Just went over to Twitter for the first time in a while, and everyone’s bleating about wanting an invite to Bluesky.
Meanwhile, Mastodon’s over there just working fine and doing what they want Twitter to do.
It’s bizarre.
Normies are confused by Mastodon and how it works. Tried suggesting it as an alternative on /r/worldnews and most people just said that it was too confusing; one guy said that he couldn’t login but turns out he forgot which instance he had signed up for originally.
My choices now are
Mastodon
Lemmy
Kbin
Actually edit the novelI have to say the silver lining in all of this is that decentralized forms of community building are on the rise, and this is a good thing. I don’t think it’s healthy to centralize all data and power in the hands of private companies that can decide to, oh you know, kill api access etc.
Have they tried not using that garbage heap?
Would it be possible to have you fediverse username connected to the blockchain so you could use it to associate with an instance? And if that instance closed, say, you could simply connect your blockchain based account identity to another instance?
Why would blockchain be necessary to do that? Honestly, 99% of the time blockchain is just a highly inefficient buzzword.
Usually there are better ways to achieve the same outcome, with the added bonus of not automatically attracting a cavalcade of Web3 con-artists and grifters.
Why would you need blockchain for that?
Why not use good old signatures for that?
I’ve been feeling a significant amount of sadness at the feeling like I’ve now fully lost the 2 places that were my havens for safety and community during the pandemic (Twitter and Reddit). I mostly disconnected a few weeks/months ago, but this weekend feels like the full, official breakup. I wonder if anyone/everyone else is feeling the same?
Yesterday felt to me like the day Web 2.0 died. It’s actually rather awkward. Web 2.0 devolved into enshittification, Web 3.0 to many looks to be a scam from the outset, and that leaves us with the Fediverse as the most hopeful continuation of what we liked about Web 2.0. But what is the Fediverse? More of the same as Web 2.0? An entirely new thing? I’ve been coming to view the Fediverse as being Web 2.0.1. It’s a bug fix. The corporations controlling Web 2.0 were the problem, not the idea of a more dynamic and interactive web. The solution isn’t strictly speaking Peer 2 Peer solutions, as many people still want a curated and moderated space, so they’re not dealing with a constant onslaught of dicks and nazis they didn’t ask for (I’m sure someday the Peer 2 Peer networks will have a viable solution for that, but for now, they don’t as far as I can tell). But a networked governance structure in which volunteers own the instances and the users have more choice in how their space is moderated seems like a major fix to what we were seeing before, and I think it’s a major benefit for all of us
I’ve been really intrigued by the developments coming from the Web0 / small web train of thought. https://web0.small-web.org/
Not a great day for social media. Twitter down, Reddit has not 3rd party apps, Lemmy is being hugged to death by people bailing Reddit and Twitter.
I guess I’ll go outside.
Lemmy isn’t hugged to death. The issue is that everyone is just heading to the same handful of instances.
Here’s the current usershare breakdown by instance, if anyone’s curious:
Source: https://github.com/tgxn/lemmy-explorer/tree/main/frontend/public/data
Lemmy.world is getting a very big chunk, but other than that it actually seems fairly distributed.
I guess there has to be a lowest common denominator instance. Not at all a bad thing, it leaves the dedicated communities out of their inevitable implosion range which still having access.
Really everyone always wants to be on the most popular “site” instance to ensure it will just not go away suddenly. After that they go for ones that give them a cool @ domain name. This is how email and Jabber/XMPP worked for years. Modern fediverse should be using some form of modern distributed identity, not 1965 email style identities.
Yes, I figured. My domain name is not as cool as “shitjustworks” or whatever. But I can say that my instance is gonna stay for as long as Lemmy as software is supported, no matter if there are many users or not. I strongly believe that FOSS and the Fediverse are the future and I want to give something to the community by hosting the instance.
I went through the evolution of email… At first it was universities, then ISPs etc. Having your identity tied to them SUCKED every time you no longer qualified for an account, changed providers ETC. I was a hotmail user before Microsoft purchased it, and an early beta Gmail user… While this is some centralisation these two identities have lasted decades, where AT THE TIME AOL was the (this is the biggest, never going away) option, now almost no one has an @AOL.com address.
Point being that no matter the current promise your instance could DIE if you get ill or can’t afford to host it etc. The model is BAD. I have said it before and will say it again, Identity SHOULD NOT be tied to instances, AND it needs some form of bot and trust system built in.
Except unlike email, it is not a big deal to change accounts on lemmy, almost all interation happens in communites not user to user.
It matters if you create a community and are the only mod, or are a mod etc etc. You basically lose that if you lose your identity .