Mastodon has the responsibility to promote diversity in the Fediverse
I love the Threadiverse. Compared to the microblogging Fediverse’s sea of random thoughts, Lemmy and kbin are so much easier to navigate with the options to sort posts by subscribed, from local instances or everything federated. You can also sort by individual community, and then there are the countless ways to order the posts and comments (which are stored neatly under the main post, by the way). That people can more easily find the right discussions and see where they can contribute also means that the discussions tend to be more focused and productive than elsewhere. Decentralisation also makes a lot of sense, since it is built around different communities. All that’s needed is users.
Things were going quite well for a while when Reddit killed third-party apps, prompting many to leave and find the Threadiverse. However, it is quite difficult to entertain a crowd that has grown accustomed to a constant bombardment of dopamine-inducing or interesting content by tens of millions of users, if you only have a couple hundred thousand people. This is causing some to leave, which of course increases this effect. The active users have more than halved since July, according to FediDB. The mood is also becoming more tense. Maybe the lack of engagement drives some to cause it through hostility, I’m not quite sure. Either way, the Threadiverse becoming a less enjoyable place to be, which is quite sad considering how promising it is.
But what is really frustrating is that we could easily have that userbase. The entire Fediverse has over ten million users, and many Mastodonians clearly want to engage in group-based discussion, looking at Guppe groups. The focused discussions should also be quite attractive. Technically we are federated, so why do Mastodonians interact so little with the Threadiverse? The main reason is that Mastodon simply doesn’t federate post content. I really can’t see why the platform that federates entire Wordpress blogs refuses to federate thread content just because it has a title, and instead just replaces the body with a link to the post. Very unhelpful.
The same goes with PeerTube. There are plenty of videos on there that I am quite sure a lot of Mastodonians would appreciate, yet both views and likes there stay consistently in the tens. Yes, Mastodon’s web interface has a local video player, but in most clients it is the same link shenanigans, may may partly explain the small amount of engagement. This is also quite sad, because Google’s YouTube is one of the worst social network monopolies out there, if not the worst.
And I know some might say that Mastodon is a microblogging platform and that it makes sense only to have microblogging content, but the problem is that Mastodon is the dominant platform on the Fediverse, its users making up close to 80% of all Fedizens. It has gone so far that several Friendica and Hubzilla users have been complaining about complaints from Mastodonians that their posts do not live up to Mastodon customs, and of course, that people frequently use “Mastodon” to refer to the entire Fediverse. This, of course, goes entirely against the idea of the Fediverse, that many diverse platforms live in harmony with and awareness of each other.
The very least that Mastodon could do is to support the content of other platforms. Then I’d wish that they’d improve discoverability, by for instance adding a videos tab in the explore section, improving federation of favourites since it is the dominant sorting mechanism on many other platforms, and making a clear distinction between people (@person@instance) and groups (!group@instance), but I know that that is quite much to ask.
P.S. @feditips , @FediFollows , I know that you are reluctant to promote Lemmy and its communities because of the ideology of its founders, but the fact is firstly that it’s open source and there aren’t any individual people who control the entire project, and that the software itself is very apolitical. In fact, most Lemmy users both oppose and are on instances that have rules against such beliefs, so I highly encourage you to at least help raise awareness on the communities. Then, of course, there’s kbin, which isn’t associated with any extremism at all. As a bonus, it has much better integration with the microblogging Fediverse, but it is a lot smaller and younger, and still very much under development.
Anyways, that was a ramble. Thanks for hearing me out.
Mastodon has the responsibility to promote diversity in the Fediverse
That will never happen as Mastodon makes only the Mastodon thing and nothing more.
Most people have no idea that other communities exists.
@person@instance @feditips@mstdn.social @FediFollows@social.growyourown.services @fediverse@lemmy.world
The main reason is that Mastodon simply doesn’t federate post content.
Doesn’t it? I regularly see Mastodon users commenting on threads, so they must be able to see them somehow?
Yes, but they only see the title and a link to the original post in place of a body.
I don’t find that - using Mastodon (4.2) I can see threaded discussion in Lemmy - each comment as a post - but have to start somewhere.
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Agreed!
I don’t use Mastodon as much as Lemmy, and from what I can tell it seems hard to see content from Lemmy with the way it’s set up. I think you can only follow communities, and if you do then you get spammed with every single comment from that community?
