A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.
Remember the overriding ethos on Beehaw: Be(e) Nice. Each user you encounter here is a person, and should be treated with kindness (even if they’re wrong, or use a Linux distro you don’t like). Personal attacks will not be tolerated.
Subcommunities on Beehaw:
This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
I never thought about this indirect upside of using fediverse apps. There is absolutely no incentive to publicity, who the heck is gonna pay me for promoting their book over my BookWyrm? They will make two cents from that.
So when someone publishes something over these underdog app it's because they are genuinely interested. It's really refreshing to be able to read sincere opinions from people tbh.
Just a side note, ActivityPub protocol - the core engine that lets all of fediverse to talk to the rest of the fediverse is… 5 years old. Every feature imaginable is still to be implemented.
Calckey has the superior feature set to Mastodon by far. When the project matures, it'll be a force to reckon with.
How is the first I've heard of Clackey? Their website is the most inviting one I've seen with the Fediverse so far.
The project is only like a month or two old, though it is a fork of a more well-established Fediverse platform (MissKey), so it's still building up awareness of its existence.
Calckey certainly looks cool and feature rich, but every Calckey instance's main page alone slows my computer down a lot and overwhelms my eyeballs lol. Don't know what to do to make that better.
so I signed up for a Calckey account (on calckey.world) but content is extremely limited compared to what I see on Mastodon?
for example: if I search for the hashtag #F1 on calckey the most recent post it finds is from a week ago
this whole federation thing is still a bit confusing at times about what gets federated and where, #F1 is pretty popular on Mastodon.social when I search
The server list says that instance has 71 users, so that would probably be why. Posts only show up on an instance if something requests them (users following an account, searching a permalink, subscribing to a community, etc). There are solutions to this problem, such as relays in which servers agree to funnel a bunch of posts to each other periodically to share content. You should ask your instance admin if they have one set up, or if they'd be willing to if not. Otherwise, you should make an account on a larger instance, as those tend to be better federated.
I personally really enjoy Matrix but it’s not really a “fediverse” thing but it is a federated end to end encrypted messaging platform
I personally set it up to use as a messaging aggregator. The ability to scroll past Whatsapp, Telegram, and Discord chats in the same app is hilariously cursed. There are bridges for basically everything. Though some are more complete than others.
Bridging ha also been very effective for showing people the merits of matrix. Opening schildi and scrolling for a bit has made people go "GIVE ME THAT". Everyone is tired of having half a dozen chat apps just be able to talk to everyone they know.
Fediverse is well differentiated into many sites offering similar capabilities to their more well established commercial and proprietary counterpart, and as the time passes these federated alternatives quality is nearing practically the production level, apart from Mastodon and Lemmy which are the most known by now it is worth mentioning also PeerTube (Youtube), PixelFed (instagram), Misskey, Calckey and Pleroma (a mix between twitter and tumblr), HubZilla (facebook), FunkWhale(Bandcamp) and OwnCast (twitch).
Here some handy links:
I use GoToSocial with Sempahore for my microblogging (alternative to Mastodon).
Also Owncast as an alternative to Twitch.
And then I watch tilvids.com and other Peertube instances for videos.
And of course Lemmy. :-D
Oh and then there's Funkwhale for audio.
It's all in different states of usability, depending on the communities involved.
I'm still waiting for a really good Peertube instance.
Understandable. But it's the chicken and egg problem. Creators don't want to create content, because there's no consumers. Consumers don't want to sign up, because there's no creators.
So are you the chicken or the egg? :-D
If you're on one you don't like anymore you could always change instances and watch videos there. If you're worried about losing comments, well you can comment from other Fediverse servers such as Mastodon or GoToSocial and they show up on the page for the video. :-)
You know what, Peertube needs the equivalent of an acquisition and the perfect candidates would be, and I'm on record saying this before, DailyMotion and Vimeo. They've already got content and by implementing activitiypub integration, they can grow their audiences and compete with YouTube for once and for all.
But yeah, for me. I haven't even found a video to watch let alone comment. That said, my YouTube is generally me watching album reactions, music videos, Hot Ones, Adam Something and Beard Meats Food.
Nothing stopping Vimeo from plumbing in ActivityPun amd joining the Fediverse. It's open and the only reason no one does is because the data is valuable and they don't want to share and play nice.
These walled gardens were not how the internet was imagined.
I've found several good videos/channels on urbanists.video which is kind of specific to urbanism but still there's some good stuff. The videos have a lot lower production quality than most YouTube channels, but I actually kind of like how casual it is.
They're just making videos because they have something interesting/funny/educational to share and they're not out there trying to make money.
I never understood this 'chicken and egg' analogy. Dinosaurs were laying eggs millions of years before they became chickens.
It's more "which came first, the chicken or the chicken egg". It's a useful phrase to describe a situation where two things necessarily depend on each other. Chickens must come from chicken eggs, and chicken eggs must come from chickens, and one had to precede the other.
(In the actual case of chickens, it can be resolved easily - by defining "chicken egg" as either an egg laid by a chicken or an egg which contains a chicken, you will obviously and quickly draw a conclusion.)
