The Fediverse has one problem, concentration of users on few instances, mastodon.social being the largest.
And cancel culture.
Highly politically motivated cancel culture.
What right do they believe to have to dictate to their users what the can and can't read?
That should be solely in the user's hand.
The irony of writing this in HN is ... whatever the right word is
Also, fragmentation and visibility.
It's neigh impossible to find interesting content if you're not on the main big instances.
What right do they believe to have to dictate to their users what the can and can't read? That should be solely in the user's hand.
Are they choosing what people can read, or are they choosing what they're willing to federate? No one is stopping people writing and publishing things on federated services. People are only choosing what they're willing to broadcast over the part of the service they run.
It's not practical for every user to choose each individual message to read. We allow others to help us filter. If you want the unfiltered version you go get it (and then try to find something under the torrent of spam).
The right to speak is not the same as the right to an audience. If users want to hear you they will seek you out. If not, you've said your peace, and that's all you're entitled to.
I run a very small instance and have zero problems finding content. I have a constant stream of posts to the point where its hard to keep up with. It's pretty much a myth that there's no content unless you're on a large instance.
Instances often block users or other instances because their users have asked them to do that. They often have posted guidelines about what they will or won't allow. Users will hold them to it. Users can and do block other users on an individual basis. If a lot of people are blocking you, the problem might not be them.
> And cancel culture. Highly politically motivated cancel culture.
Most of the people who started on Mastodon are people of the LGBT+ community that were getting constantly harassed on other platforms. This 'cancel culture' is just a healthy attitude to having a zero tolerance policy on abuse, it is how it avoids being the enormous bigoted alt-right techbro mess that is now X.
Since Mastodon is federated, you can choose the instance you want to use, and what you see. Just don't expect other instances to actively want to engage there.
I’ve had an awesome experience the last five years running instances for me and friends. So many nice interactions. I recommend running an instance for people you know well. It can still connect to everyone else, but you have your own little corner to feel more connected in.
> If the American press had given me 20 minutes of airtime I could have convinced everyone they don’t want to get involved with Greenland.
On one hand the author recognizes the scope of the “protocol wars” as a rational thing being irrelevant in the actually relevant time span. On the other hand, the author swears that they can bring rationality to a deeply emotional matter through discourse.
you are aware that he doesn't actually believe that he "[...] could have convinced [..]"
it's a manner of speech
a instrument of telling a story
a way to express how completely absurd "US getting involved into Greenland" is for anyone who understands the land (geography/weather) and people even unrelated to geopolitical aspects like alienating allies
> We all need pointless hobbies, but I care about YouTube stars like I care about distant stars dying. It’s interesting to someone somewhere but those people don’t talk to me. I mostly use social media as a place to waste time, not a platform to form para-social relationships to narcissists. I prefer my narcissism farm to table. I’d rather dig a grave with a rusty spoon than watch a Twitch “star”.
I don’t really care about the substance of this article, but the style is entertaining. Curious for anyone who writes in a similar style - do people actually compose like this breathlessly, or are these kinds of lines wrought over several revisions? I know everyone’s different, but I can’t imagine writing like this on a first pass.
AI? I just read it and remembered how I got busted for writing papers for friends. Style and voice are tangible and I'm getting an uncanny valley creepy crawlies from the opening of this article. edit, maybe some AI segments, I would guess the author is young and will write differently in a few years.
> If the American press had given me 20 minutes of airtime I could have convinced everyone they don’t want to get involved with Greenland. We’re not tough enough as a people to survive in Greenland, much less “take it over”. Greenlandic people shrug off horrific injuries hundreds of kilometers from medical help with a smile. I watched a Greenlandic toddler munch meat from the spine of a seal with its head very much intact. We aren’t equipped to fuck with these people, they are the real deal.
The US has long since wanted to purchase Greenland, not "fight" them, for strategic reasons. I'm not sure why there is this fantasy that the US is going to fight the Greenland people? Honestly.
This is nicely written but I found some of the views strange. The most disturbing one to me is that the author wants news from social media and claims they have troubles getting news (e.g. criticizing the Washington Post). Not only is it obviously problematic to attempt to get news from social media and everybody knows that, it's also very bold to insinuate that there is lack of access to news. Maybe US citizens get this impression from TV news infotainment, which is indeed abysmal. Okay, I get that. Nevertheless, there are plenty of other sources, we're being swamped with news and know more about what's happening in the world than ever before. Normally, people also complain about the opposite, that they get anxiety from too much exposure to news. So I don't get that point.
