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1. Embed this notice
   Alek (tarkowski@101010.pl)'s status on Friday, 14-Apr-2023 21:50:57 JST Alek

   "Orbital re-insertion completed" - is it OK to think of #mastodon instances as orbits?

   Also happy to see my char count per post quadrupled, who would have expected! So instances have some mysteries after all.

   THis was for me the first opportunity ever to practice data portability in practice. High time!
   #interoperability
   #dataportability
   Turns out, It's quirky thing.

   For example, it seems that #Mastodon has not managed yet to get a fully fledged system of notifying followers, something an admin promised two years ago. #EveningEmpires

   Also, posts can be downloaded easily from an instance, but not uploaded to a new one. If you want to learn more about it, there's a huge technical thread on Mastodon's GitHub. And that's it.
   I might try to have a nice evening read next week.
   https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/12423

   • Embed this notice
     clacke (clacke@libranet.de)'s status on Friday, 14-Apr-2023 21:50:52 JST clacke

     in reply to

     • Darius Kazemi

     @tarkowski You never got a good answer, so I'll pick this up.

     The most significant example of a Fedi server with unique functionality and community is probably friend.camp, run by @darius .

     He forked Mastodon to create Hometown, which has features like local-only posting to strengthen the local community. He has also built other services around Hometown/Mastodon, which tie into the community and the user identity and offer other features, federated or not.

     Finally, the onboarding process is slow, personal and deliberate, in contrast with the instant open registration of big general-purpose servers.

     Here is his talk and the subsequent Q&A (both hosted on PeerTube, of course) from 2020's apconf:

     socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/…

   • Embed this notice
     Alek (tarkowski@101010.pl)'s status on Friday, 14-Apr-2023 21:50:55 JST Alek

     in reply to

     Quick update on moving accounts in Mastodon:
     - the alias+move option worked this time, hard to say why it did not work the first time
     - the bug that I submitted 5 days ago did not get any attention

     Anyway, the jump is complete, I'm on the new instance. Unfortunately feels exactly the same. I was advised that local feeds offer an interesting "local flavour" stream, but having looked at a few, I don't see reasons to get excited about local.

     Which made me wonder: there does not seem to be much innovation (or maybe there is actually none?) in terms of functionalities offered by the different servers.

     I get it that this comes from the federated nature of mastodon, where you want the functionalities determined by the protocol that ensures interoperability between the instances.

     But there is always an option to add a feature that goes beyond the interoperable core of features. And also the protocol could be updated to include a new feature. Who decides whether that happens?

     So basically more questions, more things to find out. If you have any leads please let me know, also in terms of hashtags because #mastodon feels to general, #interoperability too technical and #feditips is a bit mysterious.

   • Embed this notice
     Alek (tarkowski@101010.pl)'s status on Friday, 14-Apr-2023 21:50:56 JST Alek

     in reply to

     So there actually is a more advanced migration function built into #mastodon. Seems that someone forgot to update the FAQ.

     Still... it does not work for me! Which will be a nice opportunity to try out how submitting a bug works.

   • Embed this notice
     Alek (tarkowski@101010.pl)'s status on Sunday, 23-Apr-2023 03:26:15 JST Alek

     in reply to

     • clacke
     • Darius Kazemi

     @clacke @darius thanks for the answer. I’ve been following Darius’s work on Hometown and it’s one of the most interesting examples of forks.

     I like how deliberate it is, it’s a small network in the world where small is the norm, small squared. Ultra small.

     but that virtue is also a limitation, when thinking about impact on the Fediverse. The way I see it, a healthy Fediverse should be diverse, and that means that there’s a variety of clients that have at least a fair chunk of the “non-market share”. Today’s that’s not the case, and I don’t think hometown is meant to do that.

     I honestly feel, while having all the respect for Mastodon and its creator, that Fediverse – despite all the talk about decentralisation – is quite a centralized network, at this point. Which like all the centralized networks in the past, awaits its challenge from some actor able to grab a significant share, and reshape the space. Think Mozilla / Firefox.

     clacke likes this.
   • Embed this notice
     clacke (clacke@libranet.de)'s status on Sunday, 23-Apr-2023 03:42:38 JST clacke

     in reply to

     @tarkowski It has been said that in any online social network, and maybe it applies offline too, 1% are creative people who really move the subculture forward and come up with new things, 10% are active people who provide feedback and discussion and contribute to the liveliness and direction of the space, and 90% get enjoyment from the network but don't feed much back into it.

     In a somewhat analogous distribution, in the Fediverse 90% are on Mastodon, while 10% are on GlitchSoc/Hometown, Pleroma/Akkoma, Misskey/CalcKey, GNU Social, GoToSocial, Epicyon, Honk, etc.

   • Embed this notice
     clacke (clacke@libranet.de)'s status on Sunday, 23-Apr-2023 03:46:27 JST clacke

     in reply to

     @tarkowski I don't remember the figures now from the instance distribution paper that was written a few years ago, but I think we're not too far off if we say 90% of the people on the network are on big servers like mastodon.social, mastodon.online and pawoo.net, 9% are on servers smaller than 100k but larger than 1 user (and probably hosted on Hetzner in Germany or Finland), and 1% are on single-user servers (hosted in wardrobes everywhere).

     That's probably pretty ok in terms of diversity. The potential for personal expression and creating one's own experience is there, both technologically and socially. The most valuable innovation in e.g. GlitchSoc is upstreamed to Mastodon eventually, and cultural norms have a similar pattern. There is a safety valve so the the almost-centralized part doesn't become a walled garden.

     Plus, rather importantly, the major part of the center is run by a gGmbH, not a corporation with rent-seeking investors.