maegul (he/they)

A little bit of neuroscience and a little bit of computing

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: January 19th, 2023

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  • It’s not too hard. There are a bunch of different platforms one might experiment with as well as instances. Some will use multiple accounts for different needs or interests. On lemmy, multi accounts are useful for have different feeds, for example. I probably have 7-10. I’ve probably forgotten about a few of them. If you’re curious, it happens.




  • It’s definitely an interesting and relevant idea I think! A major flaw here is the lack of ability for communities to establish themselves as discrete spaces desperate from the doomscrolling crowd.

    A problem with the fediverse on the whole IMO, as community building is IMO what it should be focusing on.

    Generally decentralisation makes things like this difficult, AFAIU. Lemmy has things like private and local only communities in the works that will get you there. But then discovery becomes a problem which probably requires some additional features too.




  • The catch is that the whole system is effectively centralised on BlueSky backend services (basically the relay). So while the protocol may be standardised and open, and interpreted with decentralised components, they’ll control the core service. Which means they can unilaterally decide to introduce profitable things like ads and charging for features.

    The promise of the system though is that it provides for various levels of independence that can all connect to each other, so people with different needs and capabilities can all find their spot in the ecosystem. Whether that happens is a big question. Generally I’d say I’m optimistic about the ideas and architecture, but unsure about whether the community around it will get it to what I think it should be.



  • It’s funny how long I’ve been off of netflix … I haven’t seen any of these (even despite wanting to watch Stranger Things S4 just to finish it).

    Something about netflix just burned me. I tried subscribing again after they introduced ads and the amount clunkiness and incompatibility they’d introduced through that basically burned me for good. I subscribe to some things here and there but I’d lost track of how much netflix is basically off of my radar.


  • Suspicion is totally fair re BlueSky IMO. The system they’ve design seems to me (and others AFAICT) to have the potential to include interconnected components or sections with various degrees of independence.

    The elephant in the room, which I point out on BlueSky whenever I can, is that no one seems to really be trying to build the hard parts of that out. Which is a shame because it could be interesting.

    EG, there’s a chance that a hybridised system running both BlueSky’s protocol and the fediverse’s could be viable and quite useful. Add to that the integration with some E2EE, and it finally feels like an actual attempt at building something new for the modern internet.

    Fortunately there is some noise around these ideas, so hopefully their system can outlast their finances. But yea, a rug pull is definitely not out of the question.


  • I’m not close to Gaiman or the fandom or the story, at all … but I did manage to pickup on some of the whisper network through mastodon, where I read a couple of posts or blog posts by people who seemed to be close to the fandom and even be friends with him (in one case). The vibe was very much he’s likely a womanising guy and has been his whole life and likely has standards “below” what most would consider normal. There also seemed to be a bit of introspection about how much the fandom around him was kinda culty and that that clearly enabled whatever he did, as a common enough pattern seemed to be that someone would go through something unseemly, but because it was Gaiman and all their friends were fans, they presumed it was them or their fault and never wanted to open up about it.

    Like I said though, this is essentially gossip, so don’t take it seriously or anything (also I don’t have any links or anything).



  • If there is a platform that does it better, I bet people will start to notice.

    Yea … I suspect it’s a protocol problem more than any one platform, because there’s just too much flexibility in the protocol and so any inter-platform transfer is necessarily noisy. Multiplied by the number of platforms, and you get quite a bit of noise.

    To your point though, a new platform that kinda does it all on its own could likely take off quite well and then set a new de facto standard around how to do things. Bonfire seemed to be that, and may still be. AFAIU, they’re trying to solve performance issues right now before properly opening up.



  • Just feels like every attempt at alternative social media is dying as the internet shrinks to a few corporate websites that control everything.

    Yea … it’s sort of a lens for me as I view/critique the actions and decisions of people building alt-social … this stuff is hard and fragile but also important … so not fucking around with it kinda matters (to me at least).

    The hate toward BlueSky from mastodon/AP people, for example, is misguided I think. The, IMO, general lack of concern for inter-platform interop across the fediverse bothers me too, where I ask whether a platform is being a good “fediverse citizen”. And some of the “cultural purity through vigilance” culture out of the mastodon/microblogging crowd is, IMO, short sighted.

