JupiterRowland
@JupiterRowland@sh.itjust.works
- Comment on Why BlueSky Isn’t the Alternative to X (Formerly Twitter) You’re Looking For — and Why Mastodon Is the Better Choice Over X, Threads, and BlueSky 2 days ago:
No idea, I’m not that deeply into it.
- Comment on Why are people preferring Blue Sky over Mastodon? 2 days ago:
The *keys also had many of the features that Twitter migrants complained were lacking from Mastodon. But trying to talk to anyone on Mastodon about platforms that aren’t Mastodon was a total non-starter. Mastodon is a giant Mastodon circle jerk.
If you see someone tell Mastodon users that the Fediverse isn’t Mastodon, they’re hardly ever on Mastodon themselves. They’re most likely on Friendica which suffers the most from obnoxious Mastodon users, and if not, they’re likely to be on Firefish or Akkoma or sometimes on Hubzilla.
The most extreme case I’ve encountered was a Mastodon developer who tried to convince me, a Hubzilla veteran, that Mastodon is literally the only feature-complete project in the Fediverse. Fortunately for him, I didn’t ask him about full text formatting support, permissions, nomadic identity, multiple independent identities on one login, WebDAV/CalDAV/CardDAV or a built-in wiki engine.
But the real issue with Mastodon is that it has a significant population of people who believe it’s a sacrosanct cultural space, and that are very vocal about telling anyone coming into it that they need to learn the local customs or GTFO.
Worse yet, “coming into it” is also applied to everything in the Fediverse that isn’t Mastodon. After learning that there’s, in fact, more than Mastodon in the Fediverse, many Mastodon users still think Eugen Rochko has invented the Fediverse, and everything must have come after Mastodon.
Thus, even Friendica users who have been around since before Mastodon even saw its very first release are being forced to ditch Friendica’s own culture, adopt Mastodon’s culture instead and stop using all of Friendica’s features that Mastodon doesn’t have. And Friendica is five and a half years older than Mastodon. It has its own well-defined culture which is very different from Mastodon’s because Friendica is so much different from Mastodon.
It’s almost like European colonists vs natives, only that the European colonists didn’t assume the natives had entered the previously completely uninhabited land after them.
- Comment on Mastodon sees a boost from the 'X exodus,' too, founder says 2 days ago:
Musk-boi could “buy” Mastodon, Spez could buy Lemmy.world and ml, and Zucker-bot could “buy” Pixelfed tomorrow, but that wouldn’t stop anyone from forking those platforms and leaving the main instances.
Or going someplace in the Fediverse that’s neither Mastodon nor Lemmy nor Pixelfed.
- Comment on Why BlueSky Isn’t the Alternative to X (Formerly Twitter) You’re Looking For — and Why Mastodon Is the Better Choice Over X, Threads, and BlueSky 2 days ago:
Because nobody knows they exist. Especially not on Mastodon. And even less outside the Fediverse, tech media included.
And truth be told, way too many Mastodon users don’t want to know. They want the Fediverse to remain what they thought it was when they joined: only vanilla Mastodon.
Really goes to show that Lemmy is full of tech-curious geeks: Tell a Lemmy user about a Fediverse project that’s neither Lemmy nor Mastodon, and it’s much more likely for the reply to be something along the lines of, “where public instances.”
- Comment on Why BlueSky Isn’t the Alternative to X (Formerly Twitter) You’re Looking For — and Why Mastodon Is the Better Choice Over X, Threads, and BlueSky 2 days ago:
I’m on a (streams) instance on which someone else is following pr0n accounts. That instance is small enough (13 channels, including clones of external channels) to suggest them as contacts to me until I’ve removed them as suggestions.
Only boobs I saw without searching mastodon.social for non-pr0n hashtags.
- Comment on Why BlueSky Isn’t the Alternative to X (Formerly Twitter) You’re Looking For — and Why Mastodon Is the Better Choice Over X, Threads, and BlueSky 2 days ago:
Curated tits then?
- Comment on Why BlueSky Isn’t the Alternative to X (Formerly Twitter) You’re Looking For — and Why Mastodon Is the Better Choice Over X, Threads, and BlueSky 2 days ago:
Exactly why most Germans only had a @t-online.de address back in the day. The only exceptions were those who needed an e-mail account before they had their own home and their own landline connection.
- Comment on Why BlueSky Isn’t the Alternative to X (Formerly Twitter) You’re Looking For — and Why Mastodon Is the Better Choice Over X, Threads, and BlueSky 2 days ago:
IMO the success of BlueSky is good for the Fedi. It can take the “let’s be the next mainstream thing” monkey off of its back and just be itself.
