It’s not a community setting or feature. It’s a fact of the internet.

If you publish something to someone else’s website, you no longer have any control over it. And federation means publishing your content on thousands of websites, many of them not even running the same software. Your comments are out there on mbin sites, Friendica sites, Hubzilla sites, Mastodon sites, Misskey sites, and many others. Someone’s pribably got a custom web server they developed, slapped some ActivityPub inside of it, and didn’t bother to make it even understand delete requests.

This is the internet. It is public, and it is forever. You really need to treat it as such.

These are usenet data sales. Usenet is an old network of distributed discussion groups that predates the web by about a decade. It contains a large trove of media and software - particularly older media and software - that is easy to acccess because it’s not a P2P network that is reliant others keeping their shares alive.

Many usenet providers offer bulk data plans, rather than continual subscriptions. This means you buy x GB of bandwidth, and you use it on whatever time table you like.These are great if you don’t do a lot of downloading, or if you’re just trying it out, or if you’re using usenet as a secondary or tertiary source for things.

Like the fesiverse, most usenet providers do not provide a full view of the whole network, so it can also be good to have a secondary provider that has different retention policies, so a lot of usenet users will buy these data blocks for that purpose, as well.

Ok, but that means all of the buzz about the fediverse is negative.

And also all of the ghost accounts suggest that “negative” is a common experience here.

The prople who are happy are also happy to let the place languish, because they got what they want: A space to circle jerk about linux, to complain about Twitter and Ressit, and to “both sides bad”. But maybe that isn’t what’s best for the internet. Maybe we should want something better?

Hashtags still only show you posts that are specifically addressed to users on your host site. They just act as a quick-search feature. You need some kind of “actor” to re-address things to people who aren’t following the OP in order to get true propagation across the network. This is what guppe groups do, and what Lemmy communities do.

If you don’t already have any followers, there is little point in posting anything there.

See, I disagree. This may be true on the large Masto sites, but if you join an interest-first site, then the Local timeline is actually an ansynchronous chatroom filled with people with similar interests.

Fedi microblogs work really well for finding and connecting with people you have comminalities with when using small-to-medium sized sites. Much better than Lemmy, really, where the post content itself is the primary vehicle of interest, rather than the poster. The Reddit model is actually kind of shit for discussion, since it goes the extra mile to depersonalize the posts.

Lemmy is way better for content ingestion, while the microblogs are way better for socializing.

Assuming you’re not on Mast.soc, anyway.

Yeah. Peoples concerns around Meta and EEE notwithstanding, ActivityPub is an open standard maintained by the W3C. It’s meant to be used by anyone and everyone, just like HTTP is. The desire is to give options that esshew social silos, not to create social wilderness outside of the corporate city states

It’s not so much the performance issues that kill the projects – instances with hundreds to a couple thousand users are very, very healthy for the fediverse – it’s that the codebase is…

Well, Misskey is a 10-year-old solo development project that’s been cancelled at least once by the dev due to burnout, with documentation partially in broken english, and the rest in Japanese. Working with it is… yeah…

Global feed. ‘All’ on Lemmy, ‘Federated timeline’ on Mastodon, etc., for established instances.

Trolling big instances and copying account URLs on clean instances.

Edit: Wanna tell me what’s wrong with that? Or are we just passive-aggressive and not worth talking to?

The fediverse is a place where websites automatically share content. What people do with that is wide open.

I’m white, I’m male, I’m straight, cis-gendered, and middle-class. My neighbours aren’t going to bother me. And if they also become aware of what “anarcho-communism” means in the process, they wouldn’t even blink.

Thr police might not appreciate my thoughts on them, but I think they’d suddenly have way less public support in this scenario, so meh.

I guess it depends on what you want. If you want to be totally anonymous on the internet, then it’s a bad idea. If you want people to use Mastodon, then it’s probably an OK one, since the way people use microblogging is to follow famous people, and famous people aren’t using Mastodon unless there’s evidence that there’s an audience there for them to play to.

Someone asking doew not obligate you to respond. There is no theivery. You can walk away without saying anything. They cannot take your time from you.

You’re choosing to waste it by responding with something unhelpful, though, and wasting their time for the sake of your unrequested public masturbation.

There is no bare minimum to ask for help.

There is a bare minimum to responding to someone asking for help, though: Being willing to provide some. Replying to tell them they haven’t earned the help yet is just being an asshole for the sake of feeling self-satisfaction, and it’s actively making the Internet a worse place.

Don’t do that shit. They don’t need to know your feelings on the issue, and neither do the rest of us. Nobody asked about them.

It really wouldn’t be a Lemmy client with a Facebook-like personal profile, pages, and more. You’d need your own backend, and then you’ve got something all its own.

I know you’re worried about Friendica’s ability to scale, but how big are you expecting to scale your site?

The political divesity is less of an issue than the political ferver. Most people don’t want to talk aboit politics. They want to avoid political discussions, and get upset when people do things as basic as pointing out that politics exists in their bubble.

The fediverse turns them off because it’s loaded with politically aware and stubbornly vocal people, not because there aren’t enough people playing apologetics for the ruling class

The fediverse really is best viewed as a local-first space. Everything just works better if your primary focus is on the people or communities on your local instance. But people keep trying to think of it as primarily about the space in between, because that’s what’s novel.

But most people do not give a shit about that novelty, and we “market” it terribly.

“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.

I do know. I just don’t care. I believe in an open internet, not a place set aside for people to live out their Revenge of the Nerds fantasies. ActivityPub allows people to have their sheltered spaces, and also not attack the public square.

They’re choosing to attack the public square anyway, because they don’t want their shelters, they want the whole fucking world. And they can’t have it.

It’s got a lot of untreated, traumatized people, and frustrated power nerds on it, and both groups let you know it with haste.

The kicker is, the population is still small enough that they could be easily overwhelmed and put in their place, but you need a real mass of semi-tightly networked people to come over and take over the space, and that’s… just not the way community migrations work. So they can fairly safely gatekeep the space.

Well, until Threads washes over everything. I don’t want to give shit to Zucks, but Threads will fundamentally change the makeup of the fedi microblog space in an instant, and that instant is growing ever closer.

If the people putting money in deserve to be paid for that money, it can be treated as a fixed term loan, with an established interest rate. That makes it a business expense.

Profit is what’s left over after everyone is paid for their work, and the costs of materials, housing, and maintenance - invluding the maintenance of debts - are covered. It’s either what you’ve over-charged your customers, or underpaid your employees.

And that’s wrong.

It’s frustrating, because a lot of the interesting people to follow and engage with on Mastodon have also jumped to Bluesky, and the fedi crowd continues to crow about algorithms and brain rot, when the biggest reason people bounce off of Mastodon is the other people on Mastodon.

There’s a deep undercurrent of “angry, hostile nerd”. When people started flooding Mastodon in 2022, you could see the binary reaction of “Finally, the recognition we deserve!” and also “you’re in my house now, you fucking normie, and you’d better start acting like it”.

Unsurprisingly, the “fucking normies” noped out, either immediately, or as soon as they had another option that satisfied their objections with Twitter.

But we’re going to wring our hands and bitch about onboarding flows and the great sin of defederation, because it let’s us ignore that we are the problem.