Chozo

I can’t see any posts from the last year when viewing that from Mbin. Which is weird because I’m also somehow already subscribed to it, so I should be seeing newer posts.

Keep in mind, it’s not a real score. That’s only what that user sees, based on upvotes from servers their instance is federated with. My instance is federated with a different list of servers, so my score for you is slightly different at 25584. Somebody on a third mbin instance will likely see a similar, but still different score.

I just hope that in the future people will avoid using software names in their server branding, because it only confuses people.

100% this. For instance, one would think that “Lemmy World” is something that’s officially related to the Lemmy project development. But in actuality, the “official” Lemmy instance would be Lemmy.ML, which is notoriously defederated from many of the big players in this space. It’s all very misleading to the uninitiated user.

Herein lies a problem I’ve had for a while, actually. It’s hard to tell people about Lemmy, because “Lemmy” isn’t really a website, or an app, or even a platform, really. It’s a protocol that anybody can use. For instance, we’re not really posting comments here on Lemmy, as much as we are posting comments via Lemmy. Right now, I’m posting a comment on Lemmy World via Lemmy, from Fedia. The average new user is very quickly gonna get lost in the sauce with that.

So even the main recruitment page, “Join Lemmy”, is kinda misleading because how do you join a protocol? It’s kinda like saying “enlist with TCP/IP” or “create an account on HTTPS”. Like… what does that even mean to a user? It leads most people into thinking that “Lemmy” is some centralized community with a hub of some sort, which is ironically antithetical to everything Lemmy stands for in the first place.

I think one solution to this would be to stop referring to things as being “on Lemmy”, and instead use terms like “a Lemmy site” or “a Lemmy instance”, which I think would help articulate the fact that “Lemmy” is a piece of software and not the community, itself. So when trying to refer friends to join a Lemmy instance, we should use the instance’s name, instead of “Lemmy”. But this brings about another problem; how does an instance form an identity to begin with?

Take Lemmy World here, for example: What is LW’s “identity”? What kind of site is this? What’s it about? What is the community here for? It’s called Lemmy World, so is it about the Lemmy software? To the outsider, it just looks like an off-brand Reddit; which may be what some are looking for, but there’s no real identity to be found in that.

You do have some instances that are a bit more focused, however, and have a distinct “identity” about them. Unfortunately, a lot of those are defederated from the major instances because of those identities (Lemmy.ML, Hexbear, etc). But there are also a lot of really good ones like the solarpunk or literature instances, and interestingly enough, LemmyNSFW, which all have their own focused subject matters but are still part of the Fediverse at large. When you sign up to one of those instances, you know what kind of community you’re getting involved with. You’re there for a reason, just like everybody else.

I think Beehaw does a good job in this, specifically; even though they’re a “general purpose” instance much like Lemmy World, they have very clear guidelines and expectations for how users behave and what they post, which helps solidify its identity. If I tell you “think of a Beehaw user”, you can probably concoct an idea in your head about what that person is like. If I tell you “think of a Lemmy World user”… can you even narrow it down enough to create a caricature at all?

I don’t have any real point to all this, just rambling about some frustrations I’ve had for a while with the terminology of things around here. I dunno what the solution should really be.

That’s true, but I don’t think we’ll see that sort of rapid growth on Mastodon. At least not for a while. For now, Bluesky is sucking up most of the users seeking Twitter alternatives. I imagine that the growth will be slow enough that it’ll be easy enough for mod teams to scale up to.

Haha, what a bozo! Now we’re going to relentlessly shit-talk them in this sub-thread that OP has no ability to moderate nor stem the flow of vitriol from.

(Further continuing the example.)

Good. I get why they were originally resistant to it, but fringe, outlier situations can be dealt with when you have actual mods maintaining things. The reason quote-retweeting was used so heavily for bullying on Twitter was because there were no repercussions for it, and Twitter never enforced their bullying rules for the practice. Mastodon instances have their own mods enforcing their own rules, to a much better degree than Twitter ever has. While the potential for bullying still exists, it’s far easier to mitigate on Mastodon.

Dan is constantly talking about buyout requests he’s receiving for Loops and Pixelfed, so much so that it makes me a bit suspicious of those claims. Nearly every other post I see from his Mastodon feed is bragging about another alleged buyout offer, and how he’s not for sale.

Has he ever shown proof of any of these offers he’s received? It’s not that I want to doubt him, but he’s been very persistent with this claim and I think it’s fair to scrutinize it at this point.

It’s not really “rigged”. Most people don’t have any use for that much outgoing bandwidth because they’re not uploading that much data. They’re usually downloading a lot more, though, so it makes sense to prioritize the bandwidth based on how people will actually use it. It’s more than sufficient for HD video calls, which is probably the most upload-intensive task your average user is going to conduct. Giving your entire neighborhood gigabit upload speeds is a waste of resources, unless your entire neighborhood is running media servers from home.

You’re still getting the bandwidth you’re paying for, it’s just not balanced in a way that suits your fringe use-case. Your ISP very likely has options that rebalance that bandwidth prioritization if you actually need and will use more upload bandwidth, but those are typically going to be business accounts.

Also not sure what this has to do with the Fediverse.

How does that person think ATProto would prevent monopolization? ATProto is effectively controlled by a singular corporate entity. It already is a monopolized protocol.

Bluesky says they created ATProto because account portability is a problem on ActivityPub - which it 100% is. But account porting is something that’s still being worked on for ActivityPub. If Bluesky actually cared about a decentralized platform, they would have contributed toward ActivityPub’s development by helping to create the account porting tools. Instead, they created a new network that they own and control, and have gaslit their users into believing is “decentralized”.

NA here. It’s loading perfectly fine for me right now on the desktop site. Pages I’ve never opened before are loading in like 1/10th of a second for me.

I’m also not signed in from this computer, though (can’t remember my LW password and haven’t bothered to check). Not sure if that’s making any difference, but figured I’d provide my perspective from a logged-out user.

I meant the Loops side of things, my bad.

Dansup is walking, most of everyone else is talking.

Isn’t that because Dan hasn’t open-sourced his project yet and doesn’t let anybody else contribute?

I’ve gotten some odd vibes from him (his recent posts hyping up Loops and Pixelfed have slightly manic energy to them), but I’m curious what you find weird about him.

I’m sure he’ll read it.

@jerry@fedia.io This seems like a reasonable instance for Fedia to block.