The wire services are the source of practically all news. There are vanishingly few other actual news-gathering organizations. (One fewer with the Washington Post deciding that they don't want to be one, either.)
That's the news. Everything else is repackaging.
The actual truth (or as close to it as can exist) has been out there and readily accessible this whole time. People choose to get it through pre-digested outlets instead, and then get outraged that everyone else is ignoring "the" truth.
I want to know exactly how far the Iranians have gotten against the IGRC in the last 24 hours. I subscribe to WSJ but they don’t have that details. X and Reddit do, with some obvious caveats (I do find Community Notes on X very good though).
They're not popular, but going outside in a flurry of missiles isn't good for your health. It's not like the US has coordinated with anyone on the ground to plan a revolt. They seem to have just imagined one will materialize.
They still don't love the regime but today they share a common enemy.
I just tried to check out the Fediverse and found utter confusion. I'm not saying its bad-- I'm saying I am bewildered. There are communities I can join, but I can't tell how I should choose a community. I could find no way to search for communities that might be a fit. Apparently there are a lot of different kinds of social media under the broad banner of the Fediverse. How should I choose, and what are the implications of choosing?
I suppose I could pick a random community. But what's the point? I don't know.
It’s a little wild to read comments like this because this was just how the Internet worked before Twitter got popular. I still get “happy birthday” emails from forums I joined 20+ years ago.
If you don't want to choose, install the official mastodon app. It should direct you to create an account on mastodon.social, unless you go out of your way to pick something different.
I suspect the sign up flow has changed since you last tried.
This is a big turn off for me too. I don’t want to “figure it out for myself”. That’s why I became catholic as an adult.
With the fediverse I have an overwhelming fear of missing out if I pick the wrong communities. I feel like it needs aggregation which defeats the purpose.
Puff piece with 1000+ words that doesn't ever assert anything in particular that the author was wrong about. But if you enjoy a babbling endorsement. However you will be left hanging about what corner of the largely inscrutable "fediverse" the author is bleating about. Make no mistake, mastodon feeds are prone to shameless promotions, scams, and attention whoring that infects all social media, but it's still marginal and so seems quaint.
To get a sense of this skim
sfba.social
which is a feed of trending posts with a U.S. west coast vibe.
> mastodon feeds are prone to shameless promotions, scams, and attention whoring
My mastodon feed contains only the users I follow. If they post unwanted things I unfollow them. Mastodon doesn't force you to see content from people you don't follow.
The sfba trending list has engagement-bait, but you shouldn't look there (on any social media site) if you don't want that sort of content.
For me, having been on fedi for like 7 years now, there are cool places, and there are not so cool places.
I might be more lucky than most in that I barely need to curate my time there, cause I follow cool people, and so I just see what they like too
> cause I follow cool people, and so I just see what they like too
Maybe offtopic but I was reading something on hackernews and thought about something like this yesterday as the world starts getting more brand-ed and corporate-y that perhaps its up to the average person to share the list of cool people/things they know.
But I don't think that a follow itself might be the largest indicator of showing others what cool people are.
Yesterday, I tried linkhut (https://ln.ht) and added it to my profile. It just has cool things that I found online and I have written minor notes below it on why I think the things are cool or not.
I am curious to know but can some idea like this take off within the fediverse community/ say personally for you?
Can you have a linkhut profile that I can just see which can have cool people that you found and why you think that they are cool? And if I think that you are cool, then I can have some of that coolness be transferred to people you think cool too?
I used to be on fediverse and I think that there are some very cool people on fediverse, its just very hard to find them sometimes.
I've had a vague idea rattling around in the back of my brain for a while now, for some kind of endorsement system using public keys and signatures, so I can apply an endorsement to a particular site (perhaps with some kind of hash of the content so that it expires if the site changes), and get recommendations from others doing the same. When visiting a new site I can see a reputation score based on how many people have endorsed it and how much overlap there is between me and them. Users would also be able to endorse each other, and exclude either other from the algorithm, too - so hopefully networks effects would form organically around topics of interest - and more loosely between topics.
archive.org + website + linkhut search + username? (Endorsements can work by having the link of ln.ht profile itself being part of another user's Linkhut profile)
For example: Suppose you went to fluxer.gg (Open source Discord alternative that I found cool)
You can even endorse me by having my username linkhut be within your linkhut profile for example and I think I am seeing some social aspect of it in the frontpage of linkhut as well although I don't particular appreciate that right now.
