I think a better title & question would be, "Why is Mastodon struggling to thrive?"
It's surviving no problem, but it's not thriving for a multitude of reasons. Some are pretty well covered across comments here & in the linked discussion, and are more or less reiterations of prior discussions on the matter.
Ultimately I think as much as many of those reasons are correct, the biggest reason is the same as ever: network effects. All the jank and technical details could be endured and adjusted to if there was sufficient value to be had in doing so, i.e. following accounts of interest/entertainment, connecting with friends, etc. That's proven to varying degrees by those that have stuck with Mastodon. In turn, however, it's also clear by how many bounce off that for many there's still insufficient value to be found across Mastodon instances to justify dealing with all the rough edges.
If Mastodon had enough broadly appealing/interesting people/accounts across its instances, people might deal with the various technical and cultural rough spots the same way they deal with similar on other social networks they may complain about yet won't leave. There still aren't enough of those sorts on there for many though, so Mastodon simply survives but doesn't thrive.
Yes but no. Due to architectural differences, federation under AuthTransfer protocol is simply different compared to ActivityPub. In its own terms it is federated as individuals' data is stored in personal data servers (PDSs) connected to a relay, which currently is only the Bluesky relay, that roughly speaking connects them to other personal data servers.
You can technically operate your own personal data server apart from those operated by Bluesky, but I think it's fair to say the vast majority on there don't. It's not clear yet, apart from fully holding your own data, how useful it is to operate your own given you only have one relay to use anyway at the moment.
So even in its own terms Bluesky really isn't federated in much of a meaningful sense yet. The problems are twofold: a major part of their pitch is making federation Just Work™, keeping the underlying tech out of mind to mitigate confusion, but you can't have your cake and eat it too here. Eventually, if you're really committed to meaningful federation, you have to teach people about the value of operating their own personal data servers, at minimum, otherwise what was the point in separating it out in the architecture?
Problem is, that goes against their pitch to their audience and spoils the appeal. It's telling a good joke only to kill it by explaining to the one person that went, "I don't get it."
Secondly, they've already upfront said that relays may be cost prohibitive for many people to operate, resulting in only a few ever being spun up. If that remains the case and is true, then even if a few were spun up, that's not any more federated or distributed than the rather consolidated web we see now. How much of a difference would it make if the social web was running on AuthTransfer and the major relays were owned and run by Meta/Facebook, Twitter/X, and Google?
Congrats you have your own data in a personal data server...But are you really the one running it, or did you just opt into the PDS entryway offered by Facebook/Twitter/Google/etc. because sorry, what's that about a server?
A variation on the game on the internet would arguably be avoiding sharing clickbait, wannabe viral posts, e.g. LinkedInLunatics' absurd posts promoting a business or work expectations, and other variations of attention grabbing nonsense, i.e. mis/disinformation.
Not sharing attention bait at all, and not giving it further attention, is a way to successfully play this form of the game. However, by its very nature, many often can't help but occasionally share content of this form, wittingly or not, and in turn are frequently losing this game.
Unilulalezooing is truly an art.
Any of you that celebrate Halloween already up to anything? Movie marathons/rewatches, books/short story reading/rereading, playing/replaying games, or whatever else?
Also, for those wanting to share spooky vibes, you might check out the following communities: !spooky_memes@lemmy.world !witchymemes@lemmy.world
Found myself revisiting this article the other day, sort of on accident, as I was trying to look up software that was somewhere between server and local in its functionality. The ideas laid out still appeal to me as someone that likes to handle my own data more, but doesn't necessarily like to fuss with server software & configuration (if I can help it).
A new generation of collaborative software that allows users to retain ownership of their data.
> Cloud apps like Google Docs and Trello are popular because they enable real-time collaboration with colleagues, and they make it easy for us to access our work from all of our devices. However, by centralizing data storage on servers, cloud apps also take away ownership and agency from users. If a service shuts down, the software stops functioning, and data created with that software is lost. > > In this article we propose “local-first software”: a set of principles for software that enables both collaboration and ownership for users. Local-first ideals include the ability to work offline and collaborate across multiple devices, while also improving the security, privacy, long-term preservation, and user control of data.
As of writing this comment, it's the first/most recent post on there of her with her hair dyed pink. It's a carousel post, so whoever screenshotted this did so after flipping through a few of the other photos.
If the option isn't appearing [on going to the post], it likely means the user created the community. In that case you could try DMing them and sorting out the matter if they're still active or, in the event they're not, contacting the admins and I think they may be able to handle it.
Edited for clarity due to skipping steps.
