Yep, I’ve done it accidentally before. I replied to what I thought was a mastodon account but it was a Lemmy sub. All the comments on that thread come to me on mastodon as replies.
Since I did it by accident, and they also didn’t know it, we were all very confused for a while.
I’ll sometimes tag Lemmy communities in my mastodon posts. The only thing I dislike about it is how Lemmy displays tags in the post title. There’s got to be some way to fix it so it’s not so off-putting.
Link aggregators have a problem on the fediverse. The approach is server-centric, which has positives, but it also has major negatives.
The server-centric approach is where a community belongs to a certain server and everything in the world revolves around that server.
The problem is that it's a centralized formula that centralizes power in a the hands of a whichever servers attract the most users, and potentially breaks up what might be a broader community, and makes for a central point of failure.
Right now, if [email protected] and [email protected] talk on [email protected] then a lot of things can happen to break that communication. if c.com defederates b.com then the communication will not happen. If c.com breaks then the communication will not happen. If c.com shuts down then the communication will not happen. If c.com's instance gets taken over by management that doesn't want person1 and person2 to talk, then the communication will not happen.
Another problem is that [email protected] and [email protected] might never meet, because they might be on [email protected] and [email protected]. This means that a community that could reach critical mass to be a common meeting place would not because it's split into a bunch of smaller communities.
Mastodon has servers going up and down all the time, and part of the reason it's able to continue functioning as a decentralized network is that as long as you're following people on a wide variety of servers then one server going down will stop some users from talking but not all of them so the system can continue to operate as a whole. By contrast, I'm posting this to one server, and it may be seen by people on a wide variety of servers, but if the one server I'm posting this to goes down the community is destroyed.
There are a few ways to solve the problem...
one method could work as something like a specific "federated network community". There would be a local community, and the local community would federate (via local mods, I presume) with communities on other instances creating a specific metacommunity of communities on many instances that could federate with other activitypub enabled communities, and if any of the federated communities go down the local community remains. If any servers posed problems they could cease being followed, and in the worst case a community could defederate totally from a server (at a community level rather than a server level) In that case, [email protected] and [email protected] could be automatically linked up once both connect to [email protected] (I'm thinking automatic linking could be a feature mods could turn off and on for highly curated communities), and if c.com shuts down or defederates with one of the two, [email protected] and [email protected] would continue to be able to talk through their federated network.
Another method would be something more like hashtags for root stories, but I don't know how server-server links would be accomplished under a platform like lemmy, kbin, or lotide. I don't know how hashtags migrate on mastodon type software and how that migrates. In that case, it might be something like peertube where a network is established by admins (or users, I don't know) connecting to other servers manually.
Finally, I think you could implement the metacommunity without changing the entire fediverse by having the software auto-aggregate metacommunities. You could create a metacommunity community1 on a.com that would then automatically aggregate all posts on communities called community1 on all known servers. The potential downside of this is you could end up with a lot of noise with 100 posts of the same story, I haven't thought much about how you could handle duplicates so you could participate but wouldn't have 100 similar posts. In this case with respect to how to handle new posts, each metacommunity would be a local community and new individual posts would be posted locally and federated to users on other metacommunities. If metacommunities of this sort became the norm, then the duplicates problem may be solved organically because individuals using metacommunities would see the posts on other metacommunities and wouldn't bother reposting the same story, much like how people see a story and don't repost in individual communities.
One big problem is scaling, doing something like this would definitely be a non-trivial in terms of load per community. Right now if one person signs up to one community, they get a lot of posts from one server. Under a metacommunity idea like this, if one person signs up to one community, they get a lot of posts from many, many servers. lemmy.world has 5967 total instances connected to it, and 2155 instances running lemmy, lotide, kbin, mbin, or friendica that could contain similar types of community, that's a lot of communities to follow for the equivalent of one single community, especially if some of the communities in the metacommunity have a lot of traffic in that community. You'd have to look at every known server to first see if it exists and second if it has a community appropriate for the metacommunity, and the metacommunity would have to routinely scan for dead hosts to remove from the metacommunity and live hosts that may start to see an appropriate metacommunity has been created.
I'm sure there are other solutions, but I'm just thinking of how things work within my current understanding.
Of course, for some people, the problem is one they don't want solved because it isn't a problem in their view (and that's a legit view even if it's one I'm not really amenable to). Some people prefer smaller communities, or want tighter control over their communities. For servers or communities that don't want to be brought into a metacommunity, it seems like some sort of flag to opt-out (or opt-in as the case may be) should be designed in -- I'm thinking something in the community description like a textflag NOMC or YESMC that server software would be designed to respect.
