[Yolta]

It saddens me that every time I see a fediverse-related post on HN, it gets inundated by people who don't "get it" and that is to be expected: fediverse is not Twitter and everybody gets Twitter. That change in mentality is not easy.

Fun story: massive influx of users from India recently and the timelines got flooded by posts indirectly asking: "what is the way to fame here? How do I get followers?". Fediverse doesn't work like that. You just… talk with others. There's no "you and your followers". There's "us".

Analogy: you are not in a metropole. You are in a village that is extremely well connected to all other villages. You do not need to shout to be heard.

I'm on a FOSS-focused instance. We talk all kinds of stuff and FOSS is one of them. I have my Home timeline where I follow all the people I want to hear from (both my instance and all others). I have my Instance timeline where I'm basically guaranteed to read interesting stuff I can reply to and meet new people who also considered this instance to be their haven. And the Known Fediverse timeline… Well, it's fun to browse but come on, imagine a timeline of all tweets on Twitter: mostly useless.

Choosing the right instance also involves choosing the right moderators for you. Mods can block other instances. If you don't like what the mods do, change instance or start your own community. After all, it's not Twitter, the people decide how content is moderated, not a for-profit company.

That's the fediverse for ya. Hope to see you there!

[sneak]

> Mods can block other instances. If you don't like what the mods do, change instance or start your own community.

Doing so costs you all of your followers. This is one of the main issues with the culture of heavyhanded instance operator censorship: you can’t simply switch like you would an email host with your own domain, because few/no AP implementations support bring-your-own-domain virtual hosting.

This is like saying “well, if you don’t like that the mail admin simply doesn’t let you email certain domains, just change your email address!”

[klntsky]

> Doing so costs you all of your followers

This is not true anymore. You can "transfer" your account to another instance, and all the followers will not need to refollow.

[lainsoykaf]

This is sadly not quite correct. You can send out a 'Move' activity from your old account, notifying other servers that you have moved. There's no guarantee that they understand that activity, or, if they understand it, that they actually follow the new account automatically.

[vertex-four]

In practice, nearly all your followers will be using fediverse software that understands and supports Move{Actor} in a similar way to Mastodon. There's not a massive amount of fediverse software - it's not like IndieWeb where everyone does their own thing - and the microblogging-focused software largely implements the same feature set.

[kick]

Most Mastodon instances currently running today don't support it.

[cptskippy]

It seems like virtual hosts would be reluctant to support it because it allows clients to move away from them. Vendor lock-in and such...

[nenolod]

That depends on that software being deployed in a timely manner. There's plenty of instances out there still on Mastodon 1.6 and 2.0 because the admin installed it 2 years ago and hasn't updated since.

[grishka]

I probably need to look into supporting this in my federated social network thing. It does work with Mastodon and Pleroma right now, but it certainly could do better.

[sneak]

Even if the move notification worked perfectly, the people on instances your local admin has defederated with will never receive it as a result of the defederation. I don’t think this is a solution.

[jhauris]

This is good to know. One of the things that holds me back is choice paralysis on picking an instance.

[alfiedotwtf]

I would love if social media platforms could stop letting people know who followed who, even to the followers themselves... I think it would make places less vain and toxic

[zimpenfish]

I can't see how it would make it less toxic - a lot of the toxicity I see comes from accounts where it just wouldn't be possible for them to know who followed them because they're well into the 100ks, if not millions.

[CaptArmchair]

Not quite. It's not a bug, it's a feature.

Going back to the original quote: "The fediverse is like interconnected villages instead of a large metropole. There's no need to shout." and I think it's quite apt.

The fediverse is far closer to early online fora, bulletin boards then it is to e-mail. Maybe you were deeply entrenched in a particular online community, establishing an online identity, a reputation, visibility,... connected to your name. But outside of that domain? Well, you have little social credit on other discussion boards.

This approach models closely to how societies work in reality. And how individuals prioritize their own social connections. First family, then extended family, friends, co-workers, and society at large - an online audience - way down the road. Each of us will subconsciously look at people starting from the implicit question "Who is part of my tribe, who's an outsider?"

Now, the important part here is that you may feel compelled or forced to leave a group, family, tribe,... So, this implies giving up your locally established social credit and hope you can rebuild that elsewhere. For most people, that's an extremely expensive and risky proposition.

So, what do Reddit and Facebook do different, then?

Reddit is hugely successful because it provides a platform that can sustain thousands of small communities. Much like how online fora - but also e-mail based newsgroups or BBS'es - used to work in earlier days. Facebook's killer app is not the wall or your profile - contrary to what you may think - but... facebook groups. The same is true for Telegram or WhatsApp. These are tools that allow you to establish small communities.

And then you have the entire "followers/following" thing.

What Facebook and Reddit did was successfully merge the idea of a portable, persistent identity - a profile - between local communities by building a platform that also made migration and establishing new communities really easy and cheap (just a few clicks: bam! new group or subreddit!)

Now, followers / following: that's NOT a social network. That's an audience. And there's a distinct difference between those two. (even though there's an overlap too)

For all the talk over "engagement", communicating towards an audience is mostly a one-to-many one-way street. You may reach hundreds of thousands on Twitter, but you may only directly engage - and establish a meaningful relationship - with a handful of people.

If you want to directly and presently reach a large audience, then either e-mail newsgroups, the fediverse or online fora are the wrong venues. Arguably, even Reddit is the wrong platform if you directly tap into millions from a single or a few publishing points (accounts).

If you're looking for small communities in which you want to get entrenched, then the fediverse is the right place to be. Even though that comes with the perpetual yet very real trade off of establishing social credit locally which you can never carry with you if you migrate away.

