Fediverse presence

[mrnhmath]

It seems federated platforms based on the ActivityPub protocol are all the rage these days. What does we think of this communication model? Should the Pale Moon project have a presence on it? If so, it seems floss.social would be a great place to start.

[athenian200]

It seems federated platforms based on the ActivityPub protocol are all the rage these days. What does we think of this communication model? Should the Pale Moon project have a presence on it? If so, it seems floss.social would be a great place to start.

Well, I'm not opposed to it, but I also am not sure it would benefit us much given that we already have a whole online forum. I think if we had a presence there, the best way to use it would be to highlight specific announcements and well-written forum posts that we want to be seen by a broader audience. But I also am not sure if it's something that we should invest much time in, you know what I mean?

That said, I would be a lot more interested in the idea if there were a UXP-based project that supports the ActivityPub protocol itself, one that people could use to interact with the Fediverse. That would make UXP relevant to that community enough to make a presence worthwhile, as it stands I am not sure if we are relevant enough to their interests.

[suzyne]

I think if we had a presence there, the best way to use it would be to highlight specific announcements and well-written forum posts that we want to be seen by a broader audience.

I agree that this might be of value? I am on Mastodon and Bluesky and some of the accounts I follow are of software or companies that I am interested in. It does seem to be a trend for "cool" projects to be experimenting with alternatives to twitter, sorry I mean X, for the occasional news post.

But of course, somebody would have to be the person to take it on to make it work. For me, I am more than happy with the communication I get from this forum.

[moonbat]

Can't see any use other than announcements of upcoming releases. We've had this discussion wrt IRC and Discord before, so I'll reiterate that a chatroom or a Twitter clone are no substitute for a forum.

[jobbautista9]

If Pale Moon is going to have a social media presence again, I'd suggest going with Bluesky/ATProto than the ActivityPub-based fediverse. And I say this as one who mainly uses Misskey and prefer ActivityPub in general.

It may seem weird for me to suggest against the software I mainly use but Bluesky does have a lower barrier of entry, and you can use your own domain as your handle in bsky (therefore no need for verified checkmarks) without self-hosting at all. The meta discussions there are far less toxic at the moment than the AP-based fediverse (especially Mastodon which is the worst offender of all) in my experience, so no need to deal with fediblock and shit like that (if you don't value your sanity just look at https://mastodon.social/tags/fediblock).

[moonbat]

The meta discussions there are far less toxic at the moment than the AP-based fediverse (especially Mastodon which is the worst offender of all) in my experience

Toxic in what way? They aren't open to suggestions?

[jobbautista9]

Oh that's one thing in Mastodon. If you talk about how you wish quote posts are available in Mastodon someone is surely gonna go reply guy on you and say something along the lines of "actually Mastodon is better off without it because quote posts are often abused in Twitter and I'd rather not have a Twitter experience again" (despite the data saying otherwise)

But I'm thinking more along the lines of rubbing some Mastodon user the wrong way a bit and they escalate it by posting to the fediblock hashtag about how horrible you are and why every fediverse instance admin should block you from their servers.

Perhaps it's unlikely to happen if the account will strictly stick to announcements. Hopefully that will never happen. But it just takes one Mastodon user to look at our forums, see some post talking about how Mozilla has never been the same after the ousting of Brendan Eich, and conclude that Pale Moon is homophobic and should be blocked by all admins to oblivion, even if the users of those instances may not agree with it. That's just one ridiculous but plausible hypothetical scenario I can think of if Pale Moon goes with ActivityPub.

[moonbat]

I personally detest the whole Twitter format that so many others tried and aped. It began as multi-user SMS (the reason for the earlier 140 character limit). There's zero control over post visibility, everything is public letting every moronic troll with an opinion post a rejoinder or dox you if you were dumb enough to use your real identity to post, as so many people have done. Since there's no distinction between posts and replies, it's all one big mess of a stream. Prefer long form blogs any day, so I'm a fan of Substack the way I earlier was of Blogspot, Wordpress and the like.

[athenian200]

Perhaps it's unlikely to happen if the account will strictly stick to announcements. Hopefully that will never happen. But it just takes one Mastodon user to look at our forums, see some post talking about how Mozilla has never been the same after the ousting of Brendan Eich, and conclude that Pale Moon is homophobic and should be blocked by all admins to oblivion, even if the users of those instances may not agree with it. That's just one ridiculous but plausible hypothetical scenario I can think of if Pale Moon goes with ActivityPub.

Oh my God, people like that would never be willing to work with us... like, even if we tried to appease them, it wouldn't be good enough, there would be too many unwritten rules. Even some fairly normal people are alienated by some of the stuff that has happened with Pale Moon's history, I can only imagine what Mastodon people would think of us...

[Moonchild]

Mastodon is a non-starter. It's only federated in as far as each little god of their own server allows federation, i.e. 1000's of little bubble universes where everyone agrees-or-be-banned.

As for BlueSky... I have a personal account there, it's grossly under-utilized, but at least it's better than MeWe.
Still, I don't see much reason to be active there just for announcements; if you're going to use social media it's expected you interact. We have RSS feeds for announcements etc. on this forum, if you want to hook into that.

