@morrowind@lemmy.ml

It’s a bit of both in my opinion. You only market/suggest Lemmy (as forum/link aggregator software) to those with the tech knowledge to build with it, but to everyone else you mention a community site to join and don’t bother mentioning what it’s built with, as they won’t care anyway.

If we remain in our current comfort space, Lemmy will likely continue to stagnate as a niche platform.

I follow what you’re getting at here, but I think this line of thinking, of Lemmy as a platform, also contributes to the issues in drawing more people to this network of communities/sites.

As Kichae said in your other thread:

[…]
“Lemmy” doesn’t exist like Reddit does. It’s not a place people can go to talk about shit. It’s a website engine. It exists like WordPress does. One of its features just happens to be “can pull content from other websites”.

If we want this space to grow, we need to focus on building community websites that stand on their own. Then we can market it as “hey, you love it here on MyInterest.social, but did you know you can also talk to people from SomethingElse.social? Pretty cool, huh??!?” Nobody seems to want to do that, though. That means we’re totally at the mercy of places like Twitter and Reddit, waiting for them to fuck up badly again and hoping more people just kind of land here, in some cheap and uncanny knockoff of where they really wanted to be.

On one hand I agree that the interface, and in turn the user experience, is worth focusing on to help get people to participate around here. On the other, I think you also need what Kichae describes at the end of their comment. Communities that can stand on their own with their own distinct identities and interests that also happen to let you talk with and see stuff from other distinct communities.

At some point I’d like to move to a little more focused sort of community like that built with Lemmy (or Piefed, or Mbin), but haven’t had luck finding any that fit so far since many are broader in scope instead.

I don’t love the default Lemmy web UI, but I agree with the sentiment of preferring a lighter, faster UI…Which makes me surprised to read that you love it.

I don’t know why, but it occasionally slows way down for me when signed in and browsing. It’s nearly driven me to switching interfaces to see if they’re any better with performance.

Streaming isn’t the middle ground in my opinion, rather it’s unrestricted downloadable files that you can then handle however. Streaming provides some convenience but no consistent access (see various shows being delisted or shuffled between services).

Companies would love if everyone forgot having home video, in the sense of owning copies of movies and shows they always have access to and ability to watch whenever.

Btw, if you’re still into animated shows, there’s a few communities around for them.

General animation:

!animation@lemm.ee

!adult_animation@lemmy.world

!animationafter30@lemmy.world

Japanese animation:

!anime@ani.social

Give’em some activity if you’re wanting to share and talk about some animated stuff you’ve been checking out!

Yes and no. Mastodon instances can show Lemmy community posts in a clunky looking way, as they treat communities like a group account which boosts every post.

If someone on Mastodon is familiar with Lemmy, they can technically also follow individual people to ensure their feed looks a little less awkward. However, given the default limited character count of many Mastodon instances, it’s still going to display as the title and link to the Lemmy post at best, if I remember right.

On the other hand, Mastodon people can post to Lemmy communities and reply to comments in threads here, but it also tends to come out rough, especially if they’re unaware of the formatting differences. If you’ve ever seen a really long title that abruptly cuts off mid-sentence, there’s a good chance that was someone posting from a Mastodon account, unaware that it’s better to make a brief opening sentence as title, then an empty line followed by body text, to best fit the formatting here.

Similarly if you see someone replying to a comment starting with an @ mention to the person they’re directly replying to, chances are it may be someone from Mastodon, as replies there include @ mentions by default. Also due to federation weirdness, I’m honestly not sure if they have to keep that mention or not for it to work properly, think I’ve seen it work without, but it’s honestly easier to make an account on a Lemmy instance to participate than deal with awkward federation issues that come up between it and Mastodon.

True, but as noted, it isn’t a necessity to run a full-network relay, which those resource demands and costs relate to.

At the same time, one of the larger Mastodon instances, Mstdn.social in terms of financial costs alone amounted to about 1000 euros per month as of October 2024.

The architecture of ATProto also enables a greater degree of flexibility in separating out costs by comparison, which in some respects may be an interesting model worth consideration for new or developing ActivityPub software, and in some respects is already in the works with projects like Bonfire and ActivityPods. On the ATProto side there’s already at least one person looking to adapt ActivityPub to ATProto’s PDSs in a manner similar to ActivityPods, just using ATProto data formatting instead.

We use different terms, but that’s what I’m referring to here:

ActivityPub is more suited to scaling across multiple instances/sites than up, and I’d argue that’s its strength.

I understand the hesitation, which is why I’ve been trying to monitor its developments closely. Hence why I linked the example of someone testing out a small network ATProto relay, and why I also dug up this post about self-hosting different parts of the ATProto infrastructure the other day.

From what I’ve observed, there’s no pushback against people doing so, and the only things stopping people are the usual: time, costs, knowledge, motivation, etc. For the first step to really happen at all there have to be people with the resources and motivation to do so, which is always the tricky part. In a small way part of my OP is intending to encourage anyone with both to give it a shot, as I lack some of the necessary resources to try it myself.