I’m pretty sure it used to be easier to get people to move to new things like new forums, Xfire, Ventrillo
In some respects it was somewhat easier to get them to be on multiple platforms instead of moving. Think of the original messenger proliferation, where sometimes people would be on IRC, XMPP, AIM, ICQ, MSN Messenger, or etc. so much so that you had software like Pidgin and Trillian to help consolidate server/chat rooms and friends lists to more easily chat with all your contacts.
Even with Ventrilo, I remember being open to also switching to Mumble or vice versa if there was some hiccup with either.
Thing T. Thing may be thrilled to learn of their new robotic peer
There's also some of their business strategy, e.g. Super Mario 3D All-Stars limited release, low production runs of Amiibo, and so forth.
There's this for corporations across the board:
!fuckcorporations@lemmy.world
For Nestle specifically:
!fucknestle@lemmy.world
Edit:
For the occasional venting there's also:
!vent@lemmy.world
If this idea was successful enough, I think I'd like to see sets from other scenes, like the fight upon the cliff, and going through the deadly swamp.
Gradually we've been seeing the tv and movies or shows and movies communities pick up activity, which is good, and the multiple games communities each seem to be doing okay too.
Entertainment
However, there remains kind of an awkward spot where there's not exactly a general entertainment community (outside of Beehaw, that is) from what I can tell. There is an existing community, !entertainment@lemm.ee, though that someone could try to pick up and make active.
This could serve as a catchall for some of the more business-oriented news and some of the fluff celebrity chatter, depending on how one wants to go with it. Worth noting for celebrity chatter there is also !popculturechat@sh.itjust.works though.
Music
In a similar vein, while there's a variety of music communities, there's only a few generic ones, with the largest outside of Beehaw and Hexbear being the largely undefined Music community on Lemmy World. The lack of definition, that is, no sidebar guidance on what the community may be used for, makes it unclear what the community's expectations/preferences for posts are.
As with entertainment, this could be where more music business news could find its home, alongside some band chatter. Although as with entertainment, there's a music-themed community for the chatter to be found at !popheads@poptalk.scrubbles.tech for those interested.
Sports
Likewise with sports, there's a ton of different sports communities, but only two large generic communities to be found on Beehaw and Hexbear (supposing Lemmyverse is accurate). Before any of the more specific sports communities can gain more activity, I think it'd help to have a generic sports community to help people get oriented and find likeminded folks to form whatever specific communities they'd like.
Much like the first two, this could be for sports news and chatter...But unlike the first two, I can't find any generic fluff sports star/team chat communities.
Ideas on How and Where to Organize
In each of these cases regarding broader communities, I think following a similar organizational approach to Beehaw could be a good idea, but they would be better suited to instances more openly federated and not at as much risk of defederation. A few Lemmy instances that come to mind for this are Lemmee, ShitJustWorks, Lemmy Zip, and perhaps Reddthat?
I'm not sure where Mbin instances are in terms of federation smoothness and stability, otherwise I might suggest some of them. On a different note, if there were more Piefed instances I might suggest them, but last I checked the flagship seems to still be the largest and isn't open for community creation.
---
In short: there's good opportunities for broad, generic topic communities for entertainment, music, and sports on more widely federated instances. At the same time, even where these communities may exist on some widely federated instances, opportunity remains for more clearly defined variations of these communities to encourage posting with less uncertainty.
Always happy to see more RSS-related tools emerge!
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/20265433
> Canadian National Railway said on Friday that labor union Unifor has filed a notice of dispute to the Canadian Minister of Labor, just three days after initiating negotiations. > > Also known as "conciliation", the notice of dispute can be sent by either party to the Canadian Minister of Labor during a negotiation and typically results in the appointment of a conciliation officer to assist the parties in reaching an agreement.
Yeah, Belgium has its own sordid history for sure. Frankly I wasn't aware of the extent of the abuses by the Catholic church there until reading this article, and unfortunately I suspect one may readily find similar in other countries that have had any major Catholic presence.
Prime Minister Alexander De Croo's speech was one of the most pointed ever directed at the pope during a foreign trip.
> On a brutal day for the frail and aging Pope Francis, the king of Belgium, its prime minister and the rector of the Catholic university that invited him here all ripped into the institution he heads for a spectrum of sins: for covering up cases of clergy sex abuse and being far behind the times on embracing women and the LGBTQ+ community in the church. > > And that was all before Francis met with the people most harmed by the Catholic Church in Belgium — the men and women who were raped and molested by priests as children. Seventeen abuse survivors spent two hours with Francis on Friday evening, telling him of their trauma, shame and pain and demanding reparations from the church.
Yeah...Honestly now that you mention it I never have looked into how they're structured and if that may play a part in them not doing so. What I do know is that I respect their mission and want to see them stick around and reshape things to allow for more organizations like them to exist rather than get snuffed out.
For months a huge iceberg blocked the path of hundreds of penguin chicks but somehow they survived.
