I had no idea of the size and variety of the Fediverse! It has me feeling a bit overwhelmed. I’m enjoying BookWyrm very much; it’s the GoodReads/LibraryThing replacement I’ve been looking for for years.
I love the simplicity of Paper.wf for blogging. It’s truly elegant; I just click the link and start typing. But as far as I can tell there’s no way for others to find my blog or for me to find other blogs on the site. There’s no browse or follow feature. Nor can anyone comment on my posts! Those seem to me to be HUGE omissions.
Have you used any Fediverse blogging options? What are they like? And what other Fediverse services would you recommend? Other than Mastodon, I’ve already tried that (it didn’t excite me).
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I never thought about this indirect upside of using fediverse apps. There is absolutely no incentive to publicity, who the heck is gonna pay me for promoting their book over my BookWyrm? They will make two cents from that.
So when someone publishes something over these underdog app it’s because they are genuinely interested. It’s really refreshing to be able to read sincere opinions from people tbh.
I personally really enjoy Matrix but it’s not really a “fediverse” thing but it is a federated end to end encrypted messaging platform
I personally set it up to use as a messaging aggregator. The ability to scroll past Whatsapp, Telegram, and Discord chats in the same app is hilariously cursed. There are bridges for basically everything. Though some are more complete than others.
Bridging ha also been very effective for showing people the merits of matrix. Opening schildi and scrolling for a bit has made people go “GIVE ME THAT”. Everyone is tired of having half a dozen chat apps just be able to talk to everyone they know.
I’ve been seeing things about matrix more and more and it’s seeming like something interesting. I checked out their website and, like a lot of this stuff, it’s a bit unclear for me.
So you do as you do here and set up an account on an instance and then port everything through it? Does smashing all the different chats into one list have a way to differentiate them from one another? I’m just looking for more about it to help me understand it.
I run a private personal instance. It is federated, meaning I can message anyone else on any other federated matrix node, and they can message me. But no-one can make an account on my instance without a single-use token from me, which I create using admin privileges.
The bridging is done using extensions to the matrix server, in the form of bridge bots. They will create puppet accounts for each bridged user, which they will then puppet to mirror that user for you. You also give this bot access to your external account, allowing them to “puppet” your account to the users you’re talking to, on their respective platform. I run these on my own hardware, same as the actual matrix server, which they talk to.
You can set it up in a variety of ways, but in my case, I made it so that bridged users have their platform appended to their display names. A user from discord appears to me as “Username (Discord)”. That way, even if I have the same person on both Discord and Telegram, I can find and differentiate them in matrix.
If you want matrix for bridging, your own instance is likely the best bet. If for example, you create a user on matrix.org, I have no idea how I’d go about actually bridging any other accounts to that user, as I would not have access to managing the extensions available on the matrix.org instance.
As far as I know, matrix.org and most other instances only concern themselves with communicating between matrix users. The only matrix anything that advertises bridging, is beeper.com, which is currently invite-only. It’s matrix in the backend, I think, and seems to intend to be a paid service for having all your chats in one place.
It’s possible to use the extensions of another matrix server, from another server, but this is not ideal (it comes with some access permission limitations). And finding a server with these extensions set up, and with an admin willing to let you access them, can be tricky.
That said, setting up your own matrix instance is not as complex as setting one up for the fediverse (ActivityPub). If you don’t care about federating, it’s even easier, and you can always enable federation later. You do need a domain, a permanent one. There is no way migrate the domain to another, once a matrix server is set up, at this time. The only way to do that is to literally delete everything and start over. A lesson I learned the hard way…
Feel free to dm me if you wanna know more :D
Just a side note, ActivityPub protocol - the core engine that lets all of fediverse to talk to the rest of the fediverse is… 5 years old. Every feature imaginable is still to be implemented.
its kinda like MQTT for humans rather than machines.
Like what?
MQTT, a protocol so machines can talk between each other. Mainly for IoT devices. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MQTT
Thanks, never heard of this before!
Thanks, that’s good to know! I’ve been wondering where I can make recommendations for features to be added. Although I’m sure the devs are working themselves to death right now.
Some, but it’s open source and a lot of people have day jobs. I’ve wanted to contribute to some things that are annoying me, but after work, exercise, taking the dog out, and making dinner, I have like 2 hours of my time…. so it’s hard to rally.
So ditch the dog, ditch the job, and make it happen. No excuses!
Calckey has the superior feature set to Mastodon by far. When the project matures, it’ll be a force to reckon with.
