@GossiTheDog@cyberplace.social

Not everything has to be shit.

#Introduction Hi #fediverse ! We’re the European Southern Observatory, and we design, build and operate ground-based telescopes.

One of them is our Extremely Large Telescope, currently under construction in #Chile. It will have a 39 m mirror, and its rotating enclosure will weigh 6100 tonnes, or about 700 mastodons!

We’re looking forward to chatting with all of you about #astronomy

📷 ESO/G. Vecchia

4/

Fediverse Custom Feeds are a powerful technology!

And are one piece in creating a "plug-in" system for the Fediverse.

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The UI/UX part of a Fediverse Custom Feed is making apps understand what to do with a Actor type="Feed" actor.

For example — when the user "Follows" an Actor type="Feed" actor, then the app could make the content from that actor show up next to the home-feed, as an alternative feed.

2/

The Protocol part of a Fediverse Custom Feed is a new Actor Type — the "Feed".

We already have Actor Types:

• Application
• Group
• Organization
• Person
• Service

https://www.w3.org/TR/activitystreams-vocabulary/#actor-types

Add "Feed" to that list.

1/

A Fediverse Custom Feed is — part UI/UX and part Protocol.

🧵

Another interesting graph is the one showing, where our followers are: Almost 99% use #Mastodon, but the (tiny) rest is pretty diverse. Here at least, the promise of the #Fediverse has not yet really been fulfilled.

(🧵 3/4)

If you combine #Mastodon, #Flipboard and #Bluesky into the #Fediverse, they are not that far from #Facebook. But of course, that's a bit of a stretch (at least for now).
But what's clear, is that Flipboard is not as strong as before. Any tips, on how to get more out of @Flipboard?

(🧵 2/4)

@Gargron @mosseri
I don't see this as a good thing. #Facebook, #Threads, #Instagram etc. are highly toxic digital spaces run by billionaires to further their own self-interests. Personally I'd prefer if the #Fediverse could be run as a separate, better alternative to such spaces.

One of the prime issues with #mastodon are the overlapping and confusing ways to consume other peoples posts. Do you do it by server? By people you follow? By hashtag? By list?

If the answer is "yes" to all of these questions, then why can't I send a message to all people in a list? How do I form a community *ACROSS* instances?
@Gargron

The criticisms from this 2022 article are still true today at the end of 2024.

The signup process is too hard and servers are too opaque for users to make good decisions when they come to the Fediverse. One example: some major server instances have blocked threads.net and *then* blocked servers that federate to threads.net. Policies are not evenly applied or even visible to users when they sign up for a server.

https://www.fastcompany.com/90808984/using-mastodon-is-way-too-complicated-to-ever-topple-twitter

... people instead, as they are not aware of an umbrella standards organization that can provide such a space.

It seems that what's left for @interpeer and others is to do what so many other projects do, and turn into their own organizations publishing standards from processes such as the PEP process for Python.

We discussed also how the FEP process for the #Fediverse differs drastically in this in that it doesn't have the same interoperability requirements that other orgs place on specs.

@dangillmor Hey, @Gargron can we possibly see some updates that would improve onboarding on #mastodon & the #fediverse ?? ♥️

I distinguish #SocialNetworking" (human interaction) from #SocialMedia (content publishing or broadcasting, influencers, engagement, massive scale, growth hacking, etc).

For social media you can try #StarterPacks, for the social networks.. no, this is something conceptually completely different in my book.

Unfortunately both are intermixed on the current #fedi, no consensus on direction, plus..

#Fediverse: An online decentralized social network used primarily to host common social media apps.

@Gargron What do you think about the idea of #mastadon servers supporting #atproto in addition to #activitypub?

By the way, thank you very much for your work and vision!

Why do I have a bunch of people in my “following” & “followers” list that I KNOW I didn’t follow, and when I click on their profile it shows as not following, gives me the opportunity to follow…but not block or mute or remove these followers. Moreover, I never received notifications of these followers. WTF is this evil?

Honestly baffled

@Gargron TY for all your hard work. I believe it is paying off. I left #twitter in 2017 but went cold turkey. Tried #bluesky earlier this year but after a week I deactivated because it felt the same as twitter and I left twitter because of how bad it made me feel. A few weeks ago I decided to try mastodon and it hits different. I'm not steeling myself before opening the app. I'm still getting a feel for it but I'm I haven't left yet and don't intend to any time soon. Long live the

We may not be the biggest by numbers yet, but Mastodon (and the fediverse) has proven itself to be an effective and reliable communications platform over the course of the last 8 years, and does not depend on venture capital to survive. The #fediverse is the future.

Exactly two years ago, we started to post links on #Mastodon via our account @heiseonline 👇

https://mastodon.social/@heiseonline/109314036284496776

It took longer, than I expected, but here we are: it seems like this account now brings continuously more #traffic to heise.de than #X (#Twitter) in its entirety, although it only has ¼ of the follower number (and many of them don't seem to be active anymore).
I'll prepare some graphs after the weekend.

#SocialMedia
#TwitterExodus
#MastodonMigration
#TwitterMigration

Vorerst ist das hier der offizielle Mastodon-Account von heise online.
Wird jetzt erst einmal händisch befüllt, aber wir haben schon weitergehende Pläne und wollen hier mehr machen.

I think it's going to be more important than ever that #Mastodon and the #fediverse are not centrally operated out of the US unlike almost every other social media platform out there.

Regarding #Bluesky opening signups, one person on HN comments:

> The account portability is probably the biggest problem with the #fediverse right now.

