I had no idea of the size and variety of the Fediverse! It has me feeling a bit overwhelmed. I’m enjoying BookWyrm very much; it’s the GoodReads/LibraryThing replacement I’ve been looking for for years.
I love the simplicity of Paper.wf for blogging. It’s truly elegant; I just click the link and start typing. But as far as I can tell there’s no way for others to find my blog or for me to find other blogs on the site. There’s no browse or follow feature. Nor can anyone comment on my posts! Those seem to me to be HUGE omissions.
Have you used any Fediverse blogging options? What are they like? And what other Fediverse services would you recommend? Other than Mastodon, I’ve already tried that (it didn’t excite me).
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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:
@BobQuasit For example I’m using Friendica to participate in this discussion. Friendica aims to be the Swiss knife concerning social media. Also there is Peertube, a video sharing system. Then have a look at Pixelfed which is specialized in sharing pictures.
The fediverse is really wide.
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.
Pixelfed just implemented an instagram import feature as well!
And the word is banned on Instagram lol
Free speech and corporate ownership are completely incompatible.
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.
Do I need to create separate accounts on each of those or can I use this one? Can I log in to Funkwhale with this account or get Funkwhale posts here on kbin, or am I better creating a separate account on each “thing”? I’m still very new to this whole fediverse thing…
One of the eventual goals of kbin is to be compatible with the rest of the fediverse and to “just work” with the rest of it. By way of comparison, Lemmy is basically just a federated Reddit, so, this is actually one of the reasons I chose to go with kbin.
From a practical standpoint, it’ll likely be a while before that becomes a reality, but I like that as a goal.
I’d say see if you can search for the instance in the search (once we’re 100% federated) and if it doesn’t work and it’s something you want to participate in, unfortunately, you’ll need to go there directly.
Also - Your kbin.social account can only log into kbin.social, you can’t use it to log into any other sites (this would include other kbin sites, lemmy sites, mastodon sites, etc…), what you can do is see content from those sites by subscribing to them or on the front page (non-subscribed)
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. :-)
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.
Re PeerTube, as a creator, is it worth it to try an find an instance that suits my content right now?
If you’re putting your content up on Youtube right now, then Peertube can just mirror that content without much work. At least that’s my understanding. I’m not a Youtuber. diode.zone is one I’ve used in the past which doesn’t really have any kind of gatekeeping.
However, I personally enjoy TILVids the most. They’re curated. You ahve to talk to the TILVids admin to get access and he kind of is there to help folks get started and if you take off then he suggests you create your own. That happens with few. TechLore for instance just did this. But he does have a focus on videos that help folks learn things, but even GamingOnLinux mirrors there.
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.
What happens when instances die off, would their comments be deleted and you’d have threads with half conversations everywhere?
I believe once a post or comment is federated it will continue to stay even if the instance it came from is no longer in service. instances are not “streaming” the data to each other, they send copies and store it in their own dbs. So this comment right here will have a bunch copies out there on other instances.
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.
Never heard of BookWyrm. Excited to check it out! Thanks!
If you have a CSV file of previous reviews from Goodreads or some other site, you can import it into BookWyrm. Look me up when you get there; I’m @BobQuasit@bookwyrm.social .
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I personally really enjoy Matrix but it’s not really a “fediverse” thing but it is a federated end to end encrypted messaging platform
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.
Thanks, that’s good to know! I’ve been wondering where I can make recommendations for features to be added. Although I’m sure the devs are working themselves to death right now.
Some, but it’s open source and a lot of people have day jobs. I’ve wanted to contribute to some things that are annoying me, but after work, exercise, taking the dog out, and making dinner, I have like 2 hours of my time…. so it’s hard to rally.
its kinda like MQTT for humans rather than machines.
Like what?
MQTT, a protocol so machines can talk between each other. Mainly for IoT devices. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MQTT
Thanks, never heard of this before!
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?
AFAIK the problem is there is no good movie database which allows free use of their data
So what? We’ll create one!
Years ago the owners of GoodReads announced that Amazon had taken away their access to the Amazon book database. It was an existential threat, they said, and asked the GoodReads community to volunteer to create a new book database to replace Amazon’s. Hundreds or thousands of us worked for free, donating thousands or tens of thousands of hours to the project.
And then GoodReads announced that they’d sold out to Amazon. Apparently they’d been in negotiations with those bastards the whole time they were lying to us about losing access to the database. Maybe proving that they could sucker their loyal users into donating free labor helped raise the selling price of GoodReads a little.
As for the database we created, I guess it’s Amazon’s now. Of course, if we create a movie database of our own, NOBODY will be able to buy it! And we can make it available for free use, if we want.
Okay, let’s do this. But we need someone to create an Interface and Database
That’s mostly outside of my area of expertise. I work with databases, but not from an app perspective. How can we find people with those skills? Post on Lemmy?
TMDB? Community-built database, there’s an API, seems still active and reasonably up-to-date.
That sounds great!
Wikidata is under CC0 license so I imagine that’d be useful https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:WikiProject_Movies
IIRC the critique was that Wikidata doesn’t provide enough structured data
I thought that was the whole point of Wikidata. But I’ve not actually used it yet.
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.
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.
hmm, I guess the responsibility is partially on me to manually find/follow people from other instances to increase the cross-instance federation?
right now I am creating new accounts on all the different fediverse platforms so I can see which UI/UX I prefer, but I would like to eventually use only 1 or 2 accounts if possible
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.
As long as it’s closed source there’s always the incentive to sell.