Linkhut also is open source/have public API's
I found Linkhut only yesterday fwiw but its really cool and want to vouch for it. So does this work for the use case that you are mentioning?
Plus another point about Linkhut which I have talked in another comment is the note functionality. It allows me to reason (why?) I liked a particular website of say any project or any person and allows me to add words to it as well. This might be the feature I like the most because it allows me to use words to sort of actually have word-of-mouth for any cool things that we find on internet.
And this way you can also find reasonings for other websites that a person may've vouched for in a way too. I found this whole idea really elegant.
Edit: Oh btw there is also the concept of tags. So suppose you wanted more discord alternative. You could search #discord and it can for example lead you to stoat, matrix etc. from other people too.
I am not sure if there is already an extension that does it but an extension could be made to really simplify some aspects of it. I definitely feel this and there is some maybe small community on linkhut so you're not starting from scratch and also the merits of linkhut in general seem to me be good enough for average person to use.
> as the world starts getting more brand-ed and corporate-y...
I gravitate toward what I consider authenticate/consistent people which for me at least has seemed to work out as I also try to be that way.
> Can you have a linkhut profile...
It doesn't really work that way, you can see other peoples public conversations to see how they interact, as a metric for their personalities, which, might be more work. It's network effects moreso.
as for https://ln.ht, I can see it working for some people, but personally I think there's a bit too much going on, sensory overload.
> as for https://ln.ht, I can see it working for some people, but personally I think there's a bit too much going on, sensory overload.
I do understand the sensory overload aspect. I personally don't use the social aspect of it that much.
Essentially the idea that I want to say was that even the people that I follow (say on bluesky) etc. sometimes I don't know why I follow them exactly either or any idea of giving this info to the world for that matter.
The idea of linkhut interests me especially with their note section: I can have a profile of cool things/people I found and I can share it to world and I can try to explain the "why cool?" so that people can judge things on that aspect and it gives more info, that's all.
Unfortunately even for fediverse/ all social media. You really can't end up writing the exact reason you follow someone as a comment everytime you follow someone. Sometimes sure but not always and those comments can get muddled up with other comments that you write while using the platform itself.
> It doesn't really work that way, you can see other peoples public conversations to see how they interact, as a metric for their personalities, which, might be more work. It's network effects moreso.
I suppose so. But I think the idea to me for using something like linkhut isn't for people to offload searching how people interact/the metric as you mention but rather the fact that we are unable to find these people/products in the first place!
There has been too much stuff going on in the world in social media that there are genuinely cool people/projects that you don't even see. My point is similar to outlinks in the sense of sharing some visibility to those who don't have such visibility in the darkness of internet sometimes.
I only sort of found it yesterday so but that's my take on it. I am curious to hear yours though.
> Puff piece with 1000+ words that doesn't ever assert anything in particular that the author was wrong about
His article mostly talks about other things but I think his title is sufficient. He says that he never thought that the news would become so unreliable that he would end up getting his news from randos on Bluesky who simply share what they know without an intention to monetize it.
Yeah, the choice of title is indeed strange. But it does convey a personal point of view about the platform very well. Largely inscrutable? Compared to what?
Very much the puff piece of someone living in a social media bubble. The real problem is how the fediverse is going to survive the onslaught of laws related to social media age verification, data retention, data privacy, data not-privacy (breaking e2e encryption and retaining data for a really long time to spy on users), etc. There are a lot of problematic laws right now, but the velocity of new laws is alarming.
One can make an argument that compliance is possible -- but it isn't free. I don't see how small, independent websites will survive. Operators chose not to follow the laws (which sometimes conflict with each other.) As long as you don't scale too much or the operators or anonymous they can probably get away with it.
I use Mastodon. I use Twitter. Twitter is still fine as long as you keep your follow list clean. That means unfollowing people who post noise, which somehow people haven't figured out 17 years later?? Only view the chronological feed. Could this all have just been RSS feeds? Probably.
He asserts to being wrong about the Fediverse being as bad as all the rest, because the Fediverse is full of real people instead of corporatized bullshit.
