Fediverse

Not sure if this is the right place to post, but when the reddit protests were happening, I used Lemmy for a bit then decided to detox from "social media" for a while till now. Am I misinterpreting the activity here?

I have been looking for instances of peertube, but some of them do not have registration enabled or only support a specific type of videos (For example, technology), I want an instance where you can register and that is not limited by a specific theme for the videos.

Thinking about this lately, especially in the context of the UD elections getting discussed a lot all over Lemmy.

If you look at the top 20 instances https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy

• Lemmy.world and feddit.nl are Dutch
• Lemm.ee is Estonian
• Feddit.org, discuss.tchncs.de are German
• SJW and lemmy.ca are Canadian
• Lemmy.blahaj.zone, aussie.zone and Reddthat are Australian
• sopuli.xyz is Finnish
• slrpnk.net is Portuguese
• lemmy.dbzer0, infosec.pub, mander.xyz, programming.dev, lemmy.sdf.org are thematic
• Beehaw is USA-based, but defederated from LW and SJW and still on 0.18.3, so not sure they're even that interested in Lemmy anymore

Out of the top 20, there is Midwest.social and Lemmy.today but they are quite small (326 and 201 monthly active users).

On the other hand, a lot of other countries have their own instances

• feddit.uk
• jlai.lu
• feddit.dk
• szmer.info
• lemmy.eco.br
• feddit.cl
• feddit.it

With the USA population and the Internet presence of the USA citizens, you would expect at least one large generalist instance based in the USA, but it doesn't seem to be the case.

Any ideas what the reasons might be? Is this just a coincidence?

I'll go first...

My favorite Fediverse platforms as of 2024

1. Mastodon - my main social feed platform that first introduced me to the Fediverse in general.

2. Lemmy - my second main social feed platform that originally substituted Reddit from years ago.

3. Matrix protocol - communication platform I use to connect with users on the Lemmy instance I'm on

4. Peertube - would love to get an account going and use it more often but still don't know how but there's FediVideo.

5. Bookwyrm - Goodreads alternative that I signed up for that could use more work for a genuine reading tracker.

BONUS: my least favorite Fediverse platform lately

WordPress - because I used to run art blogs on there before I heard word about drama about the CEO of the corporation so I basically had to put out my last existing art blog...RIP.

FOSDEM is a huge grassroots Free and Open Source Software conference held annually in Brussels, Belgium. It brings together thousands of users and developers from Europe and around the world. The conference is organized into themed tracks called "developer rooms" or "devrooms".

For the first time (I think) there will be a devroom at FOSDEM 2025 devoted to Open Source software that implements ActivityPub or is otherwise closely related to the Fediverse.

Interested software developers are invited to submit proposals for talks at the event. It would be especially great to have talks about Lemmy or from the wider Lemmy ecosystem, since this is such an important part of the Fediverse developer community.

Instructions for submitting a proposal are in the linked blog post. Please let me know if you have any questions!

Sad to see them go, but all the best to the admin!

Disclaimer: I wrote this article and made this website.

There was some talk of this issue in the recent fediverse inefficiencies thread. I'm hopeful that in the future we'll have a decentralized solution for file hosting but for now I deeply believe that users should pay for their own file hosting.

I would like to use Bluesky. They've done a bunch of seriously interesting technical work on moderation and ranking that I truly admire, and I've got lots of friends there who really enjoy it.

But I'm not on Bluesky and I don't have any plans to join it anytime soon. I wrote about this in 2023: I will never again devote my energies to building up an audience on a platform whose management can sever my relationship to that audience at will.
[…]
Enshittification can be thought of as the result of a lack of consequences. Whether you are tempted by greed or pressured by people who have lower ethics than you, the more it costs to compromise, the fewer compromises you'll make.

In other words, to resist enshittification, you have to impose switching costs on yourself.

That's where federation comes in. On Mastodon (and other services based on Activitypub), you can easily leave one server and go to another, and everyone you follow and everyone who follows you will move over to the new server. If the person who runs your server turns out to be imperfect in a way that you can't endure, you can find another server, spend five minutes moving your account over, and you're back up and running on the new server.

Any system where users can leave without pain is a system whose owners have high switching costs and whose users have none. An owner who makes a bad call – like removing the block function say, or opting every user into AI training – will lose a lot of users. Not just those users who price these downgrades highly enough that they outweigh the costs of leaving the service. If leaving the service is free, then tormenting your users in this way will visit in swift and devastating pain upon you.
[…]
Bluesky lacks the one federated feature that is absolutely necessary for me to trust it: the ability to leave Bluesky and go to another host and continue to talk to the people I've entered into community with there. While there are many independently maintained servers that provide services to Bluesky and its users, there is only one Bluesky server. A federation of multiple servers, each a peer to the other, has been on Bluesky's roadmap for as long as I've been following it, but they haven't (yet) delivered it.