    A common thread being a readiness for negative behaviour and effects rather than building and supporting.



  • In general, this is true of the broader population as a whole. Mastodon got the size that it’s an actual place (and I think this applies to lemmy/threadiverse too). But it’s by no means “THE place” or even categorically a big public place. More like old-school forums that have a particular user base and vibe that you visit from time to time.

    For the fediverse, the “migration” was exciting and successful, but compared to big-social, a drop in the ocean. And the biggest clue for that is that the people most excited about Threads joining the fediverse are Evan (author and lead “advocate” of ActivityPub) and Gargron (masto CEO/founder) … they want to taste that big-social scale and know that they don’t have it and likely never will.



  • Reality for mastodon, I think, is that the “migration” is basically over, and has been for over a year now. The Brazilian move to BlueSky (and not mastodon) highlights it very well.

    Recalibrating on what we want and can do with the fediverse, as well as how central we want the mastodon project to be, are the best things to do now.

    For me, it seemed like Gargron didn’t really know how to speak about the lack of a Brazilian migration to mastodon in favour of BlueSky, and handle a new moment of actually dropping in popularity or perceived relevance (having been the underdog then rising start for a while), which I take as a cue that being the dominant center of the fediverse isn’t a natural fit for Gargron and his project, to the point where the fediverse may have just outgrown it.

    So, random thoughts:

    • I think de-emphasising mastodon as the fediverse’s big player and surest means of gaining users is likely a good idea in the medium to long term. Replacing twitter for twitter users is now something others do substantially better: Threads and BlueSky. While I’m not sure Mastodon, or its decentralisation, offers anything particularly novel, different or attractive. If anything, its lack of compatibility with other fediverse platforms is likely a negative.
    • More broadly, a focus on microblogging is best de-emphasised, for the same reasons as above. Conspicuously, mastodon is the only platform that’s really trying to replicate twitter-style microblogging. Just about every other platform tries to go beyond it in some way.
    • Instead, IMO, community building through richer and more flexible platforms is what the fediverse should focus on, in large part because it matches what the fediverse’s decentralisation actually provides: control and ownership over your community.
      • Indeed, I think the fediverse needs to kinda wake up to what it really is. So much of the advocacy during the twitter migration was pushing the idea that the decentralisation doesn’t really matter (and “it’s just like email”) and can be ignored for the most part.
      • In reality, it does matter and can’t be easily ignored. And the world has more or less realised that, with mastodon (and the fediverse) now suffering from a branding issue.
      • So I say the way forward is to accept what decentralisation is and either add an additional layer to polish the UX, or lean into it and build on it rather than pretend this place is something else.
    • By community building, I mean “flexible space creation” that likely translates to a range of relatively composable features, structures and content types and formats. Basically, stop rebuilding big-social style platforms, and build “humane spaces” that more or less comprise any/all of the formats of the existing platforms in a way that people can use however they want.
    • Unfortunately, this is likely not trivial, at all, and would likely require better organisation amongst those contributing to the fediverse, and perhaps improvements to the protocol itself.

    As for the threadiverse (lemmy, piefed, mbin, nodebb etc), it’s always struck me that group based structures (EG, lemmy communities) seem to work better over federation. Account migration from instance to instance is simpler, in part because the user is not the central organisation. Which instance you’re on doesn’t really matter that much. Also, blocking a whole community seems a useful middle ground between blocking a user and defederating a whole instance at the instance level, and ditto with community level moderation which can operate over federation. Additionally, the little technical talk I’ve seen on the issue seems to indicate that moving a community from instance to another might actually be quite viable.

    If true, then community building might be best started with the group based platforms. Maybe an ecosystem of formats that involves all of them other than microblogging might work well?? Perhaps user-based content could take on a different structure from what microblogging does … perhaps something like what BlueSky does could be adapted to fuse user-based structures into group-based platforms like lemmy (IE, your content exists in a pod which you can own and which is portable, which is then sucked up into various public feeds depending on what permissions you provide)??

    Things like private communities, group chats, blogs, wikis (and RSS feed management?) intuitively seem to me to pair well with group-based platforms and community building.