cross-posted from: https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/2271023

This was born out of a couple of comments I left on peoples posts of them asking for a clear explanation of key fediverse concepts and them saying the explanations made things a lot clearer for them.

There are a lot of people who learn better with long form explanations they can go over as many times as necessary that short explanations or graphics don't really work for.

Its all text, written with real world non techy examples to reach people who might not be technically minded at all. At the moment there's just one article but I aim to fill it out a lot more.

I've only just applied the SSL certificate so if you get a warning that's why but its only markup, styles and 2 js functions to scroll the page and change the mode/theme so there's nothing dodgy going on.

I recently made a new account on lemmy.blahaj.zone, because I’ve been harassed and doxxed on my old account and I wanted a fresh start with a more lighthearted online identity that I could be more open about my gender identity on. I’d heard blahaj zone was good for trans people, so I made my account there. And yeah, autism@lemmy.world removed my post discussing neuronormativism from a queer perspective, but I hoped maybe “the trans instance” would be friendlier to trans people.

A couple days after making my account, I saw someone on Blahaj engaging in the tired old cliche of “I hate politics, there’s no politics on my social media and I want to keep it that way!” Well we’ve all heard the joke that the two races are white and political, the two genders are male and political, and the two sexualities are straight and political. Hatred of politics is a transphobic, sexist, and racist trope. And having sufferred harassment and abuse from people inside the queer community who “hated politics” and saw trans or nonbinary or xenogender identities as political, I knew this kind of speech was going to make bigots feel comfortable saying they also hate politics, and they think us trans people are it.

So, I responded to the transphobia. I started out by attempting to educate them on what politics actually means. But I was interrupted by the Blahaj admin Ada, who told me that politics is “anything I disagree with”, and that indeed politics isn’t welcome on Blahaj. This language was deeply triggering of my past issues dealing with abuse, and I knew from past experience this sort of thing is said by people who are getting ready to say some enbyphobic or racist hate speech. It is especially common for white queer people to talk this way to BIPOC queer people. I tried to reason with Ada, explained the history of the cliche, the trauma it’s caused many trans people, and the consequences this kind of speech will have on the community here, making us all less safe.

Ada wasn’t having it. She minimised my concerns by reducing them to my personal trauma while ignoring my wider concerns for others’ safety, and weaponised my PTSD to paint my opinions as invalid because I am mentally ill. She said she owns Blahaj, and she gets to do whatever she wants with it, and nobody is allowed to express a differing opinion, even one that protects trans people, because that’s politics. At the time I thought her concern was me speaking directly to transphobes and making them feel uncomfortable by calling out their actions, so I said I’d just report it instead, and she banned my account.

This behaviour protects transphobes, WILL lead to trans and BIPOC people being harassed on this instance, attacks and gaslights victims of trauma (my concerns can’t be valid because I have a mental illness), and forces out any trans person with a commitment to safety for the community.

The thread where all this happened: https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/comment/2143969

This is shameless self-promotion, but part of a working theory I have that Mastodon users have more to offer Lemmy than your average Reddit user. See my other post about it here: https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/2174573

TLDR: Mastodon users are inherently active posters and already understand federation. Also there are MILLIONS of them.

Please consider following if you'd like to get more Lemmy in your Mastodon feed or more Mastodon users in your Lemmy feed!

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/3823167

And now something certainly no one asked for: a new Marketing Concept for Mastodon! Let’s face it: the bird icon and the whole birdy concept of Twitter was perfect marketing. It just was. Its so effortless, casual and simply fun. And now that Elon Musk gave it away - why not claim it for the Fediverse? The moment is almost too perfect. But for that, we would need a new name, concept, icon, everything. Birds could be a good theme here. Not one, a whole sky of them. Mastodon always was about community after all. And I think it would also provide a more seemless transition from let-down Twitter-users. Marketing works through stories. The story here: Twitter-Bird Larry still lives, he is just chilling in Rio with all these other birds instead of being stuck in his old cage. Its now that he is actually free.

What do you think of this? I mean Mastodon's mammoth is cute but it’s not perfect. It doesn’t include in itself or through an underlying analogy how Mastodon works and feels on a daily basis, which many great product concepts do. For example, Docker: you have the whale with the containers in the icon, now you already kind of know how docker works. That's very good. With the mammoths at Mastodon - no one ever really got what they were standing for, right? Except for being extinct, which is not exactly uplifting to begin with. And they also didn't tell any story.

