Mastodon: @mattswift@mastodon.social
Wouldn’t it make a lot more sense for the article title to specify it’s specifically about the US, then? The US is the only country that doesn’t do this and it’s really annoying when just browsing (especially since lemmy.world is hosted by a Dutch individual using software made by Europeans).
Your “suggestion” is far more condescending.
If concerned about privacy you wouldn’t switch to Apple - you’d actually install a custom OS on your Android phone, since you’re allowed to do that on most phones.
It’s on Codeberg, here’s the link: https://codeberg.org/Bazsalanszky/Infinity-For-Lemmy/releases
It’s specifically on the IzzyOnDroid repo, instructions here:
I would suspect at some point it will come into contact with other matter but yea… That could take a very, very long time.
I tried Sync for a little bit, but I didn’t really vibe with it to be honest, Infinity is still by far my favourite phone client.
Really, you should just download it anyway and try it, you’ll find out quickly if it’s for you or not.
In your example, people who have the “bad instances” blocked won’t see the replies under the posts in question, as the instance will not fetch replies from said source.
With how Mastodon works as well, it won’t fetch replies from instances until they’re known either, so brand new instances aren’t going to flood popular comment sections - this is a bit of a con though in a way, as it degrades the user experience when trying to read threads and causes people to constantly post the same stuff as they can’t see all the replies.
I think this disconnect here on Lemmy comes from why people use the platforms they did before (Reddit vs Twitter).
Reddit was always purely content focused, and I feel people trying out Mastodon from Lemmy are expecting the same thing - where Mastodon is about content, and not people you want to follow.
I also love Mastodon as well and I don’t think the issues people are posting about in here are issues at all either, as Mastodon being about directly connecting with people and a purely chronological feed is why I like it - if I want to search content relating to a topic, I browse Lemmy instances instead.
Technically the idea is that if Chrome has barely any market share (will never happen, but let’s pretend), they cannot implement this as it will anger and lock too many users out of day to day life.
However…
With Google Search and YouTube being by far the most 2 popular websites in the world, I think they still could. The vast majority of people would never give those up and if they’re told to use another program to access them, they absolutely will, meaning in an ideal world with a browser competition, they can easily destroy it immediately.
Nomadic identity is a bit of a weird one, because there’s no silver bullet. It’s either:
I do agree it would be way better for a single account/identity to just work everywhere on the Fediverse, but I’m not entirely sure how the details should be handled. Nostr is one implementation (it’s the first one), whereas things like SSO with Google / Microsoft is the second (kbin, for example, has this).
I have noticed that Mastodon development has slowed down considerably though, but admittedly it must be hard having requests from literally every angle about every use case and concern. It’s easy for us to say “just add quote posts”, “just add search”, but the people who have already been on Mastodon have used it knowing those don’t exist, so the Mastodon developers have to implement these things while still thinking of every use case and also still sticking to their own beliefs as to what Mastodon should be.
Telling people to “just use Firefish” is a common thing that comes up when people talk about this, but it’s not really a solution at all with where we’re currently at. (this isn’t aimed at you, by the way, just addressing this specific point)
Whether we like it or not, Mastodon is by far the biggest player in the microblogging space (8M accounts on Mastodon vs 499K on Misskey at #2. with Mastodon being 77.9% of the entire Fediverse!), and it is going to be what the vast majority of people are using, simply due to word of mouth or mindshare. On these sorts of platforms, many features depend on the people you’re posting to also experiencing the same features you are. Quote posts are a very popular topic that’s requested for various reasons on Mastodon, but while the 3rd party apps and other microblog platforms have these implemented, it doesn’t matter if 80%+ of your followers are using Mastodon, because they won’t see the post as you intend for them to see it.
