I’m probably going to be allowing most of my streaming subscriptions to lapse over the next year or two. Gonna stick with Dropout and PBS, but that might be all.

On the one hand, it seems slightly less ideal to have the same organization that develops mastodon also providing hosting for it. On the other hand, they probably have a better chance of doing it well.

Yeah, I could see it going two ways. On one hand, they could devote too much time to their for-profit arm and neglect the FOSS branch, or worse, make the .com a favored child over the .org, like WordPress does. But on the other hand, they could be like Canonical which, while they’ve made some questionable decisions with Ubuntu over the years, has pretty staunchly put open-sourced all of their improvements and opened up their improvements to everyone downstream.

And I too miss moz.soc.

Not on Mastodon. Some of the other fedi microblog platforms have had it, though.

I’m really excited to get a chance to see it.

Oh, interesting. I honestly just glazed over that every time, but you’re right that that’s a step in the right direction. What I’d really like is for the instance to go the next step further and merge the conversations visually.

So in my mind, at the top of any individual post you’d see the thumbnail and the link title; and then underneath that, as a special-looking top-level comment, it would show the post title and OP text for each incarnation of the post across various instances and communities. The replies to those individual posts are then all rolled up under their top-level comment.

You could roll Mastodon (and other Fediverse) posts in there, too; they would just appear as their own top-level comment, just like replying to Lemmy posts on Mastodon works currently.

Good to know. I want to use webapps rather than native apps as much as possible anyway, so this is probably good.

On Reddit, I kinda get it. You wouldn’t want to connect the same link across (for instance) /r/antiwork and /r/conservative; the crosstalk there would get horrifyingly bad. But on a federated platform, when you could have multiple /c/antiworks on different instances, it fragments the conversation.

Apparently! Everyone’s talking about topics and feeds, I didn’t know they’d made that advancement. Gonna check it out!

Oh, fascinating! I’m going to have to take a look. Everyone’s talking about topics and feeds, I didn’t know they’d made that advancement.

What I really want out of a federated Reddit-like service is link consolidation. I don’t want to see the same link posted on five different communities; I want those to be consolidated into one topic, with the OP text and comments from each threaded below it. It’d clean up the interface and make it work a lot more usefully.

In fact, this would make pretty much everything in the Fediverse better. Let me sort my timeline by URL or hashtag, so that I can see what is being said about a certain thing and not make the same observation or joke that a dozen others already have. Put that functionality into an RSS reader, so that I can see the discussion without leaving the article. Or, even better, merge the two into a single feed, tying threads together based on the URL that’s being shared.

Now that would be an “everything app” worth using.

EDIT: Apparently they’ve already made the first leap there! Everyone’s talking about topics and feeds, I didn’t know they’d made that advancement. Looking forward to trying it out.

Those are silly folks lmao

Eh, I kind of get it. OpenAI’s malfeasance with regard to energy usage, data theft, and the aforementioned rampant shoe-horning (maybe “misapplication” is a better word) of the technology has sort of poisoned the entire AI well for them, and it doesn’t feel (and honestly isn’t) necessary enough that it’s worth considering ways that it might be done ethically.

I don’t agree with them entirely, but I do get where they’re coming from. Personally, I think once the hype dies down enough and the corporate money (and VC money) gets out of it, it can finally settle into a more reasonable solid-state and the money can actually go into truly useful implementations of it.

This is one of the few things that AI could potentially actually be good at. Aside from the few people on Lemmy who are entirely anti-AI, most people just don’t want AI jammed willy-nilly into places where it doesn’t belong to do things poorly that it’s not equipped to do.

I’m sure there were some forum software packages that offered voting and ranking and such. All of the ones that I was a part of were quiet enough that you didn’t need such a thing, though; you could keep up with every post, even if only to decide that you weren’t interested in it, if you read it every third day or so.

Yeah, I think “forumverse” isn’t bad. Though I have always felt like a Reddit-like interface and a forum interface are fundamentally different, in some way I can’t really put my finger on. I’ve been involved in bulletin board forums (fora?) in one aspect or another since the late 90s, so maybe it’s just nostalgia vs. recency bias; though it could also be the feeling that a “forum” seems like it should be hyper-specific, with different subforums on an already-niche bulletin board scoping down to even more niche and specific areas.

(Side note: Actually, now that I think about it, maybe the forum -> topic -> thread connection is why people like the name “threadiverse.” The word “thread” definitely seems like it arose from there.)

Anyway, I am fully ready to admit that I’m yelling at clouds here. Get off my lawn, dang kids and all that.

Definitely agreed.

I don’t think likes serve the same function as votes. The downvote, the ranking as a function of score and recency, and the surfacing and consensus-building that comes as a result are the main point of this sort of platform.

By contrast, the microblog “like” (at least on a platform without an algorithm, like Mastodon) doesn’t do anything other than express appreciation.

Threads are common in pretty much every form of social media now, from friend-aggregation sites like Facebook and Friendica to messaging services like Discord and Revolt. They’re hardly exclusive to a Reddit/Lemmy-type service. Mastodon even organizes posts into threads (though I think that it does so in a much more clumsy way).

(Edit: by “don’t they have votes?” do you mean polls? Because that’s a completely different function altogether than the Lemmy/Reddit vote.)

I’ve been calling them “Redditlikes” or “Reddit replacements” in ordinary conversation. We won’t need terms like that forever, though.

What about “Fedivotes” or “Votiverse?” Upvotes and downvotes are pretty key distinctives to this form of social network.

Overall, in my experience, any improvement will require the same amount of time; whether from bad to acceptable or acceptable to good.

I’m not saying it’s a matter of desire. It’s a matter of time. A full-time developer has to feed their family, so they have to put most of their time into the stuff that makes them money. That means that their passion project is just naturally going to get less time as a function of the number of hours left in the day and the amount of energy for coding that the developer in question has.

Further, ux design is a less “atomic” process; small amounts of time working on ux is going to have less impact than small amounts of time in coding. A programmer could conceivably fix a bug or make a minor improvement or feature request in ten minutes, and a Wikipedia editor could spend ten minutes improving the grammar and punctuation of an entire article; but the ux process requires mockups, iteration, asset creation, and coding for every change—and even if that can be done in ten minutes, the rest of the ui will look completely different, meaning that the overall ux will be worse than before, despite that one thing looking better.

What can we do to change it? Companies that rely on FOSS should donate to projects so that the people who work on them can afford to do so at least part-time, or empower their own employees to contribute to FOSS on company time. Those are really the only two options, barring some sort of UBI or public grant for open source software.