The win for mastodon is that it's a choice to view those feeds at all. Some have none by default (e.g. librem.one), you only see who you follow. Same with bluesky. "Discover" is there by default, but can be removed. It's a tad annoying in some places, like when your feed is "empty", they still show it at the bottom, but it's a big banner which, for me, is a perfect indicator to stop scrolling. You can also hide "Trending Tooics".
Why would I be interested in random people's opinions on various things?
I wasted a few minutes of my life reading this rant. It was a total loss. I haven't been entertained by it and I couldn't find anything useful in it. Just the ramblings of a bitter person with which the Internet is filled.
[0]:(I recently bought it and it was idling around, your comment made me think what I should add on it so I did. I hope you evaluate that you were being bitter in your comment as well)
> Why would I be interested in random people's opinions on various things?
Sadly, if you are asking such question, I don't think that the blog post was intended for ya.
The Fediverse has one problem, concentration of users on few instances, mastodon.social being the largest. And cancel culture. Highly politically motivated cancel culture. What right do they believe to have to dictate to their users what the can and can't read? That should be solely in the user's hand.
The irony of writing this in HN is ... whatever the right word is Also, fragmentation and visibility. It's neigh impossible to find interesting content if you're not on the main big instances.
What right do they believe to have to dictate to their users what the can and can't read? That should be solely in the user's hand.
Are they choosing what people can read, or are they choosing what they're willing to federate? No one is stopping people writing and publishing things on federated services. People are only choosing what they're willing to broadcast over the part of the service they run.
Exactly. Each instance is deciding who to federate with and each user is deciding which instance to join
It's not practical for every user to choose each individual message to read. We allow others to help us filter. If you want the unfiltered version you go get it (and then try to find something under the torrent of spam).
The right to speak is not the same as the right to an audience. If users want to hear you they will seek you out. If not, you've said your peace, and that's all you're entitled to.
I run a very small instance and have zero problems finding content. I have a constant stream of posts to the point where its hard to keep up with. It's pretty much a myth that there's no content unless you're on a large instance.
Instances often block users or other instances because their users have asked them to do that. They often have posted guidelines about what they will or won't allow. Users will hold them to it. Users can and do block other users on an individual basis. If a lot of people are blocking you, the problem might not be them.
'cancel culture' is when you decline to federate content users don't want, I guess?
> And cancel culture. Highly politically motivated cancel culture.
Most of the people who started on Mastodon are people of the LGBT+ community that were getting constantly harassed on other platforms. This 'cancel culture' is just a healthy attitude to having a zero tolerance policy on abuse, it is how it avoids being the enormous bigoted alt-right techbro mess that is now X.
Since Mastodon is federated, you can choose the instance you want to use, and what you see. Just don't expect other instances to actively want to engage there.
I’ve had an awesome experience the last five years running instances for me and friends. So many nice interactions. I recommend running an instance for people you know well. It can still connect to everyone else, but you have your own little corner to feel more connected in.
> If the American press had given me 20 minutes of airtime I could have convinced everyone they don’t want to get involved with Greenland.
On one hand the author recognizes the scope of the “protocol wars” as a rational thing being irrelevant in the actually relevant time span. On the other hand, the author swears that they can bring rationality to a deeply emotional matter through discourse.
you are aware that he doesn't actually believe that he "[...] could have convinced [..]"
it's a manner of speech
a instrument of telling a story
a way to express how completely absurd "US getting involved into Greenland" is for anyone who understands the land (geography/weather) and people even unrelated to geopolitical aspects like alienating allies
Reads like an intro to a Portlandia remake, only its 2010 nostalgia mixed with heavy handed Reddit-tier remembrances and jibes.
Your 'social media' purity is still some network engineers bastardization of bits. Forums, Usenet, irc, email groups,...
Lamenting what was or what could have been is useless when there is still work to be done directing the outcome.
Vent. Move on.
Love that writing. I didn’t expect a full size blog post like that based on the title. That makes me very nostalgic of the old blog era
> We all need pointless hobbies, but I care about YouTube stars like I care about distant stars dying. It’s interesting to someone somewhere but those people don’t talk to me. I mostly use social media as a place to waste time, not a platform to form para-social relationships to narcissists. I prefer my narcissism farm to table. I’d rather dig a grave with a rusty spoon than watch a Twitch “star”.