If there was an easy way to scroll through a list of subscribed communities on Mastodon (like a mini threadiverse panel inside Mastodon?), that would probably simplify things a lot. Mastodon users could read and comment on Lemmy posts easily, and most importantly: they could find and share content in a more intuitive way
I think you can only follow communities, and if you do then you get spammed with every single comment from that community?
yeah, pretty much :/
The boost spam has to do with the way Lemmy solves the problem Mastodon has when it comes to spreading comments across instances. Lemmy will Announce every created post and comment, which will cause them to be replicated across servers. Mastodon only uses Announce to boost posts.
Both approaches are perfectly valid choices on their own, but they clash when used together.
In the past, the Mastodon devs suggested subscribing to hashtags as an alternative to subscribing to groups. As for the boost spam, Mastodon has a “hide boosts” button (at least on my end in the app) that’ll let you hide boosts for accounts.
I’m not sure if you’re able to follow Lemmy users from Mastodon (I know the inverse isn’t possible) but I don’t see why you would. I just don’t think it makes sense to follow a Threadiverse user.
I succeed to follow my own Lemmy account from my Mastodon account, it works (initially seems empty, but new posts/replies show up later). From there I could potentially boost or reply. If somebody clicks on my comment in Mastodon, they’ll find the whole Lemmy thread. This should help (more numerous) Mastodon users to discover Lemmy.
There are a few communities that get Mastodon comments and I love to see them!
There’s also the Tagginator bot that got started recently which might help
No, it doesn’t.
At the core of the various fediverse solutions is the idea of choosing who to federate with and who not to. Mastodon should not be forced to “federate” with lemmy. And
I know that you are reluctant to promote Lemmy and its communities because of the ideology of its founders,
Is about as good a reason as possible to not want to touch something with a ten foot pole. I know that I like Lemmy and Mastodon, but I have a VERY large blocklist on lemmy.
But the other aspect is: As influencers learned in the 10s, the kind of content that makes sense on mastodon/twitter doesn’t make sense on cohost/tumblr or lemmy/reddit or whatever else. All cross posting does is make for a lesser experience on the secondary platforms.
That said, I do think there could be better support for the decentralized nature of each platform. It would be really nice if I could specify what mastodon instance I use in lemmy and what lemmy instance I use in mastodon so that links would automagically convert. Which would make linking to posts a lot less awkward. I don’t want things to be mirrored, but it would be nice to link to an interesting topic or a fun post from a developer or artist.
As for why mastodon is more successful: Because people are actually making content on Mastodon. I like Lemmy, but too many of these boards feel like “race to copy links and comments from reddit”. It IS nice to have fewer nazi chuds but… it feels like there were tankie seat fillers waiting in the wings.
But that also extends to interactions. I like to shitpost on lemmy and rant about my various bugbears but… I have yet to have a “meaningful” interaction. Whereas I have had at least a dozen solid exchanges and discussions on Mastodon. And… it is baffling that the twitter-like feels more like a community and less like I am shouting into a crowded room.
And a lot of that boils down to “why” people embrace the sites. Lemmy… feels like going on a date with someone who just got out of a long term relationship and can’t stop talking about their ex… and then tries to send a dick pic to show that they are over him.
Whereas twitter is still in a mess of “Well… I don’t like nazis and transphobes but all the brands and creators I like are on twitter so I am going to protest and stay on twitter”. And blue skies and the other one very much feel like a twitter replacement whereas Mastodon (and, sort of, Cohost) feel like a “Twitter sucked. Let’s actually do better”. To go back to the dating metaphor, it is like going on a date with someone who will unabashedly order the whole fish or the ribs because life is too short to pretend you don’t like “ugly” food or messy food or whatever.
If Lemmy can actually build its own identity? Then I don’t think we would need to worry because people will naturally want to link to discussions. But until it does? It isn’t worth it.
And peertube is just a stupid idea that means videos can’t be monetized (so creators have zero incentive or justification to put time and effort in) while also providing a hefty cost to instance hosts because video is expensive.
Regarding that comment on Peertube: free social media means that people create content because they want to make something known, not because they want to earn money through clicks. Most content on YouTube that makes a lot of money is trash and clickbait. It is a much better system that people reward creators out of kindness and gratitude for their good content.
This has come up constantly over the centuries:
It isn’t about evil corporate/fuedal/whatever interests ruining art. It is about having the time to make art. Ethan Chlebowski and Brian Lagerstrom semi-recently did a podcast where they talked about this. For a 20 minute recipe video you tend to have to iterate on the dish at least a dozen times (if not more). And that costs money and time.
