Alongside others mentioned (tags/flairs, multi-communities, keyword filtering, etc.) another feature I’d like to see added/improved is notification settings.

Something like…

In account settings:

• Enable/disable all notifications.
• Enable/disable post reply notifications.
• Enable/disable comment reply notifications.

For others’ posts/comments and per posts/comments:

• Enable/disable post reply notifications.
• Enable/disable comment reply notifications.

With those settings you could more easily tune out all notifications or only opt into those you’d like to see, and opt out of those you’re done with (say your post/comment got popular and you’ve had your fill from the replies).

Unrelated to notification settings, it would also be nice to be able to block communities from the front page via the … More menu in the default web UI.

Ah, the vim part was me trying a little too much to express a short e sound lazily.

It will still raise eyebrows because that’s not how it’s said.

At least not yet, or by enough to recognize that it is (by some, somewhere!). There’s bound to be an accent somewhere that pronounces it like this to where the “normal” way sounds strange 😂

Without writing it out like this: (nō-vĕm′bər) or this (nəʊˈvɛmbə) I wasn’t sure how to write it and express the varying sounds of the e’s in it. Maybe “no-vim-ber” would have been better?

To add to this, I think as long as decentralization involves having to know how to and have the money to operate a server, it’s not going to reach the point some may hope for. The monetary costs may be lower than ever, but that doesn’t address the knowledge requirements (not to mention time for setup and upkeep).

Even one of the more user friendly attempts at this so far (AT Protocol) doesn’t address this in a meaningful way, as one still has to get into the weeds of server config, domain leasing, etc.

Yeah, keyword filtering isn’t a default feature (yet) @Varyk@sh.itjust.works. I’m not sure which apps/frontends enable keyword filtering, but I think Voyager on mobile does, not sure which web frontends do.

For people finding you, it means having to interact more in ways that encourage them to follow/subscribe to you, similar to how it goes now. For you finding stuff, it’s also similar in that you’d want to follow/subscribe to those that introduce you to others to follow/subscribe to. It’s really more for those that don’t mind putting forth effort to have their own online social space, much like the setup involved in having any online space.

I find it hard to believe they’d tell an archeologist ‘no’ for some reason.

Depends on if enough of the team is superstitious, and fears their findings will lead to a greater disturbance unleashing a long forgotten ancient force that may devastate the region.

Buuut that’s highly unlikely, so yeah, weird they didn’t reach out. Unless they were the superstitious ones in a different way and wanted to be first to seize an ancient power (or less interestingly, they wanted the credit for the finding and didn’t want to let on what they were looking for).

When preserving culture is criminal, or punishable, ya might want to reevaluate your laws

In the meantime, people are gonna do it anyway 'cause why ask permission to back up and preserve your own stuff? And when the law finally catches up, some will be grateful to those that did so despite the earlier wrongful laws that tried to discourage them.

RSS would be an interesting route but like, it would need a feed for every creator wouldn’t it? unless the social media platform allows it built-in like BSky does

If I understand ya right yeah, with BSky/Mastodon you pull the individual feeds for each account if you go that route (or maybe someone has an .opml file of several already grouped by topic to import). To me it’s no worse than having to individually follow them on-platform, but I know I’m atypical in that respect

Once ya have’em it’s all in one feed in your reader so not too different than the following feed

What you describe is basically the flipside of what happened to RSS folks, so I know what you mean. It sucks to stop getting updates the way you’re used to, and more hassle making the transitions to whatever the different method is.

It’s basically the reason Twitter/X still has anyone there, except they have higher switching costs compared to an open following format.

Honestly I take the compromise approach where I can, which is social media that still generates RSS, like Bluesky/Mastodon/etc. and use that to avoid making additional accounts.

Nah, I get that normal people wouldn’t, but I can dream. It’s so much better than making Yet Another Account. Plus I know in set up we’re talkin’ people pulling the feed into a reader, but also for content creators making sites, loads of sitebuilding software already has RSS baked in, so it’s not even that big an ask from them.

If there’s another more convenient no-sign-up method of keeping up with sites and stuff online, I’d love to know, 'cause I know many aren’t about to use RSS.

Hmm, if so, it wasn’t clear in the documentation I read. I was of the impression it was still passing posts through the relay to enable others’ discovery & interaction.

But apparently what they actually meant was, “users of Mastodon instances rarely explore outward”? The instances would auto-federate, but in practice, the “crawlers” (the users) aren’t leaving their bubbles often enough to create a critical mass of interconnectedness across the Fediverse?

It’s more along the lines of, as Mastodon’s been one of the more popular ActivityPub platforms for awhile longer, there’s a longer history of federation faffery, i.e. instance admins/people not getting along leading to defederations leading to a somewhat more fragmented network. Lemmy’s only grown in adoption more recently and hasn’t had as much time for that faffery to crop up as much, and has a different style and audience to it anyway, so it may be less prone to that, time will tell.

Regardless, your conclusion is basically on point for many folks. Federation stuff is no better to them than the erratic moderation/management of larger platforms that’s driving them elsewhere. Of course problem is, moderation/management’s not really something tech can solve (as Bsky’s already run into with its attempts at enabling third-party moderation).

They’re supposed to be able to, true, but I’ve not come across any examples of that in action yet. If you know of any I’d be interested in seeing them, as I’ve been trying to keep up with AuthTransfer’s developments.

It can be, yeah. However, similar may be said of responsible social media setup.

Relay (backend albeit rumored to be expensive)

Not even rumored, so much as explicitly expected.

The federation architecture allows anyone to host a Relay, though it’s a fairly resource-demanding service. In all likelihood, there may be a few large full-network providers, and then a long tail of partial-network providers.

I just assumed Mastodon was like Lemmy, where every instance federates with every other instance basically by default and there’s only some high-profile defed exceptions.

That’s…Not how Lemmy works either. In fact, and someone may correct me if I’m mistaken here, your hell is sort of how it works as I understand it. Instances don’t have any built-in crawlers to seek out others running on ActivityPub with the same software, e.g. Lemmy or Mastodon or the like. That’s genuinely been one of the biggest stumbling blocks with the whole protocol, as discovery is largely a manual affair. The only crawlers we have are the people using the service and following remote people or communities or channels from other instances to let the one we’re on see them.

One of the basic reasons for this that I’ve read is that it’s related to handling scaling, as each instance trying to handle all of the data of all the people on each other instance right away would bog down the servers and probably crash them. It also arguably works out, to a degree, that there’s a good chance not everyone on each instance is of interest to each other anyway, so you may not want or need each server to know about every other server’s people/channels/communities/etc.

But I’m going to stop before I get too much further into the weeds of all this. The irony is that the simplest solution to discovery issues with all of this presently is to invite those you want to have a similar experience to you, or want to connect to with the fewest jumps, to the same instance as you to mitigate any of those issues. Does that tend to undermine many of the benefits of it all? In a lot of ways, yeah, but that’s where many ActivityPub platforms are at currently, at least the more popular ones as I understand them.

I’m still on the fence about that…I think it’d make more sense for many to drop social media and opt for their own site with RSS feeds. A lot of social media for some is little more than a noisier RSS reader. Sometimes even literally with those with auto-playing videos. 😬

A variation on the game on the internet would arguably be avoiding sharing clickbait, wannabe viral posts, e.g. LinkedInLunatics’ absurd posts promoting a business or work expectations, and other variations of attention grabbing nonsense, i.e. mis/disinformation.

Not sharing attention bait at all, and not giving it further attention, is a way to successfully play this form of the game. However, by its very nature, many often can’t help but occasionally share content of this form, wittingly or not, and in turn are frequently losing this game.