Bluesky feels like there is still too much data silo mentality behind the project, and the federation part seems more like a symbolic gesture than something that is meant to actually allow users their data freedoms?

I keep going back & forth on this tbh. I don’t think it’s merely symbolic, but I think it makes the same kind of mistake many tech-oriented people make in imagining that many people will know how or even want to run their own servers.

This is why towards the end I mention that I foresee the AuthTransfer protocol producing more or less similar platforms to the fediverse despite the differences in architecture. Supposing Bluesky continues apace with the release of their work, we may see something like an atproto.xyz that’s basically an independent microblogging service like Bluesky but with whatever custom adjustments they’ve made. The whole PDS idea will fade into the background as this independent service emulates the Bsky Social model of acting as a PDS entryway service and platform.

Any decentralized benefits many were intended to find via AuthTransfer’s PDSs will sort of end up falling to the wayside, which may be okay if you’re okay with that. At that point it’s just another distributed model though, and should be assessed on those grounds for whatever benefits or downsides it possesses compared to others.

Fwiw as I understand it data portability is possible without a custom domain, aside from your handle/name. A custom domain only seems necessary if you want to prove and maintain your identity across AuthTransfer services/platforms that permit/enable custom domains in handles. It’s basically a more direct form of the website verification one may find on federated platforms like Mastodon.

Without it you’d be jumping between subdomains and top-level domains in your username/handle similar to how you do so on ActivityPub platforms, i.e. @uniquename.bsky.social -> @uniquename.otherATprotoplatform.tld.

So, it’s good to keep in mind you will face that, and be prepared with some patience and counter-arguments.

I wouldn’t really encourage this, as much as one may be inclined. Some may be willing to change their mind, but many others of a resistant disposition aren’t that interested in leaving so much as venting frustrations, and lurkers may get the impression the alternative you’re advocating is full of however you may present yourself in your argument.

It’s better to look for those genuinely asking where to move to or what alternatives there are, and if they specifically mention Lemmy, then you might help them along there. Otherwise I’d suggest mentioning a variety of alternatives to choose from and mix together, such as setting up a RSS reader (if they’re more of a passive reader), Lemmy or Kbin/Mbin, or scaling back Reddit use as they explore these alternatives, rather than pressing them to drop it outright for a single option.

Remember if you do:
Don’t get caught up in the technical details, those aren’t what matter to many people. Obvious exceptions if they express interest in hosting a server.

Don’t talk in the jargon of fediverse this, federated that, those mean nothing to outsiders. Unless they ask for further details, but even then, use more familiar terms like saying it’s a website connected to other sites or whatever might help bridge understanding.

Do point them to whichever instance you’re on, or seems relevant to whatever interests they may have mentioned, to join. One of the big problems people mention is figuring out which site/instance to join and how to navigate around here, take this opportunity to help them cut through that.

Ask them which subreddits/accounts they’ve joined or like to follow where they are as relates to the platform they’re trying to move from (i.e. Reddit/Twitter/etc.), and try to help point them to either their equivalents or similar that may be found around here.

This service going down and me recently deciding to try to check in on whether some people I used to follow on Twitter had migrated elsewhere made me realize how much Twitter’s basically isolated itself from the open web.

A part of me hopes this serves as a wake-up call for those that were still hovering between using Twitter and weaning off it using services like this, to reach out to those they follow and let them know, “Hey, if you think you’re still posting publicly…You’re not, only other people here can see this.” For many people that may not matter, but for creators/influencers? I dunno, maybe network effect is enough that they feel the large audience there is plenty, but I’d think they might want as broad of a reach as possible, and a popular but limited view platform isn’t necessarily that.

Much more importantly though are any government/critical services. They really need to be brought up to date, if they haven’t been already, that the platform is no longer as publicly accessible as it may have once been. Also the same applies not just for Twitter but Facebook and the like as well, but that’s another topic.

