figure out what to do with things that don't have such a UUID yet, and how to handle UX. But it would be a vast improvement over plain-text hashtags.
I don't really want this post to just die in the ether, tbh, as posts are wont to do. I'd like to actually make this a thing. Is there anyone out there who knows what an implementation of this would take? I'd love to help (computational linguist).
#tech #technology #Fediverse #activityPub #socialMedia #hashtags #semanticWeb #wikiData #mastodon #goToSocial #fediSoftware #fediDev #fediDevelopers #fediDeveloperVerse #accessibility
RE: https://mastodon.uno/@amministratore/116967326136690873
Looks like there’s a Mastodon identity verification scam going around.
Good rule of thumb: if a web site asks you to verify your identity, you close that browser tab.
The scam letter looks like this (thanks to @amministratore):
***
We detected suspicious activity on your account and have temporarily restricted access. Your new posts are currently visible only to you. To restore full access, please complete the verification process using the link below:
🔗 <shortened link removed but you can report UPDATENOTIFICATION.CLICK to https://globaldomaingroup.com/report-abuse for it to be taken down>
If you do not verify within 24 hours, your account may be deleted for guideline violations. Successful verification will grant you a badge to enhance your visibility.
Thank you for your cooperation.
Sincerely,
The Support Team
***
Do NOT click any links if you receive such a message and inform your server admin.
#mastodon #scam #updateNotificationClick #fediverse #warning
@Earl
Today I have been talking to an environmentalist but he told me a statement "we can't stop this but just control its impacts) we were talking about #global warming but he told me that one tree in a home works and some veggies that's the way we can control its rapid growth. So I decided to spread this word also spread it to others #environment #ecology #photography #mastodon ##fediverse #politics
Are you a Mastodon Admin?
#Poll #Mastodon #Admin #Multichoice
| Yes. Here's my plushy: | 0 |
| Unsure: | 0 |
| No, is it painful?: | 2 |
| Other: | 0 |
It's time for our first Server Spotlight!
We want to help people find their communities across the #fediverse so we're featuring servers here on this account.
First up: The Mended Drum, a home for fans of all things Sir Terry Pratchett.
It is said that if you stay on The Mended Drum long enough, you'll meet every hero on the server: https://mendeddrum.org/directory
(keep an eye on your horse, though 😉)
#FeaturedServer #CommunitySpotlight #Mastodon #SocialWeb #GNUTerryPratchett
This is part sub-toot, part observation and part my own experience...
I've found Mastodon to be a really vibrant, exciting, engaging, diverse and inspirational platform. BUT, if a person doesn't interact with others on here, they will miss out on a lot!
It's definitely the best platform I've been a part of, because of the people here, the tools available, and the structure of the fediverse as a whole.
But... you DO need to engage to get the best experience.
Disclaimer: This is all just IMO of course
Mastodon has a built-in system to prevent you seeing the same post boosted again and again. However, it allows boosts to reappear if 40 other posts have passed through your main timeline, and this is why you may see the same boost repeated.
As the Fediverse is now much busier, Mastodon's devs are raising this number to 80 other posts (technical details are at https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/pull/39784). This should hopefully be in the next update.
(Thanks to @nitrml for pointing this out 🙏 )
RE: https://techhub.social/@manlycoffee/116961593297443609
I may be sounding tongue-in-cheek, but I've been humouring the idea of "the email of social media" and/or "social media of email".
I'm trying to see just how viable such an interface will be.
Pretty much embrace the email-like nature of ActivityPub.
The folks who looooove acting competitive (you know, antagonism towards a competing ideas) love to scoff at ActivityPub (well, really, the Mastodon protocols overall).
I actually don't think they're wrong.
For this reason, I think ActivityPub is fine for what it is.
In fact, embrace it.
Treat it like email, with one added feature: the idea of "following".
I opened the post below. #Mastodon metrics told me: 3 boosts, 0 likes.
I boosted the post. Metrics changed: 1 boost, 1 like.
#UX 🤷
https://www.digitaleoverheid.nl/nieuws/rijk-kiest-voor-europese-cybersecurityleverancier/
2/ "telling me, that I should think about saving the planet"
Yes "save the planet" means at least having the will and motivation WITH others. Trying often.
One of the main reasons things don't work is because of the communication / even between the good people which is obvious from #Mastodon as a provider not organising as #friendship or developing people themselves.
Developing software only, so people are mostly just users, 1-way posters / micro-blogging - not much more).
[continued...]
