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.

And then they, too, can be defederated by salty Mastodon admins. At least I saw a lot of instances talk of defederating BBC when I still was trying to enjoy Mastodon.

All official BBC accounts, yes. It has locked signups.

I would happily bet money that federation keeps getting kicked down the road. “Oh, we have to do X first. Also Y just came up, and you know it was a waning moon last night so…” They have no reason to enable it as long as things go their way.

Email does not have issues finding emails. For a much better post than I can write, read TheChargedCreeper’s comment above about the on-boarding experience they (and I) experienced.

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 remember everyone saying the exact same in 2016. “Maybe Dems will reflect.” Other than putting up a white man for 2020, I can’t see a single difference in their approach ever since.

Force feeding estrogen to CEOs to break the glass ceiling. Woke.

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.

In the imaginary world where Gmail required you to visit Outlook to view the entire thread because it hadn’t synced yet, yeah sure they’re exactly the same. In the real world the email comparison stops being useful beyond explaining how @ monikers work.

Quite the opposite, it’s very very old. :)

ilk noun

• family, class, or kind: “he and all his ilk.”

https://www.dictionary.com/browse/ilk

Considering the thread title of “Meta”, the fact that Meta used to be called Facebook, and Albatross’s wording “and it’s ilk”, it should be safe to assume we are talking about Meta as a whole and not just Facebook.com.

Glad that he eventually got it fixed.

Fortunately, Lifeward eventually capitulated and Straight was able to get his exoskeleton repaired — but that was only after an intense campaign

Still, these are the issues that make me question why anyone is excited for products like brain implants. The longer we can go without commercialised body modifications, the better.

Unfortunately there are very few open review projects and none that people have tried to actually integrate into one of the OSM apps. It makes me rather disappointed as finding businesses and checking reviews is one of the most common uses I have for Google Maps and yet OSM cannot replace it.

Twitter was quite diverse actually (it might still be, I can’t say). You had the far left, far right, and everything in between on there but it worked somewhat because the algorithm kept people mostly in their bubbles unless they went seeking it out.

Depends what you use and how you use it. With how I use my computer, I have issues on Windows that require terminal input to solve and are more confusing than many of the Linux issues I face, but the way I use Linux also requires terminal. Some applications just work better or only on terminal whether you’re on Windows or Linux and some debugging steps will inevitably take you down the dark road of decade old menus and terminal commands.

Day to day basic tasks though? It shouldn’t need any special knowledge, provided that you don’t follow the wrong online tutorials like I did when starting out. For example, Firefox was out of date so I looked up how to update Firefox. The package manager did not have a new version and I didn’t think to manually go into settings and refresh the repository (stores auto update, right? Well, no actually…). Basically I ended up trying to install via a .deb package from their website… it didn’t work and I felt Linux was dumb. What I should have done was update my OS and package manager first or simply sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade (yes this is terminal, sorry). My point is, sometimes you have to realise the question you are asking is flawed and not the system.

I actually think the poor branding is part of why Mastodon is hard to spread. Can you picture anyone seriously saying they “tooted” something? Because I can’t.

Instead of up/down buttons you would have a set of buttons such as “Agree”, “Disagree”, “Funny”, “Useful”, etcetera. The only website I know of that still uses these is Ravelry.

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.

Oh! Well that’s awesome then, thanks for the correction. I did look it up but ended up on some “top feature” article which barely mentioned any features beyond layer multi select. I should have looked further.