Plus, it keeps the obnoxious “But muh follower count” fame whores and the majority of the “Why can’t this be exactly like Twitter, I want a total Twitter clone” dumb-dumbs out. They’d ruin Fediverse culture even more than the second migration wave two years ago which was so massive that those who fled back then only encountered each other on Mastodon and hardly anyone who had been in the Fediverse before then.
- Comment on Why BlueSky Isn’t the Alternative to X (Formerly Twitter) You’re Looking For — and Why Mastodon Is the Better Choice Over X, Threads, and BlueSky 2 days ago:
Still, this chart looks like it’s actually counting phone apps rather than providers. Google doesn’t have two separate e-mail services AFAIK.
- Comment on Why BlueSky Isn’t the Alternative to X (Formerly Twitter) You’re Looking For — and Why Mastodon Is the Better Choice Over X, Threads, and BlueSky 2 days ago:
It actually doesn’t.
Install the official Mastodon app on your phone, launch it, scroll past the instance selection box that railroads you to mastodon.social anyway, and it’s no more complicated than Twitter. It’s just that nobody knows that.
Fun fact: The official Bluesky app has a selection box for a PDS, too. It’s no more and no less complicated than the official Mastodon app. Nobody knows that either.
Granted, of course, if you let yourself be railroaded, the place where you land in the Fediverse won’t be the bee’s knees, and you won’t know that there are not only better Mastodon instances (or more Mastodon instances in the first place), but also better server applications than Mastodon (or anything else than Mastodon in the Fediverse in the first place). But hey, it’s easy-peasy.
- Comment on Why BlueSky Isn’t the Alternative to X (Formerly Twitter) You’re Looking For — and Why Mastodon Is the Better Choice Over X, Threads, and BlueSky 2 days ago:
Awful user experience can be anything from side-effects of decentralisation (no, you can’t search the entire Fediverse for something; no, you can’t even search all of Mastodon for something) to Mastodon’s official app being crap and people being unwilling/unable to use an app that isn’t named “Mastodon” to Mastodon refusing to catch up with the rest of the Fediverse in features to Mastodon refusing to finally become the 1:1 Twitter clone expect it to be. Mind you, the latter two contradict each other.
- Comment on Why BlueSky Isn’t the Alternative to X (Formerly Twitter) You’re Looking For — and Why Mastodon Is the Better Choice Over X, Threads, and BlueSky 2 days ago:
Another feature-rich Forkey from before Firefish’s first “death” which, as I’ve read somewhere, must have managed to iron out more of Misskey’s original issues than the other Forkeys.
- Comment on Why BlueSky Isn’t the Alternative to X (Formerly Twitter) You’re Looking For — and Why Mastodon Is the Better Choice Over X, Threads, and BlueSky 4 days ago:
where pleroma where akkoma where misskey where firefish where iceshrimp where sharkey where cherrypick where catodon where mitra
- Comment on Why BlueSky Isn’t the Alternative to X (Formerly Twitter) You’re Looking For — and Why Mastodon Is the Better Choice Over X, Threads, and BlueSky 6 days ago:
Misskey and the actual Forkeys are in TypeScript and Vue.js. And they all have the same bugs that you can’t just simply get rid of.
Iceshrimp.NET is a rewrite of Iceshrimp in C#, that’s why it’s named Iceshrimp.NET. It promises to get rid of all issues inherited from Misskey because it doesn’t have a bit of Misskey left in it anymore.
But maybe we need more rewrites in more languages to satisfy as many people as possible. A Catodon rewrite in Ruby on Rails for Mastodon fanbois and fangurlz, no matter what a chonker it’ll end up being. Sharkey rewritten in PHP to satisfy those who like things as easy and lightweight as Friendica & Co. And even more because not few say that both C# and Ruby on Rails and PHP suck.
Or is there anything that doesn’t suck at all? Go sucks because Google. Rust sucks because Mozilla. Python sucks because it’s Python being Python. And so forth.
- Comment on Why are people preferring Blue Sky over Mastodon? 6 days ago:
People want a 100%, 1:1, perfect clone of immediate pre-Musk Twitter. They want Twitter without Musk.
Bluesky is a 100%, 1:1, perfect clone of immediate pre-Musk Twitter. It is Twitter without Musk.
It looks exactly like Twitter, it feels exactly like Twitter (both the Web interface and the official app), and it’s for tech-illiterate dumb-dumbs.
