@ruben I agree with this synopsis

@liaizon Yep, said pretty much the same thing the other day.

To me, the one key feature we need is the ability to disable replies, and maybe also control who can reply, those are top 1 and 10 requests on Mastodon's GitHub, and both have been open for several years.

The team's response: it's too hard. Which, fair enough. But putting any effort into UX/UI polishing, as needed as that is, will be wasted as so many people already left because of the constant harassment and gatekeeping.

I also pointed out that by the time Bluesky's VC money runs out, there might already be enough independent communities running the full ATProto stack, so people will just be able to migrate without needing to ever look at the fediverse again.

@liaizon We've really fumbled the big Twitter/X migration, and just learned nothing.

@stefan another place where WAFRN and GoToSocial leading the way with close to zero funding

@liaizon @ruben I think fediverse could still become mainstream, but maybe not through Mastodon?

I had pretty high hopes when Tumblr originally announced integrating ActivityPub, of course that's not happening anymore.

Less so with Meta's Threads, given the company's history.

Flipboard and Ghost are still putting in the effort, which is great, but those are not platforms used by regular social media users.

We really just need a new fediverse platform that's user-friendly. Seems like that's nearly impossible without VC money though, so I don't know.

@liaizon Yeah, if I had the time and resources, I'd set up a server with GoToSocial and a Phanpy frontend, gave it a cool modern name, and try to lure in normies, without advertising the whole federation thing too much, just as an added bonus.

Alas, I really don't want to deal with content moderation.

@liaizon @stefan Pixelfed has had comment controls since 2019, and Loops just shipped "Hide comments" support, but I agree we can do more, I'm working on extensive comment controls for both Pixelfed and Loops.

@stefan same same 100%

@dansup Really nice to see someone taking safety features seriously!

Do hidden comments federate? That is honestly a great feature to have, I only thought of this recently during a conversation around reply controls, as a potential way to deal with the delay caused by the roundtrips needed to verify if a reply can be posted.

(Presumably this works differently on Loops, definitely curious to learn more.)

@liaizon

@liaizon @stefan So?

If the Pixelfed/Loops user wants to disable comments, and other software doesn't respect that, why would the Pixel/Loops user care about ghost threads/replies?

We're focused on providing better/safer experiences for our users, and if other platforms don't abide by that, okay, but I'm not sure it's as pressing of an issue as you think it is.

We will get this fixed with interactionPolicy, people love our platforms because we have supported this for years.

@stefan @liaizon We don't yet federate the hidden state, but soon will.

If you have a Loops.video account, you can see this in action here (press Load more until you see the Show hidden comments button): https://loops.video/v/5YvxWOxcRa

(Hidden comments require auth, but I'm going to remove that limitation in the next update)

@dansup Very cool!

@liaizon

@sun @liaizon I hope one day I can be something so we have pleroma being a little popular. How I see it it's free software (gnu) vs Linux again but with social media fontends like do you like bootleg Twitter or bootleg tweet deck

@ruben @liaizon I'm waiting for people getting sick of twitter etc.

@liaizon blusky is one website so far so centralized it's just twitter lite.

@ruben All very good points!

And honestly, I also care less about fediverse being mainstream than about growing the diversity here.

But also, I really do want us to move beyond corporations being the middlemen of our social connections. Honestly, if ATProto takes off, Bluesky eventually folds, and the future is independent Atmosphere communities, that's really not so bad.

I care a lot less about the tech stack than who controls it.

(Okay, I will never get used to the ATProto-style usernames, for that reason alone, I hope the fediverse "wins".)

@liaizon ohh wafrn looks very cool

@Bike I mostly agree about the reasons you mention here. I guess the part that I am uncertain is what exactly "won" will look like. I don't see the current fediverse going away, but I do fail to see any path at this getting mainstream adoption like bluesky is currently getting. and that narrative concerns me. I think there are still avenues that must be taken to work together on a shared future path.

@liaizon for me both protocols have very different success conditions. In both cases having more users off the main platforms of tiktok, Facebook, Instagram, etc is a condition. but for bsky I think it looks like total users but for fedi in think it's number of servers too.

I think that the difficulty of deploying servers was part of the reason we didn't get larger adoption. I think what fedi is great at -smaller communities having both internal and external conversations - was hampered by those groups needing to have a server deployed. The communities that would have benefited went to discord instead, and the people whov wanted microblogging wanted universal reach.

I dont know how solveable this problem was for fedi given "it's too hard to make a webserver" has been a problem since geocities.

@liaizon sorry, that came out too confrontational.
after further consideration I don't think I currently care enough about this topic to engage with it at the necessary depth to have a meaningful conversation. not a super techy person anymore.