How is the first I’ve heard of Clackey? Their website is the most inviting one I’ve seen with the Fediverse so far.
The project is only like a month or two old, though it is a fork of a more well-established Fediverse platform (MissKey), so it’s still building up awareness of its existence.
I really liked the misskey that it has custom emojis and a lot of Japanese users sadly i couldn’t figure out a good way to search tags or topics.
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The good news is that they announced that they’re changing the name soon; they have not said what it will be though.
They’ve just announced it! The new name is Microsoft Excel 365.
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I’m trying to imagine a worse name. Since God has a sense of irony, I imagine it will end up being a doozy!
YES! It’s the most imposing name imaginable. And not at all intuitive.
Calckey certainly looks cool and feature rich, but every Calckey instance’s main page alone slows my computer down a lot and overwhelms my eyeballs lol. Don’t know what to do to make that better.
Well, it is a new project, so it probably needs some optimization. As far as visual clutter goes though, I think Mastodon’s quad column layout is much worse about that.
Yeah, I remember when it was first launched and it’s come a long way already.
AFAIK, the quad column layout in Mastodon is based on Tweetdeck. I don’t like it either, but some ex-Twitter users do, so that’s neither here nor there.
I use Ivory both for iOS and macOS, and that’s a great way to browse Masto, IMO. When I’m in the browser though, I do use and prefer the quad layout.
I need to check it out again. I ended up making an account and never using it. Was just something about it I didn’t like, but at this point, I can’t remember what. Lol.
I’ve always felt there are just a lot of features I’m not interested in, crammed into Calckey. I wonder if I can disable those as an admin.
How heavy is it to run? I am waiting for GoToSocial to mature slightly before jumping on to host my own instance, but the only reason I’m choosing it really is because of its lightweight-ness.
so I signed up for a Calckey account (on calckey.world) but content is extremely limited compared to what I see on Mastodon?
for example: if I search for the hashtag #F1 on calckey the most recent post it finds is from a week ago
this whole federation thing is still a bit confusing at times about what gets federated and where, #F1 is pretty popular on Mastodon.social when I search
The server list says that instance has 71 users, so that would probably be why. Posts only show up on an instance if something requests them (users following an account, searching a permalink, subscribing to a community, etc). There are solutions to this problem, such as relays in which servers agree to funnel a bunch of posts to each other periodically to share content. You should ask your instance admin if they have one set up, or if they’d be willing to if not. Otherwise, you should make an account on a larger instance, as those tend to be better federated.
hmm, I guess the responsibility is partially on me to manually find/follow people from other instances to increase the cross-instance federation?
right now I am creating new accounts on all the different fediverse platforms so I can see which UI/UX I prefer, but I would like to eventually use only 1 or 2 accounts if possible
Following users does help increase federation, yeah. Another solution is creating a dummy account that follows a bunch of users in order to pull in their posts.
If you follow folks (shameless plug of myself - like me) on Calckey.social, which is I think a bigger server. That may help! When I moved to Calckey I transferred over everyone I was following on Mastodon
do you happen to have a invitation key to the main server?
I don’t have an account on the flagship instance.
i ended up going with calckey.world, thanks though. it looks really good too
Fediverse is well differentiated into many sites offering similar capabilities to their more well established commercial and proprietary counterpart, and as the time passes these federated alternatives quality is nearing practically the production level, apart from Mastodon and Lemmy which are the most known by now it is worth mentioning also PeerTube (Youtube), PixelFed (instagram), Misskey, Calckey and Pleroma (a mix between twitter and tumblr), HubZilla (facebook), FunkWhale(Bandcamp) and OwnCast (twitch).
Here some handy links:
I use GoToSocial with Sempahore for my microblogging (alternative to Mastodon).
Also Owncast as an alternative to Twitch.
And then I watch tilvids.com and other Peertube instances for videos.
And of course Lemmy. :-D
Oh and then there’s Funkwhale for audio.
It’s all in different states of usability, depending on the communities involved.
I’m still waiting for a really good Peertube instance.
Understandable. But it’s the chicken and egg problem. Creators don’t want to create content, because there’s no consumers. Consumers don’t want to sign up, because there’s no creators.
So are you the chicken or the egg? :-D
If you’re on one you don’t like anymore you could always change instances and watch videos there. If you’re worried about losing comments, well you can comment from other Fediverse servers such as Mastodon or GoToSocial and they show up on the page for the video. :-)
You know what, Peertube needs the equivalent of an acquisition and the perfect candidates would be, and I’m on record saying this before, DailyMotion and Vimeo. They’ve already got content and by implementing activitiypub integration, they can grow their audiences and compete with YouTube for once and for all.