Something else to chip in here in terms of interesting ideas, specifically regarding “protected/limited (leashed?) boost”, there’s some angles to this that the Glitch fork of Mastodon seems near in terms of local only posts and hiding boosts from specific people.

On their own these features don’t amount to what OP’s describing, but I think they may offer some groundwork for ways to work out the “limited boost” idea. Also, the more I think on it, the more I kind of like Leashed/Moored as a description over protected, as I think it more clearly implies controlled reach of posts, but maybe that’s just me.

Has anyone thought about how we can bring more people over to the Fediverse? My friends and family are all still on the Big Tech platforms like FB and Insta, and I doubt I will be able to convince them to switch over to a Fediverse platform, especially if they themselves don’t see any of their connections using the platform too. How does the Fediverse community plan on attracting more users over?

This is a common question from newcomers, and it’s not necessarily a bad one, just worth being aware of this to better understand some of the responses you may see. Something else to keep in mind is that there is no collective, united Fediverse community in the way that you might sorta see on some bigger tech platforms (albeit even on those, there’s not really a singular community either).

What this means is that there’s no combined community effort from folks across the Fediverse to attract new users, and since it’s all loosely connected communities driving it all, there’s no market push to popularize them as you’re more apt to see from the tech industry. In fact, if you wander into some parts of the Fediverse, you’ll find some folks far happier to keep their communities small and to themselves for a variety of reasons, sometimes conflating the tech and their community (i.e. a popularization of Lemmy as tech wouldn’t mean their little Lemmy community instance had to link up with every other one).

That said, there are also plenty of folks around here interested in the question and planning/discussing drawing in more folks. Some of those discussions being about improvements to the technology to make it less jank and comfortable for less technically inclined users, others about how to present it without getting in the weeds of the tech details, and some just by trying to post interesting/entertaining content to keep folks interested past a glance. There’s as many ways to approach it as there are Fediverse communities, and so there’s not really been any one way that people have been going about it.

They have received the blessing of the Moose.

I’ve mainly done this with hashtags, so I may be off if it differs somewhat for keywords, but I’m pretty sure it works as a logical OR.

So if I put a bunch of hashtags in a filter for sports like #sports, #football, #hockey, etc. if a post contains any one of those tags, it should filter it for me. The nice part is you can adjust it so that it either completely hides the filtered results so they don’t clutter up your feeds, or hide with warning and the name of the filter on the warning notice, which allows you to click & review the post to see whether you really wanted it caught by your filter or not.

If you’re just starting out you’d probably want to run it with warnings first to get a sense of whether it’s working as desired, and if not adjust as needed.

Thankfully folks tend to be pretty respectful of spoiler concerns and will specifically say spoilers below when writing about them, use content warnings to hide them, and use hashtags like #[GameName]spoilers, which can help when making filters. It’s not ideal, but if I really don’t want to see spoilers for something, I’ll filter by its name and hashtag and set it not to expire (you can set filters to last only a week if you like, so you don’t forget to disable them).

If it’s not there, one may also try checking the about page or the instance’s Meta/Announcements/Status/etc. magazine(s), as it ultimately depends on where and if the admin has decided to make the info available so far as I can tell after glancing over a few Kbinstances.

As an example: kbin.cafe doesn’t have the admin info/profile on the about or contact page, but they’re the owner of the CafeMeta magazine.

It’s been awhile since I made a new account on a Mastodon instance, but is search engine indexing enabled by default? If it isn’t, then that would probably be part of why this is being made opt-in for Mastodon search, as there’s been a vocal portion of folks on Mastodon opposed to search across the board.

Even if search engine indexing was enabled by default, y’know those vocal folks probably disable it ASAP and would be making a fuss if this update went & enabled Mastodon search by default. Which, well, why post publicly at all if the concern’s related to privacy or not being bothered by internet randos, but 🤷‍♀️

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.

