Hey, isn't this interesting? Turns out Mastodon is actually way bigger than @gargron originally thought! It seems that its userbase has been significantly undercounted.
By how much, you ask? Well, we're talking about 407,000+ monthly users!
So, with these new numbers, Mastodon actually boasts an impressive 1.8 million monthly active users (MAUs).
But hang on, that's not the whole story. The Fediverse itself is even larger than Mastodon. There are millions of people connecting to the Fediverse through various platforms like Lemmy, WordPress, Firefish, micro.blog, and more! My hunch is that these platforms might also have been undercounted, although I can't confirm it for sure.
@andy Especially when there are people out here like me who became part of the fediverse because we didn't want to be tracked and monitored and counted and analysed. We're invisible to the trackers -- and we're certainly not anybody's product. We don't even have a brand name. These things all represent the very sick dysfunctional world we left behind.
@Stark9837@fediversenews My apologies alt-text. My newsroom right now is me - a 60 year old woman. I'm trying to do 20 things at once and I guess the alt tags on my part have suffered... It's definitely NOT because I don't support this.. It's just logistics at the moment
@fediversenews I'm looking for a mathematician to help me with different formulas to draw an elliptical arch.
Anyone interested? I'm open to discuss prices 🙂
Thank you!
#Lemmy core devs running an AMA on Monday, 7 Aug, 1500 CEST
See post: lemmy.ml/post/2671212
Generally, I think it's valuable for people to be able to get to know their platform's devs and their admins better. So I think this is a pretty cool idea.
Nice! I would have done the same except that mastodon doesn't render/format lemmy posts well at all so it kinda defeats the point, especially as you can't quote-boost to add additional information (honestly frustrating!)
Your link seems to take me straight to lemmy though (??)
The story here, AFAIU, is that it's the same developer porting the app from a reddit to lemmy backend. I've never used it, but android users have been excited for it from what I've seen.
I’m starting a Lemmy group to collect mainstream press coverage of the Fediverse, ActivityPub and the like. When you see an article on a news site or such, consider submitting it there?
The idea is to “crowdsource” a repository of what the world says about us in mainstream outlets that have a significant audience.
The #Firefish word #trademark is registered for NICE classes 9, 41, 42, i.e. computer software and services etc., for the whole of the European Union (and I believe for the UK too, not checked). Server admins in those jurisdictions, you may want to avoid domains containing the word or at least get legal advise before deploying a server with such a domain - this could potentially be costly otherwise.
@choyer@sin@fediversenews to add one more example: gmail.pl was registered to some person and hosted a website for book lovers (that translated into gmail acronym). Court in Poland denied the claim to this domain and Google eventually paid him.
@atomicpoet@fediversenews before last fall, I didn't even know what really was the fediverse. Then I discovered #Mastodon and I've seen some time after that the difference between the network and the protocol which are based on so many platforms in this universe. Journalists have to look at far more than centralized networks and make an effort to understand what is the #fediverse.
@ericdano@atomicpoet@fediversenews what are the specs of your server ? I'm interested in having my own server (but with #Firefish instead of Mastodon).
There are now a few alternative front ends for lemmy and some instances are installing them at alternative endpoints. Check out new.endlesstalk.org too!
m.lemmy.world has also been set up for a mobile PWA (voyager/vger, formerly wefwef).
I think this is awesome!
How hard would it be for mastodon instances to do something similar?
@maegul@fediversenews Thinking about it, maybe the main interface could add a optional and easy to use selection menu. That way we could keep the default to avoid confusion and still add others but it would require both to be installed.
The hottest topic in the #Fediverse right now has to be #Threads, formerly known as #P92 or #Barcelona, the alleged #Twitter killer by #Meta, and what'll happen when it federates with the rest of the Fediverse. So without further ado, here are my thoughts about this.
So why did Meta announce Threads to include #ActivityPub?
Well, it certainly wasn't because they needed a ready-to-use federation protocol. Threads itself will remain a centralised, proprietary, corporate silo with exactly one instance. I mean, when #Tumblr announced to include ActivityPub, this didn't come with the announcement that everyone will be able to run their own Tumblr instance, remember? It just meant that their silo will be able to connect to Mastodon & Co. and quit being a walled garden.
It's more likely that Threads was planned to get ActivityPub support because at least the EU is going to force online services to become interoperable in some ways. And some big corporations are growing cautious of the expected "or else!" So if Meta wants to offer Threads in the EU, Threads will have to be able to connect to something not owned by Meta. So they've decided to include ActivityPub because a) it's ready-to-use, b) it's free-to-use, c) it already has lots of projects and instances and users to connect to, d) it's something Meta has heard of, and e) it isn't Dorsey's #ATproto.
