JupiterRowland

joined 2 years ago
[–] JupiterRowland@sh.itjust.works 1 points 4 months ago

Don't make it a scratch-built, stand-alone Fediverse server app.

Make it a third-party add-on for Hubzilla or (streams) or Forte that sources the profiles of channels that activate that add-on. I mean, you've gotta see the number of profile fields available on these three.

[–] JupiterRowland@sh.itjust.works 2 points 4 months ago

But, but, unlimited characters aren't purist, old-skool, original-gangsta microblogging! And understanding threaded conversations isn't purist, old-skool, original-gangsta microblogging either!

What do you want next, full HTML rendering support? Embedded in-line images? More than four options for polls?!

[–] JupiterRowland@sh.itjust.works 3 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Go ahead. Try to force that upon Friendica that has called its instances "nodes" for almost 15 years now.

Or Hubzilla that not only calls them "hubs" but also resists any and all cultural or technological influences from anything that wasn't created by Mike Macgirvin.

Also what if I told you that (streams) and Forte call them "communities"? You know, like Lemmy's and PieFed's "subreddits"?

[–] JupiterRowland@sh.itjust.works 2 points 4 months ago

Mostly Hubzilla. Also (streams), WriteFreely and Lemmy for special purposes.

[–] JupiterRowland@sh.itjust.works 0 points 5 months ago

Lemmy users = Redditors = geeks.

OP is talking about people for whom the Internet is Facebook, Google, YouTube and Amazon, and who have always only ever used phones and never in their lives laid their hands upon an actual computer.

People who had their Gmail account registered and configured by whoever sold them their phone (or one of their past phones).

Anything that goes beyond "load an app with the same name as the thing you want to use from the App Store, user name, password, go" is too complex for them.

[–] JupiterRowland@sh.itjust.works 2 points 5 months ago

If you don't mind a learning curve and having to use the Web interface (because there's no native mobile app): (streams). From Friendica's creator.

If (streams) sounds good, but you need a shit-ton of extra features on top (and be it diaspora* connectivity), and you don't mind an even steeper learning curve: Hubzilla. Also made by the guy who made Friendica.

If you absolutely, absolutely, absolutely must have a dedicated native app on your phone, you're on Android, and you can live without features such as nomadic identity, multiple channels per account and advanced, fine-grained permission control: Friendica.

If you absolutely, absolutely, absolutely must have a dedicated native app on your phone, but you're on iOS: Wait for Relatica to have a stable release, then Friendica. (Caveats see above.)

Forget diaspora*. It's fading out. Shortly before New Year's Eve, a bunch of big diaspora* pods shut down, and at least according to one stats site, diaspora* lost more than haf its users.

And Pleroma is a Twitter replacement that, just like Mastodon, started out as an alternative UI for GNU social.

[–] JupiterRowland@sh.itjust.works 1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Imagine being able to post only to Alice, Bob and Carol and nobody else ever laying their eyes on the post. Not in the Fediverse, not outside the Fediverse.

Imagine only Alice, Bob and Carol being able to reply to your posts, but all three being able to see and reply to each other's replies.

Imagine being able to define groups of connections with which you can do the above.

Sounds like utopian science-fiction. Is reality.

Hubzilla (official website), a Friendica fork by Friendica's own creator, offers literally what I've described above. It has since 2012, almost four years longer than Mastodon has been around.

If you want something more lightweight with not quite such a steep learning curve, there's also (streams) (code repository from 2021 from the same creator, the result of a whole series of forks. Similar advanced and fine-grained permissions system, but somewhat easier to use.

[–] JupiterRowland@sh.itjust.works 1 points 5 months ago

Why does the fediverse not have a privacy control to limit who can see and interact with your posts?

It does. The Fediverse is more than Mastodon and Lemmy.

Especially Hubzilla and (streams) with their advanced permissions systems provide what you're looking for and more. Only downsides are the learning curves ((streams)' learning curve is not exactly shall, Hubzilla's is steeper), UIs that don't look like they were made in 2024 from venture capital and a total lack of native mobile apps (you can install both as PWAs, though).

