Matt

It depends what we mean by “bad with technology.”

A lot of posts here are talking about how the current young generations (Generation Z and Generation Alpha) are bad with technology as they don’t understand anything, and this is true, but to most people being “good with technology” means you’re good at using it for desired results, not necessarily understanding how things work or how to troubleshoot.

In my opinion: No. Due to the type of technology that the millennials grew up with, they are generally good at adapting to new and changing technologies, so I suspect they’ll be quite good at keeping up. Whether this will hold true for Z and Alpha is to be seen.

Sounds like what you need is Floorp, it’s a Firefox fork with all of this built in.

https://floorp.app

Yeah there is, governments too. It’s not super widespread but they do have a presence.

Due to how federation and anti-viral Mastodon is though, they can’t hijack trends and stuff so a lot will most likely never come.

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:

https://apt.izzysoft.de/fdroid/

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.

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.

Well, when it comes to Matrix, they can’t really “compromise” in a way that other platforms may be able to, as their protocol is designed to be as private and secure as possible first, then the features come later.

While “nobody cares about privacy” and features are king, I personally have a lot of respect for the Matrix developers for sticking true to their vision instead of compromising for the sake of adoption. Matrix and Element DO want to be feature-rich, but they will only accept things if they work with their principles.

Furthermore, the Matrix team aren’t the ones “complaining” about adoption, they’re actually quite happy with how much adoption there is - it isn’t insignificant as there’s over 80 million known accounts, which is much bigger than the ActivityPub social media platforms, and many people use Matrix independently which they can’t track.

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:

• People store their credentials and data on their own systems in a peer-to-peer like system, but people are going to be constantly losing their access to their identity if they do this, so while this is technically ideal, it isn’t going to work for those that aren’t too familiar with technology. People have gotten very used to not having to look after their data in recent years.
• The identity is handled by some sort of identity server for authorisation, but what this will most likely do is give rise to some centralised identity services that you’re going to have to trust, which arguably may be against decentralisation.

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.

I only self-host a MediaWiki website at the moment, along with a PPSSPP adhoc server for said game that the wiki is related to. I want to self-host a lot more stuff, but storage space is expensive, and I don’t really want to leave things running at home all the time either as it will eat into my electricity bill.

Nextcloud and OnlyOffice are what I’m interested in next, and perhaps a Fediverse platform.

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.

It’s whatever you want it to be.

In general, people on the fediverse are pretty chill and not hateful, but there are instances full of genocide deniers or literal white supremacists.

Thing is though, each instance moderates differently and your experience varies depending on where you are.

For example, beehaw.org (not sure if it’s back up) is a very heavily moderated and curated space, and most people there tend to be from marginalised groups. They will federate and defederate accordingly so that experience is preserved.

On the other hand, you have instances such as exploding heads which are “free speech” which attracts the kind of people you expect, and your interactions across the fediverse will follow suit.

Your instance and moderation defines your experience on the fediverse, not the platform.

“Active users” in these sort of metrics tend to just be one sort of post/comment in the past 30 days, so probably!

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.

There is verification of sorts for what it’s worth - you drop some HTML on your website, then tell Mastodon to crawl your website to look for it, and if it picks it up, it verifies that your Mastodon account and website are linked.

It helps for all sorts of use cases beyond “this is a famous person”, since people who run smaller projects can also verify who they are on Mastodon - I have 2 verified links on my profile for example.

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.

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.