Only recently has an instance selector been added to the sign-up process of the official app, but Bluesky still markets itself to its users as the self-same kind of centralised monolithic silo as Twitter and Facebook.
Mastodon has a vastly different UI and UX from immediate pre-Musk Twitter, but people don’t want to learn anything new. And truth be told, I’ve read from Misskey/Forkey users that Misskey and the Forkeys actually have an easier-to-use Web UI than Mastodon.
Also, Mastodon advertises the fact that it’s decentralised with lots of instances to choose from, even though the gGmbH would rather want everyone to be on mastodon.social. This freaks people out.
Joining Mastodon is actually no more difficult than joining Bluesky in practice because the official app railroads everyone to mastodon.social without forcing them. But people won’t know until they’ve actually installed and opened that app.
The only reason why Mastodon grew so quickly to such an enormous size in late 2022 was because it was the only alternative to Twitter that anyone knew, including those who pulled Twitter users onto Mastodon. The only other advantage it had over anything else was that, unlike Twitter, it didn’t have Musk and uncontained droves of Nazis. Had people been sent to Akkoma or Calckey instead of Mastodon, it would have exploded the same.
Inb4 “How can people use e-mail then?” That’s because everyone’s on Gmail, and many think e-mail is a proprietary Google product.
- Comment on How are Misskey and its forks doing? 3 weeks ago:
Firefish will be discontinued around the end of the year.
Here’s the context: Calckey/Firefish, a direct Misskey soft fork was mostly a one-person show, entirely run by Kainoa who was also the sole tech admin of the lighthouse instance. There were other devs, but Kainoa was the sole maintainer and the only one who could merge patches into production code. Nobody else was ever authorised to do so. Calckey/Firefish was Kainoa’s baby.
In late 2023, Kainoa largely disappeared from the face of the Earth. No engagement with the Fediverse at all anymore. There were sparse signs of life, but that was all. Turned out Kainoa had graduated and started a job and didn’t even have a few seconds to post anything into the Fediverse. In the meantime, Firefish didn’t follow Misskey’s development and got stuck on Misskey 12 level while Misskey went to version 14. Also, the lighthouse instance whose only tech admin was Kainoa completely crapped off and became entirely unuseable.
All other devs jumped ship. I think both Iceshrimp and Sharkey were launched by former Firefish devs (at least one of them was, Iceshrimp being a former hard fork of Firefish which was quickly rebased into a more up-to-date Misskey soft fork whereas Sharkey started out as a Misskey soft fork right away.
After about half a year, Kainoa came back and promised that things would continue. But someone else had to continue it. And that was Naskya. It was up to her to continue, but with zero help from Kainoa. The latter didn’t want to continue any of the existing Firefish sites, not the website, not the lighthouse instance, not even the code repository because all three ran on Firefish-specific domains which Kainoa probably couldn’t be bothered to transfer. All three were scheduled to shut down which is why many people think Firefish is dead: The old links no longer work.
So when Naskya took over, she had to set up a wholly new code repository, essentially fork Kainoa’s repository as long as it still existed (Naskya’s Firefish is a hard fork of Kainoa’s Firefish, technically speaking) and set up a new llighthouse instance. But since she ended up the only dev, it became much too much work. And so she announced to discontinue Firefish by the end of 2024.
Iceshrimp was designed for stability which is also why a number of Firefish features had been kicked out. It itself is on maintenance for as long as it will continue to exist, which won’t be that long.
The reason: Iceshrimp.NET. The Iceshrimp devs decided to no longer put up with Misskey’s mangled, faulty code base and no longer try to patch what’s broken on Misskey’s side. And besides, a Fediverse server application entirely based on JavaScript (TypeScript + Node.js) doesn’t sound that much like a good idea. Instead, the Iceshrimp devs decided to re-write all of Iceshrimp from scratch, from the ground up, in C#. This is far from done which means it’s even farther from being daily-driveable.
So you’ve got two Iceshrimps now: One is a Forkey and only receives bugfixes or security patches anymore, if anything. One is not a Forkey and not ready for public deployment yet either.
Sharkey used to be the king of features, but at the cost of reliability. Especially Sharkey’s Mastodon API implementation is infamously bad. The Sharkey community has been waiting for someone to step up and develop a completely new Mastodon API implementation for Sharkey for I don’t know how long.
Also, the Sharkey devs lost a whole lot of community support when they collected donations for a server for Sharkey purposes and then took the money to set up a Minecraft server. Make of that what you want.