Yeah, I tend to agree with the rest of your post, and I’m highlighting this part because I feel it’s probably one of the biggest missteps so many of the federated platforms have made. It helps to have a couple sort of “demo” instances to help folks understand how it works, but the flagship model that many have taken (e.g. Mastodon.social, Lemmy.ml (at least at first), Pixelfed.social, Calckey/Firefish.social, etc.) has had the unintended effect of somewhat obfuscating the basic distinctive features of the platforms, i.e. distribution/decentralization & federation.

It’s apparent no one has cracked this problem yet, otherwise we wouldn’t have this repeated “misstep” across the platforms, and in this regard I’m no different in terms of not having much of any better ideas. Imo to an extent each of these platforms is in a similar situation to Mastodon in terms of being between a rock & a hard place, but Mastodon definitely moreso than the others simply due to its popularity.

A good and interesting read, and a good reminder of some of the awkward bumps those using federated platforms for awhile may take for granted when trying to invite others to join in.

Tbh some of those bumps that are specific to Mastodon (e.g. text search/Content Warning culture/quote posts) make me think it may be better to direct folks to instances run on different backends without some of those friction points (e.g. Akkoma/Firefish~Calckey/Misskey). Although those introduce their own set of quirks to deal with (particularly Misskey/Firefish being even more different in style), that’s mostly unavoidable when making the move to any different space.

Not sure tbh…It may be, or it may try to convert it to a link to the quoted post instead.

For a link to that community: !learn_programming@programming.dev

Or simply: https://programming.dev/c/learn_programming

Yep! And they have different styling & feature sets that some may prefer, like Firefish has full text search & quoting posts unlike Mastodon for a super basic yet big difference.

There’s also a bunch of other features I haven’t dug into much that are interesting, like “antennae” for following words/hashtags and widgets for a variety of things. I don’t know how well they all work, but overall it’s aiming to be much more robust than Mastodon.

From left to right?

Blue Sprinkle Spiral, Misty Glow, Tight Bright Phase

But I wish its good aspects (ease of finding other users who discuss what you like, democratizing who gets a “voice” in public discourse, allowing users to directly confront public figures/institutions when needed, etc) could be replicated on Mastodon somehow.

Besides that last point (as that depends entirely on getting those in the space to begin with), I think the first two come down to the Mastodon culture needing to shift a little to be less…Hesitant? That may not be the best word for it, but some of the discoverability and openness of discussion may be related to this culture of hesitancy to connect & post from some who have faced the brunt of bullshit & harassment on corporate social media.

There’s also the other side to this of an air of proactive rule/norm enforcement that itself makes folks uncertain of what’s okay to post or which way to post in some instances, which may be a misreading of the instance/space but sometimes it isn’t and though well-intended, doesn’t help a ton either.

Are you signed in to an instance, or viewing without signing in? Apparently (and this may be a case by case situation), those stats aren’t shown when one isn’t signed in.

I can see them when signed in & I’ve clicked on a post though, mainly the favorites (likes) & boosts (retweets), whereas comment counts are sorta visible before clicking a post to view replies. I say sorta as if a post has multiple replies it just shows as reply icon 1+ instead of the exact count.

You’re kinda not wrong, and definitely not wrong about the breaking news part, but I’ve found a lot of lighthearted goofing about to do on there, partly from following silly bot accounts & boosting them, and partly from the more relaxed & imo better curated all/other server feeds of smaller instances.

On the larger instances it’s harder to find this good middle ground, especially if you go in without anyone in mind to follow. The other weird quirk to all this is that by default Mastodon is more private than spaces like Twitter, so people have to actively choose to tag their posts and enable features that might help others find them. Also, if you don’t have many remote followers, your posts won’t federate to as many other instances, and similarly, if someone limits who can follow them their posts (which may be fun & great) won’t travel as far. The latter isn’t a default enabled setting or anything, btw, but I think it may have a subtle effect on the general vibes of the space.