Furthermore, as we know, the “culture” of Mastodon is of the Fediverse at large, using a different platform isn’t going to fix this issue - your community is what you make of it depending on your instance really, but fact of the matter is, most people are going to be drawn to the simpler general instances “where everyone is at”, which is going to be the big Mastodon instances. Trying to divert those people to other platforms isn’t going to work, because they don’t understand how all this works, so good first impressions need to be made on Mastodon, and unfortunately due to the culture of Mastodon attracting a certain type of crowd and no mass migrations to “Eternal September” the culture, especially since Threads now exists, this is going to be a very hard barrier to overcome.
Whenever I’ve talked to people about Mastodon outside of the tech-savvy spaces, most people just see Mastodon as an app and there are “people on Mastodon”, attempting to try and introduce people to all these different platforms and how you can still talk to everyone in places unfortunately just makes their head explode, as they’re not used to the open web due to how it evolved after the rise of Facebook.
Mastodon is stuck between a rock and a hard place, where it wants to make decentralisation the norm by attracting as many people as possible, while still keeping its general culture in place and not wanting to turn into “another Twitter” which usually ends up being filled with hot takes and people dunking on people for entertainment - but unfortunately, this is how people consume social media now, it’s all about content.
It’s weird that you use Germany as an example when Germany has been on Mastodon since 2020 at https://social.bund.de!
The reason this doesn’t work so well is that Lemmy communities are ActivityPub groups, which is not a feature the Mastodon has really implemented - right now you just follow the group as a user and it boosts all the posts to you.
However, Mastodon plans to do groups in their next major update, and this will most likely make the integration much nicer.
To be fair it’s not really “falling” - Lemmy instances are not in competition with one another due to federation.
Understandably people want to feel like they “won” somehow, but this isn’t something you really need to worry about on the Fediverse, it’s more like everyone working alongside each other.
Sports is definitely hard to have take off in these sorts of spaces, since sports are generally talked about much more amongst regular/casual users, than the more tech-savvy crowd who are willing to try these things out.
It’s the same on the biggest ActivityPub platform (Mastodon) - the really popular regular subjects such as sports and cars just don’t have a presence there.
Haha, this is how fast-moving open source projects work, things change constantly as they believe it’s better to just get (perceived) improvements out of the door when they’re cooked up, instead of waiting in any capacity.
And that’s fine, the Fediverse gives you tools to not have to deal with that through silencing or defederation.
But for many people on the Fediverse, they’re here specifically for other things, and being able to interact with the corporate social web from outside of it is ideal for them.
Note that I’m not arguing for or against here, it’s just very easy to see why many aren’t interested in defederating.
It’s not that complicated.
Threads is another instance that brings people to the Fediverse, and people like the idea that they can stay on their instances while still interacting with the world at large. For many people, having everyone on the Fediverse is the goal, and in fact, is a long-term goal of most of the platforms - the “Fediverse” is not meant to be a sort of closed community only for marginalised people to get away from the corporate web, it’s for everyone to use in whatever way they see fit.
There is literally nothing more to discuss if you’re wondering why people “defend” Threads.
Ultimately, it’s because the concerns of privacy are simply too far removed from people, or they trust certain entities more than others.
For example, if your next door neighbour knows all your browsing history, people would be bothered, but people are not bothered if Google knows as it feels they would have no direct effect on their life, whereas your next door neighbour might.
This can be easily seen in the whole discussion regarding privacy on Mastodon.
A lot of people refuse to use Mastodon over Twitter, because “Mastodon admins can see my DMs”, even though Twitter absolutely could as well (Twitter apparently has encrypted DMs since May 2023 though). The reason for this is they see a Mastodon admin as someone who could potentially have an effect on their digital life, whereas they trust Twitter not to do anything with the data since they’re a big corporation who has nothing to do with their personal life.
Unless it is an effect they can directly observe (or imagine to occur), people simply don’t care. This applies to almost all discussions around the big picture, such as things like climate change or unions, or whatever.
Whether we like it or not, people absolutely trust corporations.
They also host a Matrix instance at https://chat.mozilla.org!