A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.
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I never thought about this indirect upside of using fediverse apps. There is absolutely no incentive to publicity, who the heck is gonna pay me for promoting their book over my BookWyrm? They will make two cents from that.
So when someone publishes something over these underdog app it's because they are genuinely interested. It's really refreshing to be able to read sincere opinions from people tbh.
I personally really enjoy Matrix but it’s not really a “fediverse” thing but it is a federated end to end encrypted messaging platform
I personally set it up to use as a messaging aggregator. The ability to scroll past Whatsapp, Telegram, and Discord chats in the same app is hilariously cursed. There are bridges for basically everything. Though some are more complete than others.
Bridging ha also been very effective for showing people the merits of matrix. Opening schildi and scrolling for a bit has made people go "GIVE ME THAT". Everyone is tired of having half a dozen chat apps just be able to talk to everyone they know.
Just a side note, ActivityPub protocol - the core engine that lets all of fediverse to talk to the rest of the fediverse is… 5 years old. Every feature imaginable is still to be implemented.
Fediverse is well differentiated into many sites offering similar capabilities to their more well established commercial and proprietary counterpart, and as the time passes these federated alternatives quality is nearing practically the production level, apart from Mastodon and Lemmy which are the most known by now it is worth mentioning also PeerTube (Youtube), PixelFed (instagram), Misskey, Calckey and Pleroma (a mix between twitter and tumblr), HubZilla (facebook), FunkWhale(Bandcamp) and OwnCast (twitch).
Here some handy links:
Calckey has the superior feature set to Mastodon by far. When the project matures, it'll be a force to reckon with.
so I signed up for a Calckey account (on calckey.world) but content is extremely limited compared to what I see on Mastodon?
for example: if I search for the hashtag #F1 on calckey the most recent post it finds is from a week ago
this whole federation thing is still a bit confusing at times about what gets federated and where, #F1 is pretty popular on Mastodon.social when I search
The server list says that instance has 71 users, so that would probably be why. Posts only show up on an instance if something requests them (users following an account, searching a permalink, subscribing to a community, etc). There are solutions to this problem, such as relays in which servers agree to funnel a bunch of posts to each other periodically to share content. You should ask your instance admin if they have one set up, or if they'd be willing to if not. Otherwise, you should make an account on a larger instance, as those tend to be better federated.
hmm, I guess the responsibility is partially on me to manually find/follow people from other instances to increase the cross-instance federation?
right now I am creating new accounts on all the different fediverse platforms so I can see which UI/UX I prefer, but I would like to eventually use only 1 or 2 accounts if possible
Following users does help increase federation, yeah. Another solution is creating a dummy account that follows a bunch of users in order to pull in their posts.
I just tried Calckey it looks more polished UI-wise than any other Fediverse platform I have seen so far. I think Calckey would make an excellent social platform for the public (non-tech) users.
Pixelfed is also an excellent Instagram alternative, it reminds me of how Instagram used to be before the Facebook acquisition. Their iOS beta app is in good shape as well.
Pixelfed just implemented an instagram import feature as well!
And the word is banned on Instagram lol
Free speech and corporate ownership are completely incompatible.
Another good alternative to GoodReads is StoryGraph. I prefer it over BookWyrm because it has a nicer user interface and it has an app. However, I don't believe it is apart of the Fediverse.
Interesting to see that tumblr is adding support for ActivityPub. I wonder if any other legacy platforms will undertake to federate.
Meta is working on an Instagram side project that will act like twitter and will use activitypub. I highly suspect though tumblr and meta taking an interest in the fediverse might ultimately add more people to interact with at the cost of being lousy neighbors
Is/will there be a movie/TV equivalent of BookWyrm, something to track and discuss what you've been watching? A quick search tells me it's been discussed and seems like something people want but it doesn't look like it's been done yet, at least not as a dedicated service. Is that right?
That is absolutely brilliant. I would love something like that. Why doesn't it exist?
I’ve thought about and talked about this too! We need this!!! Letterboxd equivalent.
AFAIK the problem is there is no good movie database which allows free use of their data
So what? We'll create one!
Years ago the owners of GoodReads announced that Amazon had taken away their access to the Amazon book database. It was an existential threat, they said, and asked the GoodReads community to volunteer to create a new book database to replace Amazon's. Hundreds or thousands of us worked for free, donating thousands or tens of thousands of hours to the project.
And then GoodReads announced that they'd sold out to Amazon. Apparently they'd been in negotiations with those bastards the whole time they were lying to us about losing access to the database. Maybe proving that they could sucker their loyal users into donating free labor helped raise the selling price of GoodReads a little.
As for the database we created, I guess it's Amazon's now. Of course, if we create a movie database of our own, NOBODY will be able to buy it! And we can make it available for free use, if we want.
Okay, let's do this. But we need someone to create an Interface and Database
Wikidata is under CC0 license so I imagine that'd be useful https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:WikiProject_Movies
IIRC the critique was that Wikidata doesn't provide enough structured data
Try writefreely. Its a blogging thing that supports markdown and can look super nice
@BobQuasit I am on Friendica. It is a macroblogging platform, but more akin to Facebook in look and feel (it even somehow resembles the old Facebook, but server admins can add other themes to give it a different look). The feature set is very extensive, and it is way richer than Facebook, tho. You might find it a bit complicated at first. I would recommend anyone to watch this video series to learn more about it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qvOmvEpmgQI
After you learn all about it, you might find it your Fediverse home.
I've been intrigued by this one. Might give it a go! Hubzilla also sounds interesting, if a bit hard to get my head around what exactly what it does?
I use GoToSocial with Sempahore for my microblogging (alternative to Mastodon).
Also Owncast as an alternative to Twitch.
And then I watch tilvids.com and other Peertube instances for videos.
And of course Lemmy. :-D
Oh and then there's Funkwhale for audio.
It's all in different states of usability, depending on the communities involved.
@BobQuasit For example I'm using Friendica to participate in this discussion. Friendica aims to be the Swiss knife concerning social media. Also there is Peertube, a video sharing system. Then have a look at Pixelfed which is specialized in sharing pictures.
The fediverse is really wide.
I could be wrong but I think Paper.wf is only intended to write stuff on and you need to promote your blog via other socials. Then, people can follow your blog via things like Lemmy, Mastodon or other Fediverse platforms. Commenting would also be done via other fediverse platforms I imagine.
That seems unnecessarily complicated! But I appreciate the info.
I love that you're sharing these other fediverses. This is really interesting AND helpful, but...
I love the simplicity of Paper.wf for blogging. It's truly elegant; I just click the link and start typing.
Creed? Is that you?