Check out the app permissions for the Mastodon app vs its competitors, and you’ll get an idea.

Of course, it’s not the Fediverse as such - Threads is still surveillance capitalism, even if it gains full AP support. And 3rd party Mastodon apps can track as much as they want. But the Fediverse makes it possible, by not depending on returns on investments.

Twitter was never the town square of the Internet. The Miiverse was.

It would be way too cool if the Wii homebrew scene implemented ActivityPub in the original miiverse. I might just dust of my Wii for that.

Might have been a user error then! Admittedly I did not try very hard.

There’s also a low bandwidth mode available. It’s an impressive platform in general.

In my experience it’s very snappy, and with minimal JavaScript (if at all). Hell, it’s even somewhat usable in Lynx, though I couldn’t sign in.

I wouldn’t be quite so pessimistic. There’s a commit for #FetchAllReplies (by @jonny@neuromatch.social, I believe) that seems to be shaping up well, with a seemingly healthy debate going on. Just yesterday @Gargron@mastodon.social posted in agreement that it is a must-fix issue.

They’re moving slow, but their reasons for doing so doesn’t seem to boil down to an unwillingness to fix it.

Mastodon is non-proprietary software. So one person or company cannot own it in a meaningful sense.

His foundation might own the copyright on the name and logo, so that bad actors can’t pretend to be them. That’s pretty much it.

I was surprised to learn how little the domain as user name feature actually means, after setting it up with my bridged account.

The real user names on Bluesky are called DIDs. Different URLs can point to a DID, making your profile discoverable through this URL. By default it’ll be username.bsky.app (or username.instance.bsky.brid.gy), but as long as the URL redirects to the DID it could really be anything.

Several such redirects could be active, but you choose one to be the “official” one that shows up on your profile. People don’t follow your domain though - when they interact with you, they interact with the account associated with the underlying DID.

It’s basically just smoke and mirrors for what is still a very centralized service.

It is still, of course, more decentralized than Twitter, as one can post there through the bridge without having an account. So that’s neat. But the whole domain thing is deceiving as hell.

As a general rule, try to also include a description of who you are on your profile. If you’re active people will check in, if you give some sort of description there they are more likely to actually follow you.

Usually when someone follows me I’ll check out their profile, if they look interesting I’ll follow them back. If their profile is empty I usually won’t.

I post on mastodon and bridge to bluesky. That way I can reach anyone there interested in following me, but I personally don’t have to bother with the site at all.

As someone trying to reach an audience, it’s pretty much perfect. Each to their own obviously.

Thanks, very insightful!

Maybe elaborate?

Vitamin D supplements. You’re not gonna get much sunlight, and you need vitamin D not to get depressed.

The locals are used to seasonal depression. Foreigners tend to have a hard time with it.

Layers are key. Noting beats real wool.

Use mittens, not gloves. Gloves suck.

You cannot interact with microblog folks on Lemmy, unless they actively post something in a Lemmy community by tagging it. So if you want to combine microblogging with threaded discussions Mbin is the only platform that does both. Mbin lists followers publicly.

I think there are Mastodon forks (or configurations) that hide followers from the public though. But it will only ever be half hidden.

It’s useful.

Let’s say you see someone who posts stuff you’re interested in. In a brief moment of absolute brilliance, you think to yourself “aha! Maybe this person follows other people whose content I would be interested in!”

So you check, and sure enough, there’s a bunch of interesting people listed. So you follow them as well. Your social graph grows, you have a better time there, the people you follow get better reach and gets to enjoy pleasant interactions with you. Everybody’s happy.

These social media platforms are designed to be public. If you want to do stuff in secret, do it somewhere else.

That’s fantastic.

It seems clear the English speaking web has a preference for Bluesky. It would be interesting to know how much variation there is between users of other European languages. It seems to me the Germans are pretty active in the Fediverse, which makes sense considering a significant portion of them have been huge privacy nerds since the fall of the GDR.

I mean, I totally believe people who would find the act of milking a cow to be disgusting have no business drinking milk from the supermarket. We need to reflect on where food comes from, and if that changes people’s habits that’s probably a good thing.

In part, I think legislation should play a role here. When buying milk you should be able to know what kind of conditions the cows lived under and what they were fed. I don’t think there’s anything disgusting about cow milk as such. Induatrial farming, on the other hand…

I’m not telling you to shut up. But I am telling you that you’re probably not convincing as many people as you’d wish by telling them that their culture and way of life is “gross”.

Also, some of the best plant based food is totally gross. Fermentation is life.

If everyone made an effort we’d live in a completely different world almost over night. At least as someone who cares about sustainability side of it, that’s what matters. But I appreciate that veganism consists of a bunch of different forms of arguments and motivations.

If you consider this to be the main reason not to eat cheese, you would particularly benefit from keeping it to yourself.