[athenian200]

Mastodon is a non-starter. It's only federated in as far as each little god of their own server allows federation, i.e. 1000's of little bubble universes where everyone agrees-or-be-banned.

So... basically, it's a like a worse version of a forum, but one that allows other people to optionally permit users registered on forums they trust to post on them? That's what everyone is so excited about?

I mean, it's not as though people don't register to a bunch of related forums under the same username anyway... only the difference is that instead of banning a whole forum at once over a few bad users, we just ban the accounts of the individual users if they cause trouble.

Mastodon's approach seems like it would, if anything, intensify the natural human tendency to judge people as groups rather than individuals... there would be this tendency to suggest whole communities pay the price for tolerating one member who says something distasteful by being defederated.

Maybe I'm a little old-fashioned, but there is a reason why I keep coming back to forum communities over and over again... it just seems to be the only thing that works long-term besides the Facebook model, all the other models seem to fizzle out a lot faster.

[Pentium4User]

I don't think that fediverse is a relevant thing for PM.
You actually can't discuss there. It is like Twitter 2.0, pictures are relevant, not the text.

The second thing I noticed is that now the people who disagree with Musk moved to Fediverse, including all the crap they posted on twitter before. The right-wing crap stays on Twitter.

If you check mastodon.social, you will see it.
I don't think most people who use it are interested in PM stuff.

[Pentium4User]

Maybe I'm a little old-fashioned, but there is a reason why I keep coming back to forum communities over and over again... it just seems to be the only thing that works long-term besides the Facebook model, all the other models seem to fizzle out a lot faster.

It depends on the users. If you attract the wrong users, they will destroy every medium.

[suzyne]

Off-topic:
A platform is just a way of delivering content, and the value depends entirely on who you choose to follow and how you use it, so I am reluctant to right-off any particular medium because of the bad actors or account owner horror stories. For example, I have an interest in space and astronomy and so on Mastodon by following @fraser@m.universetoday.com (and others) my feed gets filled with more good content than I usually get through each week. People are free dislike any new platform that doesn't appeal to them, but that doesn't mean that said platforms have little value for everybody.

[Massacre]

I think, a Telegram channel is much better both in reach and discussion possibilities.

[athenian200]

Off-topic:
A platform is just a way of delivering content, and the value depends entirely on who you choose to follow and how you use it, so I am reluctant to right-off any particular medium because of the bad actors or account owner horror stories. For example, I have an interest in space and astronomy and so on Mastodon by following @fraser@m.universetoday.com (and others) my feed gets filled with more good content than I usually get through each week. People are free dislike any new platform that doesn't appeal to them, but that doesn't mean that said platforms have little value for everybody.

Off-topic:
That's absolutely a good point, of course. I'm only addressing that I don't think it would be useful for an official Pale Moon presence. Whether I use Mastodon personally or not would depend on whether I find people or content I enjoy that are on that platform. It's how I am with everything... I use Facebook not because I like Facebook, but because there are people and communities that gather on there that I need/want access to. Same goes for things like Reddit and Discord. Same would be true with Mastodon. I guess it's just that so far, I haven't encountered anything I want or need that's exclusively on Mastodon, that I can't get from Reddit, Discord, Facebook, etc. But if that changes, I might well use it... it all comes down to whether there's a community I feel compatible with on there that I care enough to interact with. From what I've heard of it, I doubt there is, but I'm not saying I would never use it on principle if I had a friend on there who wanted me to use it or asked me to comment on something, more just that I don't see it offering much value to Pale Moon as an official presence.

[Pentium4User]

I think, a Telegram channel is much better both in reach and discussion possibilities.

What is the benefit against the forum?
Telegram required a phone number, the forum doesn't.
Telegram is a chat, and chats tend to create a mess when different topics are discussed.
It is also not searchable/threadable like the forum.

[Moonchild]

A platform is just a way of delivering content, and the value depends entirely on who you choose to follow and how you use it, so I am reluctant to right-off any particular medium because of the bad actors or account owner horror stories. For example, I have an interest in space and astronomy and so on Mastodon by following @fraser@m.universetoday.com (and others)

This works if you follow people who are on server instances friendly to the one your account is on, but the problem is that the reach becomes limited when Mastodon server admins block conversations with other instances they have beef with. That is the problem with this kind of federation where each instance has as much or as little reach as the admin of that instance decides you should have, combined with what the admins of the instances your contacts use decide they should have. I've already seen quite a few instances of arbitrary blanket bans cutting communication channels as a result. So no, it does not depend entirely on who you choose to follow and how you use it; the organizational setup of it is inherently favouring segregation and cliquing where it is as much a matter of who is located where as it is a matter of usage and individual people you decide to follow.

[Massacre]

What is the benefit against the forum?

Reach.

Telegram required a phone number, the forum doesn't.

Indeed, it is the main disadvantage, when you don't have one.

Telegram is a chat, and chats tend to create a mess when different topics are discussed.
It is also not searchable/threadable like the forum.

There are channels. A post in a channel with comments is like a thread.

[suzyne]

the problem is that the reach becomes limited when Mastodon server admins block conversations with other instances they have beef with.

I haven't seen that happen, but then my Mastodon use is not yet what anyone could call extensive. But from what you report, then I agree that is a fundamental problem, which when I see it happen would leave me disillusioned with the platform as a whole too.