[–] JupiterRowland@sh.itjust.works 1 points 5 months ago

Common misconception by Fediverse newbies: "Fediverse" is an umbrella term for a bunch of decentralised walled gardens. Like, Lemmy only connects to Lemmy, Mastodon only connects to Mastodon, Pixelfed only connects to Pixelfed etc. And if you're on Mastodon, and your Facebook friends join Friendica, you need a Friendica account to get back in touch with them.

In reality, just about everything is interconnected with everything. No matter what it is.

You can use your Mastodon account to follow people on Pixelfed, on Friendica, on Misskey, whatever.

That said, having a separate Lemmy account makes sense because Lemmy/the Threadiverse is somewhat special in operation. Also, it's all about conversations and groups, and Mastodon doesn't understand neither. And starting a thread on Lemmy from Mastodon is not as straight-forward as starting a thread on Mastodon from Mastodon.

[–] JupiterRowland@sh.itjust.works 3 points 5 months ago

OP wants something that looks like the Twitter app, that feels like the Twitter app, that handles like the Twitter app. But with Mastodon underneath.

Essentially the "literally Twitter without Musk" which millions of Twitter refugees have expected Mastodon to be since 2022.

Probably also hard-coded to mastodon.social to hide Mastodon's decentrality from the dumb-dumbs.

[–] JupiterRowland@sh.itjust.works 3 points 5 months ago (1 children)

The closest you'd get would be with Hubzilla or (streams). Or Forte if it wasn't experimental with no public instances yet. They even have file spaces with WebDAV on which you can upload files and then define who is permitted to see/access these files or the folders they're in.

However:

What you want isn't their default M.O. You'll have to get used to and think yourself into something with a learning curve that's even steeper than Friendica's. You'll have to learn and understand the permissions system, including giving nobody permission to see your connections. Ideally, all your connections would have to be smart enough to know how to to hide being connected to you from the public and to actually do so.

Encryption is optional and "uninstalled" by default for everyone, and it isn't even available on all server instances (it's up to the admin to activate that add-on, and then the user has to activate it, too). Also, it uses passphrases and not automatically generated key pairs.

Finally, if you insist in using it with a mobile app, you're completely out of luck. It's browser or PWA for all of them.

[–] JupiterRowland@sh.itjust.works 2 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Could be wrong, or just more domain-specific, bu my experience is people don’t complain that the video is 15-30 minutes long, is that it’s a video (and that long) when the information could have been more succintly and practically displayed in a text tutorial or a blog format.

Which is kind of interesting, considering it wasn't that long ago that people asked for tutorials and other information in the shape of videos because they couldn't be bothered to read shit.

 

I've noticed that there isn't a single Lemmy community, Mbin magazine etc. for Fediverse memes.

Is that because 99.9% of the Threadiverse came directly from Reddit, almost all Lemmy communities and *bin magazines are outposts of subreddits, and Reddit doesn't meme the Fediverse because hardly anyone on Reddit knows the Fediverse in the first place?

Is it, in addition, because especially Lemmy is too detached from the rest of the Fediverse to know what's memeable and to really understand memes about the Fediverse outside Lemmy?

Or is it simply because Fediverse memes go into other, more general communites/magazines where they simply drown in the flood of other threads?

I mean, I barely see any memes about the Fediverse anywhere on Mastodon. That may be either because your typical Mastodonian is not cut from meme-maker wood, or your typical Mastodonian doesn't know enough about the Fediverse beyond Mastodon, or next to nobody hashtags their meme posts. so they're impossible to find.

And so I thought that this is more common in the Threadiverse, seeing as how meme-happy Reddit is.

 

I'm asking because it is really difficult to find a place for discussing accessibility in Fediverse posts beyond the limits of any one Fediverse server application.

I'm looking for something

  • in the Fediverse
  • with technology that supports discussions
  • where users know the Fediverse beyond whatever software that particular place is running on
  • where users know something about how and why to make Fediverse posts accessible for e.g. blind users
  • where users take this topic seriously instead of seeing it as a gimmick
  • where it's likely enough for someone to reply to posts

Mastodon takes accessibility very seriously. But Mastodon users never look beyond Mastodon. Every other Mastodon user doesn't even know that the Fediverse is more than only Mastodon. Most of those who do have no idea what the rest of the Fediverse is like, including what it can do that Mastodon can't, and what it can't do that Mastodon can. Many Mastodon users even reject the Fediverse outside Mastodon, and be it because it "refuses" to fully adopt Mastodon's culture and throw its own cultures overboard. This would include using features that Mastodon doesn't have. You're easily being muted or blocked upon first strike if you dare to post more than 500 characters at once.

