I wasted a few minutes of my life reading this rant. It was a total loss. I haven't been entertained by it and I couldn't find anything useful in it. Just the ramblings of a bitter person with which the Internet is filled.
I don’t really care about the substance of this article, but the style is entertaining. Curious for anyone who writes in a similar style - do people actually compose like this breathlessly, or are these kinds of lines wrought over several revisions? I know everyone’s different, but I can’t imagine writing like this on a first pass.
On one hand the author recognizes the scope of the “protocol wars” as a rational thing being irrelevant in the actually relevant time span. On the other hand, the author swears that they can bring rationality to a deeply emotional matter through discourse.
I suppose I could pick a random community. But what's the point? I don't know.
With the fediverse I have an overwhelming fear of missing out if I pick the wrong communities. I feel like it needs aggregation which defeats the purpose.
I suspect the sign up flow has changed since you last tried.
The irony of writing this in HN is ... whatever the right word is Also, fragmentation and visibility. It's neigh impossible to find interesting content if you're not on the main big instances.
Are they choosing what people can read, or are they choosing what they're willing to federate? No one is stopping people writing and publishing things on federated services. People are only choosing what they're willing to broadcast over the part of the service they run.
Most of the people who started on Mastodon are people of the LGBT+ community that were getting constantly harassed on other platforms. This 'cancel culture' is just a healthy attitude to having a zero tolerance policy on abuse, it is how it avoids being the enormous bigoted alt-right techbro mess that is now X.
I want commentary on the news. We should be critiquing the news and it's way more interesting that just uncritically accepting mainstream narratives.
_wire_•3h ago
To get a sense of this skim
sfba.social
which is a feed of trending posts with a U.S. west coast vibe.
jaggs•3h ago
phaser•2h ago
bigthymer•1h ago
His article mostly talks about other things but I think his title is sufficient. He says that he never thought that the news would become so unreliable that he would end up getting his news from randos on Bluesky who simply share what they know without an intention to monetize it.
dekken_•1h ago
Imustaskforhelp•1h ago
Maybe offtopic but I was reading something on hackernews and thought about something like this yesterday as the world starts getting more brand-ed and corporate-y that perhaps its up to the average person to share the list of cool people/things they know.
But I don't think that a follow itself might be the largest indicator of showing others what cool people are.
Yesterday, I tried linkhut (https://ln.ht) and added it to my profile. It just has cool things that I found online and I have written minor notes below it on why I think the things are cool or not.
I am curious to know but can some idea like this take off within the fediverse community/ say personally for you?
Can you have a linkhut profile that I can just see which can have cool people that you found and why you think that they are cool? And if I think that you are cool, then I can have some of that coolness be transferred to people you think cool too?
I used to be on fediverse and I think that there are some very cool people on fediverse, its just very hard to find them sometimes.
dekken_•1h ago
I gravitate toward what I consider authenticate/consistent people which for me at least has seemed to work out as I also try to be that way.
> Can you have a linkhut profile...
It doesn't really work that way, you can see other peoples public conversations to see how they interact, as a metric for their personalities, which, might be more work. It's network effects moreso.
as for https://ln.ht, I can see it working for some people, but personally I think there's a bit too much going on, sensory overload.
Imustaskforhelp•37m ago
I do understand the sensory overload aspect. I personally don't use the social aspect of it that much.
Essentially the idea that I want to say was that even the people that I follow (say on bluesky) etc. sometimes I don't know why I follow them exactly either or any idea of giving this info to the world for that matter.
The idea of linkhut interests me especially with their note section: I can have a profile of cool things/people I found and I can share it to world and I can try to explain the "why cool?" so that people can judge things on that aspect and it gives more info, that's all.
Unfortunately even for fediverse/ all social media. You really can't end up writing the exact reason you follow someone as a comment everytime you follow someone. Sometimes sure but not always and those comments can get muddled up with other comments that you write while using the platform itself.
> It doesn't really work that way, you can see other peoples public conversations to see how they interact, as a metric for their personalities, which, might be more work. It's network effects moreso.
I suppose so. But I think the idea to me for using something like linkhut isn't for people to offload searching how people interact/the metric as you mention but rather the fact that we are unable to find these people/products in the first place!
There has been too much stuff going on in the world in social media that there are genuinely cool people/projects that you don't even see. My point is similar to outlinks in the sense of sharing some visibility to those who don't have such visibility in the darkness of internet sometimes.
I only sort of found it yesterday so but that's my take on it. I am curious to hear yours though.
robinsonb5•1h ago
dekken_•1h ago
Imustaskforhelp•25m ago
For example: Suppose you went to fluxer.gg (Open source Discord alternative that I found cool)
You searched it upon ln.ht: https://ln.ht/?query=fluxer.gg
You can then find the username who uploaded it there (in this case, its me): https://ln.ht/~imafh
You can then for example, find another thing that I uploaded there about a song/musician that I found really cool :-
Fuji Gateway - Tuesdays, Am I Right? (Official Lyric Video): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ijjb_0RW28c
You can even endorse me by having my username linkhut be within your linkhut profile for example and I think I am seeing some social aspect of it in the frontpage of linkhut as well although I don't particular appreciate that right now.
Linkhut also is open source/have public API's
I found Linkhut only yesterday fwiw but its really cool and want to vouch for it. So does this work for the use case that you are mentioning?
Plus another point about Linkhut which I have talked in another comment is the note functionality. It allows me to reason (why?) I liked a particular website of say any project or any person and allows me to add words to it as well. This might be the feature I like the most because it allows me to use words to sort of actually have word-of-mouth for any cool things that we find on internet.
And this way you can also find reasonings for other websites that a person may've vouched for in a way too. I found this whole idea really elegant.
Edit: Oh btw there is also the concept of tags. So suppose you wanted more discord alternative. You could search #discord and it can for example lead you to stoat, matrix etc. from other people too.
I am not sure if there is already an extension that does it but an extension could be made to really simplify some aspects of it. I definitely feel this and there is some maybe small community on linkhut so you're not starting from scratch and also the merits of linkhut in general seem to me be good enough for average person to use.
I am curious to hear your thoughts on this.
immibis2•59m ago
IDK about Linkhut. Why should I use a whole SaaS to manage a single page list of links?
Imustaskforhelp•44m ago
Linkhut is open source and seems nice to me that's all.
gzread•1h ago
AJ007•1h ago
One can make an argument that compliance is possible -- but it isn't free. I don't see how small, independent websites will survive. Operators chose not to follow the laws (which sometimes conflict with each other.) As long as you don't scale too much or the operators or anonymous they can probably get away with it.
I use Mastodon. I use Twitter. Twitter is still fine as long as you keep your follow list clean. That means unfollowing people who post noise, which somehow people haven't figured out 17 years later?? Only view the chronological feed. Could this all have just been RSS feeds? Probably.
kgwxd•1h ago
8organicbits•13m ago
My mastodon feed contains only the users I follow. If they post unwanted things I unfollow them. Mastodon doesn't force you to see content from people you don't follow.
The sfba trending list has engagement-bait, but you shouldn't look there (on any social media site) if you don't want that sort of content.
Synaesthesia•4m ago
Seems pretty cool TBH