> In May a huge iceberg broke off from an Antarctic ice shelf, drifted, and came to a stop - right in front of “maybe the world’s unluckiest” penguins. > > Like a door shutting, the iceberg's huge walls sealed off the Halley Bay colony from the sea. > > It seemed to spell the end for hundreds of newly-hatched fluffy chicks whose mothers, out hunting for food, may no longer have been able to reach them. > > Then, a few weeks ago, the iceberg shifted and got on the move again.
Some bittersweet news, with an important reminder of how much more precarious life is for creatures living on the Earth's poles due to the changing climate.
Two weeks ago the world did not know the capybara from Hoo Zoo in Telford existed.
> A young capybara's escape from a zoo a fortnight ago gripped animal lovers across the globe. > > Cinnamon's Friday 13th flit from Hoo Zoo and Dinosaur World in Shropshire has inspired memes, merchandise, and a song, which staff have on repeat.
> Four additional healthcare workers in Missouri who came in contact with a hospitalized bird flu patient developed mild respiratory symptoms but the virus was not confirmed in any of them, U.S. health officials said on Friday. > > The report from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention brings to six the number of healthcare workers who cared for the Missouri patient and developed respiratory symptoms. > > Unlike previous U.S. bird flu cases this year, the Missouri patient, who was hospitalized on Aug. 22, had no known contact with infected animals. Scientists are watching closely for signs that the virus has begun to spread more easily in people.
> Canadian National Railway said on Friday that labor union Unifor has filed a notice of dispute to the Canadian Minister of Labor, just three days after initiating negotiations. > > Also known as "conciliation", the notice of dispute can be sent by either party to the Canadian Minister of Labor during a negotiation and typically results in the appointment of a conciliation officer to assist the parties in reaching an agreement.
then some steam games would theoretically also be exempt because they don’t use steam drm.
I think the main difference that would arise between these and GOG would be the provision of installers. Even though some Steam games don't use its DRM, they're still reliant on Valve's servers and an online connection for installation. GOG games are reliant on CD Projekt's servers and an online connection for installer downloads, but upon download completion, one may install and reinstall games even while offline.
That's a critical difference in digital distribution, in my opinion.
JPMorgan disclosed that the CFPB could punish the lender for its role in Zelle, the giant peer-to-peer digital payments network.
> Buried in a roughly 200-page quarterly filing from JPMorgan Chase last month were eight words that underscore how contentious the bank’s relationship with the government has become. > > The lender disclosed that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau could punish JPMorgan for its role in Zelle, the giant peer-to-peer digital payments network. The bank is accused of failing to kick criminal accounts off its platform and failing to compensate some scam victims, according to people who declined to be identified speaking about an ongoing investigation. > > In response, JPMorgan issued a thinly veiled threat: “The firm is evaluating next steps, including litigation.”
Title is original from site.
Arguably a better title:
Why JPMorgan Chase is prepared to sue the U.S. government over regulation
The web’s collective memory is stored in the servers of the Internet Archive. Legal battles threaten to wipe it all away.
Note: article may be paywalled if you've read all your free articles from Wired for now. Archive link in that event.
> [...] Against the back wall, where one might find confessionals in a different kind of church, there’s a tower of humming black servers. These servers hold around 10 percent of the Internet Archive’s vast digital holdings, which includes 835 billion web pages, 44 million books and texts, and 15 million audio recordings, among other artifacts. Tiny lights on each server blink on and off each time someone opens an old webpage or checks out a book or otherwise uses the Archive’s services. The constant, arrhythmic flickers make for a hypnotic light show. Nobody looks more delighted about this display than Kahle. > > It is no exaggeration to say that digital archiving as we know it would not exist without the Internet Archive—and that, as the world’s knowledge repositories increasingly go online, archiving as we know it would not be as functional. Its most famous project, the Wayback Machine, is a repository of web pages that functions as an unparalleled record of the internet. Zoomed out, the Internet Archive is one of the most important historical-preservation organizations in the world. The Wayback Machine has assumed a default position as a safety valve against digital oblivion. The rhapsodic regard the Internet Archive inspires is earned—without it, the world would lose its best public resource on internet history.
Note: article may be paywalled if you've read all your free articles from Wired for now. Archive link in that event.
Workers have been sharing videos alleging the precarious working conditions that have allowed the Chinese ecommerce giant to target unstoppable growth.