You can more or less math how many tickets you’ll sell at a theatre or what your ad/sponsor revenue will be for a video to budget that out. You can’t really do that when you are counting on sporadic donations.
Mastodon supports long form and rich content perfectly fine. The problem is that Lemmy and Kbin extend ActivityPub in a way that nothing else does. While most of the Fediverse uses Note objects, Lemmy chose to use Page objects. Mastodon supports Pages but only renders a title and a link because it doesn’t really know what pages are.
Pages represent web pages, whereas notes represent “a short written work typically less than a single paragraph in length”. In my opinion, using Page was a mistake on Lemmy’s end. Just like Lemmy won’t support Place objects, I’m not sure if any other platform will ever support Page objects, because Pages are much bigger in scope than anything most Fediverse applications ever deal with.
There are also other problems. Lemmy expects the community to be CC’ed or Federation may break.
It’s a rather moot point, because the Lemmy devs tell you to use Kbin or Mastodon or anything else if you want basic interactions with Mastodon users.
Something that’ll undoubtably confuse people is that Lemmy will send a Create to create a post (makes sense) followed by a boost (Announce) to populate it across servers. In Mastodon, this manifests as a long list of boosted posts. This is the only way Lemmy can spread comments to every other server, but it’ll flood any normal timeline with boosts.
Notation invented by other platforms (!community@server) isn’t going to make it into Mastodon, I don’t think. You can just paste a full URL (https://lemmy.world/c/linuxmemes) into Mastodon and get to the community, though, so I don’t really see the need. This is because of perfectly sensible design choices made by both the Lemmy devs (using group: in webfinger to indicate groups, even though that URL scheme is nonstandard, so username and community can overlap) and the Mastodon devs (accounts follow the standard Webfinger notation and usernames are expected to be unique).
Mastodon has stupidities of its own (think “you must @mention usernames” despite ActivityPub having a non-content field for that purpose that’ll work just fine). But in this case the problem is that different projects use the same standard for different purposes.
Interaction between Mastodon and Lemmy is possible, but it’s a massive pain, and even if Mastodon were to support Page objects to render Lemmy posts, it’ll always remain a pain. I don’t think asking Mastodon to change the way their software works to support use cases it was never designed to support (and perhaps doesn’t want to support) is very viable.
That said, you could try to check out the code over at Github and see if you can make Page objects render better in Mastodon. Probably best to ask the maintainers what approach they’d prefer, but I think rendering posts would be a rather small change that would greatly improve interoperability.
Pages represent web pages, whereas notes represent “a short written work typically less than a single paragraph in length”. In my opinion, using Page was a mistake on Lemmy’s end. Just like Lemmy won’t support Place objects, I’m not sure if any other platform will ever support Page objects, because Pages are much bigger in scope than anything most Fediverse applications ever deal with.
Using note was the mistake. Limiting communication to short quips, like Twitter does, is a fucking travesty. The fact that people routinely and often make multiple tweets to extend what they want to say proves this point. Twitter/X was the worst thing to happen to communication in the internet age by further reducing the attention span and ability of people to concentrate on longer bodies of writing, thereby making people even dumber.
Twitter/Mastodon should not even be a thing, honestly. They are dumb methods of communication for dumb people. You can always post something shorter in a long form system, but you can’t post something longer in a short form system, without making multiple posts. It’s fucking stupid and always has been. The primary reason for the short form, originally 140 char, was because you could text it in one message. This made a bit of sense… just a tiny bit, as it opened up communication where there previously wasn’t any. But as we moved away from that paradigm of 140 char text messages, the idea of a Twitter became more and more stupid, where today, we have Twitter/Mastodon as the bastion of the idiot regime who can’t think past 280 characters.
Mastodon chose a microblog format, and people using Mastodon chose it for its microblogging format. I understand why you may not want to use Mastodon, but plenty of people are using Mastodon because you can’t type walls of text. Character limits impose restraints that can drive creativity and force users to think about what they wrote, and revise their thoughts.
Nobody is forcing you to use Mastodon.