There are only four ways that posts can appear in your main Mastodon timeline:
- You follow the account that made the post
- You follow an account that shared the post
- You follow a hashtag that is included in the post
- You follow a group that shared the post
If you see a post in your main timeline that doesn't seem to fit into any of these categories, this guide might help you find out what is going on:
➡️ https://fedi.tips/why-is-a-post-appearing-in-my-mastodon-timeline-i-dont-understand-how-it-got-there
@argv_minus_one
#Mastodon for the way at the start...
#Jitsi Meet realtime audio chat after checking people's'profile more deeply and their direction.
Finding the #art of #talking while accepting some #relativity in / #motivation to do more / #sharing your likes / talents to #test and increment #trust.
Going for the win in #humanity "slowly but surely".
Perhaps not all-in but half-in (?) for those with time to #improve #logic.
#Mastodon + #Jitsi WebRTC
=
#Human AND #Software #Development
@argv_minus_one
We can write our experiences here and feedback.
We can see how invested I and other people are in proving / defending their logic / why this way.
A bit like we're doing now already - maybe you don't believe it's possible to save people / planet (directly or indirectly) but we're already doing it.
We're not talking about sensitive info but we are constructing a better world and logic by simple increasing experience talking, seeing expression & enjoying tough topics sometimes.
@argv_minus_one Ok but you're distracting away from the main points - about deeper talking.
So the number count + depth of those replies indicates something shallow about #Mastodon / #Fediverse (actually 'normal' peolpe that need improving)...
I'm not comparing or saying it's only numbers:
Talking here is not really talking much / too shallow.
I appreciate your reply and will see the others...
(Remember some of you / them / us are Twitter people and part of my point in improving social.)
If you're following someone who posts interesting stuff but boosts way too often, you can mute just their boosts:
1. Go to the account's profile page
2. Click the ⋯ button
3. Click "Hide Boosts"
Their own posts will continue appearing in your timeline as normal, but their boosts won't.
You (plural / #Mastodon users) are not helping anyone else as a more-focused side-job to solving the world / deepening #friendship).
We all need help personally to focus / help others more-personally again - that's almost the only way
Live your life - just stay away from hashtags that don't work for you / others.
OK PEOPLE?
@argv_minus_one "Socialising" isn't really happening deeply on #Mastodon today.
You can measure my opinion via the numbers of reply and my / your experience and even look now at your own feed to measure it.
*** Here's why / how I think my analysis is nearer the truth, accepting it's never 100%: ***
(see next post)
I'm currently trying out Pachli and it seems that it will become my new main Mastodon client on Android. The interface is very clean and it works great. What I like is that I can customize the fonts and that they offer Atkinson Hyperlegible, which is a very good font in terms of readability.
Great work, @pachli!
Warum habe ich eigentlich einen Account im Fediverse?
Immer wieder lese ich Beiträge von Menschen, die nach kurzer Zeit enttäuscht sind. Sie hatten sich vom Fediverse etwas anderes erhofft oder vergleichen ihre Erfahrungen mit Facebook, Instagram, X oder anderen kommerziellen Plattformen.
Dabei lohnt es sich, einmal einen Schritt zurückzugehen und sich zwei ganz einfache Fragen zu stellen:
❓ Warum habe ich einen Account?
❓ Welche Erwartungen habe ich an das Fediverse?
Diese beiden Fragen erscheinen zunächst selbstverständlich. Doch die Antworten fallen oft sehr unterschiedlich aus.
Manche möchten einfach ihre Gedanken teilen oder ein digitales Tagebuch führen. Andere suchen Austausch mit Gleichgesinnten. Wieder andere möchten ihre Projekte vorstellen, Wissen weitergeben oder Menschen für ein Thema begeistern. Einige möchten Nachrichten lesen, neue Kontakte knüpfen oder einfach einer Community angehören.
Ebenso unterschiedlich sind die Erwartungen.
Erwarte ich viele Follower? Viele Kommentare? Sofortige Aufmerksamkeit? Eine große Reichweite? Oder wünsche ich mir vor allem einen respektvollen Austausch mit Menschen, die ähnliche Interessen haben?
Das Fediverse funktioniert in vielen Bereichen anders als kommerzielle soziale Netzwerke.
Hier entscheidet kein zentraler Algorithmus darüber, welche Beiträge möglichst viel Aufmerksamkeit erhalten. Es gibt keine Firma, deren Geschäftsmodell darauf basiert, unsere Aufmerksamkeit möglichst lange zu binden. Sichtbarkeit entsteht vor allem dadurch, dass Menschen miteinander in Kontakt treten.
Deshalb lohnt sich vielleicht noch eine dritte Frage:
Was bin ich selbst bereit, in diese Gemeinschaft einzubringen?
