Matt

They also host a Matrix instance at https://chat.mozilla.org!

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.

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.

It’s weird that you use Germany as an example when Germany has been on Mastodon since 2020 at https://social.bund.de!

The reason this doesn’t work so well is that Lemmy communities are ActivityPub groups, which is not a feature the Mastodon has really implemented - right now you just follow the group as a user and it boosts all the posts to you.

However, Mastodon plans to do groups in their next major update, and this will most likely make the integration much nicer.

“Active users” in these sort of metrics tend to just be one sort of post/comment in the past 30 days, so probably!

To be fair it’s not really “falling” - Lemmy instances are not in competition with one another due to federation.

Understandably people want to feel like they “won” somehow, but this isn’t something you really need to worry about on the Fediverse, it’s more like everyone working alongside each other.

There is verification of sorts for what it’s worth - you drop some HTML on your website, then tell Mastodon to crawl your website to look for it, and if it picks it up, it verifies that your Mastodon account and website are linked.

It helps for all sorts of use cases beyond “this is a famous person”, since people who run smaller projects can also verify who they are on Mastodon - I have 2 verified links on my profile for example.

Your comment doesn’t really contradict anything I said, and I agree with you.

I don’t subscribe to the idea that the Fediverse means everyone should have to interact with everyone, to be clear, but people absolutely have the choice to federate with those we may consider bad actors, and then we can respond in kind.

I am all for defederation of bad actors, I’m mostly just explaining why others are not against the defederation of Threads.

True, the claim that people “absolutely trust corporations” is definitely hyperbole, but I would say they most certainly have some implicit trust for them in a way that people might not trust a volunteer.

Sports is definitely hard to have take off in these sorts of spaces, since sports are generally talked about much more amongst regular/casual users, than the more tech-savvy crowd who are willing to try these things out.

It’s the same on the biggest ActivityPub platform (Mastodon) - the really popular regular subjects such as sports and cars just don’t have a presence there.

For a non-tech answer, it’s basically the “language” used between these websites to make them talk to each other.

If a website uses ActivityPub, it can fetch information (and send information) to other sites that are using ActivityPub in a specific way that’s designed for social media.

Another example of this would be SMTP (simple mail transfer protocol) which is what e-mail uses so that different e-mail servers (outlook, yahoo, gmail, etc) can all talk to each other seamlessly.

They are actually, communities are ActivityPub groups, the issue is that Mastodon does not implement groups (but it is soon!), so what the Lemmy group has to do is boost all the posts/comments so that people can see them in Mastodon.

Once Mastodon gets groups though, the experience should be much better.

And that’s fine, the Fediverse gives you tools to not have to deal with that through silencing or defederation.

But for many people on the Fediverse, they’re here specifically for other things, and being able to interact with the corporate social web from outside of it is ideal for them.

Note that I’m not arguing for or against here, it’s just very easy to see why many aren’t interested in defederating.

It’s not that complicated.

Threads is another instance that brings people to the Fediverse, and people like the idea that they can stay on their instances while still interacting with the world at large. For many people, having everyone on the Fediverse is the goal, and in fact, is a long-term goal of most of the platforms - the “Fediverse” is not meant to be a sort of closed community only for marginalised people to get away from the corporate web, it’s for everyone to use in whatever way they see fit.

There is literally nothing more to discuss if you’re wondering why people “defend” Threads.

Ultimately, it’s because the concerns of privacy are simply too far removed from people, or they trust certain entities more than others.

For example, if your next door neighbour knows all your browsing history, people would be bothered, but people are not bothered if Google knows as it feels they would have no direct effect on their life, whereas your next door neighbour might.

This can be easily seen in the whole discussion regarding privacy on Mastodon.

A lot of people refuse to use Mastodon over Twitter, because “Mastodon admins can see my DMs”, even though Twitter absolutely could as well (Twitter apparently has encrypted DMs since May 2023 though). The reason for this is they see a Mastodon admin as someone who could potentially have an effect on their digital life, whereas they trust Twitter not to do anything with the data since they’re a big corporation who has nothing to do with their personal life.

Unless it is an effect they can directly observe (or imagine to occur), people simply don’t care. This applies to almost all discussions around the big picture, such as things like climate change or unions, or whatever.

Whether we like it or not, people absolutely trust corporations.

Because they use ActivityPub, both of them can potentially interact with each other (post, viewing, following, liking, boosting, etc). There’s no way to stop Threads from being able to interact fully with Lemmy if it’s something Meta wanted to implement. Mastodon can already interact with Lemmy directly by following communities, posting to communities, and interact with posts/comments. Lemmy doesn’t go the other way though because it isn’t implemented, but it could be.

Any ActivityPub software/platform/website can interact with any other ActivityPub software/platform/website if it so wants to, because the backend of things like posts/comments/communities/etc are the same across every single platform if they choose to implement them, the difference between the ActivityPub platforms is how they choose to show you information and how you interact with it.

Edit: Made a few edits for clarification.

It was obvious - the instances are not shown on sources like fedidb.org anymore, but if you went to the instances which were growing fastest, all the accounts on there had gibberish names with almost no user activity.

It would be great if Lemmy actually had 2 million users, but it just doesn’t, sorry. :(