Fediverse presence

[suzyne]

Off-topic:

Oh yeah, tell me about it... I think it would be even worse if we hadn't dropped Windows XP support.

If people love, for example, Windows XP and think that it's the best operating system interface ever, good for them. Or Maybe it's Windows 7 and everything has been downhill from there?

Since I am extremely partial to Windows 10 and will resist 11 for as long as possible, I understand that having a strong preference is valid, but what I push back against here, is uncritical black and white thinking. That peculiar idea that what someone thinks somehow reflects the universal experience and is an objective truth.

Not wanting to pick on Eduardolucas1 and I only refer to it again because their statement is a recent example, but when they said "Social Networks and instant messaging are a failure and a nightmare" there is so little nuance and it is such a broad indiscriminate generalisation that it lacks any real meaning. Me, my family and friends use those daily and when on such platforms we are not living a nightmare or feel they are failing us.

I guess it's the absolutism of some views that appear on these forums that can rub me the wrong way. Usually I ignore such comments, and sometimes I don't, but it would be nice to read opinions, not comments phrased in ways to suggest that the writer thinks they are the keeper of some indisputable truth.

Facebook and Twitter definitely don't need the heavy JS frameworks they use in order to do what they do, and neither do most other modern websites.

But what can we do? We got here not just because of big corporations, but via the legions of web developers looking for easy solutions. Maybe the blame lies mostly at the feet of Wordpress and the way it normalised using systems that you didn't need to understand?

I was asked to make a website for a church community. For their needs, a static site would have been more than sufficient, but they persistently kept saying "But what about Wordpress!". Accusing Meta and Google or some other big company for where we are now has its place, but I suspect the complete answer is more complicated and involves the choices of plenty of little people and small businesses too.

[andyprough]

Me, my family and friends use those daily and when on such platforms we are not living a nightmare or feel they are failing us.

It's a good point.

I haven't used Facebook for various reasons, mostly because my extended family doesn't use it much, but also because the way Facebook scrapes and sells the personal data rubs me wrong. However, I'll be needing to use Facebook in the future. I plan to move out of the city to the countryside over the next few years and do some farming with animals and crops. The farmers in my area are all on Facebook and they use it for everything. They buy and sell seed and feed on it, they buy and sell farming equipment, they make arrangements with neighbors to get help doing repairs or to get someone to watch their farm when they go on vacation. They buy and sell and trade livestock. It's virtually impossible to survive as a small farmer in this area without all the help that neighboring farmers willingly provide on Facebook and without access to the local marketplace created on Facebook. So at some point I'll take the plunge, and I expect that the experience will be largely positive, although I'll probably try to mitigate my loss of privacy somehow or other. But it will be enjoyable to be part of that community.

[athenian200]

Yeah, my perspective on whether social media is a disaster or not, is a little more complicated. I don't have much experience with Twitter because a platform that only allows 140 character Tweets and image posts was never my style, but I can talk about Facebook, since I joined in 2007 and watched all my friends in high school move over there from MySpace. My view is more that Facebook was really good when it first came out, and that's why people embraced it. Even for a few years after it first came out, it just kept getting better. But like everything else, at some point it just started getting worse, removing features and having ever more bloated and Chromium-specific code.

Like for instance, one Facebook feature I really liked that they took away was Notes, that was at first very simple, but almost grew into a way to do blogs on Facebook. They wound up killing it and making it hard for me to share any Notes I had previously published with friends, forcing me to hunt through archived data and use the half-busted backend stuff to do ridiculously specialized searches in order to get read-only access to my old Notes, and then republish them as normal posts with no formatting of any kind, just to try and save the content. That's the thing I don't like about Facebook... they haven't really been making it better, it caters more and more to advertisers and less and less to users, and features I personally use keep getting removed while the overall experience just keeps getting slower.