I don’t really care about the substance of this article, but the style is entertaining. Curious for anyone who writes in a similar style - do people actually compose like this breathlessly, or are these kinds of lines wrought over several revisions? I know everyone’s different, but I can’t imagine writing like this on a first pass.
[delayed]
There are probably parallels with rap artists. There are those that improvise and flow.
(the rest of us edit and re-edit)
AI? I just read it and remembered how I got busted for writing papers for friends. Style and voice are tangible and I'm getting an uncanny valley creepy crawlies from the opening of this article. edit, maybe some AI segments, I would guess the author is young and will write differently in a few years.
Weird sentiment to have for some guy that says "uncanny valley creepy crawlies." Did you get your friends good grades??
It’s a British newspaper columnist style. Read anything from AA Gill if you like it.
>I want news I don’t want your endless meta commentary on the news.
I want commentary on the news. We should be critiquing the news and it's way more interesting that just uncritically accepting mainstream narratives.
> If the American press had given me 20 minutes of airtime I could have convinced everyone they don’t want to get involved with Greenland. We’re not tough enough as a people to survive in Greenland, much less “take it over”. Greenlandic people shrug off horrific injuries hundreds of kilometers from medical help with a smile. I watched a Greenlandic toddler munch meat from the spine of a seal with its head very much intact. We aren’t equipped to fuck with these people, they are the real deal.
Wow.
I laughed so hard. The whole articles tone is really enjoyable to me.
Like anyone is going to listen to anything for 20 minutes.
The US has long since wanted to purchase Greenland, not "fight" them, for strategic reasons. I'm not sure why there is this fantasy that the US is going to fight the Greenland people? Honestly.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cwyg1jg8xkmo
https://edition.cnn.com/2026/01/10/politics/us-will-take-gre...
Because the US was threatening to take over Greenland by force maybe? There's a reason Denmark rushed soldiers there.
“But we need it really for international, for world security, and I think we’re going to get it. One way or the other, we’re going to get it,”
-- Donald Trump, March 4, 2025
This is nicely written but I found some of the views strange. The most disturbing one to me is that the author wants news from social media and claims they have troubles getting news (e.g. criticizing the Washington Post). Not only is it obviously problematic to attempt to get news from social media and everybody knows that, it's also very bold to insinuate that there is lack of access to news. Maybe US citizens get this impression from TV news infotainment, which is indeed abysmal. Okay, I get that. Nevertheless, there are plenty of other sources, we're being swamped with news and know more about what's happening in the world than ever before. Normally, people also complain about the opposite, that they get anxiety from too much exposure to news. So I don't get that point.
The wire services are the source of practically all news. There are vanishingly few other actual news-gathering organizations. (One fewer with the Washington Post deciding that they don't want to be one, either.)
That's the news. Everything else is repackaging.
The actual truth (or as close to it as can exist) has been out there and readily accessible this whole time. People choose to get it through pre-digested outlets instead, and then get outraged that everyone else is ignoring "the" truth.
I want to know exactly how far the Iranians have gotten against the IGRC in the last 24 hours. I subscribe to WSJ but they don’t have that details. X and Reddit do, with some obvious caveats (I do find Community Notes on X very good though).
Iranians are not rebelling against the IRGC because why would they? Generally an outside attack makes the government more popular, not less.
They're not popular, but going outside in a flurry of missiles isn't good for your health. It's not like the US has coordinated with anyone on the ground to plan a revolt. They seem to have just imagined one will materialize.
They still don't love the regime but today they share a common enemy.
I just tried to check out the Fediverse and found utter confusion. I'm not saying its bad-- I'm saying I am bewildered. There are communities I can join, but I can't tell how I should choose a community. I could find no way to search for communities that might be a fit. Apparently there are a lot of different kinds of social media under the broad banner of the Fediverse. How should I choose, and what are the implications of choosing?
I suppose I could pick a random community. But what's the point? I don't know.
It’s a little wild to read comments like this because this was just how the Internet worked before Twitter got popular. I still get “happy birthday” emails from forums I joined 20+ years ago.
If you don't want to choose, install the official mastodon app. It should direct you to create an account on mastodon.social, unless you go out of your way to pick something different.
I suspect the sign up flow has changed since you last tried.
This is a big turn off for me too. I don’t want to “figure it out for myself”. That’s why I became catholic as an adult.
With the fediverse I have an overwhelming fear of missing out if I pick the wrong communities. I feel like it needs aggregation which defeats the purpose.
