Hi! Appreciate your works! So, talking about this place. Welcome to another corner of fediverse. #Kbin and #Lemmy are federated forum platforms which work like Reddit but on principles similar to #Mastodon or #Pixelfed. That's why we can talk together here by being on different platforms. Magic of federation!
#Kbin actually handles this really well. Whenever it detects 2 of the same #thread (at least that's how I think it works), it'll group them and only show one of the threads on your feed. If you click on it, right under the thread will be the other #cross-posted threads on other magazines, each of which has its own upvote/downvote and comment count. You can click on any of those threads to switch to a certain magazine's thread and see the #comments there. Also, when you comment, it only goes to the thread you currently have open.
#Kbin has a #feature to kind of deal with this called #collections. Instead of subscribing to all #magazines of a same type or even name, you can put them in a collection (or find a collection where somebody already did that) and then favorite that collection see all of those magazines in your feed. Splitting up the discussion is still not ideal but at least this lets you see all of it at once and increases #discoverability.
Mastodon has the responsibility to promote diversity in the Fediverse
I love the Threadiverse. Compared to the microblogging Fediverse’s sea of random thoughts, Lemmy and kbin are so much easier to navigate with the options to sort posts by subscribed, from local instances or everything federated. You can also sort by individual community, and then there are the countless ways to order the posts and comments (which are stored neatly under the main post, by the way). That people can more easily find the right discussions and see where they can contribute also means that the discussions tend to be more focused and productive than elsewhere. Decentralisation also makes a lot of sense, since it is built around different communities. All that’s needed is users.
Things were going quite well for a while when Reddit killed third-party apps, prompting many to leave and find the Threadiverse. However, it is quite difficult to entertain a crowd that has grown accustomed to a constant bombardment of dopamine-inducing or interesting content by tens of millions of users, if you only have a couple hundred thousand people. This is causing some to leave, which of course increases this effect. The active users have more than halved since July, according to FediDB. The mood is also becoming more tense. Maybe the lack of engagement drives some to cause it through hostility, I’m not quite sure. Either way, the Threadiverse becoming a less enjoyable place to be, which is quite sad considering how promising it is.
But what is really frustrating is that we could easily have that userbase. The entire Fediverse has over ten million users, and many Mastodonians clearly want to engage in group-based discussion, looking at Guppe groups. The focused discussions should also be quite attractive. Technically we are federated, so why do Mastodonians interact so little with the Threadiverse? The main reason is that Mastodon simply doesn’t federate post content. I really can’t see why the platform that federates entire Wordpress blogs refuses to federate thread content just because it has a title, and instead just replaces the body with a link to the post. Very unhelpful.
The same goes with PeerTube. There are plenty of videos on there that I am quite sure a lot of Mastodonians would appreciate, yet both views and likes there stay consistently in the tens. Yes, Mastodon’s web interface has a local video player, but in most clients it is the same link shenanigans, may may partly explain the small amount of engagement. This is also quite sad, because Google’s YouTube is one of the worst social network monopolies out there, if not the worst.
And I know some might say that Mastodon is a microblogging platform and that it makes sense only to have microblogging content, but the problem is that Mastodon is the dominant platform on the Fediverse, its users making up close to 80% of all Fedizens. It has gone so far that several Friendica and Hubzilla users have been complaining about complaints from Mastodonians that their posts do not live up to Mastodon customs, and of course, that people frequently use “Mastodon” to refer to the entire Fediverse. This, of course, goes entirely against the idea of the Fediverse, that many diverse platforms live in harmony with and awareness of each other.
The very least that Mastodon could do is to support the content of other platforms. Then I’d wish that they’d improve discoverability, by for instance adding a videos tab in the explore section, improving federation of favourites since it is the dominant sorting mechanism on many other platforms, and making a clear distinction between people (@person) and groups (!group), but I know that that is quite much to ask.