Facebook Messenger though, is honestly pretty good for what it is. It used to be better too, because it was originally designed so you could access it via XMPP, which meant it was really easy to use it with something like Pidgin and get an AIM-like experience. For context, most of the people I talk to on Facebook Messenger migrated over there from AIM, and for me the transition was pretty seamless at first because I was able to use Pidgin just like I had been doing for AIM. For a while I even had both my Facebook friends and my AIM buddies side-by-side in the same application and could monitor both services at once. Even today, you can still kind of hack around with Facebook's proprietary chat protocol and APIs enough to sort of get it to work with Pidgin inconsistently, but the point is it used to be really easy. Though, if I'm being honest, even AIM itself didn't like people using third-party clients, and I doubt AIM would have been much better than Facebook Messenger today if it had survived.

Facebook Marketplace is also really useful as an eBay alternative. Basically, Facebook makes a lot more sense if you think of it as being more like the old AOL ecosystem that you accessed through the AOL client to go to AOL-branded services rather than real websites... it's basically something people can use to get an Internet-like experience without having to be tech-savvy enough to go on the "real" Internet. Only it has attracted enough people and generated enough value that even people who are tech-savvy have a reason to use it over the kind of platforms they would prefer, and wind up resenting it in the process. Because it wasn't made for them, it was made for the AOL-type users.

Overall, I would say the primary reason I still use Facebook is simply because of the access it gives me to people and existing friend networks. It's not so bad and unusable as to justify me cutting myself off from all the non-technical people I know and isolating myself on platforms used only by nerdier people, but it is definitely a lot less functional than it was in, say, 2014 from my perspective.

[suzyne]

Off-topic:

It's virtually impossible to survive as a small farmer in this area without all the help that neighboring farmers willingly provide on Facebook and without access to the local marketplace created on Facebook.

Overall, I would say the primary reason I still use Facebook is simply because of the access it gives me to people and existing friend networks.

That's largely why I am Facebook too. To be where the people are who I want to keep in touch with. For family members, you can encourage, but it is impossible to get them to shift as an entire group to anything different.

And I have joined private groups that have been on Facebook long before I came along, and as the newish member it is not for me to suggest, "Hey, do you all want to try cohost or MeWe?". So I just use Facebook.

On the issue of it being less functional than before, there is a wide gap between not as good, and being rendered unusable, and I think Facebook is quite a long way from that second point.

So, I have gone through my Privacy settings and configured it to be all as restricted as possible, and sure they are collecting data and serving ads, but that is part of the deal of being where the people and activities that are important to me are.

And FB Messenger is ad free (for which I am thankful) and works really well.

[Eduardolucas1]

If people love, for example, Windows XP and think that it's the best operating system interface ever, good for them. Or Maybe it's Windows 7 and everything has been downhill from there?

Since I am extremely partial to Windows 10 and will resist 11 for as long as possible, I understand that having a strong preference is valid, but what I push back against here, is uncritical black and white thinking. That peculiar idea that what someone thinks somehow reflects the universal experience and is an objective truth.

Not wanting to pick on Eduardolucas1 and I only refer to it again because their statement is a recent example, but when they said "Social Networks and instant messaging are a failure and a nightmare" there is so little nuance and it is such a broad indiscriminate generalisation that it lacks any real meaning. Me, my family and friends use those daily and when on such platforms we are not living a nightmare or feel they are failing us.

I guess it's the absolutism of some views that appear on these forums that can rub me the wrong way. Usually I ignore such comments, and sometimes I don't, but it would be nice to read opinions, not comments phrased in ways to suggest that the writer thinks they are the keeper of some indisputable truth.

You`re blandly and literally assuming meaning and a depth or context i didn`t imply or exposed in my sentence. I`m saying social networks and IM are like that because they are defined by public and popularity, in the sense that those who aren`t used and are good are literally not a good example. I`m speaking about whatsapp, facebook, tiktok, telegram and discord, which are the ones people really use. They are objectively crap.

And honestly, i feel no need to justify myself to you to prove i`m not entitled to an absolutism of my own views. There are even research materials in psychology and public health studies that show how harmful they are. I`m not required to not affirm a short, concise set of opinions without a dissertation, if they have basis, in any public space.

[Moonchild]

Off-topic:

You`re blandly and literally assuming meaning and a depth or context I didn`t imply or exposed in my sentence.

