Mastodon: @mattswift@mastodon.social

  • 0 Posts
  • 78 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 8th, 2023

help-circle



  • I have worked in service/retail, and this argument doesn’t make a lot of sense. Most service/retail is actually 7-day weeks, but the workers average out to 5-day weeks with rotating shifts etc.

    All that would have to happen is the workers now average out to 4-day weeks, with a similar level of pay (which is what the 4-day week advocates are asking for).

    The 4-day week isn’t about office workers, it’s about everyone.




  • There’s no rules for the Fediverse, all it means is that they utilise the ActivityPub protocols to be able to federate with other websites that also use it (there’s others, but basically irrelevant now).

    Mastodon requires OAuth2 for apps to get access to your account because it was designed that way, and Lemmy wasn’t, it’s as simple as that. Any platform can be part of the Fediverse (including Reddit, Twitter, Facebook etc if they really wanted to), which also means that platforms can also do anything they want.








  • In your example, people who have the “bad instances” blocked won’t see the replies under the posts in question, as the instance will not fetch replies from said source.

    With how Mastodon works as well, it won’t fetch replies from instances until they’re known either, so brand new instances aren’t going to flood popular comment sections - this is a bit of a con though in a way, as it degrades the user experience when trying to read threads and causes people to constantly post the same stuff as they can’t see all the replies.


  • I think this disconnect here on Lemmy comes from why people use the platforms they did before (Reddit vs Twitter).

    Reddit was always purely content focused, and I feel people trying out Mastodon from Lemmy are expecting the same thing - where Mastodon is about content, and not people you want to follow.

    I also love Mastodon as well and I don’t think the issues people are posting about in here are issues at all either, as Mastodon being about directly connecting with people and a purely chronological feed is why I like it - if I want to search content relating to a topic, I browse Lemmy instances instead.


  • Well, when it comes to Matrix, they can’t really “compromise” in a way that other platforms may be able to, as their protocol is designed to be as private and secure as possible first, then the features come later.

    While “nobody cares about privacy” and features are king, I personally have a lot of respect for the Matrix developers for sticking true to their vision instead of compromising for the sake of adoption. Matrix and Element DO want to be feature-rich, but they will only accept things if they work with their principles.

    Furthermore, the Matrix team aren’t the ones “complaining” about adoption, they’re actually quite happy with how much adoption there is - it isn’t insignificant as there’s over 80 million known accounts, which is much bigger than the ActivityPub social media platforms, and many people use Matrix independently which they can’t track.


  • The one thing Musk and Spez have successfully done is make themselves scapegoats that leave people believing that everything will be resolved once they leave, so people have hope since there’s a “clear solution.”

    These issues run much deeper than the individual owners and CEOs though, it’s the rot of the companies and platforms themselves, and getting rid of those people will solve absolutely nothing.

    What needs to happen is for people to just switch off and help grow alternative platforms away from corporate meddling. Will it ever become mainstream? Maybe not, but it will never happen if people never try and just give up.


  • Nomadic identity is a bit of a weird one, because there’s no silver bullet. It’s either:

    • People store their credentials and data on their own systems in a peer-to-peer like system, but people are going to be constantly losing their access to their identity if they do this, so while this is technically ideal, it isn’t going to work for those that aren’t too familiar with technology. People have gotten very used to not having to look after their data in recent years.
    • The identity is handled by some sort of identity server for authorisation, but what this will most likely do is give rise to some centralised identity services that you’re going to have to trust, which arguably may be against decentralisation.

    I do agree it would be way better for a single account/identity to just work everywhere on the Fediverse, but I’m not entirely sure how the details should be handled. Nostr is one implementation (it’s the first one), whereas things like SSO with Google / Microsoft is the second (kbin, for example, has this).

    I have noticed that Mastodon development has slowed down considerably though, but admittedly it must be hard having requests from literally every angle about every use case and concern. It’s easy for us to say “just add quote posts”, “just add search”, but the people who have already been on Mastodon have used it knowing those don’t exist, so the Mastodon developers have to implement these things while still thinking of every use case and also still sticking to their own beliefs as to what Mastodon should be.


  • Telling people to “just use Firefish” is a common thing that comes up when people talk about this, but it’s not really a solution at all with where we’re currently at. (this isn’t aimed at you, by the way, just addressing this specific point)

    Whether we like it or not, Mastodon is by far the biggest player in the microblogging space (8M accounts on Mastodon vs 499K on Misskey at #2. with Mastodon being 77.9% of the entire Fediverse!), and it is going to be what the vast majority of people are using, simply due to word of mouth or mindshare. On these sorts of platforms, many features depend on the people you’re posting to also experiencing the same features you are. Quote posts are a very popular topic that’s requested for various reasons on Mastodon, but while the 3rd party apps and other microblog platforms have these implemented, it doesn’t matter if 80%+ of your followers are using Mastodon, because they won’t see the post as you intend for them to see it.

    Furthermore, as we know, the “culture” of Mastodon is of the Fediverse at large, using a different platform isn’t going to fix this issue - your community is what you make of it depending on your instance really, but fact of the matter is, most people are going to be drawn to the simpler general instances “where everyone is at”, which is going to be the big Mastodon instances. Trying to divert those people to other platforms isn’t going to work, because they don’t understand how all this works, so good first impressions need to be made on Mastodon, and unfortunately due to the culture of Mastodon attracting a certain type of crowd and no mass migrations to “Eternal September” the culture, especially since Threads now exists, this is going to be a very hard barrier to overcome.

    Whenever I’ve talked to people about Mastodon outside of the tech-savvy spaces, most people just see Mastodon as an app and there are “people on Mastodon”, attempting to try and introduce people to all these different platforms and how you can still talk to everyone in places unfortunately just makes their head explode, as they’re not used to the open web due to how it evolved after the rise of Facebook.

    Mastodon is stuck between a rock and a hard place, where it wants to make decentralisation the norm by attracting as many people as possible, while still keeping its general culture in place and not wanting to turn into “another Twitter” which usually ends up being filled with hot takes and people dunking on people for entertainment - but unfortunately, this is how people consume social media now, it’s all about content.


  • I only self-host a MediaWiki website at the moment, along with a PPSSPP adhoc server for said game that the wiki is related to. I want to self-host a lot more stuff, but storage space is expensive, and I don’t really want to leave things running at home all the time either as it will eat into my electricity bill.

    Nextcloud and OnlyOffice are what I’m interested in next, and perhaps a Fediverse platform.