Fediverse

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A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).

If you wanted to get help with moderating your own community then head over to !moderators@lemmy.world!

Rules

Learn more at these websites: Join The Fediverse Wiki, Fediverse.info, Wikipedia Page, The Federation Info (Stats), FediDB (Stats), Sub Rehab (Reddit Migration), Search Lemmy

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
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submitted 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) by woelkchen@lemmy.world to c/fediverse@lemmy.world
 
 

!fediverse@lemmy.world is not a place to file your grievances with "free speech", disrupting users, moderation, etc.

If you have problems with users: File complaints to the mods or just block them.

If you have problems with mods: File complaints with admins of the instance or just migrate to an alternative community.

If you have problems with an entire instance: Just leave it.

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This community was essentially unmoderated for a while and I've been recently approached to take over moderation duties here. What I don't intend to do is to change any existing rules here but to enforce what has piled up in the moderation queue.

The discussion under the recent post about spam accounts turned into a flamewar regarding US domestic politics which has literally nothing to do with the Fediverse.

With dozens of comments, I don't have the bandwidth to sift through them individually and I've locked the thread. The PSA about spam accounts still stands which is why I didn't remove the post. The accounts involved with that flamewar get a pass for this time. Consider this a warning. Further trolling about US political parties will result in bans.

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Let me start by saying that I think that Fediverse communities with open registration are also really important. But the topic of this point is to grow Fediverse communities organically using invite codes.

Alright but... why?

While there are some remaining technical and convenience issues, one of the biggest hurdles preventing the Fediverse from growing is onboarding.

Personally I think that picking a server really shouldn't be any harder than picking a pair of socks to wear, but ultimately I think a big part of the problem is that we are offering new users a big list of options that they don't yet understand or care about, then asking them to arbitrarily pick one.

How is a new user supposed to know which server to join (or which ones to avoid) if they don't know anything about how the fediverse works?

Sure they could put in the time and effort to do some research or register for a bunch of different servers to get a feel for them. But many potential newcomers aren't going to do that. Instead, they're more likely going to just decide that the Fediverse is "too complicated" and return to their safe, centralized, familiar and established platforms, run by corporations and oligarchs.

Willy Wonka's Golden Ticket

I think one roundabout way to address this problem is somewhat counter-intuitive: the creation of more closed-off servers, in which users are occasionally given sharable invite codes to bring other new users into the fold.

By giving someone an invite code to a closed-registration fediverse community you are:

  • Instantly solving the server choice paralysis problem, by simply making the choice for them.
  • Giving people something that they are more likely to perceive as being valuable, they feel that they are part of an exclusive club.
  • Creating the possibility of exponential viral growth, as every existing user has the means to invite a number of other users. This also means that the average community member may take a more active role in growing their community, since if they want more people on their server the best way to do that is by giving out codes.

This is no small part of how Bluesky became popular, by having an extended invite-only beta period during which people could be found begging for invite codes else on the internet.

Basically, I think closed-off servers with viral invitation systems are potentially a powerful tool to help grow the Fediverse, and so it's something that Fediverse software should support.

What do you think?

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Are there any fediverse or self-hostable sort of platforms made for mutual aid? Ideally with some sort of inventory system?

I’m looking to set up a one person super efficient “farm” to be the hub of a mutual aid network (it’s going to take a while to ramp up but I intend to support everyone I can as soon as I can, as long as they are worth supporting.. oooh sorry conservatives 6x prices for you..). I’m looking for a self-host able or fedi platforms, that maybe I can link to nearby mutual aid cells, perhaps. Or get them to join by mouthy-words?

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So I managed to piss off Daniel Supernault so much that delete my loops account, blocked me on the loop discord, and probably blocked me mastodon because I called him out a lot for making no progress on loops. It's a long story and I could post it to this group (subreddit?) if you're interested I can tell the story and get any receipt I still have

But im curious what the sentiment is about him.

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I’ve been mulling over Janus Rose’s recent 404 Media article, “You Can’t Post Your Way Out of Fascism.”. In many ways, she’s not wrong. But once again people are ignoring an entirely other way of doing social media that can, in fact, fight fascism.

. . .

What is to be done? Well, Rose argues that there is no antidote to Trumpian poison to be found in merely taking to social media and posting about his (or Elon Musk’s, or Pete Hesgeth’s, or any other Trumpist’s) bizarre or cruel statements. “If there’s one thing I’d hoped people had learned going into the next four years of Donald Trump as president,” she writes, “it’s that spending lots of time online posting about what people in power are saying and doing is not going to accomplish anything. If anything, it’s exactly what they want.”

. . .

Can folks doomscroll on the fediverse? Yes. Can folks post on the fediverse? Yes. Might they post about the latest outrage of Trump? Yes, definitely.

Does that mean they are failing to fight incipient fascism? No.

In fact, I argue that the act of running, moderating, and participating in federated social media is precisely the sort of organizing that Rose calls for. It’s just taking place in a media environment, rather than, say, in an NGO’s offices in a city.

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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/39121040

We've been working on these for some time, and with the recent uptick in signups, we tried to finish up the first few pages so that new users could use them.

You can find them all on fedecan.ca under Guides & Resources. For those that are not familiar, this is the website for the non-profit (Fedecan) that manages lemmy.ca.

We're planning to gather some feedback on the technical Fediverse communities first, before sharing the guides more broadly, in order to catch any issues early.

If you want to add to them, feel free to reach out, and we can help you coordinate if someone else is also working on it.