P.S. @feditips , @FediFollows , I know that you are reluctant to promote Lemmy and its communities because of the ideology of its founders, but the fact is firstly that it’s open source and there aren't any individual people who control the entire project, and that the software itself is very apolitical. In fact, most Lemmy users both oppose and are on instances that have rules against such beliefs, so I highly encourage you to at least help raise awareness on the communities. Then, of course, there’s kbin, which isn’t associated with any extremism at all. As a bonus, it has much better integration with the microblogging Fediverse, but it is a lot smaller and younger, and still very much under development.
Anyways, that was a ramble. Thanks for hearing me out.
Mastodon has the responsibility to promote diversity in the Fediverse
I love the Threadiverse. Compared to the microblogging Fediverse’s sea of random thoughts, Lemmy and kbin are so much easier to navigate with the options to sort posts by subscribed, from local instances or everything federated. You can also sort by individual community, and then there are the countless ways to order the posts and comments (which are stored neatly under the main post, by the way). That people can more easily find the right discussions and see where they can contribute also means that the discussions tend to be more focused and productive than elsewhere. Decentralisation also makes a lot of sense, since it is built around different communities. All that’s needed is users.
Things were going quite well for a while when Reddit killed third-party apps, prompting many to leave and find the Threadiverse. However, it is quite difficult to entertain a crowd that has grown accustomed to a constant bombardment of dopamine-inducing or interesting content by tens of millions of users, if you only have a couple hundred thousand people. This is causing some to leave, which of course increases this effect. The active users have more than halved since July, according to FediDB. The mood is also becoming more tense. Maybe the lack of engagement drives some to cause it through hostility, I’m not quite sure. Either way, the Threadiverse becoming a less enjoyable place to be, which is quite sad considering how promising it is.
But what is really frustrating is that we could easily have that userbase. The entire Fediverse has over ten million users, and many Mastodonians clearly want to engage in group-based discussion, looking at Guppe groups. The focused discussions should also be quite attractive. Technically we are federated, so why do Mastodonians interact so little with the Threadiverse? The main reason is that Mastodon simply doesn’t federate post content. I really can’t see why the platform that federates entire Wordpress blogs refuses to federate thread content just because it has a title, and instead just replaces the body with a link to the post. Very unhelpful.
The same goes with PeerTube. There are plenty of videos on there that I am quite sure a lot of Mastodonians would appreciate, yet both views and likes there stay consistently in the tens. Yes, Mastodon’s web interface has a local video player, but in most clients it is the same link shenanigans, may may partly explain the small amount of engagement. This is also quite sad, because Google’s YouTube is one of the worst social network monopolies out there, if not the worst.
And I know some might say that Mastodon is a microblogging platform and that it makes sense only to have microblogging content, but the problem is that Mastodon is the dominant platform on the Fediverse, its users making up close to 80% of all Fedizens. It has gone so far that several Friendica and Hubzilla users have been complaining about complaints from Mastodonians that their posts do not live up to Mastodon customs, and of course, that people frequently use “Mastodon” to refer to the entire Fediverse. This, of course, goes entirely against the idea of the Fediverse, that many diverse platforms live in harmony with and awareness of each other.
The very least that Mastodon could do is to support the content of other platforms. Then I’d wish that they’d improve discoverability, by for instance adding a videos tab in the explore section, improving federation of favourites since it is the dominant sorting mechanism on many other platforms, and making a clear distinction between people (@person) and groups (!group), but I know that that is quite much to ask.
P.S. @feditips , @FediFollows , I know that you are reluctant to promote Lemmy and its communities because of the ideology of its founders, but the fact is firstly that it’s open source and there aren't any individual people who control the entire project, and that the software itself is very apolitical. In fact, most Lemmy users both oppose and are on instances that have rules against such beliefs, so I highly encourage you to at least help raise awareness on the communities. Then, of course, there’s kbin, which isn’t associated with any extremism at all. As a bonus, it has much better integration with the microblogging Fediverse, but it is a lot smaller and younger, and still very much under development.
Anyways, that was a ramble. Thanks for hearing me out.
