You can migrate instances, though. So it’s mitigated somewhat.

There’s a “local” feed on Mastodon, too, but it’s not very well signposted.

It’s actually a messaging failure, because picking “the wrong instance” is practically impossible. It really doesn’t matter what instance you’re in, since that’s not what limits or expands your available content.

I’m not getting any meaningful results searching for that project. What is it?

Fair enough. I guess I’m just overly sensitive to the broad-strokes assumption that any given thing is an AI “smoking gun” since I’m an em dash user.

(“it’s not just x, it’s y”, etc.)

Keep in mind, the AIs learned from us. So that’s a thing in AI responses because humans use that structure. Same with em dashes.

Not even kidding, I think the fediverse is how message boards work on starships in Trek. Each ship has their own server, and as they pass within subspace range of one another, they federate. Probably most people even think it’s called “fediverse” because it’s how the Federation chats.

That’s a good one. I was thinking, stop trying to make it seem like you’re helping agents improve, and just go with something like “HOLD THE LINE.”

I mean, it’s an odious slogan for an odious government org, but at least it’s better than suggesting the opposite of their stated mission.

Wait-- their slogan is “go beyond?” That’s so parodic I can’t believe it’s true…

… WHAT.

NOPE, IT’S TRUE.

How is this government so completely and entirely inept?

Sorry, I left out the part where most RSS fetchers are not hosted by the user. Of course it is self-hostable, but that’s by far the less common use case.

Images and CSS aren’t natively a part of RSS, though (and in fact I don’t think I’ve ever seen an RSS feed or reader that tries to do any CSS rendering at all). Assuming you have a third party downloading your RSS XML, all of the tracking capabilities are outside of the RSS spec itself, and dependent on you clicking on a link or something after you get the RSS feed.

If you want news and articles from the sites you appreciate to come to you directly and not be filtered through social media first, RSS is what you want. You get every link, and often the full text of every post, and you aren’t at the whim of an algorithm.

Spam-free? It’s literally only what you’ve specifically asked it to deliver you. If a site starts spamming its RSS feed, you just unsubscribe from the site.

Tracker-free? There’s literally no way anyone could track you through RSS. It’s just an XML file and can’t run any arbitrary code.

I use it for everything I can: news sites, blogs, YouTube channels, social media feeds for people whose content I don’t want to miss. There are even services that will let you subscribe to an email newsletter through one of their inboxes, and they’ll convert it to an RSS feed for you to follow so it doesn’t clog up your actual inbox. I especially like reading webcomics through it; it makes sure I get everything, and I don’t lose my place, get spoiled by a later post, or have to rely on the whims of social media.

I love RSS.

Mastodon has definitely improved, but more to the point, there’s really nothing else. Particularly not anything that anyone is using. Unless you widen your definition to include Bluesky.

Honestly, I’d say that Mastodon’s perceived complexity in the past was kind of an illusion anyway. The problem of choosing a server was really made out to be this huge hurdle, when in fact it was no big deal at all; I was a member of several different servers over time, and I didn’t feel like my experience was substantially different on any of them. Just join one that seems interesting or is near you or whatever, and you’ll be fine. After that, it operates pretty much the same as Twitter did. Following people on other servers can be a little bit trickier on web, but in the app it’s pretty seamless.

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!