Another traveler of the wireways.
Appreciate the adjustments and responsiveness! Gave it another try after this and the different formatting hit the spot! Still need to use more to see more finely tuned results, but dig the idea.
Also as others have already said plenty, would be cool to see this cleaned up for an open source release. If you’d like to see how some others are handling a sorta similar idea but with RSS feeds, you might look to Nunti for ideas on how to approach it.
Little feedback on the UI from taking a peek at this.
When I went into settings and adjusted post display style from card to anything else, it wasn’t clear to me that this wouldn’t apply to the new For You feed, which left me confused and less inclined to use it. I still gave it a try to make sure I wasn’t missing anything and to see how much the feed seemed to change with some light interaction, but I think you’d need to use it more than I did to see an effect.
Problem being: display settings not applying to the For You feed means I’m not going to use it much with the default card view.
Second part is that there was some comment display lag as I looked through posts, so if I looked at a post about cats with cat-related comments, those comments would linger and appear for a moment under a different post about possums. It’s just long enough to be noticeable, so thought it worth mentioning.
Huh. I had to take a quick glance at the timestamp of this article to make sure it wasn’t old, as this was the same issue that inspired a short-lived fork a few years ago.
I get where this article’s coming from, as I got where the people trying to fork it under a different name were too, however for better or worse I think what matters even more to people is that the software works well and has a good UX. If I remember right, I think Glimpse intended to focus on improving the UX but it didn’t last long enough to do much in that regard.
Better than my memory though, here’s an article that gives some insight into what went into the cessation of its development.
At a glance this sounds even more intrusive than it’s been with Win10 (and maybe 11?), and sadly it’s no surprise as even without AI junk, I think the defaults with Win10 (and maybe 11) are to track your PC use to try to provide some “convenience” features, e.g. display of recently used programs/accessed files when you go to open a new desktop (Win key + Tab).
If they would be more transparent about this and indicate whether and how much of that info, “anonymized/depersonalized” or not, is being taken by them, I think people would still be understandably annoyed but more understanding; at least with an easy opt out or better still, the default being that you must opt in for any of it.
But compare with GOG then. They sell games, you download them with no DRM so you own the download essentially.
This is the model digital media should take, frankly. Anything less may as well be misleading marketing, as far as I’m concerned.
At a glance, Misskey and associated forks may appear to be Twitter-clones, but dig a little more and you’ll find they’re a lot more, for better and worse.
The interface is highly customizable, not just with some different colored themes nor a multi-column interface, but that you can stack page elements in columns and set up “antennae” or filters to surface posts including specified keywords and/or hashtags while excluding others via keywords/hashtags as well. There’s also what they call “channels” which I think are sort of like groups or dedicated topics apart from hashtags to post to and discuss whatever the channel topic is.
Oh, and because it seems *key wants to have a little of everything, there’s Pages, which is basically longform blog posting, and some versions include simple games. There’s also options for some other widgets I’ve not mentioned here. It’s genuinely pretty wild compared to the other federated microblogging services with how much flexibility it has and all that it has packed in.
I think the only other federated service I’ve found that’s comparable in flexibility may be Hubzilla, albeit I got the impression it’s less user friendly, but still, very customizable and a lot you could do with it.
That still doesn’t touch upon the negative to tethering users identity to instances.
Sorry, I should have been clearer. What I was trying to point to was that despite the portability of identity, the fact that you may still be highly reliant on the Bluesky relay (or frankly, any large relay), tethers your identity to them as without the relays there’s kind of no point to having a personal server at all.
Moreover, given the reference model provided via the Bluesky App, there’s a good chance you’ll run into similar arrangements on the AuthTransfer protocol where personal servers and appviews are joined together to essentially create instances (or entryway services I think they call them). One of the remaining distinctions from this entryway instance arrangement and ActivityPub then would be which relay or relays your entryway instance connects to.
Lastly I understand what you mean about people bouncing off Mastodon, but at the same time you kinda lose me here. You clearly mention the Fediverse preceding Mastodon yet then conclude with people having a bad experience with Mastodon meaning the rest of the Fediverse isn’t for them…? We’re using another variation of the Fediverse and ActivityPub here, so we’re both aware there’s more to it than that, even in the microblogging space, so I’m kind of confused on this point.
Nevertheless, I otherwise agree, it’s good that people have more alternatives to get away from the trashfire Twitter’s become (arguably even more of).
use[r] identities are not tethered to instances
Tbh while this is technically true, given the current circumstances, identities essentially are tethered albeit in a roundabout way. What I mean by that is, there’s no real point to them* without some relay and appview to work with, and for now, that’s just Bluesky.
That said, I agree that it would be better to go to them than to Twitter (if they’re not even considering stuff like Mastodon), but that’s a low hurdle to clear.
*-A caveat, supposedly it could be possible for personal data servers to connect to each other directly instead of via relays, but I haven’t come across anyone having tried this yet.
Oh! Thanks for the notice! I swear I think the spoiler stuff may have changed at some point, but maybe I’ve been handling it wrong this whole time.
I’ve also not really wanted to use horizontal rules because of it turning things into headings, but haven’t found a better way to put some spacing between the end of lists and the rest of a post’s text. I think I’ve corrected it properly now to be less jank.