Folge ich anderen Menschen? Kommentiere ich interessante Beiträge? Teile ich Wissen oder eigene Erfahrungen? Nehme ich an Gesprächen teil? Unterstütze ich andere oder warte ich hauptsächlich darauf, dass andere auf mich aufmerksam werden?
Das Fediverse lebt nicht von Algorithmen – sondern von seinen Menschen.
Je mehr wir miteinander kommunizieren, desto lebendiger wird diese gemeinsame Welt. Beziehungen entstehen oft langsamer als auf kommerziellen Plattformen, dafür sind sie häufig persönlicher und nachhaltiger.
Vielleicht liegt genau darin die größte Stärke des Fediverse.
Es ist kein Ort, an dem man nur konsumiert.
Es ist ein Ort, den wir alle gemeinsam gestalten.
Mich würde interessieren:
Warum habt ihr euren Account im Fediverse erstellt?
Und wurden eure Erwartungen erfüllt – oder haben sie sich im Laufe der Zeit verändert?
#Fediverse #Friendica #Mastodon #Hubzilla #Pixelfed #OpenSocialWeb #DigitaleGemeinschaft
Are you following an account which you enjoy, but it overwhelms your timeline with frequent posts?
You can use Mastodon's "Lists" feature to create separate themed mini-timelines, which helps to make your main timeline less busy:
➡️ https://fedi.tips/how-to-use-the-lists-feature-on-mastodon
You can then dip into the mini-timelines when you want to see their content.
This is especially useful for news and media accounts, as they may post extremely frequently.
Anyone used #RetroShare / @xeres before ?
#P2P #Share #Files #retro #Email #messages directly #PeerToPeer #Encrypted #Decentralised ( etc )
Four years later and #Mastodon continues to have a misogyny problem, what efforts have been made to make it better for women here?
Dear #Mastodon and #Fediverse client devs,
Please don't refer to #ContentWarnings as "spoilers."
That's only one type of #CW.
@SrRochardBunson As of almost 5AM, it's I think six hours left. I think everyone must be asleep on all platforms. I'm scared. I haven't known if people in #Europe are awake now and on #Mastodon & #Fediverse. I should maybe try to sleep, even a little. The #CanadaWildfires are supposed to hit where I am in the Midwest today. We've also got the most cases of #Cyclosporiasis in the US just a half hour drive away from me.
Bisher glauben Mastodon-Nutzer nämlich, die Admins von Hubzilla-Hubs sind entweder gleichgültig oder zu faul, um sich um solche Meldungen zu kümmern. Sie wissen nicht, daß sie es nicht mit Mastodon-Admins zu tun haben, und noch weniger, daß Mastodon-Reports auf Hubzilla nicht ankommen.
#FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Mastodon #Hubzilla
Retro-Gaiden.com has some cartoon frog emojis that get used by people sometimes. If you find this to be triggering, please block us.
RG also has people who used to post game stuff on another platform.
I understand this might cause PTSD in some people so please do what you have to do to protect your mental health 🙏
https://mastodon.social/@Chishiki611@enby.life/116916710427005297
Hello to the fediverse !
If you are admin of a Mastodon instance, you should check if IP from the bloc 43.160.0.0/12 (precisely IPs in the ranges 43.172.194 to 198 and 43.173.173 to 194)
are asking for A LOT of pages and consuming a lot of CPU / Bandwidth.
It's a malicious bot that harvest the fediverse by tags, feel free to bloc it ;)
@elsua54 @timbray I'm against the people who don't have the will (even in first person) to really connect #deeply or #invest in others for just something more.
(for example: money makes it much easier but is also a fake / symbolic virtual material which cheapens upon every new #loan... #Banks behind it all are helping spend for #war - *on both sides*).
It's the lack of humanity or trying - not just #Mastodon.
All are too comfortable with the #bad they know or don't want to #face / #delay it.
@collective_truth I was referring to the concept coined by Leisa Reichelt:
"Ambient intimacy is about being able to keep in touch with people with a level of regularity and intimacy that you wouldn’t usually have access to, because time and space conspire to make it impossible"
See 👉🏻 https://disambiguity.com/ambient-intimacy/ for a more detailed description of how it works. Perhaps, still one of the best descriptions of today's #Mastodon & #Fediverse.
.cc @timbray
@elsua54 @timbray Video is a lot harsher on #Mastodon in some places and MORE about #EricMurphy's / other people's use-case / template (maybe a more 'mainstream' demand / looking for too much. of the same...)