And while that may be true from an end-user perspective, imho it is not the biggest problem. The fact that for a new dev building an #ActivityPub app is like a Viking trying to discover America is problematic. While #ATProto has the Holland-America line where you can check in for the ride.

@jdp23 I don't see how partial relays would be possible in atproto. say some catastrophic event happens where people were dead set on splitting off from bsky the corporation. assume it's truly the top priority and nothing else goes until it happens. assume further still this is some unimaginable proportion of the userbase acting in concert - hell, say 25% want to go all at once. best case scenario for making an independent relay.

you create a new relay, migrate data to new PDSes, get that new relay to crawl the PDSes, so far so good. Now what tho? everyone on the new relay is invisible to everyone on the old relay and vice versa. you are back to 0 appviews and 0 feed generators because they all are listening to the main relay. every single appview and feed generator now needs to choose to listen to the new relay. but why would they? you're still responsible as an appview or feed generator for the content you distribute, and you don't know who this new relay is. that's assuming there's no ill will in such a massive split.

so you set up a new basic set of appviews and feed generators. do they also listen to the main relay? do you mirror the old relay in the new relay? do you let the old relay crawl the pdses too? if so, what was the point of the split? now you need to redesign all the existing appviews and feed generators in flight to deduplicate records, which is possible since they're content addressed, but i would doubt they're designed to handle multiple relays because none have existed before now.

what about DIDs? most of the existing infrastructure is designed to just use PLC, which is just a lookup table that bsky also owns. shoot. but we're saved by magic here, because remember there is no acrimony in this enormous network redefining split! So say bsky the corporation is kind enough to keep letting people register DIDs with PLC. we didn't quite make the clean break we were after, but hey it's only the fundamental ability to exist on the network that we were unable to leave behind, and we'll always be reliant on bsky's goodwill for that until someone makes a DID method that works and then we redesign all the appviews and feed generators again.

So now after all that... we're still invisible to most people on the main relay?! oh right because bsky the corporation also provides the default feeds, and despite the high numbers claimed in the press releases, alternate feeds are actually only sparsely used and as a rule very simple hashtag/account feeds because doing anything else is ridiculously expensive. Bluesky the appview is provided by bluesky the corporation, and that's what's actually fetching and hydrating the feeds for us anyway, so even if the feed generators swap over, we'd still be invisible to everyone still on bsky the app. More magic! bsky the appview chooses to crawl and hydrate our posts. We're pretty far from our initial intention of a clean break, but what choice do we have? Now we're partially viewable, some of the time, on some non-default feeds, and there's no way at all to tell within the interface which those are. All it took was totally redesigning most of the network and an enormous amount of goodwill.

What about labels? What about all the automated content moderation bsky the appview does like scanning images and etc? Who moderates? How? Who's paying for all this anyway? The new relay is bound to be extremely expensive - either it's too small and you don't have the critical mass to make any of the above happen, or it's very large and you run into exactly the same problems of scale that necessitate bsky the corporation to need seed funding and eventually make a revenue model on. Where on fedi people pay for servers and donate to their instance because it's a visible part of their experience with moderators they know and like, now all that labor is diffused among a bunch of anonymous service providers - this is by design! It was supposed to depersonalize the network and make it so everyone is just an interchangeable part that you can shop around between. What keeps people donating to the new PDSes, the new relay, the new appviews, the new feed generators? How would they even know how to do that?Meanwhile the network is continuing to tack on features with some combination of bsky corporation fiat, behind the scenes server magic, and so on, so the best we can hope for is partial compatibility and an always-inferior experience.

And that's just to get to 2 relays. what about 3? Remember how much people complained about how hard it was to find an instance? That's absolutely nothing to the combinatoric complexity of PDS * relay * feed generator * app view. How on earth will anyone know how to follow and talk to their friends? To see your friend's post, if they are not on the main relay, you need to get just the right combination of parameters. Even in this perfect scenario with unlimited resources, attention, goodwill, and organization, we couldn't even manage to make a clean break and still have to be reliant on bsky for basically the entire stack, at least partially.

So maybe some small, closed group could make subnetworks, and that is lovely! i'm glad that tech is out there. There's no such thing as privacy on those networks unless they redesign indigo, but hey it's a start! But that looks nothing like the interoperable paradise that's on the label.

In reality we don't get perfect conditions though, and so we'll get stuck at step one: new relay, zero appviews, zero feed generators, zero visibility, and zero people. Again I don't think alternate relays are possible with atproto -- if they were, then there would be no reason to invest $13 million dollars in bluesky.

📢 Big News!

Today, we’re announcing that Flipboard is beginning to federate our publisher partner accounts in Brazil and expanding federation in Canada, Germany and the U.K.

Now, people in the fediverse can follow 150 newly federated publisher accounts and 2,000 topically curated Magazines about everything from politics and world news to sports and travel.

Read more in our announcement here:

https://about.flipboard.com/fediverse/flipboard-expands-federation-in-brazil-canada-germany-and-u-k/

For a full list of federated accounts to follow, visit the Flipboard directory:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1iUFTo6rPvhqzCReLaM1c6-xUKRuBVqlZVStZl9Al-EU

Follow our Mastodon accounts in Brazil and Germany to discover Flipboard accounts to follow and keep up with the day's news:

@FlipboardBR

@FlipboardDE

And as always, tell us in the comments what you think!

Question for something I’m writing: would it be possible for Substack to make substack Notes (its twitter like feature within the Substack app) part of the fediverse?

I’m wondering if this is something that’s technically possible or not and I don’t know enough about how the fediverse operates to know if it would be feasible.