News on Catodon are sparse, if there are any. But then again, Catodon is Iceshrimp dumbed down for Mastodon converts’ convenience with a UI that’s as close as possible to the default Mastodon Web UI. That’s probably not what you’re looking for.
And it being Iceshrimp-based may pretty well mean that the Catodon development is halted and waiting for Iceshrimp.NET to be released so that Catodon can be rebased from the dead TypeScript/Node.js Iceshrimp codebase to the new C# Iceshrimp.NET codebase.
And then there’s CherryPick. AFAIK, it’s a Japan-based Sharkey soft-fork in which a whole lot of Misskey and Sharkey issues have been fixed; don’t ask me for details, I only know this stuff from hearsay. Basically, CherryPick is Sharkey in good. Or in better.
Caveats: Like Misskey, CherryPick is developed in Japan. I wouldn’t count on any of the devs, much less all of them, being fluent in English or anything else that isn’t Japanese. Also, there’s one (1) public instance outside of East Asia; it’s located in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area. All the other instances are in and around Tokyo and Seoul.
All this combined may be why next to nobody in the West even knows that CherryPick exists.
- Comment on After a year of operation, Switzerland's government closes its Mastodon instance 1 month ago:
The six accounts of the Confederation had around 3,500 subscribers in total. Seriously, what did they expect?
As many followers as they’ve built up in the Birdcage? With maybe 1% of users altogether? In a much shorter timespan?
And by running the accounts as pure shoutboxes with no interaction with replies that could just as well be unmarked crossposter bots?
- Comment on After a year of operation, Switzerland's government closes its Mastodon instance 1 month ago:
The irony is that all it would take is one high profile person or a nation state to commit to using Mastodon, and slowly you would see the numbers start to increase.
Um, nope.
George Takei is on Mastodon. I’ve yet to see masses of Trekkies piling into Mastodon.
Greta Thunberg is on Mastodon. There has never been a huge influx of FFF members. Or Zoomers, for that matter.
The Dutch government has its own instance. The Federal German government has its own instance. Doesn’t lure anyone into the Fediverse.
- Comment on After a year of operation, Switzerland's government closes its Mastodon instance 1 month ago:
The main cost is probably the extra workload put on their social media team having to publish to and interact with even more platforms.
They’ve yet to be caught actually interacting with someone. They’ve run the whole instance as nothing but a shoutbox.
- Comment on After a year of operation, Switzerland's government closes its Mastodon instance 1 month ago:
The Fediverse is not only Lemmy and Mastodon. Even the microblogging side is not only Mastodon.
Mastodon itself has a whole bunch of forks such as Ecko, Hometown and the very popular Glitch.
There’s also Pleroma with its probably even more popular fork Akkoma.
There’s Misskey with literally dozens of forks, including but not limited to Firefish (formerly Calckey), Iceshrimp (its rewrite Iceshrimp.NET won’t be a fork anymore, though), Sharkey, CherryPick, Catodon etc. etc.
If you want something with more power, something that’s much more like Facebook, there’s Friendica and has been since 2010.
If you want something with vastly more power, think Facebook meets WordPress meets Google Cloud Services meets Fandom etc., there’s Hubzilla. Whenever someone thinks “the Fediverse” needs to introduce a certain new feature just because Mastodon doesn’t have it, chances are Hubzilla has had it for longer than Mastodon has even been around.
And so forth.
- Comment on No dedicated community/magazine for Fediverse memes? 2 months ago:
Yup.
- Comment on No dedicated community/magazine for Fediverse memes? 2 months ago:
Let’s try this here before it gets its own post somewhere.
That is, I have a growing suspicion that even here in a community that specialises in the Fediverse, hardly anyone can relate to it, and out in the meme communities, nobody will even understand it.
- Comment on No dedicated community/magazine for Fediverse memes? 2 months ago:
It’s basically like a Hubzilla channel which, in turn, is somewhat like a Friendica account. Which, again, is very vagely like a Mastodon account.
To my best knowledge, you can’t follow individual accounts outside the Threadiverse on Lemmy.
In addition, (streams) has recently switched to decentralised IDs as per FEP-ef61. This could be the reason why Lemmy can’t find my (streams) channels, but it can find my Hubzilla channels: It doesn’t understand DIDs.
- Comment on A general fediverse client app, supporting multiple content types? (mastodon, lemmy, peertube, etc) 2 months ago:
It would just either have to be on a server that also offers all server applications covered by the Web client so that everything has the same domain.
