• 9 Posts
  • 25 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 9th, 2023

help-circle









  • mastodon doesn’t “discover” akkoma content and won’t show anything unless you’re following a user from there, which kinda sucks.

    I mean – that’s how all of them work. Even Lemmy. Unless your instance administrator joins relays (which have tradeoffs between privacy / effectiveness of blocking) your instance is only ever aware of posts from followed people (and reply threads followed people are involved in)

    (also MUCH lighter on server resources, compared to most other twitter-like alternatives)

    Mastodon is just unusually heavy, really. Even Misskey & forks are lighter than Masto on the server side (preferring being bloated on the client instead)


  • Mastodon feels like a fucking funeral.

    You’re clearly nowhere near the good parts, then.

    In my experience, once when you find your way into the correct circles the microblog-verse makes the “shitposting” of Lemmy look like r/memes. I do agree that discoverability could be better though, it took me 4-5 months before I got the hang of it. And now I barely check Lemmy despite my Lemmy account being older than my earliest microblog account (under this name, anyway).

    One important thing is that your instance matters quite a bit more than here. Starting on a large general purpose instance (especially if it’s mastodon.social) and just following Large Accounts and Nobody Else like most people recommend for some reason is just setting yourself up for disappointment. Instead, get on a smaller interest-specific instance (rule of thumb: the weirder the domain the better your experience will be!) and follow the local timeline (and on good software, the bubble/recommended timelines). And post stuff/interact with people. Don’t be that one person that does nothing but boost news bots and occasionally butt into replies of people asking rhetorical questions they already know the answer for.

    (Perhaps Lemmy is better at news or whatever, I wouldn’t know as I block all news communities I can find – I just don’t see the point as all the discussion around most news ends up predictable, unproductive (not that internet communities necessarily need to be “productive”), and unnecessarily angry)

    Also in a world with usable™ Misskey forks and Akkoma I think the limitations of Mastodon the software are really starting to show, and I urge anyone who’s been disappointed in Mastodon to try other microblog software. (Quotes are already a thing if you know where to look! So are emoji reactions, because people have more emotions than :star:)







  • (talking about microblog fedi here, Lemmy/threadiverse is it’s own thing)

    don’t do hashtags. hashtags (especially common ones like #memes) are overrun by repost bots and low quality garbage.

    the trick is to be on a small-to-medium instance you vibe with (1k active users seems to be the sweet spot. anything larger than 2k I’d avoid. do NOT join any flagship instances like mastodon.social), follow fun people from your local timeline, and see who they boost. and follow up the boost chain until your timeline is sufficiently fun.



  • if you were to focus this on just Lemmy itself as opposed to the wider fedi (“Especially given that there was just an update allowing for individuals to block instances they don’t like” implies that’s the case) you already have nothing to worry about as you encountering a threads user here will be even slimmer than encountering a mastodon user.

    threads is primarily targeting the microblog/personal side of fedi. the incentives and privacy expectations are quite different compared to this side of fedi






  • They aren’t forced to do anything. Manifest v3 is just a part of the WebExtensions API (which is not a standard and is really just “whatever Chrome does except we find/replace’d the word chrome to browser”) which both Safari and Firefox chose to implement in order to make porting of Chrome extensions easier.

    Before that, Firefox had a much more powerful extension system that allowed extensions quite a lot of access to browser internals, but that turned out to be a maintenance nightmare so they walled those APIs off (not a coincidence that Firefox started getting massive performance improvements after that, and extensions stopped breaking every other release) and decided to go the WebExtensions route. I have no clue what Safari was up to but I think they implemented it after.

    If they don’t implement Manifest v3, extensions that want to work across multiple browsers need to support both the older Manifest v2 and the later Manifest v3, which would be a burden not many extension authors would want to bother with, which would make them just say “yeah we’re not supporting anything outside Chrome”. Firefox avoids this problem by extending the v3 API to allow for the functionality necessary for powerful ad blocking Google removed in v3 (webRequestBlocking) while also implementing the new thing (declarativeNetRequest) side by side, so extensions that want to take advantage of the powerful features on Firefox can do so, while Chrome extensions that are fine with the less powerful alternative can still be ported over relatively easily.

    Firefox does have it’s fair share of extensions on top of the WebExtension API already (sidebar support for one), so adding one more isn’t too big of a deal.



  • also remember just like how lemmy has it’s kbin, mastodon has it’s interoperable alternatives.

    i bet a fair bit of the complaints i hear from people on lemmy (low character count, wanting to follow topics instead of people) would be solved by trying out a misskey fork such as firefish, iceshrimp or sharkey.

    i don’t think there’s any instance out there with a char count lower than 1000, and antennas are really good (why limit youself to following a single hashtag when you can follow any number of arbitrary keywords?) if you’re in a well federated instance (provided you’re ok with them not feeding into your home feed and them not being retroactive (so after you set up an antenna you’ll need to wait for new posts to filter in))

    they aren’t as polished as mastodon since mastodon kinda ate everyone’s lunch in terms of developer attention (and upstream misskey is an almost one-man-show mess developed entirely in japanese which is why everyone prefers to fork instead of collaborating), but they’ve been getting really good.

    just avoid flagship instances (> 1k active users) for the time being. scaling is still something not many of them have solved just yet