[MrGilbert]

I like to run mastodon as a single-user, and actively connect to other instances by following certain people. What I find lacking (but that might be a configuration issue): I cannot seem to get the replies to other people statuses, which are not from my server (so, basically, all). That'd be a bummer if that doesn't work.

[zimpenfish]

Pleroma v2.0.0[1] lets you hover over the "Reply to" text to get the replied to status in a little popup (which might be new in v2.) But also a little "popout" icon that will open the entire thread in another window (which previously existed pre-v2.)

[1] running as essentially a single-user instance.

[dnpp123]

I'm running Pleroma in the same use case, it works fine for me I think.

If other people want to do that and switch from Twitter -> Fediverse, I wrote a bunch of scripts to switch from Twitter to Fediverse :

https://git.sr.ht/~pierrenn/twitter_escape

Sadly, this is a bit spammy method, but I had only a dozen or so complaints so far and my "Whole known network" is now seeded pretty well : https://s.pnn.sh/ (this is a small single user home instance on ARM, so it's slow)

And TBH I find the Pleroma UI better than Mastodon for the single user instance - plus clicking on the date to get replies in the Mastodon frontend always feels weird (but it's personal taste !)

[MrGilbert]

I'm currently trying to get my head around wrapping Pleroma in Docker, as I've everything dockerized and behind a Traefik proxy.

Thanks for the links!

[kod77]

Feels too complicated to me.

Back in the day when ICQ and the first instant messengers showed up, there used to be a "find a friend" feature. You just specified what you were interested in chatting about and it would return a list of people who had said the same thing. That was all it took to meet interesting folk and make meaningful connections.

Needs to be simple for civilians I guess is what am saying.

[Polycryptus]

> And the Known Fediverse timeline… Well, it's fun to browse but come on, imagine a timeline of all tweets on Twitter: mostly useless.

I remember when I first used Twitter in 2006 or 2007 it actually had that as a feature. It was useless, but still fun as you mention.

[monkin]

I like the idea behind fediverse, nevertheless it's mostly suitable for HN users or being a replacement for phpBB forums in small communities.

> Well, it's fun to browse but come on, imagine a timeline of all tweets on Twitter: mostly useless.

BTW. This will happen too, it's just not popular enough to catch that.

[sneak]

I started that project, but haven’t had time yet to finish it:

https://git.eeqj.de/sneak/feta

[cjslep]

Careful with this. A lot of communities don't like scraping of their public content. There was a guy who got booted from archive.org I think for trying to archive an instance that had a lot of under-18 folks' content.

I'd encourage you to build a federated app instead. :)

[sneak]

I think you are making the assumption that I am scraping content based on the fact that I am developing a free software content scraper that anyone is invited to use.

[cjslep]

Yep, just like I assume countries that enrich plutonium to weapons grade levels and stick it on the pointy end of an ICBM are threatening others with nuclear weapons, even if they're never launched.

[sneak]

If you think developing web spider software is akin to developing nuclear weapons, I think you might want to go have a talk with some larger, well-known companies who have not only half-developed not-yet-working software (like my activitypub spider, which doesn't even have a storage backend at the moment), but who have fully developed advanced web spiders that have actually downloaded and archived exabytes of data from the web, to be saved privately for all time. Frequently they even let anyone who wants search the full text of it, usually without authentication!

If you don't want second parties to have copies of your data, configure your webserver not to send it to them when they request it. You can't force someone to do something with an HTTP request.

[kstrauser]

I'm going to be blunt: your ethics statement sucks. It reeks of "I don't care what you intended, I'm going to use your data in ways you didn't want because nothing is physically stopping me". At the very least, that's a terrible attitude to describe as an "ethics statement". If you were to call it "justification" instead, at least it would be internally consistent.

I see that your code makes no mention of robots.txt, so you've designed it in such a way that explicitly ignores each instances' published intention. You can't reasonably make any claims about "consent" while pretending that "User-agent: *; Disallow: /" isn't there.

[klntsky]

From a first glance it does not scrap the web UI, and uses public APIs only. So mentioning that it ignores robots.txt is not a solid argument. These APIs are there specifically for automated use.

I agree that this "ethics statement" is of no use, though. The author should have ignored these people who get upset because of their posts being copied.

[sneak]

Every time people get upset because of reasonable behavior of others and unreasonably attempt to control that behavior, it is an opportunity for teaching.

[ColinWright]

You use this phrase:

> ... reasonable behavior of others ...

According to whom? Every dictator thinks it's reasonable behaviour for them to crush the opposition, while those who look on, or those who suffer, will usually believe that to be unreasonable behaviour.

Someone I learned from a colleague once is this:

"No one ever thinks they are the bad guy."

So your concept or reasonable behaviour may not match mine, and you may exhibit behaviour that will upset me. That's not an opportunity for me to learn, that's an opportunity for me to seek some sort of recourse against you.

Don't be surprised if others attempt that.

[inbetween]

> a FOSS-focused instance .. people who also considered this instance to be their haven

That sounds wonderful - any hint how to find/join that instance? (Searching for mastodon/pleroma FOSS instances doesn't return anything useful here.)

[nenolod]

fediverse.network contains fairly exhaustive lists of open registration instances for both pleroma and mastodon

[decentralised]

I humbly suggest that you have just pointed out the major flaw for federated social networks and decentralised platforms in general: they do not serve the same purpose of Twitter, Facebook and the like.

Users come to these popular platforms not worried about what it will take from them, but what they can take from the platforms. Notoriety, fame, a following.. validation or just a business model.

[Kaze404]

Why is being different a flaw?

[decentralised]

I don't think being different is a flaw, but people are drawn towards the familiar and what I'm pointing at is that this is the reason why gaining real traction beyond the dev community is so hard.