It comes down to language no matter how you look at it. Nothing we describe with discrete words is actually discrete. If you think of evolution, it comes down to: when did the bird the chicken evolved from become a chicken? Was there a first chicken, born of not-a-chicken? Where do you draw the line between "chicken" and "not a chicken"? Only when you find that line can you decide "the first chicken came out of an egg not laid by a chicken/not a chicken egg, therefore the first chicken came before the first chicken egg" or "A not-a-chicken laid the first chicken egg, aka the egg from which the first chicken hatched". Which again is just another, long and roundabout way of saying it depends on if you define the egg by what laid it or what it contains, like you said.
So, "Which came first, the chicken or the egg?" boils down to just an older form of "is a hotdog a sandwich?"
Language requires words, and we treat the words like they have specific meanings to one degree or another because otherwise we couldn't communicate, but reality isn't beholden to the structure of our language, or to the structure of the way our brains evolved to divvy concepts up into boxes. Sometimes big boxes, sometimes little boxes, but still boxes that don't perfectly match reality.
Tldr questions like this don't have any true answer because the premise that there is a real, sharp border between the concept of a chicken and the concept of not-a-chicken-yet, or between the concept of a sandwich and the concept of a hotdog, is false. They can be fun to argue about, with everyone proposing different but equally arbitrary differences between the two concepts, but ultimately it's just a linguistic amusement.
Sidenote: the chicken vs not-a-chicken-yet conundrum crops up in taxonomic classification all the time, too, even across present day species. I remember reading a Stephen J. Gould essay ages ago about some lizards; some lived on one side of a mountain range, and others lived on the other side, so the populations were somewhat separated by the terrain and didn't intermix evenly over time.
On the far end of one side of that range, there is lizard Species A (let's call it), and on the far side of the end of the range, there is Species B, and Species A and B are obviously different and cannot mate and produce viable offspring, so they're clearly different species. Except, if you start at Species A's end of the range and start looking at the lizards between them and Species B's end, you find a steady spectrum of lizards that look phenotypically and genetically less and less like Species A and more and more like Species B, and which can still breed with each other and produce viable offspring, until at some point you reach Species B. So what do you do, if you're trying to put animals into species boxes? Even though A is clearly different from B, there's all these lizards in the middle that don't fit either box. And cutting them off into a separate Species C wouldn't make sense either because then you'd still have a species of which some members can breed only with Species C and Species A, but of which others can only breed with Species C and Species B, plus having other differing traits.
You have to pick a place to draw a line to be able to talk about the differences between Species A and B, but that line is always quite arbitrary and artificial no matter where you put it.
Tldr language and everything about the way we use it to describe the world is a social construct, more at 11.
Interesting to see that tumblr is adding support for ActivityPub. I wonder if any other legacy platforms will undertake to federate.
Meta is working on an Instagram side project that will act like twitter and will use activitypub. I highly suspect though tumblr and meta taking an interest in the fediverse might ultimately add more people to interact with at the cost of being lousy neighbors
I do hope that Tumblr gets on ActivityPub soon because I do love the idea of interacting with Tumblr posts here on beehaw or on Mastodon, or whatever other thing uses the protocol.
I just tried Calckey it looks more polished UI-wise than any other Fediverse platform I have seen so far. I think Calckey would make an excellent social platform for the public (non-tech) users.
Pixelfed is also an excellent Instagram alternative, it reminds me of how Instagram used to be before the Facebook acquisition. Their iOS beta app is in good shape as well.
Another good alternative to GoodReads is StoryGraph. I prefer it over BookWyrm because it has a nicer user interface and it has an app. However, I don't believe it is apart of the Fediverse.
After so many experiences with having online platforms sold out from under me by venture capitalist scum, I'm not inclined to trust anything owned by a corporation or single person. I'm on storygraph, but I'm not going to put effort into it. I think BookWyrm has more of a future. Even if the current owner of StoryGraph has good intentions, you never know what could happen. It seems as if things always go bad.
Is/will there be a movie/TV equivalent of BookWyrm, something to track and discuss what you've been watching? A quick search tells me it's been discussed and seems like something people want but it doesn't look like it's been done yet, at least not as a dedicated service. Is that right?
That is absolutely brilliant. I would love something like that. Why doesn't it exist?
Try writefreely. Its a blogging thing that supports markdown and can look super nice
Is that related to Paper.wf? The wf apparently stands for "write freely".
Paper.wf is using Write Freely. You can see Paper.wf in their instance list here: https://writefreely.org/instances
@BobQuasit I am on Friendica. It is a macroblogging platform, but more akin to Facebook in look and feel (it even somehow resembles the old Facebook, but server admins can add other themes to give it a different look). The feature set is very extensive, and it is way richer than Facebook, tho. You might find it a bit complicated at first. I would recommend anyone to watch this video series to learn more about it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qvOmvEpmgQI
After you learn all about it, you might find it your Fediverse home.
I've been intrigued by this one. Might give it a go! Hubzilla also sounds interesting, if a bit hard to get my head around what exactly what it does?