News flash: that is what happens when you make broad-sweeping blanket statements and present them as something objective. Not even with an "I think" in there.

[Eduardolucas1]

Off-topic:

You`re blandly and literally assuming meaning and a depth or context I didn`t imply or exposed in my sentence.

News flash: that is what happens when you make broad-sweeping blanket statements and present them as something objective. Not even with an "I think" in there.

Does that entitle someone to use fallacies to call out an absolutism which does not exist?

[Moonchild]

Off-topic:

Does that entitle someone to use fallacies to call out an absolutism which does not exist?

Yes, it does, with the critical note that they aren't "fallacies" in that case, because they are only wrong from your point of view.

However, we're drifting into a rather academic analysis of conversation which is literally a waste of everyone's time. That is the actual fallacy here, and one we see regularly: the logical fallacy of "winning an argument". This is all off-topic and fully irrelevant, and you should just admit you should have been clearer and move on. That's the last I'll say about this tangent.

[Mozell11]

Btw Pale Moon already has a Discord (but only as a backup or last resort when the forums are down) so I'm not sure if Telegram would add any more value that Discord doesn't provide already.

Discord is limited to the web (and tends to be more resource-intensive on CPU/RAM compared to a traditional forum), whereas Telegram offers native applications.

[Moonchild]

Discord is limited to the web

No it is not. If it was, I wouldn't be using it.
Native client download: https://discord.com/download

[Massacre]

No it is not. If it was, I wouldn't be using it.
Native client download: https://discord.com/download

It could be called anything "native" but in its core it is still Chromium with JS embedded.

[Moonchild]

No it is not. If it was, I wouldn't be using it.
Native client download: https://discord.com/download

It could be called anything "native" but in its core it is still Chromium with JS embedded.

Does that matter? It's a dedicated application for the task. How exactly it's programmed is irrelevant.
For that matter Pale Moon isn't "native" either because it uses XUL and JS internally for its UI, not native C++/ Windows/toolkit controls.

[Massacre]

Does that matter? It's a dedicated application for the task. How exactly it's programmed is irrelevant.
For that matter Pale Moon isn't "native" either because it uses XUL and JS internally for its UI, not native C++/ Windows/toolkit controls.

Yes, it matters. It depends on Google and inherits all their bad decisions, like no support for Windows 7. And Pale Moon at least renders its XUL and JS with internal engine, not some IE or Chromium.

[jobbautista9]

I've been thinking about an "official" Pale Moon account in the fediverse again, and I have to say I'm leaning towards supporting it being a real thing now. You see, I've been looking at the Mozilla and Firefox hashtags in the flagship Mastodon server, and while it seems like the fedi has always been critical of Mozilla, I feel like it's going to get worse, now that the MozCo has tripled down in their advertising company shenanigans. I think this might be the beginning of a mass of Firefox users finally saying no and giving other browsers a try. Maybe I'm too optimistic, but I've always been pessimistic and it just really feels different this time... So I thought this would be the best time to make a presence in the world of SNS again.

Now I did say before here that fediblock can be a headache, and I still think it's a concern to keep in the back of the mind. But I also think I may have exaggerated it. Perhaps, as long as we never ever get into the realm of real-life politics (no matter how remotely related it is), then I guess we might be fine in the fediverse... Looking at the old times when Pale Moon was still in Twitter I doubt we'd get a lot of negative attention around us if we just stuck with announcements and boosting/retweeting Pale Moon praise/testimonies/commentary.

If Moonchild doesn't want to do it himself then I can volunteer in this task. I've been using the fediverse for quite some years and I think I am familiar enough with the culture there. I feel like I've been pretty passive lately in regards to Pale Moon, so if I'm not contributing code right now then I might as well do some community building and active advocacy!