... BUT as I said and stick to the _main point_ is social here as movement, not just media
#Mastodon does near-perfect media but near-0 on #working on / with actual people, no matter who they are to help #build something else + increment #trust and how to #communicate etc.
boosted#Starterkits. Gerne #boosten, reposten:
Starterkit Loops-Accounts zum AfDverbot und Pruefdemos loops.video/starter-kits/gQFuEw4Ah-/afdverbot-pruef-demos
Starterkit Loops-Accounts zu CSDs loops.video/starter-kits/gQDnihhjhC/csd-pride-parade
Starterkit Loops-Accounts zu Wikipedia loops.video/starter-kits/gQkEpnIUe0/wikipedia
Den Accounts kann von #Mastodon/aus dem #Fediverse gefolgt werden. #Loops hat drei #Feeds, einer davon ist algorithmisch. Das Folgen/boosten/liken der Accounts und Videos bringt diesen also mehr #Sichtbarkeit in Loops.
https://loops.video/starter-kits/gSLTadqvCz/critics-of-grokipedia
https://loops.video/starter-kits/gSL4fx2xCu/loops-on-wheels
@collective_truth Ever heard of ambient intimacy by any chance? That seems to be more fitting with what you've said RE: working with people, not just with computers.
If anything, that's one of the strongest selling points behind #Mastodon and #Fediverse. In a way, the way #Web20 was first envisioned by a group of pioneers over 2 decades ago, never mind the blogosphere from 30+s years ago.
I'd venture to state we've come a long way, although not done yet!
.cc @timbray
@collective_truth Did you watch the video clip itself? If you did, does it match your own experience from having used Twitter between 2006 and 2016? I'm curious to learn what you think about it based on your own reflections.
RE: #Mastodon, does the clip itself also match your own experience with it so far? I can't relate to anything of what he claims. If anything, that video is a lovely PR stunt to promote his own work as a Web site developer and poorly done, by the way.
.cc @timbray
Introducing CLEANR® 2.0*: now for Mastodon and the fediverse. Our moderators are hard at work silencing and suspending accounts of Gazans from Palestine.
CLEANR® 2.0: making virtual ethnic cleansing a reality. Because life’s too short to see injustice™
* 100% of proceeds go to supporting Israel’s ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people.
** CLEANR® 1.0 still available from https://medium.com/slackjaw/homelessness-solved-you-re-welcome-efd11fc64960
#mastodon #fediverse #zionism #israel #genocide #ethnicCleansing #apartheid #settlerColonialism
@Beggarmidas If we can work on personal projects (something towards the truth) together please try hit + miss to find something.
It's dry out here and we're frankly socially dying / not intellectually improving anyone else even using better software like #Mastodon.
We need to socially seed / improve people and increment some more #trust somehow... that's why I ask #ToBeTheChange etc for a "Social Movement" rather than the "Social Media"...
See my posts please and reply some of this. Thanks
@elsua54 @timbray Video about why #Mastodon fails like Twitter [if the aim is for active social movement...]
"Why I'm NEVER Joining Mastodon." #EricMurphy
https://redirect.invidious.io/watch?v=Lixz5qTCMGI
Main point:
Neither #Mastodon (or #Twitter) creates / stimulate or make much or a social movement itself - it's better software not socially improving itself.
Mastodon or it's designers aren't doing the people work, which is the real evolution of communication & improvement humanity needs.
RE: https://cosocial.ca/@timbray/116891415911514354
You know what? Whenever people may ask me why I heart #Mastodon big time and why I'm no longer interested in traditional enshittified #SocialMedia tools, I'm going to start sharing this fabulous blog post by @timbray that pretty much nails it, as far as I am concerned.
In fact, for those folks who were using Twitter circa 2006 to 2010 it's a lovely trip down the memory lane of what #Web20 promised back then 👌🏻😎
#SovereignByDesign #Fediverse #FuckTheAlgorithm #Enshittification
We have better #security and #performance standards than most online banking sites, offering #0-RTT + #QUIC + #Post-Quantum #Cryptography. #tls #ssl #mastodon #instance
To clarify moderation on #HolosSocial. A relay moderates like #Mastodon: it blocks accounts and stops their content from spreading.
On Mastodon, a ban cuts the account off from followers, follows, and messages. On Holos, keys and data stay on the device, so no relay can lock it in.
Without a custom domain, a move to a new handle stays possible. With one, the identity is portable and can point to another relay. Owners keep everything, and reporters stay protected, as their relay blocks it.
Mastodon version 4.6 by default shows new/ logged out users the theme of the site that matches your system: light or dark.
This is perfectly fine for most Mastodon servers, but light mode made the Retro Gaiden site virtually unreadable with dark text against a dark background.