On the other hand: who doesn’t love free birds? I really like the idea of freely choosing the nest from which you want to participate in the overall bird-conversation. And while freedom is a politically loaded term, it nonetheless marks a key weakness of X as well as Threads: you haven’t the freedom there to change your provider, which can be seen as a basic human action: voice or leave. We are THE Twitter-platform where you are free to choose your provider and actually do the leaving. This is the one thing that isn’t possible of any of the other Twitter-like-platforms. And that's our unique feature.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/3764678

Do you think this fediverse-analogy is any good for telling people about the fediverse?

(FYI: I'm not a native speaker so please bear with some potential grammatical errors)

I keep trying to add banners to my communities, but get errors about size limits etc.

help appreciated.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/3804525

Wow, things have changed since I last posted in /c/fediverse. Here are the top five most active instances based on monthly active users:

• lemmy.world: 19516
• lemm.ee: 3779
• lemmy.ml: 2970
• sh.itjust.works: 2355
• feddit.de: 2293

Source: https://the-federation.info/platform/73

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/3802741

Several years in the making, GitLab is now very actively implementing ActivityPub! 🙌

The end-goal is to support AP for merge requests (aka pull requests), meaning git.alice.dev can send a merge request to gitlab.com/Bob/project.git

In the most expansive version of this vision, anyone running an AP-enabled git instance (with one or more repos) can send MRs to another instance’s repo, without having to sign up there.

For starters this will be GitLab-specific, but that’s already huge for self-hosters of GitLab who currently don’t benefit from the internal interop of the GitLab.com network.

First bite-sized todo on the implementation path there is ‘subscribe to project releases’. And yes, they are aware of ForgeFed and will likely make use of that spec for the advanced features of this epic.

Smart move by GitLab; through ActivityPub they’re getting a distributed version of GitHub’s social layer.

Hugely impactful as a way around GitHub’s moat as the de-facto social network of open source development. I follow hundreds of developers on GitHub, though mainly just to keep track of who I’ve interacted with, effectively adding them to a dev-specific address book.

I have a much harder time keeping track of non-GitHub devs on alt platforms, but if I could follow them on the fediverse that’s actually preferable over GitHub’s proprietary follow list.

Cross-posted to Mastodon: https://writing.exchange/@erlend/110949168258462158

For those that have poked around other fediverse stuff beyond Lemmy, and been around the spaces awhile, what's stuck out to you as stumbling blocks, or basic user experience fumbles? Which parts do you think may be technical, and which may be cultural?

Is it possible to send private messages from lemmy to mastodon or other fediverse apps

I tried it using voyager and didn't recieve any messages from mastodon see screenshots Is it possible to send end to end messages from lemmy?

 If not how would .sup work (The fediverse im by pixelfed). Any guess how would they implement encryption

Anyways i'm waiting for sup and their suprises : )

When joining or returning to a service with potentially hundreds of servers, it's possible to get mixed-up about what part of the network you joined on. Pixelfed has a handy new feature to put you on the right path again.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.basedcount.com/post/114721

My humble takes on the most popular Lemmy instances, or "how to piss off the whole Fediverse with a single meme".

Here are the links to each one of the mentioned instances:

Far Left	Centre Left	Centre Right	Far Right
Lemmygrad			Exploding Heads
Hexbear	Lemmy.ml	Lemmy.world
Beehaw	Pricefield Lemmy	Based Count	sh.itjust.works
Blåhaj Lemmy	Divisions by zero	Lemmy NSFW	Hack Liberty

Reinvestment

Regardless of where the loss in users is coming from the major takeaway here is that we are firmly in a reinvestment phase. This will likely last until Reddit does something stupid related to the IPO but in the absence of that we will probably not see a significant uptick in growth again without major improvements to the threadiverse as a whole. That means that those of us who are personally invested in the growth of the threadiverse should be taking this time to develop the tools and features necessary to weather the next wave more gracefully than the last.

Niche Community Growth

One of the biggest issue I see here is still community growth. Growing certain communities is significantly harder than others and if you don’t have a lot of crossposting potential it can be damn near impossible. As it stands, I do not see a way to fix this situation without a hot and active ranking system that takes into account the number of users active in the particular community. As part of a change like this I think we would be best served by consolidating a significant portion of the small dead communities. I think we should also strongly prefer specialized instances like lemmy.film or literature.cafe to truly take advantage of the special attention these sorts of instances are capable of providing particular topics. As it stands only a handful of them have enough broader threadiverse activity to be truly useful.

