Watchlist for ActivityPub applications:

https://git.feneas.org/feneas/fediverse/-/wikis/watchlist-fo...

This is the wide assortment of applications that speak the same common protocol that Mastodon does, as part of an interoperable social cloud. There's a Cambrian explosion of diversity in this space. Let's see more content management systems adopting this system for self-sufficient publication.

> ...you can post to the local server only, which is an excellent community building feature.

The idea of building a local community that you have to have an account and associated identity on a specific server to access is the kind of mal-aligned incentive that tends to cause federated systems to become de-facto centralized silos and, eventually, return to the status quo of a controlling oligopoly :(.

I followed this link and using the Server Wizard found that my biggest local instance is run by an experienced FOSS and business guru in my hometown. Thanks. I have to meet this guy now.

Are they including Gab users in the MAU count?

Mastodon has a "profile move" feature that moves all of your followers (on instances that support the protocol) to your new account. However, it will not move your toots (posts).

All of your account data can be exported, and everything except for toots (and media) can be imported.

https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/moving/

Post migration is tracked in https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/12423.

Hi, yes, you can move your followers to another account, and export/import other contacts. Perhaps not entirely without the old admin's cooperation though.

You can without the old admin's cooperation, but not if the old admin actively tries to stop you.

Honest question: is this something that is stopping you from joining/getting more active/build an audience?

If it is, have you considered running your own instance?

Yeah that's how it is now. The federation sort of blends into the background so disregarding that part I feel like I'm using a big message board in the early 2000s.

But actually worse, because at least those message boards had better defined topics. I can follow some hashtags that I enjoy but in the web gui it's very limited. I've been thinking about writing my own software to help me follow tags alone. Just to participate in relevant discussion.

Otherwise you're just watching people rant in the public feed and if you're lucky you might catch the occasional interesting post.

But I persist because I truly believe in the fediverse concept.

That's the most difficult part is finding who to follow (likely strangers) when you first start. You could watch the global timeline or search some #hashtags for things you are interested in or try to pick the right server with a like-minded userbase from the get-go. However, these issues aren't too different than any other social media tbf. And eventually you find interesting people exclusive to the Fediverse or post different content on it that is more interesting. Mastodon and others never force being social and following others though.

I've had the opposite experience for the most part (way easier to find good people to follow than on Twitter), but maybe that's just because circles I'm interested in have largely migrated to the fediverse which may not be true of most. It also might be because I found an instance dedicated to at least one thing I'm interested in and used that one. Maybe that approach could work for you too?

I really enjoy the scholar.social instance for my particular usecase, but yeah the network effects are real :(

The go-to managed hosting option is masto.host if you have $7/month and no great urge to run your own.

I had similar trouble when I was trying to make it work on a Fedora VM. When I gave up, admitted to myself I was a pleb, and switched to Ubuntu, it was entirely smooth. Dunno how/why.

There's a way too hard to notice Readme link on the sidebar of repositories with the file. It's right between the tags and license.

Discussion here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28945733

TIL about the AGPL license, thx for the tip.

Interesting. Is it protocol-compatible with other mastodon instances? (I'm not very familiar with how these fediverse sites work.)

It is not that the admin tools do not correctly keep track of old media, it is that the judgement over what to keep is left to the admin since it is not so simple to programmatically decide whether a resource being currently unavailable through the network means it's gone forever, and whether it's gone intentionally or unintentionally. A server that went down might come back after a month of downtime, all sorts of things happen. If you don't care about such minutea you may simply setup a cronjob to run the `tootctl media remove` utility every week and then your primary concern for unbounded storage growth are files uploaded by your own users, which is something you have to deal with regardless of whether you choose Mastodon or Pleroma.

Pleroma may save storage by not downloading federated media locally, but hotlinking to 3rd party servers leaves your users vulnerable to tracking by malicious operators, leeches off the bandwidth of remote servers, and, far more practically, does not guarantee that the media that needs to be displayed is in a file format that is playable on the users' devices. For example, as Pleroma makes no effort to convert user-uploaded files to browser-compatible formats, if Mastodon didn't go through the trouble of converting formats, Mastodon users on iOS would not be able to see many "GIFs" and videos uploaded by Pleroma users in the popular WebM format that is not available on iOS (yet).

You may prefer one or the other but there are definitely reasons for why Mastodon does it that way.

> Are there servers worth joining?

Fosstodon's alright.

> Does the fediverse make the server you join irrelevant?

In theory, yes. But in practice, joining a server means the UI gives you a global feed for that server that you don't otherwise get. And for the niche communities that have a global feed you can keep up with, you want to be able to access that.

