NotTheOnlyGamer

NotTheOnlyGamer , 4 months ago

Maybe on your instance - it's your loss. But admins have a choice - defed from them and lose access to all those users and having actual content worth looking at, or federate with them and actually grow your network into something that has enough going on to make people interested. As it is, I use Threads right now. I strongly prefer it to Mastodon. Kbin comes close, but has less content to idly scroll through. If no Fediverse site I use supports Threads, I'll keep on using it.

NotTheOnlyGamer , 5 months ago

Pitchfork being on an alternative social platform just feels right to me. So I say, go for it.

NotTheOnlyGamer , 5 months ago

I'm not at my computer, so please excuse any mobile issues. I'm in favor of the move, because it will help to simultaneously connect and decentralize communications across the platforms. Say what you will about Facebook (you're probably right), but if they're that bad, then it seems logical to me to connect to their federated service even more aggressively.

The more we push our content (and by extension the Fediverse content that kbin aggregates), the less impact their algorithm can have. The more we go out of the way to expose their content, the harder we make it them to curate/censor/suppress any voices. And if, when comparing two Fediverse instances or softwares, we find that what's been pushed to them is different, we the users can call it out to news organizations (or make it public ourselves).

And yes, I know I'm making the arguments for supporting private companies in adopting open-source. It's about being able to audit what companies we don't trust are doing.

In addition to that, I'm currently a Threads user. Anecdotally, there's a lot of wholesome content on there that I appreciate, and what limited advertising is there is nowhere near as obtrusive as Reddit or the main Facebook platform.

NotTheOnlyGamer , 5 months ago

I find it interesting that they didn't suggest the possibility that came to my mind first: cannibalization. If it was small to start with, but in clearing the neighborhood, also was volcanic enough to absorb smaller planetoids, it might have absorbed them and grown.

NotTheOnlyGamer , 5 months ago

kbin finally has notifications not throwing an error every time I try to check them, so that much is nice now. I've actually had no problems with the Reddit software on my phone, and I've unsubbed from most of the communities I was part of there which moved across to lemmy. That choice has really trimmed my experience down to a more focused one nicely. I've also gotten done turning federation back off as I want it to be, and my user block list here is getting pretty long, blocking out the spammers that come across my feed.

Of course, because kbin is still one of the smallest sites related to the ActivityPub protocol, there's limited content here compared to Reddit, Then again, there's also less content on all of PeerTube (let alone a single site) than there is on YouTube, and I'd take a shot at saying that even Threads has the largest Mastodon community beat by a country mile, let alone what Twitter still has.

So basically, I guess I'd say I'm not a refugee, I'm just doing as I did with Facebook when it first launched after MySpace and Friendster - keeping my options open and looking around.

NotTheOnlyGamer , 5 months ago

I think it's time to shut it down, hard. That's the start of something that will not end well for human beings.

NotTheOnlyGamer , 5 months ago

Flipboard was neat originally, but never really held my attention.

NotTheOnlyGamer , 5 months ago

So you want to have the Side colonies from Gundam?

NotTheOnlyGamer , 8 months ago

Honestly, given the ruckus they've been raising for a while now, my feeling is that Beehaw wants to push themselves away from society as a whole. I don't agree with their perspective, which is part of why I never engage with much of their content or users. All I can say is that I wish them only the best for their echo chamber.

NotTheOnlyGamer , 10 months ago

We need a scraper rather than an API caller.

NotTheOnlyGamer , 10 months ago

If it can't be done for free, but already existing services like Reddit & Threads are free to use, then the barrier to entry is insurmountable to roughly 90% of users.

NotTheOnlyGamer , 10 months ago

Corp vs. Cyberpunks.

Tale as old as time. Gee, what color was the sky today? The color of a television, tuned to a dead channel?

NotTheOnlyGamer , 10 months ago

Bingo. They should just be glad that the netrunners, deckers, and console cowboys have found greener pastures. Because they don't want to see what happens when you back creative angry people into a corner

NotTheOnlyGamer , 10 months ago

Given that I'm more willing to be a Net Nomad than I am to pay, Reddit 2.0 would have to be self-funding and profitable early on without my direct contribution. I think the best way to do it would be to have per-IP monthly access limits, raised incrementally by tracked linkout clicks from the platform (with a higher rate given for actual conversion actions). That way, you keep operating costs low and ensure that you're profit-focused from day 1. Yes, it's an affiliate ad platform from the start, but it allows for organic content generation from users. Oh, and of course advertisers would be charged to create organic ads in relevant communities. Obviously, with a priority being profit and cost, any software would have to be NIH FOSS, with only a few custom scripts ever created by the devs - this cuts down on costs and dev time. If anyone complains about licensing, ban them. If they try taking you to court, you have ad rev, they don't. You win with a better lawyer and sympathetic judge.

