I don't think people here realized yet how much development has sped up in the "atmosphere*"

wakest ⁂

I have been watching both spaces for many years (almost the beginning of fedi) and Bluesky when it was just a discord room before Jay was chosen. There is a major shift going on where some of the ideas that have been talked about in various shapes across various communities are being implemented with nice interfaces and able to be used by "normal people" aka not people who know how to patch their Linux kernal.

wakest ⁂

Shout out to WAFRN (@admin) and @anewsocial for taking the uncomfortable position of straddling the space inbetween protocols. I think this is truly the strategy that is going to be needed if we want to "win" the push towards an open social web for the whole internet.

Blurry Moon

@liaizon we have always been able to do that. We are just strangled by mastodon dominance and what it accepts

wakest ⁂

@sun being able to do something and there being a clear path to the thing in practice are two different things.

Blurry Moon

@liaizon I don’t know what it is but I don’t think it’s technical that is limiting it here. But I think a big factor is the dominant toolset there is a lot better than ours and we’ll never get over the inertia

wakest ⁂

I will say here again I am very much on team fediverse and the anarchist anticapitalist free culture side of networks. Bluesky has some "help" with dirty money vc bullshit. There are many things Bluesky (the company) is doing that is awful (like verifying ICE ffs and deleting Palestinian accounts) and those are things I have been continuously pointing out as well.

johnny stancil

@sun @liaizon i mean it's not a big deal, we can move to atproto if it ends up simply being better than AP, no?

céline didone

@liaizon@wake.st I think that development is good for both. In my mind the fediverse will never be a replacement for mainstream social media, but a strong counter-culture presence. On the other hand, I feel atmosphere does have aspirations to replace social media (along with a lot of its harms).

If the outcome is Fedi as space B + Atmosphere as mainstream social media instead of Fedi as space B + Twitter/Instagram/etc as mainstream media, I think we've had a win.

wakest ⁂

Bluesky also has its roots in other anarchist alternative networks. It takes a lot of inspiration from the core architects being involved in SSB (Secure Scuttlebutt)

dansup

@liaizon In theory yes, but in the real world, I've heard from many people that Pixelfed is the best photo sharing platform on AtProto (via Bridgy) and similar for Loops.

When you try to do everything, the experience is limited, and that's quite evident from the feedback and experiences I've had.

wakest ⁂

@ruben I agree with this synopsis

Stefan Bohacek

@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.

Stefan Bohacek

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

wakest ⁂

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

Stefan Bohacek

@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.

Stefan Bohacek

@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.

dansup

@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.

wakest ⁂

@stefan same same 100%

Stefan Bohacek

@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

dansup

@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.