Yeah, but you are still treating them as subsets of a singular whole.

Don’t do that.

From my experience, how people expect it to work is to be centralized and neutrally hosted, with instances acting as dumb portals, mainframe+terminal style. So it cannot work as people expect and be decentralized.

This sounds like the sort of thing that’s best solved with a ‘favourite’ option that pushes posts from favourited communities to the top of the feed. No need to get in there and over-complicate it with bespoke weightings or anything.

The “duplicate” communities are housed on different websites. Websites that could very well have their own norms, rules, and culture. Lumping them together and treating them as the same thing is just kind of invasive to them, and promotes bad netiquette.

Just pick one that you like best.

Man, do I have good news for you:

nodeBB

Discourse

Blackbox echo chamber generators really should be avoided. They add to the angst and anger of the Internet, and of society.

Community search could be improved. And people should learn to actually use it, rather than being spoon fed whatever some programmer they’ve never met thinks they should eat based on the last 3 things they clicked on.

because bsky actually listened to their users and implemented features they asked for unlike mastodon who attacked migrators during the first twitter migration.

The issue I have with this narrative is that the features migrators wanted already existed in the Fediverse, on Misskey, Friendica, Pleroma, Akkoma, etc. If anyone wanted to actually listen to those of us trying to point them to those options, things might have been a little different. But those voices were drowned out by the Mastodon circle jerk, and people didn’t actually grok the whole federation thing well enough to understand that they could follow the same people from any of the different softwareseseses.

The fediverse isn’t Mastodon, and we all do it a huge disservice by continuing to talk about it as if it were, even as we use a different fediverse platform.

Yeah, turns out weird, hostile, anti-social nerds are weird, hostile, and anti-social, and they probably ruined our best shot at freeing the web from VC backed corporate control of communication.

The whole thing’s just a scam to off-load data storage costs to super-users. It’s sad that people are excited about it.

I’ve read from Misskey/Forkey users that Misskey and the Forkeys actually have an easier-to-use Web UI than Mastodon

The *keys have a UI that has a similar design language to Twitter, but a fairly different layout. I think it’s close enough that people would recognize it as “Twitter, but different”, vs Mastodon’s “Twitter, but archaic, and also different, and therefore confusing”.

The *keys also had many of the features that Twitter migrants complained were lacking from Mastodon. But trying to talk to anyone on Mastodon about platforms that aren’t Mastodon was a total non-starter. Mastodon is a giant Mastodon circle jerk.

It made my soul sad.

But the real issue with Mastodon is that it has a significant population of people who believe it’s a sacrosanct cultural space, and that are very vocal about telling anyone coming into it that they need to learn the local customs or GTFO. The push-and-pull between “we want to be mainstream” and also “fuck the mainstream normies” is palpable, and super cringey, and it turns people away quickly.

The “just pick an instance!” and “my instance shut down” thing is a core pain point here.

BlueSky is corporately run, and it’s semi-centealized. This is bad for the internet, but it’s good for the user. At least on the surface. And that’s what users care about. It provides a sense of stability, and an umspoken promise that if anything happens, it’s their fault, and their problem.

The fediverse is run by hobbiests. You join some hobbiest’s forum or microblog, it connects to a bunch of other hobbiest’s forums or microblogs, and if things break, oh well, it’s just a hobby! And if that hobby becomes stressful for the hobbiest, they just abandon the hobby.

Leaving the users holding the bag.

The fediverse is unstable as an end user, because, as it’s currently structured, it’s not really designed to have end users. It’s designed to have hobbiest tinkerers. It’s right in the oft repeated motto of tne of the fediverse: users should own their data!

But who owns the data in the fediverse? Who actually controls it?

Server admins.

You own your data by self-hosting.

Like a giant computer nerd.

Thing is, one thing people want out of a microblogging experience is the validation of followers. If it was all about the hashtags, they’d be on Reddit or Lemmy, not Twitter and Mastodon.

The average user is hopping from phone app to phone app, following their favourite interner celebrity. They don’t care about the rest.

Meanwhile, VC backed businesses can buy internet celebrities, and on the cheap.

Can you come up with more examples? Because you’re coming across as “this happened to me, personally, once, therefore it’s run amok!”

No one is saying that defederation doesn’t happen. They’re saying it’s not the norm. And hexbear isn’t the norm, any more than lemmygrad, or poa.st are.

They do get a whole lot of advertising, social capital, and influnce over which causes get proped up, on the back of donating customers, while you’re out a few bucks that you could have pooled for a single charity and gotten a tax receipt of your own for.

Misskey has a more similar UI to Twitter, and it can’t even get noticed by fediverse users.

When you go to comment on a blog, where do you sign up?

I mean, it’s a network of indeoendent websites. I’m not sure what kind of solution to this people want.

People seem to be able to choose which wrbsite they’re signing up for when looking at Twitter, BlueSky, and Threads. It’s not like it’t that weird of an idea.

They even grok the idea that different Wordpress-based websites are different from each other!

Maybe if we stopped treating “Mastodon” as a space, and talked about it like the webhost software it is, people would understand.

The fact that the fediverse has been mentally limited to “Mastodon and Lemmy” is so sad. The features many people complained weren’t on Mastodon were right there on Akkoma, Misskey, Friendica, Hometown, and others. But nobody would even look at them.

Even on the fediverse nobody wants to discuss the sea of alternative services.

I cry a little bit every time someone acts like Misskey and its forks don’t exist