Thanks! “Feckless” is a good description of the admin response :)

This bill can’t pass without Democratic support … but last week, over 50 Democrats voted for it! It didn’t quite pass, but now they’re trying again … so please, if you’re in the US, please call your Congresspeople!

Here’s EFF’s action alert. https://act.eff.org/action/tell-congress-not-to-weaponize-the-treasury-department-against-nonprofits

Mobilizon is a really solid project – thanks for mentioning it @blaze@feddit.org !

Thanks, I’ll include something about Hubzilla’s progress … the proof of concept Faircamp integration is interesting, do you know if anybody’s following up on it?

Great point, I’ll add that.

Agreed, that would have been a much better title. There’s a lot of negativity around Mastodon – the Twitter migration in 2022 is often described as a “failure”. It certainly wasn’t a success, but I see it much more as a missed opportunity.

Network effects are certainly a big deal but every social network has to deal with the issue, and some succeed. Addressing some of the reasons for bouncing not only improves retention, but makes it more likely that people recommend it to their friends. So many of the problems from July 2023’s Mastodon Is Easy and Fun Except When It Isn’t were problems back in 2017 as well … how much progress has Mastodon made? Fortunately other fediverse software’s making more progress, but it’s still frustrating.

There definitely are some great people there. Finding the right instance makes a big difference… unfortunately, almost eerybody starts off on mastodon.social, which for most people isn’t a great choice, and don’t realize they can move – and when they do try to move, they lose their posting history which is annoying.

That was a great comment. It’s frustrating because the fediverse should be good at making it easy for people to find topics their interested in … but it doesn’t work out that way in practice.

Yeah, Mastodon’s interface has a lot of complexities. It drives me crazy when people say “just like email” … here’s the most recent diagram of what posts are visible in your federated timeline.

Yeah, right now the way I think of it is that Bluesky is (conceptualy) a single big instance, connected to the rest of the ActivityPub fediverse via Bridgy Fed (which speaks both AT and ActivityPub). Bluesky’s decentralized in a different way, and the broader ATmosphere (apps that use AT protocol) is growing as well, but it deosn’t really have the same concept of instance.

Good points! Agreed very much about all protocols growing, and that the ActivityPub fediverse is broader than just Mastodon.

https://erinkissane.com/mastodon-is-easy-and-fun-except-when-it-isnt is a good overview (not by me!) of issues that the November 2022 wave ran into. What’s frustrating is that so many of these are very similar to the issues the April 2017 wave ran into!

Release 4.3 did some work on the recommended accounts, that’s good, but the problems start even before that. What instance to sign up to? Most people have better experiences on smaller instances that match either their interests or their geography … but how to find them? mastodon.social is (for most people) kind of meh – certainly not the worst, but it’s not all that well-moderated, and it’s big enough that the local feed isn’t useful for finding interesting people or stuff – and that’s now the default. Also it took over a year to get 4.3 out; I get it, they’re a small team, some stuff turned out to be a lot harder than expected, and they had to deal with a bunch of security patches in the interim … still, that means progress is frustratingly slow.

Bluesky certainly provides another option … when Apartheid Clyde led to Twitter getting shut down in Brazil, there was a small bump in Mastodon’s numbers, but a much bigger influx to Bluesky. Then again Bluesky’s addressed a lot of problems people coming to Mastodon in 2022 had, and Mastodon hasn’t, so if everybody had come to Mastodon instead the pattern would likely have repeated itself and most of them wouldn’t have stuck around.

Agreed that there’s a difference between funding and other kinds of engagement – and a difference between initial funding to get them off the ground. Right now it’s not exactly clear what funding Meta’s contributed and what the longer-term plans are. One of the other polls in the thread was about transparency, and (at least so far) 90% of the respondents are saying that SWF should be transparent about the funding it’s getting from Meta. And, another poll zeroes in on funding and has different options for initial and up-front, and whether or not there are any strings attached.

The Bridgy Fed dev didn’t get browbeaten into anything, he thinks the opt-in approach is better (and I agree). And he’s also said the backlash was probably deserved.

Also SmokeSignal events https://smokesignal.events/

I saw a talk by the peole working on FrontPage last week, they use the Bluesky Relay, filter it down to only see the posts they’re interested it, and have their own AppView. It doesn’t yet have the same kind of intereoperability with Bluesky that Lemmy does with (say) Mastodon; FrontPage posts are only visible to FrontPage. But, there are discussions on how to get beyond that.

Thanks, glad you appreciate it!

There’s a bit more on Mastodon then Lemmy - https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/moving/#migration has the details. But not being able to move posts is a big limitation. And even the functionality that’s implemented has some unpleasant surprises – see https://erinkissane.com/notes-from-a-mastodon-migration

You asked me to help you find the examples and I said no and suggested a technique that might work. It’s an answer, it’s just one you didn’t like. When you told me that you weren’t able to apply the technique successfully, I said

Oh well. It sounds like you’ve got some work to do. The revised version of the article has some antiracism resources, so stay tuned.

Yes, I answered your question, you just didn’t like my answer.

If you can’t find them, then (like many people) that’s a sign you’re used to an environment where anti-Blackness is normalized. So, imagine a Black person reading this thread who’s been targeted by racism on the fediverse. What comments would they think are dismissive of Black people?

It doesn’t make any assumptions about your ethnicity. If you are in fact a Black person who’s been targeted by racism on the fediverse but isn’t seeing it in that thread, it’s still a useful suggestion to step outside yourself and try to reading it as somebody else would,