Just passing through.
Fedidb observes 50k monthly active users. 65% of these are distributed between instances with more than 2000 monthly active users, making up the five biggest instances. Half (51%) are on either Lemmy.world or Lemm.ee, which are the only instances with more than 3000 monthly active users.
A fourth of us are on instances with less than 1000 monthly active users.
I don’t think that’s all that bad. But who am I to say, I’m not even part of the statistic. :)
pff - the real pros can make line go down
That said, I guess people living in countries where the government is prone to censorship might do well to use smaller instances than lemmy.world, as they are more likely to fly under the radar.
Or just switch to a smaller instance if lemmy.world does get blocked, I guess.
FediLab is the app I know of that aims to support the most fediverse services. They claim to support Mastodon, Pleroma, Friendica, and Pixelfed. You could try to sign in with Sharkey as well, who knows.
I use https://phanpy.social/ with Pixelfed and Mastodon, and it works quite well with the two. I believe other services are also supported, but I have not tested it myself. :)
Really good write-up.
RE: Too many cooks:
And that means people who are more likely to be harassed also end up having to do more of the work to prevent harassment.
This is true and a genuine problem, but also a lot better than the alternative, which is the commercial platforms where nobody gives a shit about them and they are harassed on a daily basis with nothing much they can do about it.
On Twitter, community notes were hailed as a success for giving the Community an entirely toothless form of moderation. On the Fediverse, the community has been given real teeth.
RE: Guilt by association
This has happened with several beneficial alternative technologies in the past, such as peer-to-peer file sharing, the dark web and end-to-end encryption.
Nice reminder to spread the word about the wonders of P2P, Tor, and E2EE. Some people will always believe in the propaganda of the capitalists and the authoritarians seeking to undermine these technologies, but they are all very much alive and well, and I think most people are fine with the ideas of having their nude selfies or whatever protected under E2EE.
Likewise, for sure Elon Musk will try to tell people the fediverse is full of pedos. Coming from him, that puts us in the same club as that diver who saved a bunch of children in a cave in Thailand. So in that sense I guess the point about commercial capture is more relevant: I’m more worried when people like Musk pretend to be our friends. But in all honesty, I’m not very worried about that either. I still rock an entirely independent e-mail provider, even after everything Microsoft and Google has done to undermine that technology.
This looks pretty ideal in my opinion.
I think it’s fine as long as:
A lot of people, myself included, are hesitant to take the time to look at content if nobody took the time to manually share it. But for a use-case like you mentioned, for a local community that is too small to be established naturally any time soon, I think it could make sense. Especially for local news — YouTube videos should maybe still go through a human screening before being shared.
That’s my five cents, anyway. :)
If you want to look at things from a different angle, you could also consider signing up for Mbin (fedia.io, kbin.earth) or PieFed (piefed.social, feddit.online).
I guess it might make sense for some people, not for others. It does allow you to see things from a little bit of a different angle, especially in the all feed.
A colleage of mine working in the same field recently made a Bluesky post that I found interesting. The kinda stuff I’d share on a good day.
He got four likes and two shares - one of each came from me through Bridgy Fed. I very rarely get that little on Mastodon.
He has almost 800 followers there. I have less than 200 on Mastodon.
My takeaway is that Bluesky has this potential for posts to get pushed into every feed, but if they fall through the cracks of the algorithm they might go completely unnoticed. So you end up changing how you post in order to please the algorithm, losing yourself in the process.
Mastodon just feels chill to me. And I’m bridged, so I can always go viral on Bluesky anyway, I just won’t be all that aware of it.
Dude, your concept of failure is my dream. I’m happy here.
While it’s excellent that Lemmy is getting some attention out on the capitalist web, I’m not sure I’m personally interested in hearing about what is trending on Reddit in the Fediverse community - for me, Fedibridge seems like a great community specifically for that. But I might be a minority, not trying to be negativistic! :)
It could work. If anyone on Bluesky wants to give it a shot I can make a post to some testing community - my profile is bridged. Not very interestingly so though, as I don’t post microblogs often.
Edit: I just made this post in Mbin, seen here in dbzer0’s Dylan community, and here on Bluesky. Spreading it everywhere certainly worked, if a bridged user wants to respond they can share their emotions after listening to this. ;)
One can post from WordPress to ActivityPub, which could lead to blog posts ending up in Mastodon feeds. Mastodon users can then share, like, and comment.
You cannot, however, make blog posts to WordPress using ActivityPub. It’s for distribution only, like an interactive RSS feed.
I thought for a second if they had finally made Bluesky opt-out. Sadly it looks like we’ll have to wait a bit longer for that. :)
I love ⚝! Wasn’t aware of its existence. It looks more like the full-scale Fediverse logo than ⛦, and also looks a lot friendlier. Big fan.
A star also makes sense in that one of the functions on a lot of federated platforms is to favourite posts, indicated by ☆. So using a star as a symbol for social media makes some degree of intuitive sense, perhaps. In addition to the similarity to the rainbow pentagram, obviously.
Nordmann bosatt i Danmark! 🤝
Speaking of occult meanings, in meteorology, an asterism in a station model indicates moderate snowfall. It all points back to Scandinavia!
I guess there are multiple metaphors possible, but I think it works to think of the fediverse as a constellation of multiple stars, each with their own set of celestial objects spinning around them. The pentagram kinda exaggerates how interconnected the fediverse is - sometimes instances will not be interconnected, by design.
As for my username (as well as my profile picture!), I am Scandinavian and pretty tired of nazis stealing my cultural heritage for their bullshit propaganda, so I figured if I’m gonna be an anonymous antifascist online I might as well reclaim some of my culture in the process.
Sadly that’s not quite enough to remove the association between runes and nazism. ᛟ (family/bloodline) has been completely overtaken by nazis, but I think there’s a risk using any set of runes as a symbol would attract the wrong audiences.
In either case I don’t think any of the symbols would have been well suited. They reflect priorities in Nordic society back then - like bull (ᛏ), moose (ᛉ), and horse (ᛖ). ᚷ can represent a gift, but that too has sadly been appropriated by other people we do not like to associate ourselves with.
I guess ᚹ (joy) and ᚱ (travel) would not be so bad, but they don’t immediately strike me as great symbols for a social media protocol either. Maybe they could be fused with the <> ActivityPub logo to some interesting effect.
I can see how a unicode symbol could be nice - the asterism is just convenient. It’s nice enough, and it fits the metaphor. The pentagram is good for other uses.
I personally prefer ⛧ as the Unicode symbol, but I can kinda see why it hasn’t taken off.
It seems GoToSocial comes with some reservations against being crawled, which is why fedidb had to update their robots.txt. So it might not be included here by design.
Or at least that’s the impression I get from this comment section: https://piefed.social/post/496750
It’ll be interesting to see what’s going on with today’s bump in users. I’m afraid you might be right about the reliability, but then again the GoToSocial instance you linked earlier has now been removed.
I agree - but I also appreciate that all instances of Mbin and PieFed combined currently have fewer monthly active users than lemmy.dbzer0.com alone, which is only the seventh biggest Lemmy instance. So for now it doesn’t make much of a dent whether we’re counted or not. :)