I myself am mostly on Hubzilla. Not only is Hubzilla vastly more powerful than Mastodon, it is also vastly different, and being older than Mastodon as well, it had grown its own culture before Mastodon came along. Still, three out of four Mastodon users have never even heard of the existence of Hubzilla, and many who do are likely to think it's basically Mastodon with a higher character count, extra stuff glued on and a clunky UI.

If you try to discuss Fediverse accessibility on Mastodon, you end up only discussing Mastodon accessibility with exactly zero regards, understanding or interest for what the rest of the Fediverse is like.

Besides, Mastodon has no good support for conversations and no real concept of threads. It is impossible to follow a discussion thread or to even only know that there have been new replies without having been mentioned in these replies. Thus, any attempt at discussing something on Mastodon is futile.

Hubzilla itself is great for discussions. It even has had groups/forums as a feature from the very beginning. In practice, however, it has precious few forums. The same applies to (streams) even more.

Discussing Fediverse accessibility is completely futile on both. They don't "do accessibility". To their users, alt-text is some fad that was invented on Mastodon, and Hubzilla and (streams) don't do Mastodon crap, full stop. In fact, their users hate Mastodon with a passion for deliberately, intentionally being so limited and trying to push its own limitations, its proprietary, non-standard solutions and its culture upon the rest of the Fediverse. At the same time, they don't really know that much about Mastodon, and they aren't interested in it.

Most of this applies to Friendica as well, but Hubzilla and (streams) users sometimes go as far as disabling ActivityPub altogether to keep Mastodon and the other ActivityPub-based microblogging projects out, and they don't care if Friendica ends up collateral damage. They hate the non-nomadic majority of the Fediverse that much.

If you try to discuss Fediverse accessibility on Hubzilla, nobody would know what you're even talking about, and nobody would want to know because they take it for another stupid Mastodon fad. They probably don't even understand why I accept connection requests from Mastodon in the first place.

Here on Lemmy, I've seen a number of dedicated accessibility communities. But they seem to be only about accessibility on the greater Web and in real life and not a bit about accessibility in the Fediverse specifically. I'm not even sure if Lemmy itself "does accessibility" in any way. And I'm not sure how aware Lemmy is of the Fediverse beyond Lemmy, /kbin and Mastodon.

Besides, these communities aren't much more than the admin posting stuff and nobody ever replying. So I guess trying to actually discuss something there is completely useless. If I post a question, I'll probably never get a reply.

The reason why I'm asking here first is because this community is actually active enough for people to reply to posts. But I'm not sure if it's good for discussing super-specific details about making non-Threadiverse Fediverse posts accessible.

 

I've stumbled upon a weird phenomenon here on sh.itjust.works.

A couple of days ago, !opensim@sh.itjust.works was launched. I was able to subscribe to it from Hubzilla, and I know that several people were able to subscribe to it from Mastodon.

Just recently, probably coinciding with the 0.18.0 upgrade the community seemed to have disappeared, just to resurface a few hours later.

Afterwards, I tried to post to that community from Hubzilla. I've successfully posted to test communities on various other Lemmy instances from the same Hubzilla channel successfully. This time, however, I didn't see the post appear, neither on Lemmy itself nor on Hubzilla outside my personal stream. Even 17 hours later, the post appeared nowhere.

@Hyacinth@sh.itjust.works, creator and sole moderator of !opensim, said she couldn't access the community from Mastodon either. She couldn't even find it by searching for it.

I tried to search for it myself, both on Hubzilla and on a Mastodon account I use with a different identity. While I could easily find communities on other Lemmy instances, I could not find !opensim.

Strangely, I couldn't find !main either. Again, neither from Hubzilla nor from Mastodon.

At first glance, it looked like sh.itjust.works either had problems federating with anything that isn't Lemmy, problems other instances don't have, or it had massively defederated or something.

So I created an account here to report this issue. And even more strangely, all of a sudden, I can see posts in !opensim when I'm logged in, even one that was done before the upgrade. When I'm logged out, I still can't see them.

What could possibly have caused these phenomena, and how, if at all, could they possibly be overcome?

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