Puff piece with 1000+ words that doesn't ever assert anything in particular that the author was wrong about. But if you enjoy a babbling endorsement. However you will be left hanging about what corner of the largely inscrutable "fediverse" the author is bleating about. Make no mistake, mastodon feeds are prone to shameless promotions, scams, and attention whoring that infects all social media, but it's still marginal and so seems quaint.
To get a sense of this skim
sfba.social
which is a feed of trending posts with a U.S. west coast vibe.
> mastodon feeds are prone to shameless promotions, scams, and attention whoring
My mastodon feed contains only the users I follow. If they post unwanted things I unfollow them. Mastodon doesn't force you to see content from people you don't follow.
The sfba trending list has engagement-bait, but you shouldn't look there (on any social media site) if you don't want that sort of content.
For me, having been on fedi for like 7 years now, there are cool places, and there are not so cool places. I might be more lucky than most in that I barely need to curate my time there, cause I follow cool people, and so I just see what they like too
> cause I follow cool people, and so I just see what they like too
Maybe offtopic but I was reading something on hackernews and thought about something like this yesterday as the world starts getting more brand-ed and corporate-y that perhaps its up to the average person to share the list of cool people/things they know.
But I don't think that a follow itself might be the largest indicator of showing others what cool people are.
Yesterday, I tried linkhut (https://ln.ht) and added it to my profile. It just has cool things that I found online and I have written minor notes below it on why I think the things are cool or not.
I am curious to know but can some idea like this take off within the fediverse community/ say personally for you?
Can you have a linkhut profile that I can just see which can have cool people that you found and why you think that they are cool? And if I think that you are cool, then I can have some of that coolness be transferred to people you think cool too?
I used to be on fediverse and I think that there are some very cool people on fediverse, its just very hard to find them sometimes.
I've had a vague idea rattling around in the back of my brain for a while now, for some kind of endorsement system using public keys and signatures, so I can apply an endorsement to a particular site (perhaps with some kind of hash of the content so that it expires if the site changes), and get recommendations from others doing the same. When visiting a new site I can see a reputation score based on how many people have endorsed it and how much overlap there is between me and them. Users would also be able to endorse each other, and exclude either other from the algorithm, too - so hopefully networks effects would form organically around topics of interest - and more loosely between topics.
archive.org + website + linkhut search + username? (Endorsements can work by having the link of ln.ht profile itself being part of another user's Linkhut profile)
For example: Suppose you went to fluxer.gg (Open source Discord alternative that I found cool)
You searched it upon ln.ht: https://ln.ht/?query=fluxer.gg
You can then find the username who uploaded it there (in this case, its me): https://ln.ht/~imafh
You can then for example, find another thing that I uploaded there about a song/musician that I found really cool :-
Fuji Gateway - Tuesdays, Am I Right? (Official Lyric Video): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ijjb_0RW28c
You can even endorse me by having my username linkhut be within your linkhut profile for example and I think I am seeing some social aspect of it in the frontpage of linkhut as well although I don't particular appreciate that right now.
Linkhut also is open source/have public API's
I found Linkhut only yesterday fwiw but its really cool and want to vouch for it. So does this work for the use case that you are mentioning?
Plus another point about Linkhut which I have talked in another comment is the note functionality. It allows me to reason (why?) I liked a particular website of say any project or any person and allows me to add words to it as well. This might be the feature I like the most because it allows me to use words to sort of actually have word-of-mouth for any cool things that we find on internet.
And this way you can also find reasonings for other websites that a person may've vouched for in a way too. I found this whole idea really elegant.
Edit: Oh btw there is also the concept of tags. So suppose you wanted more discord alternative. You could search #discord and it can for example lead you to stoat, matrix etc. from other people too.
I am not sure if there is already an extension that does it but an extension could be made to really simplify some aspects of it. I definitely feel this and there is some maybe small community on linkhut so you're not starting from scratch and also the merits of linkhut in general seem to me be good enough for average person to use.
I am curious to hear your thoughts on this.
sounds like a anti-block list ;)
> as the world starts getting more brand-ed and corporate-y...
I gravitate toward what I consider authenticate/consistent people which for me at least has seemed to work out as I also try to be that way.
> Can you have a linkhut profile...
