Thank you! I've been thinking about it a lot, and I think it could be used to solve a bunch of different problems, like importing stuff from other networks, and having everything ready to go before you join an instance.
There's some UX questions that have to be figured out, the last thing I want is some super-cluttered design that asks for a million different options. Also, platforms would need to provide some necessary APIs (for registration and data import) to make it fully useable.
My main critique is just that, within the Mastodon side of the Fediverse, the design is highly misleading about what the feature does. It resembles a normal DM feature, but the message addressing is purely handled by mentions in the message body.
Basically, it's an antipattern, causing people to accidentally mention other people in what's assumed to be a Direct Message. It's less about privacy, more about poor telegraphing of side-effects.
I used to feel that way, but there's so much crap on that timeline, especially when you're on a bigger instance. I used to use it for the exact same thing, discovery. A lot of it is just noise to me now, though.
Well, no, this was just responding to a critique on UX shortcomings, and highlighting how different efforts could solve various problems.
It sounds more like you're talking about one of my previous blog posts, where I was talking about a super-flexible frontend that's basically a pagebuilder. Make no mistake, I would love to see custom profile music and radios! And I agree that accessibility needs to be way better!
I think a lot of people do it because they want to build communities and bring people together. It's easy to underestimate the workload and what kind of problems come up. A big problem is that people start instances, and gradually realize that they're basically stuck running things until they either hand it off to someone else, or shut down.
Her comments cover everything from “trans women are mostly autistic boys who have been gaslit” to “there are only two sexes” to “trans people are unfit to play in their gender’s sport.” However, there are far worse comments floating around out there that talk about genital mutilation and all kinds of other heinous shit.
It wasn't just "I have a different opinion, we can agree to disagree", it was full-fledged unhinged stuff that all followed the TERF playbook.
You'd be surprised, this has always been something of a weird schism within open source. There's a synthesis between socialist and libertarian ideals, the overlap of which is broadly seen as a beneficial social good. So, you get contributors and users that fall on opposite ends of a spectrum. This is just as true for the Fediverse, only the dynamic is much more pronounced, because it's a social network populated by people who got off of other social networks.
Technically, SoapBox and Rebased were forks of the Mastodon frontend and Pleroma backend by an alt-right dev that found some level of success in the alt-right part of the Fediverse. So, it's not completely unheard of.
Yeah, the UX is historically not great. I'm also pretty sure that the federated social layer is still kind of non-existent at this point. It used to be that you could upload your own music and share it, but you'd never see replies from anybody.
It's like someone took a Grooveshark clone, shoehorned federation into it, and then kind of made some features act like SoundCloud, if you squint. But, they didn't really finish the transition.
Generally speaking, I agree. It's just interesting to see a platform force a mechanism into itself that admins can't turn off. The only thing that really bugs me about that is that admins are kind of supposed to have the final say on what their server does, and some of the infrastructure for this idea seems a bit shaky at best.
What's really sad is that the CN dev is actually a super nice and thoughtful dude. In his jurisdiction (Germany) he could've gone to prison after being caught with said materials.
I run Spectra Video at https://spectra.video/. We have gated signups: basically, someone fills out a request form, we review it, the account gets approved within a short turnaround time, and the user's channel gets created.
Yeah, I'd say it might have more to do with the fact that making texts posts is a lot easier than making videos. It's still possible to introduce too much noise, regardless of medium, but there's a lot less friction when the medium is simpler and doesn't require much work.
It would be nice if there was an easy and straightforward way for instances to create their own shared indexes. There's a feature for this in PeerTube, which I guess is supposed to act like instance following + a shared search catalogue. It would be handy to know how to easily make sort of the federation equivalent of a webring.
The devs are also working on a mobile app, which I think is something the platform is sorely missing.
Thank you! I've been thinking about it a lot, and I think it could be used to solve a bunch of different problems, like importing stuff from other networks, and having everything ready to go before you join an instance.
There's some UX questions that have to be figured out, the last thing I want is some super-cluttered design that asks for a million different options. Also, platforms would need to provide some necessary APIs (for registration and data import) to make it fully useable.