The new sections:

Sections that are incomplete and relevant to new users. We have some work in progress for these, and hope to have them out soon:

A previously written section that didn't get posted about yet (thank you to Rooki):

Future plans include

  • Guides for Moderators
    • Set up a new community (best practices for name, sidebar, image, banner, and getting it federated outwards)
    • Moderation Best Practices
  • Guides for Admins
    • Information on our infrastructure and setup
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They've been down all day I think, anybody know what's up?

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There have been various posts here in the last days describing how difficult it is for new people to start using Lemmy. In fact they are absolutely correct, it is much easier to get started on Reddit. But what many forget is that Lemmy is not a corporation employing dozens of full-time designers, running A/B-tests and so on. Lemmy is an open source project run by volunteers, with only @dessalines and me working on it full-time. Neither of us is a particularly good designer, and our time is mainly spent working on the backend (database, federation, api), and preparing the upcoming 1.0 release.

If you see anything on join-lemmy.org or in the Lemmy UI itself that could be improved, the best option is to make that improvement yourself. Both of them use standard web technologies (nodejs, tailwindcss, inferno etc). The userbase here is quite technical so there are many of you able to contribute. We rarely reject any pull requests as long as they make a real improvement. Though it usually requires a little back and forth to review the changes and then address the review comments.

You can find the source code for join-lemmy.org here and follow development instructions in the readme. Regarding the default Lemmy UI go here and read the documentation with development instructions. If you are not a developer you can still help, for example by improving the documentation. Additionally you can make changes to the texts for joinlemmy and lemmy-ui.

All this said, there have also been some suggestions to make onboarding easier by directing new users to a hardcoded default instance. This may sound like a good idea at first but won't work well in practice. Running such an instance would take significant time for administration and moderation, but we maintainers are already too busy. Besides it would be impossible to reach an agreement who this default instance should federate with or how exactly it should be moderated. So if you want to get nontechnical users to Lemmy, the solution is to link them directly to a specific instance based on their interests.

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Joinmbin.org has nicer ux than any corporate. Behold the power of open source and s(tf)u ;)

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please hear me out fediverse!! this new service of the fediverse could be called "kniknak" and it could be similar to tiktok in the sense that it shows you short videos and comments and etc, but the main differences are the following: 1. connected threads of the whole fediverse, even regular posts on mastodon could become a short video 2. open source, decentralized, of course 3. comments are shown as threads instead of a regular comment section since it's connected to the fediverse. also i can remake the logo on inkscape and it would look even better, that'd be so awesome

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Put another way, what are some examples of software built with federation in mind from the start, rather than on top of a more centralized design?

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This reddit post likely has tens if not hundreds of thousands of views, look at the top comment.

Lemmy is losing so many potential new users because the UX sucks for the vast majority of people.

What can we do?

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If the fediverse is to be adopted by the masses, the onboarding experience needs to change. A new user can't be presented with a choice of instances as part of signing up or at least the process of making the choice needs to dumbed down a lot. I don't know how or if this can be solved, I just know as someone involved in app development and UX that the current experience won't work.

My mother would not know how to handle this paragraph: "Lemmy.world is one node in a network of hundreds of Lemmy instances. Before you sign up here, take a moment to explore all the instances at https://lemmyverse.net/. You may find an instance with a regional or topical emphasis that speaks to you! Don’t worry about being left out; Lemmy instances are interconnected so users from each instance can participate with communities on other instances."

For mass adoption it needs to be so simple that even non-techie older people can get through it without feeling like they might be doing something wrong.

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I started off using Voyager, swapped to Mlem because of slight differences I preferred. Recently found out Thunder for Lemmy is available on the apple appstore and it instantly became my favorite. I like how unique the ui is compared to other, it seems better suited for browsing and posting on Lemmy, while the others feel better for the initial transition from Reddit. Very suprised it has barely any downloads or reviews when its easily the best Lemmy app on IOS.

Thunder reminds me of the more "modern" alternative front ends for lemmy some sites have while mlem and voyager feel more like the alternative reddit apps (blue alien) and give a similar experience.

On desktop, I've been using Friendica.

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One thing that bluesky did very well was abstracting the decentralisation (i know, its not really decentralised, bear with me) was having "apps" be centralised. What if we just pointed people towards a lemmy.app thing and that had a server as default?

Alexandrite.app does this, but it defaults to lemmy.world which is a bit of a dealbreaker.

Edit: By "app" I mean client.

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Sorry for the terrible photo, I can only upload 1 so I had to mash all these screenshots together somehow.

If you're not familiar with GrayJay, it's a cross-platform video app. You can watch and search videos from YouTube (YMMV if you use a VPN), Odyssey, Bitchute, Nebula, Kick, Twitch, pretty much anything you can imagine, and aggregates all your subscriptions and searches into 1 cross-platform feed. And if it's not on there you can create your own plugin. There's a repository here.

PeerTube has been supported since day 1 but previously you could only view videos from the instance you added, so you had to add them all individually. It was updated recently and seems to not be tied to any instances at all. You can view comments but it doesn't seem to support login right now so you won't be able to "like" or leave comments. I've asked them to add this functionality.

For PeerTube you'll probably have to go into the sources and enable it. You'll probably also want to enable SepiaSearch at the bottom (this searches across instances, for those who have opted into search).

I don't really know how to explain the monetization model. There's a $10 lifetime license fee. They're adamant that it's not free (as in beer) but if you don't pay for the license, nothing happens 🤷‍♂️ I paid for it because it's awesome.

You can download from F-Droid (using FUTO repository) or direct from grayjay.app (the app updates itself).

There's also a desktop version, and your license works for both. Although the desktop version is really nice, it's not yet as polished as the mobile one. It also supports syncing your data over your local network.

Source code here

Enjoy!

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The groundwork made in the apps, frontends, tools and instances is finally paying off. The masses are noticing the value!

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