But yeah, for me. I haven’t even found a video to watch let alone comment. That said, my YouTube is generally me watching album reactions, music videos, Hot Ones, Adam Something and Beard Meats Food.
Nothing stopping Vimeo from plumbing in ActivityPun amd joining the Fediverse. It’s open and the only reason no one does is because the data is valuable and they don’t want to share and play nice.
These walled gardens were not how the internet was imagined.
I’ve found several good videos/channels on urbanists.video which is kind of specific to urbanism but still there’s some good stuff. The videos have a lot lower production quality than most YouTube channels, but I actually kind of like how casual it is.
They’re just making videos because they have something interesting/funny/educational to share and they’re not out there trying to make money.
I never understood this ‘chicken and egg’ analogy. Dinosaurs were laying eggs millions of years before they became chickens.
It’s more “which came first, the chicken or the chicken egg”. It’s a useful phrase to describe a situation where two things necessarily depend on each other. Chickens must come from chicken eggs, and chicken eggs must come from chickens, and one had to precede the other.
(In the actual case of chickens, it can be resolved easily - by defining “chicken egg” as either an egg laid by a chicken or an egg which contains a chicken, you will obviously and quickly draw a conclusion.)
It comes down to language no matter how you look at it. Nothing we describe with discrete words is actually discrete. If you think of evolution, it comes down to: when did the bird the chicken evolved from become a chicken? Was there a first chicken, born of not-a-chicken? Where do you draw the line between “chicken” and “not a chicken”? Only when you find that line can you decide “the first chicken came out of an egg not laid by a chicken/not a chicken egg, therefore the first chicken came before the first chicken egg” or “A not-a-chicken laid the first chicken egg, aka the egg from which the first chicken hatched”. Which again is just another, long and roundabout way of saying it depends on if you define the egg by what laid it or what it contains, like you said.
So, “Which came first, the chicken or the egg?” boils down to just an older form of “is a hotdog a sandwich?”
Language requires words, and we treat the words like they have specific meanings to one degree or another because otherwise we couldn’t communicate, but reality isn’t beholden to the structure of our language, or to the structure of the way our brains evolved to divvy concepts up into boxes. Sometimes big boxes, sometimes little boxes, but still boxes that don’t perfectly match reality.
Tldr questions like this don’t have any true answer because the premise that there is a real, sharp border between the concept of a chicken and the concept of not-a-chicken-yet, or between the concept of a sandwich and the concept of a hotdog, is false. They can be fun to argue about, with everyone proposing different but equally arbitrary differences between the two concepts, but ultimately it’s just a linguistic amusement.
Sidenote: the chicken vs not-a-chicken-yet conundrum crops up in taxonomic classification all the time, too, even across present day species. I remember reading a Stephen J. Gould essay ages ago about some lizards; some lived on one side of a mountain range, and others lived on the other side, so the populations were somewhat separated by the terrain and didn’t intermix evenly over time.
On the far end of one side of that range, there is lizard Species A (let’s call it), and on the far side of the end of the range, there is Species B, and Species A and B are obviously different and cannot mate and produce viable offspring, so they’re clearly different species. Except, if you start at Species A’s end of the range and start looking at the lizards between them and Species B’s end, you find a steady spectrum of lizards that look phenotypically and genetically less and less like Species A and more and more like Species B, and which can still breed with each other and produce viable offspring, until at some point you reach Species B. So what do you do, if you’re trying to put animals into species boxes? Even though A is clearly different from B, there’s all these lizards in the middle that don’t fit either box. And cutting them off into a separate Species C wouldn’t make sense either because then you’d still have a species of which some members can breed only with Species C and Species A, but of which others can only breed with Species C and Species B, plus having other differing traits.
You have to pick a place to draw a line to be able to talk about the differences between Species A and B, but that line is always quite arbitrary and artificial no matter where you put it.
Tldr language and everything about the way we use it to describe the world is a social construct, more at 11.
What happens when instances die off, would their comments be deleted and you’d have threads with half conversations everywhere?
I believe once a post or comment is federated it will continue to stay even if the instance it came from is no longer in service. instances are not “streaming” the data to each other, they send copies and store it in their own dbs. So this comment right here will have a bunch copies out there on other instances.