I mean, they could also have played it safe and included #OStatus just to have something they'd theoretically be able to connect to without running into nearly as many renitent netizens opposed to Meta. It'd still pass the #DigitalServicesAct. But they probably don't even know that OStatus exists.
That said, I currently wouldn't be so certain that Threads will actually add ActivityPub. It has never been Threads' unique selling-point. That'd rather be Twitter-like microblogging without Elon Musk or Jack Dorsey at the helm plus one-click registration for Instagram users. Marc Zuckerberg has never wanted to have his own Mastodon. He has always wanted to have his own Twitter. And now that the real deal is on its deathbed, he finally can.
If ActivityPub integration was actually only planned as appeasement towards the EU, it has become completely unnecessary when Threads blew a raspberry and flipped two birds at the #GDPR with its iOS app that phones all your most private data home to Threads and Instagram and Facebook to be sold to the highest bidder. Because of that, Meta is banned from offering Threads in the EU altogether. Why appease to the EU when you're banned there anyway?
So there wouldn't be any reason to be surprised if ActivityPub never came to Threads. After all, #Bluesky has talked big about decentralisation and federation and even the "invention" of #NomadicIdentity (which was actually invented in 2011 and first implemented in 2012 on Red Matrix, known as #Hubzilla today). Bluesky was announced long before Threads. Bluesky was launched long before Threads. And just like Threads, it has yet to deliver. As of now, it's just another centralised, monolithic silo, and third-party developments are the only reason why it isn't entirely a walled garden.
I guess even Jack Dorsey had to realise that it's complete non-sense to create a technological platform for decentralised social networking that's only compatible to itself, save for connectors developed by third parties without his consent. I guess he must have realised just how big and wide-spread the ActivityPub-based Fediverse is and how rapidly it's growing. Decentralising Bluesky now would be like introducing a replacement for e-mail that's completely incompatible with e-mail itself.
In fact, I think that Dorsey had launched the Bluesky project and placed high bets on it before he even knew that the Fediverse existed. And when he found out about the Fediverse, there was no way back anymore. Not without being punished by his investors.
Marc Zuckerberg, on the other hand, knew about the Fediverse when he greenlit Project 92, now known as Threads, for one of its earliest announced features was interoperability with the Fediverse via ActivityPub. That's another difference: He didn't want to compete with the Fediverse, he wanted to connect to it. Whether he actually will, now that one of the main perks of doing so has vanished due to Meta being Meta and the EU reacting accordingly, remains to be seen.
But even if ActivityPub came to Threads, that wouldn't mean that Zuck embraces the Fediverse. He won't. Even if they all used ActivityPub, the Fediverse as we know it now would be direct competition for Threads.
Threads won't tell its users about Mastodon, Akkoma, The Project Still Known As CalcKey, Pixelfed, Lemmy etc. That'd be like Microsoft officially acknowledging that Linux-based operating systems are nice, too, if installed stand-alone instead of Windows. That'd be like Apple officially publishing a list of the top five greatest Android phones with Samsung on #1.
Threads won't tell its users how to migrate to another Fediverse instance. That'd be like Microsoft officially publishing a tutorial on how to wipe your hard drive and replace the Windows on your computer with Ubuntu.
And Threads won't add migration functionality to elsewhere in the Fediverse either. That'd be like Microsoft installing an exporter for personal data on everyone's Windows machines on the next patch day that makes it easier for you to keep your data when replacing Windows with GNU/Linux on your machine.
For a while after ActivityPub has been activated, practically nobody on Threads would make use of it, especially not to connect with users in the rest of the Fediverse. They simply won't know that this rest of the Fediverse exists, much less who exists there. If any connections will be established, they'll be in-bound.
Even these first connections won't come to pass by someone discovering a cool Threads account in their Mastodon timeline. Instead, someone will stumble upon Threads accounts either because they're on Threads themselves or because the addresses of these Threads accounts are published somewhere on the Web, e.g. someone adding their Threads ID to their blog or their website. They'd end up connecting by copy-pasting that someone's Threads ID into their search field.
After these first connections have been established, it will still take very very long for the Threads users to discover that there's a Fediverse beyond Threads. No, really.
For comparison: Many of you came into the Fediverse through mastodon.social. And I dare say that a great deal of those of you did not know anything about decentralisation and instances and all that stuff at that point and instead believed that they had joined another centralised walled garden like Twitter. Someone has told me a while ago that some people who came in through mastodon.social took three months to even notice that Mastodon is decentralised, that many of the toots in their timelines come from someplace else than mastodon.social.
