I feel like there’s a nigh-supernatural element to this. People can tell that this isn’t some corporate project and so reject it out of hand. They can suss out this sort of thing and only want “legitimate” things from moneyed institutions, or bust.
@cassidyclown niggas i tell to join fedi, not even cyberia but to look into fedi in general aren't interested. In their mind it hasn't been legitimised like trad social media because it doesn't have the backing of a corporation aka their surrogate father figure.
@cassidyclown@Zealous temporarily embarrassed millionaire attitude. For many people the entire point of social media is not to make friends but to "go viral". Despite the average user getting far more engagement here than the average twitter user, there's no chance that you will get "le meme numbers" do they go back to twitter posting to 0 followers all day and maybe once per year they'll do a banger that gets 2,000 likes.
For the other half, they're looking for political drama and the only thing they want to do is dunk on some retarded take via quote tweet. For various reasons this isn't a good idea here and will typically just get you blocked by both sides for being an annoying prick.
98% of people I've seen who would even be candidates for darkfedi fall into this category.
@cassidyclown I think it's the lack of a safety net. I suspect people can feel that there is no bottom underneath them when they are on the fediverse. The sensation of your feet dangling off the ledge is uncomfortable for people who have never been anywhere they could even see it. People have been socialized into being uncomfortable with what the fediverse will always be, and good fucking luck breaking that conditioning. I personally don't think there are any great reasons not to, that a lot of the meme rebuttals about oh what server oh feed is empty are made by people you would never convince anyway. But then again, I'm here, and they're not, so of course I don't see any strong objections as legitimate. You probably have to mature into being able to want the fediverse, so to speak, to develop an appetite for it. Few do, especially among those raised on contemporary, large social networks their entire online lives. I think that's why the fedi userbase tends to skew towards traditional definitions of nerd and geek, or pre-dotcom-bubble in their introduction to the web. As part of user retention, corporate social networks probably take somewhat active discourage venturing beyond, even to competitors to an extent that most users would only come here out of desperation or necessity.
There isn’t a lack of safety net, which is why most of fedi can’t see us. Reminder that fedi was mostly about trannies looking for more censorship than Twitter offered, and it does a really good job of it.
@bot@cassidyclown I would argue that there is. You can't get help if your instance gets defederated from people you actually want to talk to. There's no adult to resolve it. You have to pack up and move elsewhere, you're totally fucked if you want to continue doing what you were doing. There's some illusion that you can get help on getting your account banned/suspended on e.g. twitter. Basically everyone is subject to the same lack of compassion or help here that only rightoid types face/faced on twitter/facebook etc. Turns out, no one likes that behavior being used against them, and I think that's the absence of recourse, or "safety net" so to speak, that turns off normie types. You can call either side of it a "safety net" I suppose, but the one that is built here is built for mastotroons to be safe, not you or I. To that end, I don't mind sticking around to be an annoyance when I feel the need to do a little trolling.
You’re just talking about the tranny janny menace, which is why fedi sucks even more since there are a million of them. Ppl should be able to make their own decisions about what they want to see.
@Inginsub@cassidyclown@Zealous fedi is the first social media I've ever had. Everything else just looked so awful. I've seen nothing to contradict that to this day.
@RustyCrab@Zealous I don't know. I've never been a daily poster on any social media platform ever until fedi. That's got to say something. I feel like we're just shit at marketing ourselves because there's no incentive to.
@gray@cassidyclown@bot fediverse would have been a Really Fucking Big Deal 20 years ago. Now, everyone has had their brain rotted by politics to the point where they can no longer chill and be chill. AP is written so you basically never see or talk to people you don't follow, antagonistic communities should be able to exist and not overlap. Instead we get endless e-drama purity spirals because no one touches nearly enough grass, or has nearly enough sex to just log off for a bit when it is appropriate. It used to just be spergs but now more and more people have degenerated into every more esoteric spergery. Over there you're liable to tranny-janny spergery. Over here you're gonna get caught up in flavor of the month niche e-celeb cult drama, or the loli question. There's no escape, there is no casual experience, and normies want casual. I think that's why there's probably more normies on the mastodon side of the wall, because it is casual so long as you aren't getting your nuts kicked into your chest cavity by the tranny gestapo. That happens in few enough numbers, just under-the-radar enough that the nigger cattle tolerate the secret police terrorizing them, for the most part. Or they just go back to Twitter/Instagram et. al. which is also exactly like that, but with more people and better software (inherently increasing the value of the experience).
@pwm@cassidyclown@bot I agree with this take on it. The fediverse isn’t normie friendly because there is simply no middle ground. If you interact with the wrong person or people you get banished by the mastodongers and labeled as a nazi or fascist or whatever and that’s not appealing for anyone who wants to just be part of a community or post about their interests. And on the other hand to just be on the mastodon side you can’t just post either without conforming to all their stupid tedious bullshit. I think the fediverse is just too divisive and too political to appeal to the masses and I’m willing to place most of the blame on the tranny jannies of the mastofag side of the fediverse.
@cassidyclown@RustyCrab@Zealous the global feed is one of the reasons nostr is revolting: it's nothing but crypto spam and hugposting pushed to every relay
@cassidyclown@RustyCrab@Zealous another thing about twkn is that it's people you and others on the instance follow, and stuff those people interact with. It's a self-organizing feed of things that may be interesting to you that doesn't use an algorithm.
@cassidyclown@Inginsub@Zealous it does. Given that twitter is imploding there may come a time when it becomes genuinely unusable. It's getting there rapidly. Twitter is, sadly, the least censored big tech platform at this point and the shitposters on there have nowhere else to go after it dies.