First time I’ve seen this bot. I would be interested in learning how to cross-post from #kbin to #Lemmy in a way that preserves the original username the way this bot did. Is that possible without 3rd party tools? I can login to a Lemmy instance and then crosspost any Kbin thread to a Lemmy community, but then the author becomes myself, not the original Kbin author.
I like Lemmy. Active development, lots of third party apps, active community, etc but what other Fediverse projects are worth getting into like this one?...
Nobody in this thread seems to have mentioned #Kbin. It's an instance that aims to combine the #microblog structure of instances like Mastodon with the thread structure of instances like Lemmy.
@fediverse Let's face it. When talking about the Fediverse, it is very hard to sell interoperability between different types of instances as a major advantage.
Do not recommend one software and/or one instance.
Using your scenario, would you recommend photography instances based on #Mastodon knowing Mastodon only allows up to 4 “attached” images? Not only that, Mastodon will only display 4 images even if there are more than that?
Or, are you going to recommend #Pixelfed designed for images. Or, maybe #Firefish, #Friendica, #Hubzilla, #Streams, which all allow more than 4 images and will display all the images even if it exceeds their software's attach limit?
Quite frankly, in my opinion, with the image display alone, Mastodon is highly not recommended. So, the number of users and instances Mastodon have does not make it the best #Fediverse software, as you have mentioned earlier, “Mastodon is the level of UX other projects should aim to”. It's not.
The best approach is we understand what the user needs and suggest to them the appropriate software and instances that will suit their needs.
Let's forget about the Fediverse for a while.
We have to remember that not everyone is on Twitter or Facebook. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of individuals who only have an Instagram account. Why? They don't need Twitter and Facebook.
In Korea, for example, they have their own culture and platforms for communication Twitter/Facebook-like, so they don't need those. But many of them have Instagram accounts.
Now, let's go back to the Fediverse.
If those are the users we are reaching out to, then there should be no problem recommending Pixelfed. Because for these target market, their only concern and type of use is to share, well, photos or their latest digital artwork. They don't care about a Twitter/Facebook-like experience or use.
That brings us back to the features of #ActivityPub. It is an “added benefit”.
Users who want to follow this content creator can do so using their existing account.
Okay, you can't do this with #Lemmy, the last time I checked, however, you can do it with #Kbin. That's a Lemmy limitation, not the fediverse.
For the content creator who migrated to the fediverse, in particular, Pixelfed in our scenario, they have a greater reach because they're federated.
(Extra: You can actually turn Pixelfed into a regular Twitter-like software if you are using the web UI. Although, last time I heard it will be removed eventually.)
(Extra 2: BookWyrm also allows Twitter-like feeds and interaction, it's not restricted to just books.)
I’m not even willing to visit shields·io¹ because it’s a Cloudflare site.
If so, it might be worth adding the badges to the sidebars.
I would oppose cluttering the sidebar with 100+ stats. Ideally there would be just 1 line:
subscribers: 310/30.6K (local/fed)
If someone wants subscribers per instance detail, that should require some deep clicking around or a dedicated site that keeps track of that.
BTW, #Lemmy has lemmyverse.net (though I think the subscriber counts are misleading there too). What does #Kbin have for finding communities… anyone know? #askFedi
footnotes:
note that I raised the dot (.) to (·) so as to discourage visits and so my msg does not add to the search engine rankings of a Cloudflare site.
Following the spirit of spreading across the Fediverse (and because my main instance is down so many times, because diverse reasons) I’m intrigued about the joining instance process, because I honestly don’t know what criteria to have in order to join another one if I ever want to do it....
I liked the name #kbin more than #lemmy, and the integration of #microblogging is a feature I appreciate. IME, lemmy also tends to attract more memes and shitposts, which generally turn me off.
Copy/pasted from a previous response I wrote regarding this topic. I hope it helps:
When you follow a given account on #Mastodon with your #kbin account, posts from that account will be #federated here. If they use #hashtags, then posts they write will be federated into #magazines here based on permitted tags chosen by magazine moderators which show up in the #microblogging section of a magazine. AFAIK, posts that don't get sorted into a particular magazine will be sent to @random. In order to search for magazines/communities, you can enter [email protected] into the search bar for example.