@skullgiver
when it comes to creativity, mastodon ui is a pre+emptive strike against creativity > vanilla mastodon does not support emoji reactions, and damn!!! mastodon ui hides that there are other platforms on the fedi than mastodon > mastodon is perfectly fine for all those who want to see mastodon content, and nothing else > creativity? no! creativity starts with openness, and mastodon surely has rather isolating approach@feditips @fediverse @FediFollows @mention @masimatutu @HamSwagwich
Where did I say anyone was forcing anyone else to use Mastodon (or Twitter et al?)
I don’t use Mastodon or Twitter, never have… because it’s a platform for people with low attention spans and lacking anything interesting to say or form a complex cogent though and discourages intelligent interaction in favor of quick quips and toxic behavior. Mastodon/Twitter is a cancer on the Internet, end of story.
“(…)Just like Lemmy won’t support Place objects, I’m not sure if any other platform will ever support Page objects, because Pages are much bigger in scope than anything most Fediverse applications ever deal with.”
ArticleorPageobjects are supported not only by Lemmy and /kbin (and Mastodon, but as link). It is a default object type on WriteFreely, can be used on WordPress, and is compatible with Friendica. Hometown (a Mastodon fork) also renders Pages and Articles in their entirety.@feditips @fediverse @FediFollows @mention @masimatutu
Articlemakes more sense for most federated long-form content, but I imagine there’s not a lot of difference between the two as far as Mastodon is concerned.If WriteFreely and WordPress use
Page, then I actually agree with the Mastodon implementation as-is: I don’t want entire articles in my timeline, but a link + image preview makes complete sense. The current system allows for comments (and comment threads) without having to stuff a long-form article into a tiny column.
the Lemmy devs tell you to use Kbin or Mastodon or anything else
So to reply to Nutomic’s closing remark on github:
I dont see why Lemmy should also implement that.
Because - if I could post to Mdon or reply to a Mdon post from my Lemmy account, some Mdon users (more numerous) might think - hey that’s interesting, I’ll follow that guy, then see my other posts to Lemmy, click and open up the whole thread (yes that works), and so eventually come to contribute to Lemmy too.
How would you post to Mastodon from Lemmy? There is no global federated timeline, your posts won’t show up unless someone follows you.
I think Lemmy users following Mastodon users can make sense, but that would require a whole new design element (something like a virtual community containing individual followed users). It’s worth considering, but I think Lemmy is currently not at a stage where those kinds of changes can be put on the road map.
Or, someone could maintain a fork, of course; Firefish exists because of a series of forks, and it’s one of the better Mastodon alternatives in terms of UX.
Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using a URL instead of its name, which doesn’t work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: !linuxmemes@lemmy.world
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I discovered Lemmy via links from Mastodon, and so found i prefer these threaded communities. Nevertheless individual “status” posts have a purpose too, we need both topic-focused and people-focused structures, these should overlap and connect better.
As my Mastodon account follows my Lemmy account, my posts/replies get into that system, more might be discovered if I included hashtags here. However I can’t do the reverse - follow a Mastodon account, or reply to or boost a post, from Lemmy. Communities might grow more if we could enable such interaction.@masimatutu @feditips @FediFollows @fediverse
It’s so laughable if #Fediverse admins try to ban #Lemmy users from federating, only because they don’t like some of its founders and thereby effectively ban all #Lemmmy users from various instances, users who are not at all associated with those in any way.It’ll come. Lemmy itself doesn’t federate well with Mastodon. I have no idea what’s going on, but if they all implement ActivityPub, it’ll be fine. Just give it time.
They all implement ActivityPub differently. The flaw in the system is that W3C/ActivityPub as a protocol can’t tell either of these projects “you are doing it wrong”.
@masimatutu this is a bit of self promotion here, but this is exactly what I want to with #nodebbActivityPub. Local only threads with the ability to two-way federate post content to followers. Implementors should be able to load the entirety of a NodeBB thread in their own native interfaces, and vice versa.
#Mastodon is the elephant in the room, and many implementors cater towards its idiosyncrasies but it needn’t be that way.
Thank you for this message.
I believe that the fediverse will not exploit its full potential until fedizens start to fediverse accross the different plateforms.
Of course, as the biggest plateform by far, Mastodon has a role to play. Interoperability accross multiple social media is what makes the fediverse fondamentally different from traditional social network and not yet another attempt at managing a social media plateform right.I think one of the biggest practical hurdles here is the authorized fetch issue which prevents some Mastodon instances from correctly federating with lemmy and peertube. From what I understand the issue there is actually Lemmy-side, so that probably needs a serious look at first.