It’s not so much that ActivityPub can’t scale up, so much as that for one, as I’ve understood it that’s not really been desirable anyway (undermines the point of decentralization/distribution), and for two, it starts getting bogged down as you already recognize. It also runs into similar, if not worse, cost problems to operate as ATProto’s full network approaches are now.

ActivityPub is more suited to scaling across multiple instances/sites than up, and I’d argue that’s its strength. It unintentionally has an implosion threshold to counter centralization in terms of cost and performance.

On the other hand, ATProto’s advantage is that it enables scaling up while also enabling better data portability. I’m aware of work on this with ActivityPub as well, but it’s still very early stages. My thinking is that there may be some ways to work with both to push towards their similar shared aims in terms of an open social web, with more flexibility in moving between spaces and adjusting experiences to better find what one wants from these different spaces.

Ideally they would be compatible, I agree.

Also you’re right regarding the capacity to scale up, and frankly, while ATProto makes it feasible, I don’t think it’s necessarily desirable even with ATProto. Part of the point of it is to have various independent relays that would better distribute the load, and enable people’s mobility when any of them go bad. Setting that aside, they don’t all have to be full network relays, in fact someone is already toying with running a small network relay.

I also agree regarding moderation problems at a larger scale, and that ActivityPub’s various software should take this as a wake-up call to improve the user experience, not so much for “big social media vibes” but for a better, less finicky experience.

However I also think there are potential benefits to ATProto, which blended together with ActivityPub, could make both better overall. The technical literacy and insistence on independent servers of the ActivityPub culture could make ATProto properly distributed and federated, which would be far better than letting it languish in corporate hands. Meanwhile the openness to optional transparent, customizable algorithms and preference for a smoother user experience of the ATProto/Bsky culture could make ActivityPub a more accessible, and livelier feeling space for more people.

Both can improve from one another, so long as both communities choose to try to learn from one another.

For a light, simplistic open source editor that’s easy to get into, Goxel has been my go-to. I’d liken it to a voxel sketchpad with how easy it is to load up and simply mess about with.

For a more robust open source editor that’s kinda rough around the edges, there’s VengiVoxEdit, which I’ve honestly only scratched the surface of personally.

For a similarly robust editor that’s less rough around the edges, the standard recommendation is MagicaVoxel. It’s a solid choice, but I’m not sure if the developer is continuing work on it or not, which makes a difference here as it’s not open source. It still works fine right now though, so if you’re on Windows/Mac, it’s a good option for a smooth, feature rich editor.

I should finally get into that. I keep putting it off for silly reasons that will never be addressed by putting it off. Can’t get better at making models if I never make any, much less texturing a model if I never texture anything.

Also one of my favorite finds in a related area were voxel editors. Highly encourage anyone into voxel art from games like VoxeLibre or Minecraft to look into them. All the fun of building with blocks with a lot more flexibility.

we can go further, somethingsomething StreetPass

If you skip the technobabble and politics about free (as in freedom), what’s left? If it’s just a platform that feels more complicated to sign up, because you have to learn about instances and it’s not clear which one you want, plus your friends aren’t there, plus it’s just 45k users total instead of a lot…?

The complication arises by making the mistake of pointing people to the backend, and the backends confusing matters by presenting themselves as platforms like existing corporate platforms. As noted, you reduce that by inviting them to join or browse your respective instance (or if you’re self-hosting, to whichever open instance you think is amenable).

You’re right though that some positive thing would help, and that’s really down to whatever positive thing you found and want to share with others about these spaces. For me it’s as simple as them being open and ad-free. I’m reminded of it every time I find myself trying to browse enclosures without having an account and they simply won’t allow me to browse much before prompting me to sign up or subscribe to view more.

In a way that’s kind of the irony of the fediverse, a major feature is that you don’t have to sign up at all in many(most?) cases.

Yeah, it’s not without faults, so ProtonMail and similar may be a good compromise, or encrypting and sending longer documents. Ideally one day email will be rebuilt from the ground up with encryption.

Also to address your later comments, E2EE messengers are great, but short form writing is simply a different use case from long form.

Exactly. The need/desire to write longer form like this may not come up as often with other more immediate means to communicate, but when it does, email’s there to serve its purpose.

Alongside others mentioned (tags/flairs, multi-communities, keyword filtering, etc.) another feature I’d like to see added/improved is notification settings.

Something like…

In account settings:

• Enable/disable all notifications.
• Enable/disable post reply notifications.
• Enable/disable comment reply notifications.

For others’ posts/comments and per posts/comments:

• Enable/disable post reply notifications.
• Enable/disable comment reply notifications.

With those settings you could more easily tune out all notifications or only opt into those you’d like to see, and opt out of those you’re done with (say your post/comment got popular and you’ve had your fill from the replies).

Unrelated to notification settings, it would also be nice to be able to block communities from the front page via the … More menu in the default web UI.

Ah, the vim part was me trying a little too much to express a short e sound lazily.

It will still raise eyebrows because that’s not how it’s said.

At least not yet, or by enough to recognize that it is (by some, somewhere!). There’s bound to be an accent somewhere that pronounces it like this to where the “normal” way sounds strange 😂