Jupiter Rowland @ JupiterRowland @sh.itjust.works

Emergency account of a not-so-average OpenSim avatar. Mostly [active](https

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2 yr. ago

If you want some search that covers as much of the Fediverse as possible, you'll have to make it centralised in some way.

If you want some search that actually always covers all of the Fediverse all the way to instances that have only just been launched for the first time, you'll have to make it fully centralised and hard-code that search into all Fediverse server apps. That way, when you first start your new private instance of whatever, it can immediately connect itself to that search engine and push any and all content on your instance to that search engine.

I don't know how well you know the Fediverse outside Lemmy. But at least on Mastodon, but probably not only there, many of those who have been around for long enough would rebel against centralised search because they don't want the Fediverse to rely on anything centralised.

Also, especially on Mastodon, you have those who strongly opposed the introduction of full-text search on Mastodon itself on the ground of full-text search being used in the Birdcage to find and then harass BIPoC and members of the 2SLGBTQIA+ community, many of whom have escaped to Mastodon because it did not have full-text search! There may actually still be Mastodon instances that run Mastodon 3.x in order to avoid the full-text search that was introduced with Mastodon 4.0.

Thus, covering exactly 100% of the Fediverse (the public Fediverse at least) would even be impossible with a centralised search engine. That is, unless that search engine managed to circumvent instance-wide blocks (you can be sure that places such as tech.lgbt or transfem.social would block the hell out of such a search engine) and ignore any and all kinds of search opt-outs.

(streams) and Forte have very nice user discovery: On your stream page which is always the landing page when you open your channel, there's an area to the left which suggests two new contacts to you. The same thing is on your contacts page. Below the two suggestions, there is a button to a suggestions page which is basically a special, filtered version of the directory. There you get even more contact suggestions. The two suggestions are randomly picked from the two on your suggestions page.

If you fill out your profile, especially the keyword field, the suggestions will improve. Also, the suggestions may include not only users, but also whatever qualifies as a group, because the directory certainly does.

It's basically like Facebook, but more convenient than Facebook has ever been AFAIR. Friendica has had this kind of suggestions since its inception in 2010, and (streams) is an indirect fork, so-to-speak. I don't know if Friendica has a suggestion field up front nowadays, though; I know that Hubzilla doesn't have one unless you add it using the PDL editor (and, please, which newbies dives into Hubzilla that deeply), and (streams) and Forte do have one.

Reason #1: It overloads them mentally. It was hard enough to wrap their minds around Mastodon not being the one website they thought it is.

Reason #2: They got so used to their nice and cosy and fluffy and friendly woolly mammoth being the entire Fediverse, and everything they ever interact with being Mastodon, that everything they (might) have to interact with that is not Mastodon is too much of a disturbance. There being something else in the Fediverse other than Mastodon simply feels too wrong.

No idea, I'm not that deeply into it.

The *keys also had many of the features that Twitter migrants complained were lacking from Mastodon. But trying to talk to anyone on Mastodon about platforms that aren’t Mastodon was a total non-starter. Mastodon is a giant Mastodon circle jerk.

If you see someone tell Mastodon users that the Fediverse isn't Mastodon, they're hardly ever on Mastodon themselves. They're most likely on Friendica which suffers the most from obnoxious Mastodon users, and if not, they're likely to be on Firefish or Akkoma or sometimes on Hubzilla.

The most extreme case I've encountered was a Mastodon developer who tried to convince me, a Hubzilla veteran, that Mastodon is literally the only feature-complete project in the Fediverse. Fortunately for him, I didn't ask him about full text formatting support, permissions, nomadic identity, multiple independent identities on one login, WebDAV/CalDAV/CardDAV or a built-in wiki engine.

But the real issue with Mastodon is that it has a significant population of people who believe it’s a sacrosanct cultural space, and that are very vocal about telling anyone coming into it that they need to learn the local customs or GTFO.

Worse yet, "coming into it" is also applied to everything in the Fediverse that isn't Mastodon. After learning that there's, in fact, more than Mastodon in the Fediverse, many Mastodon users still think Eugen Rochko has invented the Fediverse, and everything must have come after Mastodon.

Thus, even Friendica users who have been around since before Mastodon even saw its very first release are being forced to ditch Friendica's own culture, adopt Mastodon's culture instead and stop using all of Friendica's features that Mastodon doesn't have. And Friendica is five and a half years older than Mastodon. It has its own well-defined culture which is very different from Mastodon's because Friendica is so much different from Mastodon.

It's almost like European colonists vs natives, only that the European colonists didn't assume the natives had entered the previously completely uninhabited land after them.

Musk-boi could “buy” Mastodon, Spez could buy Lemmy.world and ml, and Zucker-bot could “buy” Pixelfed tomorrow, but that wouldn’t stop anyone from forking those platforms and leaving the main instances.