With respect to moderation, It seems to me that you could have a variety of strategies -- you could have a sort of default accept all moderation where if one instance moderates a post other instances take on the same action, or whitelist moderation where if one instance or one set of moderators on a whitelist take an action then other instances take the same action, or a sort of republican moderation where if a certain number of instances take an action then other instances take the same action, and probably an option for individual metacommunities to only accept moderation from the local community the original post came from. I suspect you'd want a choice in the matter per metacommunity instance on a server.
I think that was resolved in getaether.net, but unfortunately, development stalled and the lone maintainer isn’t active anymore. He only hosts the entry servers, but that’s it.
You could look at his solution, but honestly, fragmentation is part of federated networks. If it were distributed networks/P2P, like Aether, then fragmentation could possibly be much less of an issue as users would all be on the same network and posting to a community would send it to all peers, that hosts it for all others.
#Mastodon is really giving me hope that maybe, just maybe, I can build a meaningful music community. Again. For like the 27th year. lol.
Open source radio. Decentralized music sharing/streaming. People building their own radio shows. I can do this. I hope you guys will help me along the way.
Making Radio and Podcasts:
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A practical guide for anyone who wants to learn how to make successful programmes in the digital era. It examines the key roles in audio and podcasting: announcing, presenting, research, copywriting, producing, marketing and promotions. It also outlines what is involved in creating different types of programmes.
The Women Who Rode Miles on Horseback to Deliver Library Books
Librarians are amazing.
They were known as the “book women.” They would saddle up, usually at dawn, to pick their way along snowy hillsides and through muddy creeks with a simple goal: to deliver reading material to Kentucky’s isolated mountain communities.
The Camel Mobile Library Service lends more than 7,000 books to nomads in Kenya's impoverished North East Province, often because camels are the only means of crossing the inhospitable terrain. Many of the books are supplied by Book Aid International.
@JWBananas@Rentlar@SilentStorms sooo... the follow-up had a very specific point. Many people were getting a residue after trying powder detergent, and I wanted to help with that.
My main issue with detergent pods isn't so much that they're wasteful, per se, but that they cost a lot more for, potentially, worse results.
Many dozens of people continue to tell me that trying powder detergent both saved money and made their dishwasher work better. I stand by that.
It seems you have replied to, and carried on a reply chain with (meaning that presumably notifications went both ways), a user on Kbin from your Mastodon account.
I'm probably a bit late to reply, but... He was @ mentioned in the body of the original post, which Mastodon would have notified him of because mas.to is federating. Opening the notification would bring him to this thread on Mastodon, where everything would appear as it normally does when viewing a thread on Mastodon. From there, you can hold a conversation as normal with notifications and all. Unless you were looking at instance URLs, you probably wouldn't even notice the user you're replying to isn't on Mastodon themselves.
Public Books has a wonderful newsletter. This edition is all about the 220th anniversary of Haiti's independence and Haiti's influence on world politics since then: https://www.publicbooks.org/?utm_source=PUBLIC BOOKS Newsletter&utm_campaign=9e68afec90-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2024_01_15&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_d048c39403-9e68afec90-181069426&mc_cid=9e68afec90&mc_eid=f8928db7e7
"People say they want real justice... so we fob them off with a slightly less unjust system of justice. Workers howl that they're being flayed like donkeys... so we arrange for the flaying to be a little less severe and slash their howling entitlement, but the exploitation goes on. The workforce would rather not have fatal accidents in the factory... so we make it a teeny bit safer and increase compensation payments to widows.
They'd like to see class divisions eliminated... so we do our best to bring the classes marginally closer or, preferably, just make it seem that way.
They want a revolution... and we give them reforms. We're drowning them in reforms. Or promises of reforms, because let's face it, they're not actually going to get anything."
-- #DarioFo, Accidental Death of an Anarchist (2/2)
I've been reading a lot about the state of scientific publishing. Some people seem to think it's in trouble, but I see signs of health from the various innovations people are trying. Some interesting examples include the use of openreview.net to open up reviews and give credit to reviewers, and the decision by eLife to stop issuing rejections, but open up the process instead. There is an interesting critique of the eLife decision by @MarkHanson located here: https://mahansonresearch.weebly.com/blog/do-we-really-need-journals
It's a weird time for me to be working on a new journal publishing platform, but maybe it's the right time. I've always been bugged by the economics of journal publishing, and that's what got me started working on it. Maybe I should shift my focus to the social process of publishing. The death of #AcademicTwitter hasn't helped, and I don't think LinkedIn and #AcademicChatter on the fediverse have filled the need yet.
@tragiccommons I have vague ideas of a federated academic publishing model (primarily hosted by universities) on an OSS stack... but you're right there is evolution in publishing which may work better than revolution
On connecting with academics, you can also follow @academicchatter