Basically, I would want Reddit as it is today. Or Facebook as it is. The advertising I can block easily is their way of keeping my costs at a rate I'm willing to accept - $0.00/lifetime. I think forcing ad engagement will make some people run to the Fediverse and host their own instance, or join and "donate to" (pay to use) an instance they don't host, but for others, it will help them to build healthier relationships with social media, using it less and thus rationing out their time better, or they'll spend time engaged with ad content and providing real value to the platform, rather than imagined "value" by creating organic content that will need to be stored and indexed on the server.

NotTheOnlyGamer , 10 months ago

Frankly, you're incorrect. It's an incredible pain in the neck to try and deal with the Fediverse beyond local content. Without better community merging or centralization, browsing instances becomes no different than dealing with having mail on three or four non-multiplexed BBSes, or talking on forums before we had tabbed browsing. It's incredibly annoying, and pushes people right back to centralized systems.

NotTheOnlyGamer , 10 months ago

You and I will have to agree to disagree on this. Yes, active users continues to grow - on already dominant platforms. And by that I mean KBin.social as a platform, not all KBin instances; or Mastodon.Social, or even Lemmy.ML. Yes, there's not a singularity yet, but even this limited plurality shows that it's a pain in the neck to deal with the Fediverse as a whole, so pick your local poison and go for it.

NotTheOnlyGamer , 10 months ago

What issues have you specifically noticed with this?

The issue I've noticed first and foremost is that there is more than one identically named group. Don't tell me that rpg@kbin.social, rpg@lemmy.ml, and rpg@foo.bar are different communities. They're identically named communities. I'd rather have as false positive of a gun user's instance with threads about rocket-propelled grenades, rather than having to go to each group to browse. Don't tell me to just use the "subscribed" view. That doesn't pick up everything in a topic, nor does it help me to find those - again, identically named - communities on other servers. Whenever a new server comes online with an RPG community, they'll be in their own corner. They can participate as foreigners with another group, but that's not theirs. There's no central place for hosting these communities. If there was a server set up just to host groups, and the rest were for users, that would make sense. I immediately grew tired, trying to find all of the communities related to my interests so I can subscribe to all. I did that back in the day, joining forums and setting up a personal homepage with frames. In theory anyone can join any group, but they have to find it first.

If devs and leaders of the ActivityPub community are going to continue pushing the idea that everyone can talk to everyone else, we absolutely need some form of community merging for identically-named communities. For instance, a kbin.social user should be able to subscribe to cooking and see posts from cooking@. , not just cooking@kbin.social. That's a UX issue just as much as a technical one.

I wasn't around this far back. Can you elaborate on this a bit? What's the issue with "having mail on three or four non-multiplexed BBSes" ?

Back in those days, BBS mail was less "email" and more "text stored on server". To get all of your mail from multiples, you had to connect to each of the servers in sequence, download your mail, and then read it offline and reply (any good BBS software would remember where itwas from, and offer to call back and send each message). Multiplexing meant that you could have a BBS in the NYC area, it would be able to contact and download from one in, say, PA or wherever, and they could each download threads and messages, aka federated content. The pain has been massively reduced over time, and I'm glad. My next point bounces off yours:

This I remember well. Sounds like you are trying to create an account on each instance and are constantly logging out of one and into the next to keep up on the latest posts and comments. This .. is not really the way to do it.

You're right, except in cases where I want a different psudonymity; my choice. In this case, I can't check for new posts in, continuing with the same example, rpg@. without checking the group from each federated server. Posts are neither mirrored nor transcluded. That's the point I'm getting at. I should be able to just open up m/rpg and have it cover all compatible groups.

Don't confuse terms. kbin.social is an instance, the platform is kbin the software.
Actually it's well understood that kbin.social is getting too large and it's not good for instances to get this big in general - so it's kinda a good thing that other instances haven't exploded as much. See https://kbin.social/m/RedditMigration/t/122067/Jim-is-invading-the-finer-things-club-aka-kbin-social-is and

I disagree with your latter point. kbin.social has hit a reasonable mass of users to have a strong local community and become a platform unto itself, running on kbin software. I'm not interested in a smaller community. I joined Reddit because it was the largest single-site community on the Web. I want the monolithic community, and I accept the costs that incurs, including ads or ad-first design. Right now, the fediverse is just fragments at the foot of the tower of Babel, each speaking a separate tongue, even if some are intelligible to others.

I don't care about the difference between Mastodo, kbin, & Lemmy. They're web software which are trying to replace a monolith, and have seen imited success. I don't care about political leanings. I'm talking about a UX issue. If you want to defed from a site, and receive no more content, then so be it, that's the right of an Admin.