>> Does the fediverse make the server you join irrelevant? In theory, but in the beginning, an instance aligned with your interests will make it easier to find like-minded people to follow. The instances may also have different rules how you should behave. And you can run into problems when your instance admin bans another instance with which you would like to communicate, or you instance gets banned by them. Just the perils of online drama in small communities I guess. Running your own instance could help here, though.

>> Has SDF got an instance? https://mastodon.sdf.org/

The way I do it is to follow the hashtags I'm interested in, see the people that post under it regularly and decide if they're interesting enough to follow. This has a chicken and egg downside, as these people won't appear at all if nobody on your instance follows them, which is unfortunate. :(

To circumvent that you can use mastodon social's tag page, but it's less user friendly. See here an example: https://mastodon.social/tags/activitypub

Putting a centralised auth that depends on Big Tech for a software which was supposed to be decentralised and against BigTech principles?

Define "totally dead"? A lot of big servers I've looked at (Fosstodon, social.coop, mastodon.social, etc.) seem very active. Also, "dead" may have to be defined differently in a federated world where it will in fact be quite common (probably even the majority of servers) to have 2 users on an instance that are active, but of course most activity is through federation so the service itself may look like it just has a few posts a day.

> My personal wish is to see the fediverse made up of smaller, localized instances that federate across borders. So for example a Finnish instance that only accepts finnish users, but it federates with every other instance.

This would be great to stop the American-influence dominating every conversation like happens on Reddit, etc.

> To summarize my impressions over the last 5 years I'd say there is no way to run a big open instance without funding. The best way for small single actor instances to survive is to be invite only or approve each member account.

I really like the way social.coop, a cooperatively run instance, handles this. Because we're all just pooling a little bit of money (1GBP/yr for most people) we can run a service cheaper than we could run it ourselves if we're renting a VPS and there are enough people interested to create a rotating moderation team, so we rarely get too much spam from other instances. So far a cooperative model has worked very well for us; no donations required, just splitting up costs in the cheapest possible way so that no one gets burned out or feels like their money is carrying the instance!

I feel like local governments running some sort of federated network like that would be really cool, and could reduce some of the political influence twitter has. How local "local" is could be anything from a city to state/province to country-wide. Unfortunately, I think it would require centralized or federated identity management which is pretty complex, especially at a government level.

> The best way for small single actor instances to survive is to be invite only or approve each member account.

Yup! That's exactly the approach Kazemi is advocating, too. It makes sense if you think about the trust that there needs to be both ways in a admin/account-holder relationship.

I think a lot depends on having an onboarding experience that sets the expectations right. Good guidance text may come a long way already.

For those who don't know: Mastodon works differently in how you build your social graph than Twitter, where much is automated by the recommendation algorithms kicking in. I think that once one properly grasps how to go from 'empty timelines' to having some first fine people in 'following' the process of building further can very intuitive and be a refreshing and liberating experience where one feels in control.

As for ideas and feedback..

"follow suggestions [based on] most popular/proactive accounts in your language". I would be careful here, to not get to a point where Fediverse / Mastodon becomes dominated by influencers that are focal points of activity and sees this feature becoming part of their SEO marketing toolkit. While it may help uptake and network effects, it may hurt and degrade fedi culture over time.

You might consider integrating something similar to Trunk [0] so people can directly follow others that have explicitly expressed an interest in a particular topic and are open for discovery. They can peruse the timeline of these accounts and then checkmark the ones to follow based on that. This keeps social graph building natural and organic, not algorithm-driven.

As for "trending hashtags", another algorithm driven engagement feature. There may be a Hashtag Directory to browse, sort and filter and an indicator of post counts to each of them. Long inactive hashtags need not be shown, but the directory shows way more entries than just what's trending and doesn't directly push you to that.

Another idea might be to have account profiles be able to have a list of the top 3 or top 5 other accounts most valued by a person, in a friend-of-a-friend kind of way. Maybe it only becomes available once a mutual follow relationship is established, and allows further discovery of the FOAF graph.

[0] https://communitywiki.org/trunk

> Most instances have an open directory which lets you browse through the most active/recent profiles

which is useless, unless it's a niche instance. mastodon.social is generalist, so most people there are not posting anything I want to see.

But finding a good niche instance is really hard - in terms of the niche, rules, and actually being fast and working well.

The second link is useless: 'interesting accounts' with no information on what they post, or what makes them interesting.

But the first is very nice, and that's kinda what I was looking for, thanks!!!

Last update was 7 months ago, either gab didn't do any chance if this timeframe or they are also violating the license.

So basically Truth Social can do the same thing and be compliant?

A large segment of the Fediverse has already blocked Trump's domain due to incompliance with the license.

The media will cover it.