There’s nothing secret about it. They told us up front.

It’s why I stopped using Windows.

It works the same on Lemmy, it’s just that on Lemmy you subscribe to groups, and on Mastodon you subscribe to users.

Groups just forward replies and other interactions it sees to subscribers.

It’s harder to see on a large Lemmy instance like LW, but most of the fediverse is very patchwork. The network of Lemmy sites is itself very patchwork, with the MLs, Hexbear, Beehaw, NSFW, etc. all having different defederation profiles, but the whole space is an incomplete mesh. Mastodon has more themed instances than Lemmy, more very small instances than Lemmy, and a much bigger anti-capital, anti-commerce bent than Lemmy, with many more people complaining on main about other instances rules and federation policies, so if you look, you can really see it.

But the whole fedi project is patchwork by nature.

Most of these communuties using Discord are better served by something that isn’t a chatroom. So, so, so confusingly many of them use them as a store of permanent information. Like a website+forum.

Many times the benefit of Discord is the ability to paywall parts of it with Patreon integration. We need more foss and federated options that do this.

No. But it is a social media site, and people have been conflating the two for twenty years now.

Simplify user sign up. No one cares about servers, and I think this is one of the biggest thorns in the side of the fediverse in general.

I cannot stress this enough. This complaint has to die. It’s OK for the fediverse to not be ready for everybody yet. But the idea that we need to hide the fundamental building blocks of it, rather than retrain people for a different technology, has to end.

Servers matter. Servers are the core elements of all of this. The fediverse is a local-first, small social media space, dressed up as a big centralized one. We have to accept it for what it is.

Users need to decide which server they’ll use, in the exact same way they do when using centralized social media. Only now, they’ll be able to talk to people using other services. Whether you use Facebook or Reddit or Twitter matters. You have to choose which server to use between them. THey have different rules, and different cultures between them. This is true here, too.

Masking the server problem behind auto-assignments isn’t going to work, because the developer doesn’t own those servers. They have no formal relationship to those servers. They cannot vouch for those servers. If the closest fedi server to you is startrek.website and you hate nerd shit, you should not be auto-assigned to it.

If you want to simplify the Friendica signup for your friends and family, launch a Friendica-based website. Give them the URL. Now they don’t need to make any decisions. Just like they don’t for your Discord, or whatever else you may use that’s smaller and personal.

A working mobile app. There is only one app I know of that is not even in beta, and I couldn’t get it work at all. Most people will not use a site if it doesn’t have an app.

Get coding.

Clean up of basic functionalities. Default to the most intuitive and user friendly options (no delete box enabled on posts/comments that aren’t yours, infinite feed on by default, prominent option dropdown to turn on darkmode or different styles, etc). I should not be taken to someone’s page when I click the “follow” button. Following should also be a two way street, and require consent. You cannot see someone’s content on facebook unless they approve your friend request. This is how it should be on friendica. Improve groups. I see they exist, but for the life of me I cannot figure out how to browse or search for them. Stop notifying me after I make a post. I know I made the post, I don’t need to be notified. Develop more appealing UI/UX overall that is easy for a layman to understand and use. Allow editing to show updates without needing to refresh the page. Etc, etc, etc.

Most of these are admin settings. Launch your own Friendica-based website and have at it.

Add expected functionalities. Tagging users, live videos, gifs, reaction emojis, marketplace, public events, unshare, reshare with commentary, recommend friends from contacts, etc.

Tagging works. Gifs work. Marketplace isn’t going to happen, because it’s a whole different product. A bunch of these need someone to support them.

So, start coding.

Friendica is not a social networking site. Lemmy is not a social networking site. Mastodon is not a social networking site. These are web servers that let you run your own social networking sites. Social networking sites that can connect with other small, independent social networking sites, creating an open social web.

But you should not be getting people to sign up to “Friendica”. That’s not a place on the internet.

It’s a technology that drives places.

Remember when forums would be super active with, like, 500 users?