As of this writing, it is not yet available but you can see the Install button. Just click it to pre-register and it will auto download and install once OpenAI launch it.
YSK: When making posts on Lemmy/Kbin always put at the end some hashtags related to your post topic.
So users from Mastodon and Pixelfed can interact with your post without even need to use their Lemmy/Kbin account or learn about "how to use the ActivityPub".
This also helps to have more content avaliable across the Fediverse due to better discoverability.
what I take from this, though, is that even with the anger against Reddit, there’s no talk of leaving in the comments on that post!
you hate the site and all of their changes so much and it’s only been getting worse… why do you stay? even the content is already worse, and even worse on the subs that have the new Reddit tipping system… why stay?
Does anyone have any advice on whether to use #threads or #microblogs when you're looking to say, start a discussion about a topic on #kbin? Is there an etiquette for what option is best? Or do people just pick depending on their mood (having a Twitter vs a Reddit sort of a day)?
After a week on Lemmy/kbin it strikes me that one of the major oncoming problems that the Fediverse has is the fragmentation of communities across multiple instances that were formerly centralized in reddit. While this fragmentation into instances has significant upsides, it shifts responsibility for finding and subscribing to...
I feel like this is the built-in #fediverse way of doing things here. Rather than try to force a vast range of users (#kbin, #lemmy, #mastodon, #pixelfed, etc.) to hew to a reddit-like method of aggregating interests to your preferred method of browsing you will have to change your method of discovery to match the platform you’re on to find what you want. #notreddit
Hard to follow #lemmy posts from Mastodon. I decided to follow @nostupidquestions to try it out and each comment that someone posts shows up as a boost and only sometimes is threaded. Time to check out #kbin.
My #redditmigration has gone great! I am using the #kbin client, but also following a ton of threads (subreddits) on #lemmy. It works so much better than I expected and is already workable to replace Reddit. I think things will only get better as the #threadiverse grows and more esoteric/niche areas get populated.
Reddit was my last corporate social media holdout, and I am glad the company inspired me to finally jump ship with bad corpo behavior!
-Time to spread out! Federation is working. Create a 2nd account on a non-kbin.social instance. The Fediverse works better when we federate.
-Lots of group building! These ex-redditers really know their shit!
What are some cool people you follow on other Mastodon and other Fediverse Platforms?
Looking for journalists, researchers, professionals, creators, etc....
An alternative perspective on Alien.top and the Fediverser project
Tl:dr: Remember the human, even if the project doesn’t work, it wasn’t as useless as it may seem, resources consumption may be concerning...
When /some/ YT videos get special download-resistent treatment but not others (fedia.io)
For example, this invidious instance offers a download option for a YoutTube video, as that instance does for all YT videos:...
Like This? You May Like...
A community for seeking suggestions and recommendations of what else you might like based on your existing interests and tastes....
Which of the Fediverse projects are worth getting into?
I like Lemmy. Active development, lots of third party apps, active community, etc but what other Fediverse projects are worth getting into like this one?...
Your communities might be a lot larger than you think!
cross-posted from: lemmy.ca/post/5674368...
Elon Musk says Twitter, now X, is to charge all users subscription fees (www.theguardian.com)
Elon Musk has indicated that X, formerly known as Twitter, is preparing to charge all users for accessing the platform....
What made you choose your instance?
Following the spirit of spreading across the Fediverse (and because my main instance is down so many times, because diverse reasons) I’m intrigued about the joining instance process, because I honestly don’t know what criteria to have in order to join another one if I ever want to do it....
Reddit is ending Reddit Gold and users are furious (mashable.com)
The website has been knocking it out of the park for popular decisions lately /s...
[Feature Request] A Package Manger... for Communities
After a week on Lemmy/kbin it strikes me that one of the major oncoming problems that the Fediverse has is the fragmentation of communities across multiple instances that were formerly centralized in reddit. While this fragmentation into instances has significant upsides, it shifts responsibility for finding and subscribing to...