Recruiting From Mastodon

At this point it seems like we are unlikely to pull a significant amount of users from Reddit without more reddit-policy-driven migration, but there are tons of highly educated and engaged users over on Mastodon that would make serious positive contributions to the tone and quality of the discourse over here. For some reason there seems to be minimal overlap between the two communities and that blows my mind. Not only that but I actively see folks disparaging Mastodon in fediverse related communities on a regular basis (and even sometimes in the Mastodon communities themselves). As far as I can tell, these are largely lingering sentiments from a Reddit/Twitter dichotomy. Remember, as things develop the lines between threaded social media and microblogging are likely to blur. A significant number of Mastodon apps already provide a threaded view and one of kbins explicit goals is very much to bridge the gap. With this in mind, Mastodon (and federated microblogging more generally) seems like the best source for new potential users.

TLDR

TL;DR: What I’d like to particularly emphasize here is the focus on Mastodon user recruitment. They are far more likely to both improve the quality of discourse here and contribute to community building than your average reddit user. Not to mention they can already be active from their existing accounts. The barrier for entry is nil. I think a valid strat to go about this is to advertise existing specialized instances to their existing equivalent communities on the microblogging fediverse. This solves both the problems of growing the specialized instances from 0 and making their discourse substantially different enough to warrant specialized instances in the first place. Things like:

• #bookstodon to literature.cafe
• #monsterdon to lemmy.film
• #climateemergency to slrpnk.net
• #histodon to some equivalent of ask historians (This is probably the only way we’d get the experts needed)
• Any of the many art tags to lemmyloves.art

There's been an ongoing debate about whether communities should combine or stay separate. Both have significant disadvantages and advantages:

Combine:

• Network effects. Smaller communities become viable if they pool together their userbase. Communities with more people (up to a point!) are generally more useful and fun.
• Discoverability. Right now, I might stumble on a 50 subscriber community and not realize everyone has abandoned it for the lively 500 subscriber community somewhere else, maybe with a totally different name.

Separate:

• Redundancy. If a community goes down, or an instance is taken down, people can easily move over.
• Diffusion of political power. Users can choose a different community or instance if the current one doesn't suit them. Mods are less likely to get drunk on power if they have real competition.

This isn't an exhaustive list, but I just want to show that each side has significant advantages over the other.

Sibling communities:

To have some of the advantages of both approaches, how about we have official "sibling communities"? For example, sign up for fediverse@lemmy.world and, along the top, it lists fediverse@lemmy.ml as a sibling community.

• When you post, you have an easily accessible option to cross-post automatically to all sibling communities. You can also set it so that only the main post allows comments, to aggregate all comments to just one post, if that's desirable.
• The UI could detect sibling cross-posts and suppress multiple mentions of the same post if you're subscribed to multiple sibling communities, maybe with a "cross-sibling post" designation. That way it only shows up once in your feed.
• Both mod teams must agree to become siblings, so it can't be forced on any community.
• Mods of either community can also decide to suppress the cross post if they feel it's too spammy or not suitable for cross discussion.
• This allows you to easily learn about all related communities without abandoning your current one. This increases the network effects without needing to combine or destroy communities.

Of course, this could be more informal with just a norm to sticky a post at the top of every community to link to related communities. At least that way I know of the existence of other communities. I personally prefer the official designation so that various technologies can be implemented in the ways I mentioned.

Hello everyone,

Opening this thread as a kind of follow-up on my thread yesterday about the drop in monthly active users on !fediverse@lemmy.ml.

As I pointed in the thread, I personally think that having some consolidated core communities would be a better solution for content discovery, information being posted only once, and overall community activity.

One of the examples of the issue of having two (or more) exactly similar Fediverse communities (!fediverse@lemmy.world and !fediverse@lemmy.ml ) is that is leads to

• people having to subscribe to both to see the content
• posters having to crosspost to both
• comment being spread across the crossposts instead of having all of the discussion and reactions happening in the same place.

I am very well aware of the decentralized aspect of Lemmy being one of its core features, but it seems that it can be detrimental when the co-existing communities are exactly the same.

We are talking about different news seen from the US or Europe, or a piece of news discussed in places with different political orientations.

The two Fediverse communities look identical, there is no specific editorial line. The difference in the audience is due to the federation decisions of the instances, but that's pretty much it, and as the topic of the community is the Fediverse itself, the community should probably be the one accessible from most of the Fediverse users.