{1/2}

NotTheOnlyGamer , 10 months ago

{2/2}

There's still chaos in terms of instances and softwares. Until we all settle on one software that does the job, and until we have a way to have a single community again, Reddit remains the superior option. There is only one r/RPG, it works on Highlander rules - there can be only one. How many groups in the Fediverse named m/RPG or c/RPG are there? Why must each user be forced to answer that question?

That's what would fix things for me; make the federation 100% behind-the-curtain so that I don't have to think about it. I don't care about the backend, I'm not hosting, the value to me is ad views only, not cash. I'd argue a solid 80% of users on corp-owned social media wouldn't understand even if you simplify it. The fediverse/threadiverse is not a drop-in replacement for Reddit. Until it is, I'll keep one foot in spez's yard. If Meta's Threads product does become an ActivityPub community and solves this issue, I'll move there
.

NotTheOnlyGamer , 10 months ago

{3 / 2}

Apologies for any typos or bad formatting, I ran up against the 5000 character limit, and tried to edit down - and the 'more' popup actually pops under the next comment in my browser. I'm sure I could fix it somehow, but I believe everything is still intelligible.

NotTheOnlyGamer , 10 months ago

They're just following rules, man:

Rule 33. Lurk More - It's never enough.

And yes, the pool is still closed.

NotTheOnlyGamer , 10 months ago

Will you pilot the robot start the magazine or not? If not, we'll just have to send Ayanami out again.

NotTheOnlyGamer , 10 months ago

The more that happens, the more fractured the community becomes, and the easier it will be for a new centralized corporate platform to suck up users. That's how Reddit started in the first place, and how Twitter started. Heck, it's even how LJ started. You look at fractured elements of communities, and build a site for the whole community to come together.

NotTheOnlyGamer , 10 months ago

Sure, just show me the combined DnD/D&D or TTRPG community | magazine | group. It doesn't exist. There are a hundred, or a thousand, individual groups. That's not a whole community. That's a thousand fractal shards, each one with its own voices, independent of one another. Yes, occasionally they do share content or users, but that happens only rarely and with effort. TTRPG Network, Lemmy.ML, KBin.Social, Mastodon.Social, etc., all have various groups dedicated to RPGs. These groups are not able to be combined.

The inability of these groups to combine and independently organizing is a severe weakness of ActivityPub.

NotTheOnlyGamer , 10 months ago

No, what I want is r/RPG - a single, central hub for RPG-related topics. Yes, there are also subs for RPGDesign, DnD, DM advice, etc., but RPG serves as both a central community and as a hub for all those more specific groups. There is no way to have a “hub community” on the Fediverse, or to efficiently find all groups which share interests. Groups which had a “largest community” on Reddit will now find themselves shattered and separated. Sure, you can say Federation will save them, but it really won’t. All federation means is that now instead of one community, there’s one per server, and you have to know to subscribe to each and every one of them.

Sure, there’s Mastodon’s Lists feature, which works like a Multireddit, but that’s honestly a lot of effort, and doesn’t cover Lemmy or kbin posts like this one. We need a way to automerge common communities, at least in the user’s view.

NotTheOnlyGamer , 10 months ago

I was actually on the RPGNet forums for several years, but the topics, mechanics, and games which I care about became less-discussed over time.

NotTheOnlyGamer , 10 months ago

I don't think you're correct in your theory. I fully expect the Fediverse as a whole, with the exception of a few very tiny instances that won't have public signups, will deal with the problems that other social media have in the same way - ads, sponsored posts, monetization of user data, etc.. in the way the Internet accelerates, I expect it to happen within two years.

NotTheOnlyGamer , 10 months ago

I don't think it's going to be "singular bad actors" in this case. I think it's going to be every server owner realizing why the situation became what it is on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Reddit. When operating and development costs stretch beyond the grasp of donations, when the number of users far outstretches the number of donors and customers, server owners will have to seek out ways to monetize users. So, sure, you'll have people who are willing to put in the investment to launch their own server and federate as they see fit, rather than pay for the service. But you'll have a lot more people who are unwilling to pay.

That means ads and paid content. That means login walls and paywalled content, "premium" access and features, etc. I expect that every large Fediverse server will end up that way. Either that or the way they'll stay ad-free is to kick off the users and keep only the paying customers (these people will be called "donors" so they don't expect any benefit for their money). After all, kicking a user out of one instance of the Fediverse doesn't have the impact that it does on Reddit. Heck, kicking a thousand out doesn't. There's every other instance's customers and users still to talk with. There's always the ability for those people to invest in the platform with their own instance, or join one with a smaller number of allowed (non-paying) users.