That said if I'm going to do it I would probably want to avoid using Mastodon, and instead use Pleroma. It's the most featured fediverse software out there (it supports quote retweeting for example unlike Mastodon, and also supports emote reactions, from Unicode emojis to custom uploaded ones by the instance admin, which I think is a fun feature that SNSes today should have) that is compatible with and not too taxing (resource usage wise) to our browser. I'm thinking of getting an account in udongein.xyz which is one of the long running Pleroma instances out there (I have contacts with the admin there). That way I think we could do a good first impression to fedi users there, showing that we know that there's more to the fediverse than Mastodon (unlike Servo, Mozilla, and Vivaldi). Now why that server? Well I love Touhou , but also the "Udongein" is a reference to the moon rabbit of the same name, and since the name of the browser is Pale Moon, I thought it'd be a nice tongue-in-cheek. But if it's too unserious I guess I can go with pleroma.envs.net instead, though that instance has a bit stricter moderation and therefore reach could be a bit more limited than Udongein.

[Moonchild]

If Moonchild doesn't want to do it himself then I can volunteer in this task. I've been using the fediverse for quite some years and I think I am familiar enough with the culture there.

I just don't have the bandwidth available in my life to take on a Fediverse presence at the moment. If you're volunteering, then I welcome it! Since you have a good community track record here, I'm happy to have you be representative there for Pale Moon
Practical implementation is up to you.

[moonbat]

the "Udongein" is a reference to the moon rabbit of the same name, and since the name of the browser is Pale Moon, I thought it'd be a nice tongue-in-cheek

I love this part
As I understand from how federation works, even if you made the account on this server it would still be visible to people on other servers that are federated to it?

[jobbautista9]

I'm happy to have you be representative there for Pale Moon
Practical implementation is up to you.

Thank you!

As I understand from how federation works, even if you made the account on this server it would still be visible to people on other servers that are federated to it?

Yes, if a server uses the common protocol which is ActivityPub (like Mastodon does) then it should be able to see users and their posts from a Pleroma instance. However in order for a post to automatically be pushed to other servers, at least one user from those servers should be following the account. Boosting/retweeting would also cause the post to be pushed to every follower you have, including those on servers which haven't followed the account at all. This is how federation works there, and it can take some time to get used to when you're new to the concept of a federated SNS and have relied on a walled garden's "algorithm" pushing posts for you. I was that person when I tried Mastodon and when I fully moved to it after having enough with Twitter (just before it rebranded to X!)...

With all that said about posts getting pushed, you can still manually "pull" it by pasting the link to that post to your own fediverse instance's search box, making your server fetch and store it for you to interact with. Your like (and custom emote reactions, depending on the original server's capabilities), boost/retweet, and reply will get sent to the original server of course, and therefore federation is still fine in that case.

I'm still trying to get into contact with the head admin of the Pleroma server in their Matrix chatroom by the way. They're kinda hands-off from their own instance at the moment (though they have active moderation and one of the mods have asked the admin)

[jobbautista9]

A Pale Moon is now up in the fediverse! You can follow the account @palemoon@mycrowd.ca from your fediverse server.

I had to take a bit of a detour since I just realized that udongein.xyz is truly closed for registrations and won't give out any invites anymore (so no moon reference in the domain part of the handle )... I've also asked the admin of pleroma.envs.net if they want to host our SNS account, but they've declined (I suppose they're more oriented towards individuals than organizations, since they're also a pubnix after all). So I guess I'm going with an even more boring server which is "My Crowd". But hey, they're still Pleroma (or more exactly, Akkoma which is a fork) at least!

EDIT: I've also bridged the account to Bluesky, so you can also follow from there too! https://bsky.app/profile/palemoon.mycrowd.ca.ap.brid.gy

[suzyne]

I've also bridged the account to Bluesky, so you can also follow from there too! https://bsky.app/profile/palemoon.mycrowd.ca.ap.brid.gy

I can't say that I am what you could call active on Bluesky, but I do have an account and so gave Pale Moon a follow over there.

[jobbautista9]

Hehe I can see that

While I can see from the Bluesky side that you've followed it, I cannot see your Bluesky account from the fediverse side.. Seems like the bridge requires you to follow the @ap.brid.gy account in the bsky side to make it two-way. I thought they automatically become two-way when you follow at least one bridged account from the Bluesky side...

(And I probably should've followed the bridge account first before I submitted that first post in the Akkoma, doesn't seem like the bridge fetches your old posts, so the activity feed will look empty from the Bluesky side for a moment :\)