> In a video uploaded to the Chinese social media platform Bilibili in October, a Shein warehouse worker in southern China with black-rimmed glasses tells the camera he picked 650 clothing items during his last shift—a feat he claims to have accomplished, in part, by not taking a single bathroom break. The worker says the sacrifice would help him reach his goal of earning 10,000 RMB (nearly $1,500 at the time) a month at his job picking and packing customer orders for Shein, the global fast-fashion juggernaut valued last year at $66 billion. > > In a separate Bilibili video posted a few days later, a different Shein staffer says that he is “sweating profusely after picking goods all night,” but he’s grateful, at least, that his team leader is friendly. In a third clip shared to the short-form video platform Kuaishou in November, another Shein worker with long hair pulled back into a low ponytail tells the camera she is having trouble lifting her left hand after completing an 11-and-a-half hour shift at a Shein warehouse. “My first time working in logistics, there won’t be a second time,” reads the caption.
Note: title is drawn from the article, and I'd argue is rather exaggerated given the contents. A better title might be, "A Look Into Shein's Reliance on Gig Workers". Just realized this may be behind paywall for some, archive link in the event of that.
> RT was long known to be government-funded and a source of Russian propaganda. But it claimed to be independent. It hired American journalists, and featured some big names like former CNN host Larry King. The channel’s aesthetic was sleek, modern, and cable news-like. But over the years, as American relations with Russia cooled, skepticism of RT grew. > > Now, the U.S. government has accused RT and its parent company, Rossiya Segodnya, of going beyond propaganda, as part of the Kremlin’s efforts to destabilize democracies and erode international support for Ukraine.
The artificial sensor detects distant objects through ‘tele-perception.’
> Researchers have designed a robotic “artificial skin” that is as unique as the team’s animal inspiration—the platypus. Created by collaborators between China’s Tsinghua University and the Beijing Institute of Nanoenergy and Nanosystems, the dual-sensory system can interpret information not just from direct physical touch, but also through detecting electrostatic changes in the air around it.
Although I'm sharing the Popular Science article for easier reading, I'd recommend checking out the journal article it cites, as it gets into the details of the research. Best of all? Journal article's open access, so from what I can tell by checking between browsers, it's not paywalled!
“League of Legends” is caught in the middle of a dispute between Hollywood’s actors union and an audio company that provides voiceover services for the blockbuster online multiplayer game.
> “League of Legends” is caught in the middle of a dispute between Hollywood’s actors union and an audio company that provides voiceover services for the blockbuster online multiplayer game. > > The Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists called a strike against “League of Legends” on Tuesday, arguing that Formosa Interactive attempted to get around the ongoing video game strike by hiring non-union actors to work on an unrelated title.
Meta could strike deals for “really important” work.
> Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg says there are complex copyright questions around scraping data to train AI models, but he suggests the individual work of most creators isn’t valuable enough for it to matter. [...] > [...] > Zuckerberg said Meta’s future AI content strategy would likely echo its blunt response to proposed laws that would add a fee for links to news stories. The company has typically responded to these rules by blocking news outlets in countries like Australia and Canada. “Look, we’re a big company,” he said. “We pay for content when it’s valuable to people. We’re just not going to pay for content when it’s not valuable to people. I think that you’ll probably see a similar dynamic with AI.”
Social media platform X published its first transparency report on Wednesday. The report is the first since the company was purchased by Elon Musk two years ago.
> The report, which details content moderation practices, shows the company has removed millions of posts and accounts from the site in the first half of the year. > > X, formerly Twitter, suspended nearly 5.3 million accounts in that time, compared with the 1.6 million accounts the company reported suspending in the first half of 2022. The social media company also “removed or labeled” more than 10.6 million posts for violating platform rules — about 5 million of which it categorized as violating its “hateful conduct” policy. > [...] > When Musk was trying to buy Twitter in 2022, he said he was doing so because it wasn’t living up to its potential as a “platform for free speech.” Since acquiring the company that October, Musk has fired much of its staff and made other changes, leading to a steady exodus of celebrities, public figures, organizations and ordinary people from the platform.
Slightly surprised to find the Adulting, Career Guidance, and Jobs communities haven't gained too much traction, or in one case stalled out. Although these communities aren't the most exciting or uplifting, so it also makes sense.
I'm talking about the following on Lemmy World specifically:
Given the second community never went anywhere, it's probably best to instead focus on Jobs if anyone was interested. Unfortunately in the case of both the Jobs and Adulting community, the moderators no longer seem to be active to coordinate with to help the communities along.
In looking about the only similar communities I could find to these were on other instances one might also consider too large or controversial, if not both (e.g. Lemmy ml and Lemmygrad). Given their lack of activity, if there was enough interest they might be rebuilt on other instances with more effort to get them going. However, seeing as that already seems to be something of an uphill struggle, revitalizing what's here might be preferable.
Thoughts?
Finished watching it the other day and if you're into scifi, or maybe more science-fantasy, it's well worth watching! Refreshing to see some new scifi, particularly with a focus on extraterrestrial ecosystems.
Saw by searching that there's nothing about another season for now, which is a shame, but I think season 1 stands up well even as it is.