With Lemmy I’m not actually sure. I would imagine that you would be correct. But knowledge is ephemeral and needs to be kept some other way. I think that’s a better choice than some platform that’s shutting down and selling all their data to someone else. Deleting something on Reddit or Twitter or FB doesn’t actually delete it. It’s still in the servers, it’s just not publicly accessible anymore. I’m a massive cynic though, which is why I’ve been on the Fedi for a few years already. :-D
Re PeerTube, as a creator, is it worth it to try an find an instance that suits my content right now?
If you’re putting your content up on Youtube right now, then Peertube can just mirror that content without much work. At least that’s my understanding. I’m not a Youtuber. diode.zone is one I’ve used in the past which doesn’t really have any kind of gatekeeping.
However, I personally enjoy TILVids the most. They’re curated. You ahve to talk to the TILVids admin to get access and he kind of is there to help folks get started and if you take off then he suggests you create your own. That happens with few. TechLore for instance just did this. But he does have a focus on videos that help folks learn things, but even GamingOnLinux mirrors there.
To be fair (and I might’ve said this here on Beehaw/Lemmy although my memory isn’t serving me well atm), I have said that I do want to get into self-hosting stuff sometime in the future but I don’t currently have the resources to do so. Currently just seeing what self-hosted stuff there is right now for when I am able to get something set up. Also I would be open to starting my own instance as a large channel anyway. I’ve also thought about a single-user Lemmy instance that federates and is sort of a forum/discussion space for my content.
Do you have an app recommendation for Peertube on android or ios?
fedilab and newpipe on android
Do I need to create separate accounts on each of those or can I use this one? Can I log in to Funkwhale with this account or get Funkwhale posts here on kbin, or am I better creating a separate account on each “thing”? I’m still very new to this whole fediverse thing…
One of the eventual goals of kbin is to be compatible with the rest of the fediverse and to “just work” with the rest of it. By way of comparison, Lemmy is basically just a federated Reddit, so, this is actually one of the reasons I chose to go with kbin.
From a practical standpoint, it’ll likely be a while before that becomes a reality, but I like that as a goal.
I’d say see if you can search for the instance in the search (once we’re 100% federated) and if it doesn’t work and it’s something you want to participate in, unfortunately, you’ll need to go there directly.
Also - Your kbin.social account can only log into kbin.social, you can’t use it to log into any other sites (this would include other kbin sites, lemmy sites, mastodon sites, etc…), what you can do is see content from those sites by subscribing to them or on the front page (non-subscribed)
I would start using Owncast however, a) my current lease at my apartment prohibits me running a server (because internet is included in the rent), and b) I don’t have any kind of computer to run a server on for Owncast.
Hetzner is $5 a month for a VPS that would run it. And what constitutes a “server”? A server is just another name for a computer.
As someone who is already in debt because of a bad month with work, I’m not sure if I’m able to put out for a VPS. And as for the “server” thing, what I meant was I don’t have a computer I can dedicate to near 100% uptime for running the instances I’d want to.
Got you. Totally understand. I used to be in the same situation. $5/month is sometimes better spent somewhere else. With Owncast you only really need it up when you’re stream. You could do that from your PC you’re playing on, but idk the kind of overhead that’d cause.
Hmm, it looks like people have “live” sites up that are at least reachable and they aren’t streaming currently. Did I misread how Owncast works, or is there something else going on here with these sites?
As for running it during my stream (once I move out of my current apartment), I could have my laptop running Owncast possibly.
So when you go to the page that’s offline, that’s because the Owncast software is up and running as a webserver. I’ve seen some folks that take the entire page down when they’re not streaming. Really only difference is if there’s a landing page there when you’re not streaming or not.
I wonder if it would be possible to set up something that 307’s to a static page when I’m not live
Oracle free tier has been working for me for a while. They are pretty easy with the resources.
Interesting to see that tumblr is adding support for ActivityPub. I wonder if any other legacy platforms will undertake to federate.
Meta is working on an Instagram side project that will act like twitter and will use activitypub. I highly suspect though tumblr and meta taking an interest in the fediverse might ultimately add more people to interact with at the cost of being lousy neighbors
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Knowing what a jerk Jack Dorsey is though, I’m steering clear.
Is he like another spez?
I do hope that Tumblr gets on ActivityPub soon because I do love the idea of interacting with Tumblr posts here on beehaw or on Mastodon, or whatever other thing uses the protocol.
