Mastodon: @mattswift@mastodon.social

  • 0 Posts
  • 21 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 8th, 2023

help-circle

  • There’s no rules for the Fediverse, all it means is that they utilise the ActivityPub protocols to be able to federate with other websites that also use it (there’s others, but basically irrelevant now).

    Mastodon requires OAuth2 for apps to get access to your account because it was designed that way, and Lemmy wasn’t, it’s as simple as that. Any platform can be part of the Fediverse (including Reddit, Twitter, Facebook etc if they really wanted to), which also means that platforms can also do anything they want.








  • In your example, people who have the “bad instances” blocked won’t see the replies under the posts in question, as the instance will not fetch replies from said source.

    With how Mastodon works as well, it won’t fetch replies from instances until they’re known either, so brand new instances aren’t going to flood popular comment sections - this is a bit of a con though in a way, as it degrades the user experience when trying to read threads and causes people to constantly post the same stuff as they can’t see all the replies.


  • The one thing Musk and Spez have successfully done is make themselves scapegoats that leave people believing that everything will be resolved once they leave, so people have hope since there’s a “clear solution.”

    These issues run much deeper than the individual owners and CEOs though, it’s the rot of the companies and platforms themselves, and getting rid of those people will solve absolutely nothing.

    What needs to happen is for people to just switch off and help grow alternative platforms away from corporate meddling. Will it ever become mainstream? Maybe not, but it will never happen if people never try and just give up.


  • I only self-host a MediaWiki website at the moment, along with a PPSSPP adhoc server for said game that the wiki is related to. I want to self-host a lot more stuff, but storage space is expensive, and I don’t really want to leave things running at home all the time either as it will eat into my electricity bill.

    Nextcloud and OnlyOffice are what I’m interested in next, and perhaps a Fediverse platform.


  • There’s been a few comments on here talking about Firefox on Android being laggy compared to Chrome on Android.

    Nobody seems to have mentioned this, but the main reason this is and/or appears to be the case is because Firefox is capped at 60Hz, whereas Chrome will display at 90Hz, making it feel much smoother.

    No, I have no idea why.

    Edit: The above is misinformation after I did some research - it appears that resisting fingerprinting causes the browser to set itself to 60Hz, but this can be disabled to get your screen’s refresh rate, but of course this means throwing away a privacy protection…


  • Yeah it’s weird, there’s plenty of examples of what people would consider “profitable” non-profits: For example Mozilla Thunderbird pulled US$6 million last year in donations alone, with the average donation being US$21, I think.

    Mastodon, another non-profit, while not quite as lucrative, pulls in around £24,000 a month on Patreon donations alone, not counting any outside sponsors or Open Collective donations, and so on.

    Build value, and people will happily support you.


  • The Fediverse as a whole cannot be monetised, censored, or taken over by hostile entities.

    Individual instances can, but they are only part of the whole and not the whole thing, so instances of Elon Musk or Steve Huffman simply cannot happen on the same scale.

    As a fun fact of the day, Wikipedia subsists entirely on charity, so it’s very possible to run things using this model if you provide enough value and transparency for people.





  • Since this is the “fediverse”, it makes much more sense to use general terms than things specific to a platform. There’s already /kbin, and there may be other link aggregator software platforms that appear in the future, and having a standardised set of vocabulary that all platforms can use makes it much easier for everyone to understand.

    /kbin calls them magazines and there’s sometimes been some confusion over the term and Lemmy having communities, even though they are the same thing. All the microblogging platforms on the fediverse for example just have “posts” and “boosts”, there is no specific term for them like “tweets” on Twitter (there was the “toot” thing for Mastodon for a while, but it was quickly rolled back and hasn’t been official for several years).

    Don’t forget that when you post on Lemmy, you’re not posting “to Lemmy”, you’re posting to the wider “fediverse”.



  • I can only answer a couple.

    1. This is by design, due to how federation works. Federation is literally just:
    • Instance A requests information from Instance B
    • Instance B responds to the request and sends it back
    • Instance A follows Instance B
    • Instance B now federates all future posts to Instance A

    There’s nothing more complicated to it, but it does mean that instances cannot know about other instances without being told, as there is no central location that instances connect to in order to find out about all other instances.

    1. Only posts after subscribing are federated to an instance, it doesn’t backfill. An option for admins of an instance to request a backfill would not be a bad option though, but as time goes on, backfilling an entire community could take too much data on instances.

    2. Issue with Lemmy.ml, although when you see Subscribe Pending, you tend to still see things in your feed.