It doesn't really work that way, you can see other peoples public conversations to see how they interact, as a metric for their personalities, which, might be more work. It's network effects moreso.
as for https://ln.ht, I can see it working for some people, but personally I think there's a bit too much going on, sensory overload.
> as for https://ln.ht, I can see it working for some people, but personally I think there's a bit too much going on, sensory overload.
I do understand the sensory overload aspect. I personally don't use the social aspect of it that much.
Essentially the idea that I want to say was that even the people that I follow (say on bluesky) etc. sometimes I don't know why I follow them exactly either or any idea of giving this info to the world for that matter.
The idea of linkhut interests me especially with their note section: I can have a profile of cool things/people I found and I can share it to world and I can try to explain the "why cool?" so that people can judge things on that aspect and it gives more info, that's all.
Unfortunately even for fediverse/ all social media. You really can't end up writing the exact reason you follow someone as a comment everytime you follow someone. Sometimes sure but not always and those comments can get muddled up with other comments that you write while using the platform itself.
> It doesn't really work that way, you can see other peoples public conversations to see how they interact, as a metric for their personalities, which, might be more work. It's network effects moreso.
I suppose so. But I think the idea to me for using something like linkhut isn't for people to offload searching how people interact/the metric as you mention but rather the fact that we are unable to find these people/products in the first place!
There has been too much stuff going on in the world in social media that there are genuinely cool people/projects that you don't even see. My point is similar to outlinks in the sense of sharing some visibility to those who don't have such visibility in the darkness of internet sometimes.
I only sort of found it yesterday so but that's my take on it. I am curious to hear yours though.
Like this one: https://www.immibis.com/outlinks/
IDK about Linkhut. Why should I use a whole SaaS to manage a single page list of links?
Outlinks are great too. It's just that I have found it easier with Linkhut and yea.
Linkhut is open source and seems nice to me that's all.
> Puff piece with 1000+ words that doesn't ever assert anything in particular that the author was wrong about
His article mostly talks about other things but I think his title is sufficient. He says that he never thought that the news would become so unreliable that he would end up getting his news from randos on Bluesky who simply share what they know without an intention to monetize it.
Yeah, the choice of title is indeed strange. But it does convey a personal point of view about the platform very well. Largely inscrutable? Compared to what?
Very much the puff piece of someone living in a social media bubble. The real problem is how the fediverse is going to survive the onslaught of laws related to social media age verification, data retention, data privacy, data not-privacy (breaking e2e encryption and retaining data for a really long time to spy on users), etc. There are a lot of problematic laws right now, but the velocity of new laws is alarming.
One can make an argument that compliance is possible -- but it isn't free. I don't see how small, independent websites will survive. Operators chose not to follow the laws (which sometimes conflict with each other.) As long as you don't scale too much or the operators or anonymous they can probably get away with it.
I use Mastodon. I use Twitter. Twitter is still fine as long as you keep your follow list clean. That means unfollowing people who post noise, which somehow people haven't figured out 17 years later?? Only view the chronological feed. Could this all have just been RSS feeds? Probably.
>sfba.social
Seems pretty cool TBH
He asserts to being wrong about the Fediverse being as bad as all the rest, because the Fediverse is full of real people instead of corporatized bullshit.
The win for mastodon is that it's a choice to view those feeds at all. Some have none by default (e.g. librem.one), you only see who you follow. Same with bluesky. "Discover" is there by default, but can be removed. It's a tad annoying in some places, like when your feed is "empty", they still show it at the bottom, but it's a big banner which, for me, is a perfect indicator to stop scrolling. You can also hide "Trending Tooics".
Thank you for your opinion.
Why would I be interested in random people's opinions on various things?
I wasted a few minutes of my life reading this rant. It was a total loss. I haven't been entertained by it and I couldn't find anything useful in it. Just the ramblings of a bitter person with which the Internet is filled.
Says the person commenting on a site where random people give their opinions about various things..
“So when Twitter was accidentally purchased by a fascist high on ketamine” was enough to predict the rest of
Ok random person with opinion on a thing.
> Just the ramblings of a bitter person with which the Internet is filled.
https://mirror.forum [0]
[0]:(I recently bought it and it was idling around, your comment made me think what I should add on it so I did. I hope you evaluate that you were being bitter in your comment as well)
> Why would I be interested in random people's opinions on various things?
Sadly, if you are asking such question, I don't think that the blog post was intended for ya.