Or you would have to tell people to register accounts on foo.social, bar.social and/or baz.social, but the Web UI is on qux.social. Bit confusing for newbies who only knew centralised silos five minutes ago.
- Comment on No dedicated community/magazine for Fediverse memes? 2 months ago:
Here’s some stuff that I’d meme about:
- Mastodon users thinking the Fediverse is only Mastodon
- Lemmy users thinking the Threadiverse is only Lemmy
- Mastodon users thinking the Fediverse started with Mastodon
- Mastodon being ridiculously underpowered in comparison to just about everything else, particularly Hubzilla and (streams)
- Mastodon users wishing Mastodon (or, better yet, “the Fediverse”) had certain features which are readily available just about everywhere outside of Mastodon
- Mobile apps built against only Mastodon
- Fediverse tools built against only Mastodon
- Pleroma being lightweight
- Mastodon’s culture which Mastodon users are trying to force upon the rest of the Fediverse
- Forkey antics such as "Speak as cat"
- Forkeys in general
- Forkeys inspired by Blåhaj vs Mastodon’s mastodon plushie
- Mastodon users still uploading videos to YouTube and not to PeerTube
- Hubzilla’s UI
- Sharkey’s infamously bad Mastodon API implementation
- Friendica federating with everything, especially juxtaposed with some Mastodon users not wanting to federate with anything that isn’t vanilla Mastodon
- Hubzilla’s ability to host Web pages
- Nomadic identity
- Bluesky’s AT protocol seeming like a cheap knock-off of the Zot and Nomad protocols in parts
- Self-proclaimed Fediverse experts who actually barely know anything about Mastodon and don’t know anything about the rest of the Fediverse
- Character limits
- Threads perhaps wanting to EEE the Fediverse vs Mastodon actively trying to EEE the Fediverse right now
- Mastodon’s poster-side content warnings set in stone in what they want to be the Fediverse culture vs Friendica’s, Hubzilla’s, (streams)’ and Forte’s automated, reader-side content warnings which have been around for longer
- Generally, the Fediverse being older than Mastodon
- Lemmy only barely federating with everything else
- /kbin essentially being dead
- Permissions on Hubzilla and (streams)
- “Conversations” on Mastodon vs conversations on Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams)
- Certain points in the Fediverse history
Granted, I guess almost all of this will fly even over most c/Fediverse users’ heads due to how detached Lemmy is from the rest of the Fediverse. But I don’t really expect that many more Mastodon users to understand it, and those who do may be offended. Oh well.
- Comment on No dedicated community/magazine for Fediverse memes? 2 months ago:
I’ve started a new (streams) channel for Fediverse memes, but I thought Lemmy could be another, even better place to post them.
I’ve already posted two creations of mine there, One does not simply implement FEP-ef61 with very extensive explanations and What if I told you the Fediverse is not only Mastodon? with only one link to explain it. I’m still trying to find the right amount of explanation for an audience that shall be mostly on Mastodon.
Beyond that, I’ve got loads of ideas. But I don’t want to post more of them here than on (streams). So I’ll first have to define my way of posting them on (streams) to what will be a largely Mastodon audience in a way that satisfies Mastodon’s accessibility requirements the best. I hope to speed up my meme-posting rate then.
- Comment on No dedicated community/magazine for Fediverse memes? 2 months ago:
No time to run and moderate it. I’m not primarily a Lemmy user, I’m mostly on Hubzilla and (streams). It can happen that I’m absent from Lemmy for weeks.
- Comment on A general fediverse client app, supporting multiple content types? (mastodon, lemmy, peertube, etc) 2 months ago:
For one specific Fediverse project each, yes.
But what the OP is looking for is a Web client that lets you log into Mastodon and Lemmy and PeerTube all the same. Probably one that unifies your Mastodon, Lemmy and PeerTube timelines into one, rather than listing your Mastodon timeline next to your Lemmy timeline next to your PeerTube timeline in three separate columns, TweetDeck-style.
Or maybe what the OP is looking for is a Web server and client that unites all features of Mastodon and Lemmy and PeerTube in one Fediverse project so that only one single login is needed for everything.
Neither of these exists.
- Comment on No dedicated community/magazine for Fediverse memes? 2 months ago:
What I meant weren’t screenshots from social media that are treated like memes.
I rather meant original memes made in the Fediverse for the Fediverse, lampooning the Fediverse, parts of it or certain aspects of it. Even if they’re based on existing templates, no matter how old.
Also, it’d be nice if there was a place where such memes can be posted in the first place.
- Submitted 2 months ago to fediverse@lemmy.world | 46 comments