That was worrying when Bluesky was a scrappy, bootstrapped startup with a few million users. Now it has grown to over 13 million users, and it has taken on a large tranche of outside capital.

Plenty of people have commented that now that a VC is holding Bluesky's purse-strings, enshittification will surely follow (doubly so because the VC is called "Blockchain Capital," which, at this point, might as well be "Grifty Scam Caveat Emptor Capital"). But I don't agree with this at all. It's not outside capital that leads to enshittification, it's leverage that enshittifies a service.

A VC that understands that they can force you to wreck your users' lives is always in danger of doing so. A VC who understands that doing this will make your service into an empty – and thus worthless – server is far less likely to do so (and if they do, at least your users can escape).

Loops.video, the short-form video platform has finally launched, after weeks of delays. There is now an iOS app on TestFlight available, as well as an Android APK, and it there is no waitlist anymore. In some statistics shared by Loops developed Daniel Supernault, Loops now has more than 8000 people signed up and close to a 1000 videos posted.

So far, there is only some user settings accessible in the web interface. I don't have an iPhone, hence I cannot say for their app. The android app will come later, apparently.

I really wonder if this is just a different frontend for pixelfed that is video-centric, or if it will be something else.

Since it is supposed to be the TikTok of the fediverse, I really wonder if it will, like pixelfed also just feature a chronological timeline? Because what makes TikTok so popular is not the short videos, but the recommendation algorithm that doesn't even require people to follow any accounts.

If it's just another chronological media feed then they could have just modified pixelfed to only allow video upload and would jabe archived the same thing. So far I am really wondering if loops is a new thing, or if it will be just another reskin of mastodon/pixelfed/...

Democratizing Social Media Networks: 🚀 #Fediverse, #Lemmy, #Mastodon, #Pixelfed and many other #Decentralized #Federated Networks have significantly democratized the sharing of information through #ActivityPub .

📅 On Saturday, November 9, 2024, at 15:30 (Athens Time), I will be presenting “Welcome to Decentralization” at FOSSCOMM 2024, hosted by the University of Macedonia! 🇬🇷🇪🇺

🗓️ Agenda and Streaming Links: 🔗 2024.fosscomm.gr

#FOSSCOMM2024 #Decentralization #OpenSource#Federation

The whole project seems down

• https://sffa.community/
• https://sffa.wiki/wiki/Science-Fiction_Fantasy_Alliance

There were a few fantasy communities there such as [email protected] , sad to see them go

Append attachments to comments by flamingo-cant-draw ?? Pull Request #5143 ?? LemmyNet/lemmy

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/32283041

As currently they’re only using YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

History has shown us time and time again that these corporate platforms are unreliable and untrustworthy.

•Twitter has a moderation problem.

•Facebook has been found interfering with the message delivery of crucial information during emergencies, putting people’s lives at risk.

•YouTube often takes down videos for the wildest of reasons and Google had a massive fight with the federal government over Canadian media outlet compensation. Who’s to say they won’t use their dominant position to sabotage the efforts of governments they don’t agree.

We could email the council requesting that they post on the platform.

They could set up an account on one of the larger well established Canadian instances or even better start up their own.

I used to primarily use Instagram for following illustrators, sculptors, digital artists, etc., but I dropped Insta for obvious reasons.

There was also a large exodus from Insta to Cara.app almost a year ago due to Meta's stupid policies on using Insta content to train AI. While Cara is generally a great site and has anti-AI policies (I'm not anti-AI, just anti the way most companies implement AI), my problem with Cara is that it's an owner funded site that will inevitably need to find a way to monetize the content/users.

On the Fediverse, I'm on Lemmy, Mastodon (though I don't love the micro-blog format), and Pixelfed (very little activity).

So my question is: What platforms in the Fediverse are you seeing the most original artist content?

I'm still learning the quirks of federation and the behaviors of communities hosted on different instances, so I apologize if this is something that's been asked repeatedly.

I made a post to a community I am subscribed to at lemmy.ca, from my home instance at slrpnk.net. Public posts on that community (as well as the post that I made) are not showing up from my home instance. My profile page on my home instance does not show any record of the post that I made.

I was only able to find existence of the post that I made by going to lemmy.ca, and then finding the community that I posted to from there.

[email protected]

The fediverse has been good to me so far, I am more than happy to support these projects, and to support the future of social networking.

This week's news

• The Fediverse Schema Observatory is a new tool to help interoperability
• the botsin.space server will shut down
• Add monetisation to federated WordPress blogs with sub.club
• You can now set custom handles on fediverse accounts that are bridged to Bluesky

It must be the recent questionable moves made by YouTube recently disabling the upload date and the viewer counter.

(relates to https://thebrainbin.org/m/[email protected]/t/350958/Minetest-Luanti-rejected-suggestion)

Pure walled-garden behavior (by federation/decentralization) from the Minetest devs.