What do you think?

Also, as a reminder, please be respectful in the comments, it's either one of the rules of the community or the instance. Disagreeing is fine, but no need to be disrespectful.

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/3443568

(Lots of nested crossposting, but all info is available in the quote below.)

cross-posted (ish) from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/2176471

Hey everyone!

Because of how Mastodon and Lemmy are spread across multiple domains, I made an app for Android to help make following shared fediverse links hopefully a bit easier.

Fediverse Redirect has support for most Mastodon and Lemmy instances, and lets you choose which client you want the links to open in, even if that client doesn't support deep linking. It needs some initial setup because Android is very much not built for one app to have so many deep link domains specified, but it should be easy on Android 11 and later or when using LinkSheet.

Both variants are free and open source and there's support for a bunch of clients already. I'd love to hear your feedback on behavior/UI/new clients/whatever. Keep in mind that a lot of clients don't have a way to send them links, so I may not be able to add support without changes to the client.

Right now, downloads are available through the GitHub releases tab and through IzzyOnDroid. I may put the apps on the Play Store, but I don't think they'll be happy about all the deep link domains.

As with the original post, let me know if this isn't a good place to post this and I'll remove it.

It is probably due to a number of people stopping using their alts after some instance hopping.

Also a few people who came to see how it was, and weren't attracted enough to become regular visitors.

Curious to see at which number we'll stabilize.

Next peak will probably happen after either major features release (e.g. exhaustive mod tools allowing reluctant communities to move from Reddit) or the next Reddit fuck up (e.g. removing old.reddit)

Stats on each server: https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/list

Title. I remember community flairs from the red betrayer and they where immensely useful to me to determine info about others configurations etc. are they something lemmy has discussed adding? If not why?

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/3715524

The beta for groups will release later this week, which won't be federated initially. Federation will be added afterwards.

Looks like it will have some interesting features like videos, polls, and events, as well as moderator tools like limiting what a user can do.

Some links:

https://mastodon.social/@dansup/110931821965407984

https://mastodon.social/@pixelfed/110931868347117511

https://mastodon.social/@pixelfed/110931984467276917

https://mastodon.social/@pixelfed/110932004988109773

A new messaging app is in development, and the project is described as "an open source WhatsApp for the Fediverse."

Also see this discussion: https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/fep-0837-federated-marketplace/3501

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/2491711

I was wondering if there was a community where admins of different instances got together and chat in general about decisions for how they run their instances.

Sort of like an informal U.N. for Lemmy admins.

I posted a bit ago on a different account, and yeah here we are. I actually set it up!

Federation Policy

There are some instances that have been initially defederated from, most of which are just are either toxic or host illegal content across the fediverse. Defederation will only be reserved for spaces that present consistent moderation problems, host illegal content, or are hate filled. Whenever a defederation is considered a post will be made to discuss and gather community input.

Instance Management

So, same deal as over on literature.cafe. If this instance ever needs to go down, I will give at least a 30 day warning prior and make a good faith attempt to keep the instance online as well as be transparent as to why a shutdown is being considered. A financial statement will be posted monthly. This instance will likely cost more than literature.cafe long term, so if you are planning on joining and are able to donate it is greatly appreciated. I also take daily secure backups.

I am attempting to find at least one extra admin for the instance as well, but I at least plan on having a backup "break the glass" admin account like I do have on literature.cafe

Community Creation

Community creation is currently disabled and is only for admins. This may be reconsidered in the future, but if you want a new community to be made please go to !requests@lemmyloves.art and request there. For those on other instances who want to view a current list of communities go to !411@lemmyloves.art

Right now due email functionality on the instance is busted due to the host blocking the ports temporarily until the first invoice is generated for the instance. So, remember your password if you sign up for the time being or just ask to have your password reset if you forget it.

I've been running my self-hosted one user Pleroma (like Mastodon) instance. When I discovered Lemmy I started following some communities from it and also posted some comments.

Since then lemmy.ml makes one request per second to my /inbox url.

Can someone who knows ActivityPub explain why is necessary one request per second always? What are all these POST requests for?

On top of that, is there any way to tell a server or a relay to stop sending information to my inbox? Like if for example I followed someone in that server, but I don't follow them anymore, is there any way to tell the remote server to stop? If I start returning a 403 or something like that will it stop?