I just tried Calckey it looks more polished UI-wise than any other Fediverse platform I have seen so far. I think Calckey would make an excellent social platform for the public (non-tech) users.
Pixelfed is also an excellent Instagram alternative, it reminds me of how Instagram used to be before the Facebook acquisition. Their iOS beta app is in good shape as well.
Pixelfed just implemented an instagram import feature as well!
And the word is banned on Instagram lol
Free speech and corporate ownership are completely incompatible.
Another good alternative to GoodReads is StoryGraph. I prefer it over BookWyrm because it has a nicer user interface and it has an app. However, I don’t believe it is apart of the Fediverse.
After so many experiences with having online platforms sold out from under me by venture capitalist scum, I’m not inclined to trust anything owned by a corporation or single person. I’m on storygraph, but I’m not going to put effort into it. I think BookWyrm has more of a future. Even if the current owner of StoryGraph has good intentions, you never know what could happen. It seems as if things always go bad.
As long as it’s closed source there’s always the incentive to sell.
Just summed up exactly how I’ve been feeling for a long time now. Starting to feel like I just need to somehow get my technologically challenged brain to make this stuff for myself.
Try writefreely. Its a blogging thing that supports markdown and can look super nice
Is that related to Paper.wf? The wf apparently stands for “write freely”.
Paper.wf is using Write Freely. You can see Paper.wf in their instance list here: https://writefreely.org/instances
Interesting! But do other instances have more features? Paper.wf seems incredibly feature-light. You can’t browse other blogs, you can’t follow them, you can’t comment on entries or receive comments…I mean, it’s unbelievably bare bones. Beautiful, but isolated-feeling. I’m typing into a void!
Is/will there be a movie/TV equivalent of BookWyrm, something to track and discuss what you’ve been watching? A quick search tells me it’s been discussed and seems like something people want but it doesn’t look like it’s been done yet, at least not as a dedicated service. Is that right?
That is absolutely brilliant. I would love something like that. Why doesn’t it exist?
I’ve thought about and talked about this too! We need this!!! Letterboxd equivalent.
AFAIK the problem is there is no good movie database which allows free use of their data
So what? We’ll create one!
Years ago the owners of GoodReads announced that Amazon had taken away their access to the Amazon book database. It was an existential threat, they said, and asked the GoodReads community to volunteer to create a new book database to replace Amazon’s. Hundreds or thousands of us worked for free, donating thousands or tens of thousands of hours to the project.
And then GoodReads announced that they’d sold out to Amazon. Apparently they’d been in negotiations with those bastards the whole time they were lying to us about losing access to the database. Maybe proving that they could sucker their loyal users into donating free labor helped raise the selling price of GoodReads a little.
As for the database we created, I guess it’s Amazon’s now. Of course, if we create a movie database of our own, NOBODY will be able to buy it! And we can make it available for free use, if we want.
Okay, let’s do this. But we need someone to create an Interface and Database
That’s mostly outside of my area of expertise. I work with databases, but not from an app perspective. How can we find people with those skills? Post on Lemmy?
TMDB? Community-built database, there’s an API, seems still active and reasonably up-to-date.
That sounds great!
Wikidata is under CC0 license so I imagine that’d be useful https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:WikiProject_Movies
IIRC the critique was that Wikidata doesn’t provide enough structured data
I thought that was the whole point of Wikidata. But I’ve not actually used it yet.
Never heard of BookWyrm. Excited to check it out! Thanks!
If you have a CSV file of previous reviews from Goodreads or some other site, you can import it into BookWyrm. Look me up when you get there; I’m @BobQuasit@bookwyrm.social .
@BobQuasit I am on Friendica. It is a macroblogging platform, but more akin to Facebook in look and feel (it even somehow resembles the old Facebook, but server admins can add other themes to give it a different look). The feature set is very extensive, and it is way richer than Facebook, tho. You might find it a bit complicated at first. I would recommend anyone to watch this video series to learn more about it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qvOmvEpmgQI
After you learn all about it, you might find it your Fediverse home.
I’ve been intrigued by this one. Might give it a go! Hubzilla also sounds interesting, if a bit hard to get my head around what exactly what it does?
@tunetardis Haven’t tried that already. But their nomadic identity thing seems really appealing
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I tried a few days ago and it’s rough, the guide is lacking a lot of information.
Going to have to give it another go this weekend when I can dedicate more time to getting it to run.
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I’m currently using calckey, works similar to mastodon but with a better UI and UX (IMO), although still in development
Yeah calckey is by far the best twitter like experience