“Millions of users” is a vanity stat. The critical mass needed to keep a discussion group alive is actually quite small – assuming you’re interested in, you know, discussing things. So, how active “Lemmy” is is entirely dependent on which topics you’re interested in.

There are multiple publicly accessible food databases out there. Waistline uses Open Food Facts and the USDA food database, for instance.

It’s frustrating, because a lot of the interesting people to follow and engage with on Mastodon have also jumped to Bluesky, and the fedi crowd continues to crow about algorithms and brain rot, when the biggest reason people bounce off of Mastodon is the other people on Mastodon.

There’s a deep undercurrent of “angry, hostile nerd”. When people started flooding Mastodon in 2022, you could see the binary reaction of “Finally, the recognition we deserve!” and also “you’re in my house now, you fucking normie, and you’d better start acting like it”.

Unsurprisingly, the “fucking normies” noped out, either immediately, or as soon as they had another option that satisfied their objections with Twitter.

But we’re going to wring our hands and bitch about onboarding flows and the great sin of defederation, because it let’s us ignore that we are the problem.

There are several reasons why Mastodon doesn’t work for normal people, but the biggest one is, honestly, Mastodon users. People have shown themselves to be rather inventive in the face of technical limitations, or they’re willing to put up with toxic people for the sake of a great user experience, but you need the people who show up in the space to not experience both negatives.

A lot of Mastodon’s UX is really frustrating, in large part because Mastodon tries to disguise the fact that everyone’s using different websites. People would be a lot more forgiving of the jankiness of federation if they truly understood that what they’re doing is the equivalent of talking to Facebook users from Twitter. But the UI of Mastodon, the language of Mastodon, the layout of Mastodon, the features of Mastodon, and even the ‘marketing’ of Mastodon all try to make it look like the @website.com at the end of everyone’s name is just some frilly flair.

Lemmy has some similar issues, frankly, though not nearly as bad. And Lemmy is a space where I think we will see the idea of talking to people across different websites will really be treated as more core to the culture of the space, because Lemmy isn’t really going out of its way to hide the nature of the space as much as Mastodon is.

Still, I wish the hosting websites were treated as first-class citizens by Lemmy itself, rather than as just the url the ‘communities’ are taking up space on.

Hmm, I think I can live with the alternative Application Menu for now. Thank you!

Maybe I’m missing it, but I’m not seeing anything in these documents explaining how to change how the menu reacts to the mouse cursor?

Can you come up with more examples? Because you’re coming across as “this happened to me, personally, once, therefore it’s run amok!”

No one is saying that defederation doesn’t happen. They’re saying it’s not the norm. And hexbear isn’t the norm, any more than lemmygrad, or poa.st are.

As if development teams choose their projects in publisher owned studios.

But they’re only getting paid for the time a primter would take to print it, because why should she pay for more for less?

Is great until you need a job. It solves the 2 language problem right up until you’re working with others.

Credit where credit is due, if we define a generation as a 15 year period of time, and we decide that Gen Z started in 1995 (for easy math), you do, in fact, land on 1665.

I don’t know why the author thinks that Gen D doesn’t exist yet, when the pattern of X, Y (Millennials), and Z make a pattern that both implies that the Latin alphabet’s use is coming to an end for this purpose (ignoring that Gen X was named not as part of a sequence of letters, but by Douglas Copeland’s book, which was titled itself using an existing phrase), and that can easily be extrapolated backwards through time.

Damn, five figures. Nice! 912800 here.

I had the app on my phone, just to check in on my friendslist. None of them had logged on since about 2004 or so, at the latest.

Honestly the most impressive part of LLMs is the tokenizer that breaks down the request, not the predictive text button masher that comes up with the response.

Yes, exactly! It’s ability to parse the input is incredible. It’s the thing that has that “wow” factor, and it feels downright magical.

Unfortunately, that also makes people intuitively trust its output.

It “knows” as in it has access to the information and the ability to provide the right info for the right context.

It doesn’t, though, any more than you have access to the information in a pile of 10 million shredded documents.