It takes new Mastodon users even longer to discover that there's a Fediverse beyond Mastodon. From my experience, that's often three to six months. There are three major ways for Mastodon users to find that out.
One, you stumble upon a post that mentions Fediverse projects that aren't Mastodon, and that mentions that they're Fediverse projects and connected to Mastodon.
Two, you post something that implies or out-right claims that the Fediverse is only Mastodon, and someone comes and tells you otherwise in the comments.
Three, you discover weird-looking posts in your timeline that can't possibly come from Mastodon with way over 500 characters, strange-looking mentions, strange-looking hashtags etc. If you inquire whoever wrote that post about it, they'll tell you they aren't on Mastodon, but on an instance of another project which is nonetheless connected to Mastodon.
It'll be very similar on Threads, but on a much greater scale with a much bigger timeframe. I guess many Threads users may spend years without even encountering a post from outside. Most will spend many months. And I'm not talking about actually noticing that the post in question did not originate on Threads.
Unless Threads will actually slam account IDs with non-Threads domains on them into its users' faces, I think one element that Threads users will notice will be hashtags which Threads doesn't have, but which I don't expect Threads to strip out entirely like Mastodon strips out any and all text formatting. Thread user: "Hey dumbass, this ain't Twitter, Threads doesn't have hashtags!" External user: "But Mastodon has them. I'm on Mastodon and not on Threads." Thread user: "What's Mastodon, and WTF are you doing on my timeline then?!" External user: "[Fediverse explanation noises]" And even this will only lead to one more Threads user knowing about the rest of the Fediverse. Out of hundreds of millions.
The difference between mastodon.social and Threads is that new arrivals on mastodon.social are left uninformed about what Mastodon is and how it works to make on-boarding easier than if they were educated about decentralisation and instances and other Fediverse projects and then left to choose the project and the instance themselves. Threads users, on the other hand, are left believing that, beyond being a centralised silo, Threads is a walled garden with no connections to the outside world whatsoever. To be fair, it is one right now and will remain one for the foreseeable future. mastodon.social doesn't try to pretend to be a walled garden. And Mastodon itself only does so a little by hardly, if ever, acknowledging the rest of the Fediverse.
If Threads users should actually set out to discover the rest of the Fediverse and make connections to there, the impression they get from the Fediverse won't be too positive. That's because two out of three Fediverse instances will be inaccessible to them due to having blocked Threads altogether. From the point-of-view of a Threads user who has always put full trust and faith into all Facebook/Meta products and never used anything decentralised before, believing that even e-mail is a Microsoft or Google or Yahoo! product, the Fediverse will appear as nothing but a bunch of entitled arseholes.
It certainly won't help that the [Fediverse explanation noises] won't include, "This is all just hackish amateur stuff rather than professional corporate software development, and we're lightyears from your features, but it does its job." Instead, users from other Fediverse projects will mention ("brag about") the features that these other Fediverse projects have that Threads lacks. Hashtags, for example. Let me show you them.
It gets even worse if someone on Threads happens upon someone on something else than Mastodon. In comparison with Akkoma, Threads pales more. In comparison with what's-still-but-not-for-much-longer-called-CalcKey, it pales even more. And now imagine what'd happen if someone on Threads met someone on Hubzilla. Or /kbin. "Whaddaya mean, you're talkin' to me from a Reddit clone?! How's that even possible?"
Okay, so those Fediverse people aren't just entitled, they're also snooty braggarts who claim that their stuff that was developed with a budget of zero is allegedly better than Threads that was developed with a several-billion-dollar budget.
Let's just say that even if the Threads users discovered the Fediverse beyond Threads by-and-by, they wouldn't be too keen on connecting to what's left of it that they can actually connect to. The biggest chances will be if it'll be possible on Threads to share Follow Friday posts from Mastodon in such a way that it isn't too obvious that they come from Mastodon. Since Mastodon mentions don't include domains, they might pretty well pass for mentioning Threads users, and the Threads community will believe that Follow Friday was invented on Threads. Also, out-right celebrities on George Takei's level of fame if they reside on instances that don't block Threads. But otherwise, no chance.
