I know it’s a really ordinary thing to do, but the idea of people using micrblogging to find people, and not just to follow and talk to people they already know, will always be wild to me. The idea of scrolling through infinite feeds where every post could be potentially triggering (and 80% of them are just reposts anyway) gives me terrible flashbacks to when I was younger. Thank god there are people who can handle that and actually make meaningful connections to people that way.

People talk a lot about the protocols that power Bluesky vs. ActivityPub, because we’re nerds and we believe deep in our hearts that the superior protocol will win. This is adorable. It flies in the face of literally all of human history, where the more convenient thing always wins regardless of technical merit. VHS beat Betamax. USB-C took twenty years. The protocol fight is interesting the way medieval siege warfare is interesting — I’m glad someone’s into it, but it has no bearing on my life. There’s no actual plan to self-host Bluesky. Their protocol makes it easier to scale their service. That’s why it was written and that’s what it does. End of story.

So refreshing to see someone call out Bluesky for what it is.

Yup.

Though I thought of it as the Internet from 2010. No ads. No algo. All chronological. Once you figure out where the slow mode setting is and turn it off, Mastodon is the fucking best. I even pay a voluntary sub every month to help my instance host itself.

And it requires just enough setup (5-10 minutes tops) that the vast majority of the Internet is too lazy to use it, which keeps the quality high.

Instead it became the only place consistently posting trustworthy information I could actually access. This became personally relevant when Trump threatened to invade Greenland, which is the kind of sentence I never expected to type and yet here we are. It would be funny if I wasn’t a tiny bit concerned that my new home was going to get a CIA overnight regime change special in the middle of the night.

It was somewhere in the middle of DMing with someone who had forgotten more about Greenland than I would ever know and someone who lived close to an RAF base in the UK that it clicked. This was what they had been talking about. Actual human beings were able to find each other and ask direct questions without this giant mountain of bullshit engagement piled on top of it. Meta or Oracle or whoever owns TikTok this week couldn’t stop me.

I never expected to find my news from strangers on a federated social network that half the internet has never heard of. I never expected a lot of things. But there’s something quietly beautiful about a place where people just… share what they know. No brand deals, no engagement metrics, no algorithm nudging you toward rage. Just someone who spent twenty years studying Arctic policy posting a thread at 2 AM because they think you should understand what’s happening. It’s the internet I was promised in 1996. It only took thirty years and the complete collapse of American journalism to get here.

So, a few things. One, I appreciate the authors evolution on this, but I also think for anyone who lived through the US’s campaigns in the war on terror, on resistance movements like BLM, Dakota pipeline, Occupy, Me Too, on and on…

The American (and often global) experience is a eventual experience of realizing you are being lied to and finding a way to the truth. For me it was being enlisted and finding Democracy Now! because it was a show I could download on an mp3 players and put on mini-disks when I was preparing for underways.

The same sentiment that the author is appreciating is one that some people in the 90’s got when they first had access to the internet. That kids in the 2000’s felt when they found alternative media (DN!, others, many coming from the WTO protests of the 90’s), that kids in the mid-2000’s felt when they found social media, when kids in the 2010’s found the second wave of social media, when kids in the 2020’s found the fediverse, and on and on.

It’s the internet I was promised in 1996. It only took thirty years and the complete collapse of American journalism to get here.

It is a return to the internet in 1996.

No doubt there are bad actors polluting communities on the Fediverse as well and I’m not feeling quite as optimistic as the author here. But they’re absolutely right about the corporate side of the internet. The mainstream that is controlled by the rich and driven by greed. You need FOSS to have at least a good base you can build on top of. Profit oriented platforms have failed us as a society.

Interesting read, but boy does this journalist have a … different read on things than I do.

People talk a lot about the protocols that power Bluesky vs. ActivityPub, because we’re nerds and we believe deep in our hearts that the superior protocol will win.

IMO it’s the exact opposite; we talk about this because we want the best protocol to win, this time, while knowing full well that usually it doesn’t.

Of course search was broken because all OSS social tools must have one glaring lack of functionality.

My understanding is that search on the microblogging side of the fedi is intended to be “broken” (from the view of someone expecting a Twitter-style search); hashtags are for opting-in to global discoverability whilst without them your posts are intended to be stumbled upon and/or passed around rather than sought out.

If the American press had given me 20 minutes of airtime I could have convinced everyone they don’t want to get involved with Greenland. We’re not tough enough as a people to survive in Greenland, much less “take it over”.

I doubt that trump supporters cheering on the USA throwing their weight around like the world’s bully-in-chief would be receptive to such a message.

I can’t tell if I’m just too deep in the fedi-culture weeds, or if the article really is confidently ignorant.

It’s not the point of the article, but I think it nonetheless speaks to the power that the community-of-communities model provides.

The algorithmic content surfacing models are what primarily rot online interaction. Having all-encompassing sites is another cause. Letting people join communities with shared values, and those communities collectively deciding who they interact with, is a fundamental working model of human societies since prehistory.

I don’t like that the logo of Lemmy is the logo of LW in that picture.

Other than that, good read.

It’s incredible how much ActivityPub sabotages itself. This author speaks on the deliberately dysfunctional aspects of Mastodon as being a result of “open source software having to suck” when in fact the devs here chose to make it suck because they decided it was better, like removing quote tweets etc. Misskey variants do all this stuff perfectly fine, far more features than Twitter actually, although the base version is incredibly buggy and inhabited by pedophiles. There is no reason why Lemmy and its forks can’t connect to these sites either. People are just incredibly confused on here and do not see their own potential.

Big fan of Movim by the way.

I’d never considered how bang-on this viewpoint is…

This article would have been better without the ableist slur against people with NPD.