• 2 Posts
  • 55 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 9th, 2023

help-circle
  • Supernault is actively considering having the flagship loops.video server function as the centralised service for the For You algorithm.

    That sounds… potentially counter to the goals of the Fediverse. If it’s its own open-source and hostable project with an easy switch for admins to provide a different algorithm then I can see how it would be a big leg up for better discovery, but if it just locks you into phoning home to loops.video then that is terrible.

    I have thought for a while though that search / indexing should be a separate Fediverse service to allow even tiny instances to make use of large-scale search, but only as long as it remains open for anyone to host an indexer.





  • Well said. This almost perfectly describes my experience with Mastodon as well. I ended up joining a Firefish instance later which was better, but no amount of “antennas” or topic follows helps when your instance has 20 users and it can’t find anything.

    I’d imagine a platform supposedly started by the people who founded Twitter, built from what supposedly was once an internal test of modifications to Twitter, to have an easier onboarding experience than whatever Mastodon did back when I tried it.

    Bluesky works almost exactly like Twitter right now. It makes a vague mention of federation on signup but it’s basically irrelevant and everything right now still goes through their central server, so there is no issue finding content or users.




  • I’ll throw my -opinion- in the ring here because no one else is saying it the same way.

    • Echoing what other people said, finding a server was hard especially as at the time I thought defederating seemed stupid (changed my mind somewhat now that I use Lemmy). Then once signed up discovery was/is a pain. How do I find good accounts when they aren’t synced with the instance I am on? Fuck if I know, I never found an equivalent to lemmyverse.net for mastodon.
    • Now into the big problem I had: federation was a pain. It was my first interaction with a federated service that isn’t email and it was confusing and annoying. Finally find an account you like? Well you either can’t see any of their posts or the few you can have 1 reply and 5 likes. Eventually you realise you have to click onto the account’s instance to see everything and they have 100 replies and 500 likes (made-up numbers, obviously) but guess what you can’t interact with any of them because you are no longer on your instance. It basically forced me to browse logged out for 99% of my browsing, constantly following links between websites. I have not had quite the same trouble with Lemmy because despite having some similar problems, it has been a LOT quicker to sync especially once you point your instance to another.
    • The lack of algorithm or fine control of my feed was off-putting. I still hate that Facebook and other platforms make it hard or impossible to sort chronologically, but having only chronological makes for a potential to miss out on massive amounts of stuff.
    • And on a personal note, I think I’m just falling out of favour with the idea of a microblogging platform with strangers. If my friends used it things might be different.

    I did try out Firefish and enjoyed that way more as it had a fun and engaging UI and lots of extra features, but it holds the same federation and discovery issues.












  • While it is easy to fall into this trap of disagree downvotes, they should really not be used that way. All that does is turn them into a popularity contest. Downvotes should be used on comments that do not improve the thread. This may be because they are wrong, made in bad faith, rude, or otherwise, but not simply because you disagree. Ideally we would have different buttons for this like the forums of old, but no one seems interested in that nowadays.