NotTheOnlyGamer , 10 months ago

As long as it doesn't descend into extreme far left buffoonery, I think I'm happy. Then again, I've come to realize that regardless of personal political beliefs, it's the buffoonery that's the big issue. People who can do nothing to make real change take things entirely too far in arguments with others who are similarly powerless. The problem is that we've been so manipulated and driven so far apart that what seems like common sense and basic human decency to one side of the aisle is radical buffoonery to the other. I don't see a fast solution to that. Rebuilding connection across the country will take elections that everyone trusts, electing officials who work towards bipartisan solutions and the service of the public good rather than an agenda. Too bad I don't see the major parties being interested in that.

Then again, I'm of the opinion that we should go back to at least one element of our original system - the president shouldn't have a slate in place for election, so that whoever takes #2 in the popular vote becomes VP.

NotTheOnlyGamer , 10 months ago

See, I don't think it's likely to work out that way. I think a lot of people think we're more divided than we are - and the President & VP will both work to their own profit before their party line (hopefully), and that should lead to cooperation. Granted, it's cooperation that screws the little guy, but there's at least a hope of visible bipartisanship.

NotTheOnlyGamer OP , 10 months ago

See it or fold, like anybody else.

NotTheOnlyGamer , 10 months ago

Wow...

NotTheOnlyGamer , 10 months ago

Can I see it?

Actually, wait. I was on Usenet, and IRC, and Jabber...

I guess Green Day's song becomes ever more poignant on the Internet - Wake me up when September ends (hint: it does not end, it is eternal).

NotTheOnlyGamer , 10 months ago

It's still out there - waiting. There's a bunch of active servers, and I have Ambassador for Pale Moon installed. I just never have cause to use it instead of Discord anymore. I think that says more about me than IRC.

NotTheOnlyGamer , 10 months ago

It's because very suddenly, users of RIF and Apollo are going to be locked out of Reddit, and people think they'll migrate here, rather than going to the official Reddit mobile software (as a RedReader user, I've switched over), or going to Facebook/Instagram.

NotTheOnlyGamer , 10 months ago

GIF support, no, but I think most clients I've seen have the ability to display Unicode emoticons, which would help for 99% of the image use. As far as GIFs, I guess you'd need to build an IRC client that does the same thing as Discord - display a "preview" of a properly-coded image link. Because certainly, it's easy enough to search giphy or tenor and drop a link in chat.

I'll readily admit the low-effort ability to react with an icon is both a blessing and a curse. It's sometimes enough to drop in an icon or two as a response, saving mental bandwidth but still responding.

NotTheOnlyGamer , 10 months ago

It's a fundamental question about society: which is more prevalent, fear or laziness? They had no reason to move until their program stopped working. Now, it's not going to work anymore. But I don't believe we'll see a massive adoption wave. People are still confused about the nature of the Fediverse, and they're too scared by their ignorance to get over it and bite the bullet.

Unfortunately, those that do take the plunge will find that most Fediverse client software is in beta, or less than fully functional. Laziness will keep them away. Fear will push them to other monolithic platforms. So my thought is that it's going to drive traffic to Meta's properties for the time being, at least at this time.

NotTheOnlyGamer , 10 months ago

The problem of any social network that starts organically. If you're invested in the community and not specifically in the software, when people move on, you will too.

NotTheOnlyGamer , 10 months ago

There's already porn in the fediverse. I don't see a problem with it existing, but it's always bothered me when porn and social media get mixed. That's not necessarily because of prudishness or shame, but rather the fact that social media often employs dark patterns of addiction, and porn addiction can become very real, very quickly. I think we need to be careful about it, and I think there should be an onus on platforms as well as producers to help protect the vulnerable against addiction and the downward spiral.

NotTheOnlyGamer , 10 months ago

I'm sure users will step forward if they care. Otherwise, it's just a campaign optimization at work. Limit the breadth of organic content to deepen the brand-friendly content and push more paid media into the feed.

NotTheOnlyGamer , 10 months ago

You misunderstand what their product is at this point. Their primary product is advertising conversions by site users and visitors, with a minor secondary in user data - actual "content" is a distant third. By removing or restricting the means by which users can avoid interactions with the customer base, they drive traffic to the customer-sponsored content on the site. Yes, what they're doing will reduce organic traffic; that's the point. They would be very happy if every post visible to a user was a paid post.

Reddit is an advertising platform which allows user created content. I expect the majority of the Fediverse to go that way too within two years, regardless of Meta Threads. This is the Internet. This is what it is, what it was always going to be, and how it will be going forward.

NotTheOnlyGamer , 10 months ago

It's just proof that people want a monolithic platform for community. They're just upset when reality crashes in about that.

NotTheOnlyGamer , 8 months ago

So, are notifications just a dead feature now?