Idea is that eventually others will be able to build atop their protocol and set up different “appviews” as they call them as well as relays and personal data servers. As I understand it, “appviews” may be viewed similar to what Lemmy and Mastodon are to ActivityPub, different ways to view data passed through ActivityPub.
Right now I think Bluesky may be the only such “appview” for their protocol parsing data from their relay, but the idea is you could spin up your own personal data server and maybe also your own appview, or choose from whichever may eventually exist, and that would be like your own “instance” connecting you to others via the appview parsing relay data.
So in other words, sort of yes to your first question, and it’s sort of because right now there’s only one AuthTransfer relay at the moment and that’s Bluesky, but the idea is that others could be spun up, allowing more independence from Bluesky as a company.
What would be really great is if companies could calibrate their reward structures based on what’s going to make players happy to log on, rather than trying to trap them into racking up the maximum amount of time in-game.
I haven’t played video games in awhile, so I don’t think I’m burnt out on them, which may make this a matter of differing mentality…But might it not also help to reevaluate whether a game should rely on a reward system/structure to entertain people to begin with?
It seems like these reward system designs are largely unsustainable without constant upkeep, in some part given that the rest of a game built around them often lacks sufficiently entertaining gameplay systems independent of them.
this is too perfect
Linkblocks definitely sounds interesting. I’ve never gotten into social bookmarking (keeping bookmarks on another site/platform…?), but I can see the draw for building knowledge-bases this way.
When other’s, be it corporations or people start to decide which information a person can and cannot access, is a damn slippery slope we better level out before AI starts to roll out en masse.
You highlight the bigger issue here than AI alone tbh. This is why another critical element is becoming literate and teaching each other methods of independent research, using multiple sources to develop an understanding, and not relying on any singular source, especially without careful review.
All the technology in the world can’t help a person learn and understand, who hasn’t yet learned how to learn, much less understand.
Commenting to indicate my shared interest in this (despite the other comments suggesting the unlikelihood of such an option emerging).
love to be null
For the moment, a lot of the fun on some of the federated platforms is behind several steps of effort that many of the corporate platforms have streamlined people out of being accustomed to taking, which is part of why they’ve kept their larger audiences. If a single click/tap is too much, that’s enough to keep some people away from here.
It’s not a matter of laziness either, it’s more of, how much effort do I want to put into something that I’m using for casual entertainment? For many people it’s minimal, but many federated platforms currently don’t really work like that. They’ve arguably thrown the baby out with the bathwater in an overcorrection away from commercial algorithmic feeds since existing platforms have conditioned people to not have to put effort into finding silly/fun content.
The types of people to post won’t be as inclined to post if they find their posts aren’t reaching people because people mostly have to actively seek them out to engage with them at all. The types of people to more passively engage won’t be able to as easily as those posts they might engage with may never reach them because they mostly have to actively seek them out. The end result of a lack of feedback and content for both types of people, despite there being a possibility and existence of both for them, results in this recurring sense of dissatisfaction.
Note that this is written largely with Mastodon in mind, and to a lesser degree Lemmy. In Lemmy/Kbin/Mbin/PieFed/Sublinks’s cases I think they’re potentially better off in terms of structure and offering different ways to sort one’s feeds, but it’s a matter of more people joining to round out communities and discussion more.
Personally, although the terms have become increasingly blurred over the years, I refer to changing to a new version of software (including an OS, and both ideally with some improvements) as updating it rather than upgrading.
I reserve upgrade more for changes of hardware with some form of improvement over its predecessor. I’d suspect I may not be alone in this, but I dunno how common it may be. When switching to a mix of both, I simply say I’m getting a new [insert specific device depending on which].
Although I’d hesitate to call many new phones an all-around upgrade when they’re either removing features (headphone jack/expandable storage) or getting more cumbersome to hold (can you even call some modern phones a handset anymore?).
Kind of hard to say given the structure of it. Going off the approximate data from FediDB’s charts, we may be looking at around 2 to 3 million more user accounts (around 8 million to 7.25 million), as compared with data from Stats for Bluesky of 5.24 million.
Although I’m not sure how each is measuring this, a better point of comparison may be active users and daily posters. FediDB uses the former, and shows about 940,000 to 920,000 active users, compared to Bluesky’s about 220,000~215,000 to 190~195,000 daily posters. The latter is honestly being kind of generous, as going off the data there posting has been declining. Interestingly liking has stayed somewhat higher, hovering between 240,000 to occasional peaks of 260,000 recently.
According to their CEO just before they opened registrations they had 1.6 million monthly users, so maybe if you run the numbers differently it looks better…But the raw stats don’t paint a great picture, at least as I read them.
Going off Join Mastodon’s servers page (under network health), we see a figure of 942,000 monthly active users, which would suggest Bluesky should arguably have slightly more activity going off the monthly active users figure, but… 🤷♀️
This is buried toward the bottom of the release notes so I’m bringing it up here:
Any admins out there considering changing their instance sort settings or asking people on their instance if they’d like this changed, given that we can individually set sorting anyway? Taking into account the inclination of people to never adjust default settings (I remain deeply curious about this tendency, as an aside), I think it might be worth at least bringing up to one’s instance community.
If they decide they want it to remain the same, all good, and even better, it raises some people’s awareness that they can change it themselves.