Or going someplace in the Fediverse that's neither Mastodon nor Lemmy nor Pixelfed.

I think in many cases it was never about Bluesky or Jack Dorsey who never really had a saying on Bluesky proper anyway. It was more about keeping the Fediverse ActivityPub-only or even Mastodon-only.

In that light, I think the only reason why there haven't been any calls for totally Fediblocking all of Hubzilla is because 75% of the Fediverse have never even heard the name, and maybe a few hundred people outside Hubzilla know how it works and what it does. No critical mass to be appalled. And Hubzilla not being based on ActivityPub and technically being bridged to Mastodon via its own per-channel bridges would be only one out of many possible reasons to want it "gone from the Fediverse".

Because nobody knows they exist. Especially not on Mastodon. And even less outside the Fediverse, tech media included.

And truth be told, way too many Mastodon users don't want to know. They want the Fediverse to remain what they thought it was when they joined: only vanilla Mastodon.

Really goes to show that Lemmy is full of tech-curious geeks: Tell a Lemmy user about a Fediverse project that's neither Lemmy nor Mastodon, and it's much more likely for the reply to be something along the lines of, "where public instances."

When /kbin was zerg-rushed after the Reddit enshittification, it wasn't ready yet. It was a public alpha. It had five instances, all official, all experimental, only one of them public. I guess the dev had intended to calmly and orderly develop it until it'd be ready for prime-time. But all of a sudden, it was either developing missing features or removing bugs for those who daily-drove it in this state in expectation of it being a stable point release.

I'm on a (streams) instance on which someone else is following pr0n accounts. That instance is small enough (13 channels, including clones of external channels) to suggest them as contacts to me until I've removed them as suggestions.

Only boobs I saw without searching mastodon.social for non-pr0n hashtags.

Curated tits then?

Sorting Hat for Lemmy?

But hardly anyone in the Fediverse, next to no-one on Mastodon and literally no-one outside the Fediverse knows that Misskey exists. Not outside of Japan anyway. Or any of the Forkeys, for that matter (if you're a Westerner and neither an otaku nor a weeb, Iceshrimp or Sharkey may suit you better).

For more Mastodon users than not, the Fediverse = Mastodon. And outside the Fediverse, hardly anyone has even heard of the Fediverse.

Exactly why most Germans only had a @t-online.de address back in the day. The only exceptions were those who needed an e-mail account before they had their own home and their own landline connection.

IMO the success of BlueSky is good for the Fedi. It can take the “let’s be the next mainstream thing” monkey off of its back and just be itself.

Plus, it keeps the obnoxious "But muh follower count" fame whores and the majority of the "Why can't this be exactly like Twitter, I want a total Twitter clone" dumb-dumbs out. They'd ruin Fediverse culture even more than the second migration wave two years ago which was so massive that those who fled back then only encountered each other on Mastodon and hardly anyone who had been in the Fediverse before then.

Still, this chart looks like it's actually counting phone apps rather than providers. Google doesn't have two separate e-mail services AFAIK.

Nobody really actively chooses Apple Mail.

It's just that they buy iPhones, and they want a total no-brainer, like, a phone that's fully set up and ready to use without them having to do anything because it, like, totally confuzzles them 'n stuff. So whichever friendly salesperson sells them their phone also sets everything up for them. Including an e-mail account because they need one for their Apple account, but they don't know if they've got one.

If they buy an Android phone, it's the same, only that they get a Gmail account if they don't happen to already have one.

It actually doesn't.

Install the official Mastodon app on your phone, launch it, scroll past the instance selection box that railroads you to mastodon.social anyway, and it's no more complicated than Twitter. It's just that nobody knows that.

Fun fact: The official Bluesky app has a selection box for a PDS, too. It's no more and no less complicated than the official Mastodon app. Nobody knows that either.

Granted, of course, if you let yourself be railroaded, the place where you land in the Fediverse won't be the bee's knees, and you won't know that there are not only better Mastodon instances (or more Mastodon instances in the first place), but also better server applications than Mastodon (or anything else than Mastodon in the Fediverse in the first place). But hey, it's easy-peasy.

Awful user experience can be anything from side-effects of decentralisation (no, you can't search the entire Fediverse for something; no, you can't even search all of Mastodon for something) to Mastodon's official app being crap and people being unwilling/unable to use an app that isn't named "Mastodon" to Mastodon refusing to catch up with the rest of the Fediverse in features to Mastodon refusing to finally become the 1:1 Twitter clone expect it to be. Mind you, the latter two contradict each other.

Another feature-rich Forkey from before Firefish's first "death" which, as I've read somewhere, must have managed to iron out more of Misskey's original issues than the other Forkeys.