@Dave :verified: 🆗🆒 I just can tell from what I saw so far. I'm an active fediverse user since 2011. I saw many instances coming and disappearing. And I also saw those who are around since long time, some of them more than 12 years. So, which ones stayed? Contrary to your guess, I would say that instances which have open registration without user fee plan are the ones that disappeared again. Why is that so? Since they kept registration open, the number of users grew and grew, and the admins of the instance would have to adjust many aspects of the webserver structure in order to cope with the growth. Which they almost always failed to do, because they didn't know how to do it properly.
The long time surviving instances I know are either small (less than 100 users), which keep themselves small by allowing registration only on request, or they are run by a company or big association which has a user fee plan and financial resources to pay a team of server admins who know what they're doing.
You should know the admin team which is running your server, how they're organised and how they're thinking about many topics.
If you don't want to be dependent on the admin team, use a hubzilla or streams account and clone your fediverse identity and content to more than one instance and become nomadic. If one of the instances is not fulfilling your needs or goes down, your nomadic identity keeps running and living on the other instance(s).
I think it will be a mess, similar to how you described, but it's a mess we need to go through.
And I am not sure if it is such a bad thing that certain communities prefer socializing in their own community. That was one of the benefits of using old school discussion boards. You actually got to know people, and a forum tends to attract like-minded individuals.
But the beauty of the fediverse is that you are no longer limited to that community, and you can use the same account to participate in multiple communities. You don't need a separate login for each community, and you get notifications and messages all in one place.
So, I think that people sticking to their own communities is normal and typical, both in real life and on the internet. People tend to be tribal in nature, and probably more strongly, people want to find others that understand and appreciate them. Communities cater to those needs, and as such, will not be going away.
The fediverse is a federation of communities. And as such, people will be exposed to new ideas and ways of doing things. And that is a concept that will be new for many, if not most, people. There is a whole world out there that is different than what they expect. People who travel overseas already know this. Those who live in a bubble may be surprised and shocked.
People will be uncomfortable that there are different ideas out there. And they will choose to either learn and grow and realize they don't have all of the answers, or they will wall themselves off from everyone else and live in an information bubble. And that is okay too. People have right to choose who they associate with and hang out with. And as long as you are not harming others, you can believe whatever you want to believe. And others have a choice to not have to listen to you. The chaos of freedom and free agency.
It'll take time for people to adjust. But people will adjust. It took time for people to understand email and instant messaging, and now generations of people have been exposed to them. And the same with social media, centralized or decentralized. There is a wild west time, and there is a transition where it starts to sink into the mainstream consciousness.
So, yes, I agree with much of what you said. But to me, it is expected.
The question I have is this: will exposure to competing ideas and different ways of doing things encourage people to be more accepting of others, or will it become a culture war, with various factions trying to impose their way on everyone else?
We already see some of this in the fediverse. Certain projects, most notably Mastodon, have certain cultural rules associated with it. Not everyone follows them, but you get resistance for a loud minority if you break these cultural norms, enforced by negative comments, blocking, and banning. Some of this is a good thing, and some of it goes a bit too far, in some cases.
In the end, I think that the fediverse will change society, just like how the internet changed society. And it may be a bumpy drive, because we haven't paved all of the roads yet. But we will get there.
Image/photo
Besides the usual amount of bugfixes Hubzilla 8.6 comes with a solution for two issues with interoperability between Hubzilla and other federated networks which do not support OpenWebAuth or comment permissions.
1. OCAP access
Grant limited posts the right to access linked private media via OCAP tokens. This solves the issue where private media was not accessible by platforms which do not implement OpenWebAuth.
2. Accept unsolicited comments for moderation
Unsolicited comments and reactions can arrive from platforms which do not implement comment permissions. Until now those were silently dropped. With this option enabled you will have the possibility to decide if you want to approve or delete such comments.
Those options are available in the channel privacy settings and are off by default. For more info about the changes in Hubzilla 8.6 please refer to the changelog.
A big THANK YOU! to all contributors and everybody who supports Hubzilla and its development.
#Hubzilla is a powerful platform for creating interconnected websites featuring a decentralized identity, communications, and permissions framework built using common webserver technology.
Seems that there was a vulnerability which has been patched and cleaned up. Patch is yet to be merged and pushed to all instances apparently.
Overall this incident has both positives and negatives. It’s not good that this could have happened. I’m not clear on the root cause so others can attest.
Positively, lemmy is an active platform, attracting attacks and devs/admins patching and maintaining the space.
@maegul
Ok, this just makes a lot of sense. Also...
If your instance is down (mine was due to a failed AC issue), even having an external admin account would not help because people would not have access to their account to see the admin. This is assuming users are not aware of the link to the admin account on another service. I need to think on this now though. I like the idea.