I’ve adjusted the custom CSS of the site so that light and dark modes look identical.
This change explains why a couple of RG users couldn’t see the text after the 4.6 update.

There are many ways to use Mastodon through a desktop or laptop computer, including the official web interfaces, third party web interfaces and desktop apps. Here's a list:
➡️ https://fedi.tips/desktop-apps-for-mastodon
Let me know if I'm missing something!
Gentle reminder to add alt-text to your images and screenshots if you want your content to be accessible AND multiply your engagement with much more people reposting your posts.
Adding alt-text is a win-win-win situation, really. It helps everyone 💚
RE: https://chaos.social/@ordnung/116883324439423468
Question: Has chaos.social taken any action against the moderator who muted accounts that are Gaza Verified? I mean, you understand what an inhumane action this is, yes?
“These accounts are verified as belonging to people suffering genocide in Palestine. I will now mute them.”
That is not a “mistake.”
That is evil.
That is genocide complicity.
Is this person still moderating your instance?
#israel #genocide #ethnicCleansing #apartheid #settlerColonialism #mastodon #fediverse #moderation #zionism #chaosSocial
You guys know what to do: report and block this genocide-complicit zionist hasbara account.
#israel #genocide #ethnicCleansing #apartheid #settlerColonialism #hasbara #fediverse #mastodon #sockPuppet
This week at 8UTC Sunday (40 minutes..) we have another #software #mastodon titan, @yantar92 #developer of #orgmode !
#peertube #livestream : https://toobnix.org/w/2Z7id1MZQ6C2GTo4XjvuX1
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orgmode http://orgmode.org/ is comparably famous to last week's Mastodon #curl's @bagder ( https://toobnix.org/w/rPKt4GRBwLeWzF3VcMFWNo ).
The first thing anyone sees on #git is its README.org support for Ihor's orgmode. The #lisp community's Ihor's #emacs #orgmode.
+ @me 1 year org user!
#lispyGopherClimate
boost for visib
You don't have to use the official Mastodon app if you don't want to!
Mastodon is an open platform and there are lots of different apps and web interfaces which you can use. I've tried to do a guide to all the different options here:
➡️ https://fedi.tips/which-apps-can-i-use-should-i-use-the-official-app-or-a-third-party-app
You can even use your account on multiple apps and interfaces simultaneously, which is a good way of comparing their features.
How many storms did it survive? How many birds found shelter in its branches? How many forests began from its seeds? An old tree is a lifetime of giving. Let's be the generation that protects, not destroys, our natural heritage.
#trees #biodiversity #environment #ecology #ecosystem #forestry #nature #ClimateAction #photography #fediverse #linux #mastodon #agroforestry #afforestation #Reaforestation #deforestation #Greenyouthmovement #wildlife #EcoConservation
https://gofund.me/8da0ff4a0
RE: https://mastodon.social/@Joshuakevins12/116617488591022175
We recently started this project (sweet potatoes growing ) bug am looking for someone who can help us out by teaching us how to grow these potatoes effectively. The potatoes grew well and healthy looking but they didn't put on any potatoe over there down when we reached the day of harvesting , the we couldn't get anything.
YOUR IDEAS MATTER
BOOSTS WELCOME
#mastodon #solarpunk #solarpunksunday #today #fridaysforfuture #gardening #growyourown #fediverse #home #permaculture #garten #environment
#Mastodon cloud is shutting down on August 15, 2026.
9 years here..
I need to find a new Mastodon house.
My interests:
https://mastodon.cloud/@WoodooProd/111878608621149692
If some people have suggestions..
Brief interests resume:
#art #earth #music
#guitar #synths #modular #analog #progrock #ambient#photography
#science #history #archeology
#space #scifi #sciencefiction #scifiart
#ufos #ovnis #paranormal#linux #opensource
#MSDOS #DOSGaming #CPM
#retrogaming #retrocomputing #oldcomputers
#BBS #ANSI #ASCII #ansiart #asciiart #retro #vintage#gaming #videogames #gamedev #indiegamedev #indiedev
#rpg #dnd #mmorpg #rogue #nethack #roguelike
#tetris
WOW decentralized and ENCRYPTED social media over #chatmail this is such an epic prototype!
the fun part is that by using chatmail:
- DMs are already end-to-end encrypted
- your identity is your encryption key and doesn't depend on a single home server
- your profile is basically uncensorable
since you need to give people your invite link it is kind of like private social network
https://github.com/lambadalambda/deltanet/
#ArcaneChat #DeltaChat #chatmail #socialmedia #fediverse #mastodon #encryption #e2ee