The good thing is that people who do give this place a chance tend to stick around for a long time so that tells you we aren't just crazy. Given lack of options a lot of people may be forced to give it a chance.
@RustyCrab@Inginsub@Zealous I also like the non-linear conversation of threads in general. I like starting and abandoning and hopping between conversations that are often with the same people. Instant messaging typically forces a linear conversation that doesn't allow this and makes me feel awkward to start or end things. But other platforms with the same thread-like structure lack the sense of community that fedi has. I don't know - I'm trying to pin down why this clicks for me when nothing else ever has. Federation helps maintain a sense of community because even if twkn is overwhelmingly large you still have your own instance - your own "club" so to speak and others still have a tag that identifies what club they belong to and so you know them a little before you even know them really.
@Inginsub@RustyCrab@Zealous I guess people use discord for their "community" type socialising. Ignoring everything to do with censorship resistance etc. this has the community-feeling of a closed messaging group combined with the numbers-type gratification of twitter. I think it has a lot of potential still.
@kroner@cassidyclown@gray@bot I mean I only ever see like 5-6 of you, I dunno what your MAU is. Three figures is a cozy figure, I reckon. Small enough that I doubt your moderation load requires more than just your intermittent attention. Low moderation load is I think the best barometer for "is this too big for its own good"
@pwm@cassidyclown@gray@bot@kroner I run a single-user instance, and while it's lonely for sure, it's also way better than being shoved into a bunch of edrama and dealing with shills trying to divide and conquer.
Still vaguely hopeful for Nostr (mostly just to see what Alex does for it), but I'm not sure if there's a more boring community on earth. Maybe ham operators or model train collectors. If there manifests a way to form communities instead of being thrown into the general population of "PV zaps stack sats humble fiat btc" then maybe it will be better. There are also issues with everyone using different relays and only getting part of any given conversation, but the same is true of fedi.
@kroner@cassidyclown@gray@bot Eh, you can't engineer people out of all their bad behaviors. I signed up on poast and fse to try everything out, then spun up my instance. That's probably the natural cycle for anyone who shares these concerns. I do it for fun, and less for the integrity of the network, though that concern has certainly grown somewhat since I spun it up. Ultimately I don't think you need to fret too much about homogenization/centralization of the fediverse because there are significant enough drawbacks to it that people will always be flung out of the orbit of large instances naturally (broken poast threads being a really good example). That just doesn't happen nearly as much on smaller instances. Keep doing what you're doing, and I think everything will be as alright as anyone could ever hope for.
Would almost be sorta cool if a fediverse software had a feature for "maximum account limit" or something to keep the amount of people on the instance to a level the admin could handle. Although that would probably not be too popular
@victor@cassidyclown@gray@bot@kroner re: forming communities, I have kinda been wanting a fedi-imageboard, we already have fedi-reddit (lemmy), but I wonder if anyone else does. I kinda think I know how I'd want to do it, with a board actor that you follow and cc on posts that acts like a relay actor that forward the posts in each submitted thread on to users that follow it. You could even do something like federate the boards across instances, when the board actors follow each other, creating a webring basically. I dunno if I'm the man to build it, but maybe I should at least try.
@pwm@cassidyclown@gray@bot@kroner It's the same old story. Any truly "anonymous" board can't be allowed to exist, because that's where people's real thoughts about the state of the world come out and they find they're not alone. So the usual actors come in and spam illegal things and get it shut down, then it comes back but with "jannies" who "moderate" the content, and half the users leave, while the remaining half are neutered.
@kroner@bot@cassidyclown@gray@victor especially without some sort of consensus mechanism for allowing federated boards into the ring, it could get really fucked up really fast
Well, the whole thing with boards following boards we don't have right now but it is something that I could probably add on top of the existing functionality
@kroner@cassidyclown@victor@gray@bot I'm still debating whether that's actually a feature you would want, it might push the "community" into too wide a scope. Just that it would technically be possible.
The only downside we have right now is that the frontend developer has IRL things to do as they're in college still so front end development is a little slower.
We have made it pretty far with just 3 devs in about 10-12 months though, I hope we can attract more people to contribute in the future though as the project is FOSS as doing all this work with just a couple devs is time consuming
Well in any case my project is very much like Lemmy right now but with a better UX. We do have plans to differentiate ourselves in the future though once the core experience is done (things like local wall comments on user profiles and a websocket based chatroom perhaps to name a few)
I think it is possible, would need a database table to track board follows and then when a post activity is sent out you would need to add the remote board that follows the local board to the recipients. And then logic to accept incoming posts from other boards... would definitely make things a bit more complicated on the backend though.
You could also just link remote boards on the sidebar too I suppose to show your affiliation
@kroner@cassidyclown@victor@gray@bot I'm pretty sure you could just borrow actor behavior 1:1 from an AP relay, it's just that instead of only relaying to users actors who followed, you also relay to application actors who followed (assuming they too are whitelisted federated boards). The problem is that le troll instance can open up a board actor, follow one other federated board, and quickly blast e.g. cp to every connected board to that one. You would need some complicated joining the network consensus mechanism, or a whitelist and some just trust me bro between board operators who chose to federate. That's the possible headache and why you potentially might not want to do that imo.
The only reason there’s a user base at all is because of Jack and Snowden so it’s sort of a double edged sword. But ppl have enough faith in it to put money behind it like the grant Alex got so I guess we’ll see.
@pwm@cassidyclown@bot I've got an account over on the other side of the great wall of the fediverse as well as this one and I see more normal posting over here than there but that might be my own biases coming through.
I think the main problem with both sides is people try to force you to care about stuff but they are much more in your face about it on the mastodon side because of how they've walled off their echo chamber.