Fediverse presence

[Moonchild]

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

It's like reinventing the wheel, but it's not exactly round.

---

The bottom line here is: whatever additional communications channels there would be, will require time dedicated to it at the very least, if not money. I just don't see either of that possible at the moment, and I don't think any amount of reach would help if we no longer have time to work on the browser when all we do is spend our time chatting or formatting posts or, more likely, having to play cop for spammers and trolls.

[Massacre]

The bottom line here is: whatever additional communications channels there would be, will require time dedicated to it at the very least, if not money. I just don't see either of that possible at the moment, and I don't think any amount of reach would help if we no longer have time to work on the browser when all we do is spend our time chatting or formatting posts or, more likely, having to play cop for spammers and trolls.

Indeed, with more reach come more spam. There must be volunteers to fight that.

[jobbautista9]

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.

[Massacre]

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 web-only (and much heavier on CPU/RAM than a classic forum), Telegram has native applications.

[Pentium4User]

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 web-only (and much heavier on CPU/RAM than a classic forum), Telegram has native applications.

Discord supports a desktop application, but IIRC this is just a crippled browser, like MS Teams.

[Sajadi]

The issue with most of the Fediverse is this - Everyone not having a Progressive/Socialist-Communist/Anarchist opinion gets harassed, attacked and blocked and deleted - that happens to Accounts who are registered on specifically Leftist instances and to other servers too located inside the Fediverse - if they dare to be (even if it is only just for a little bit) of Conservative/Libertarian or just a simple legal Centrist/Apolitical opinion.

Bluesky is as it seems also quite hostile to everyone with a non-left opinion, even if it may-be just a moderate one. Both platforms are for the most part echo-chambers of the Left/Far-Left. Needlessly to say..

Mainstream/Niche Social Media is anyway a waste of time these days, seeing how freedom of speech is attacked and restricted nearly everywhere, no matter if by Western (Leftist) governments by upcoming or already present laws or Leftist zealot instance admins on the Fediverse.

[Massacre]

Discord supports a desktop application, but IIRC this is just a crippled browser, like MS Teams.

It is indeed Electron.

[Moonchild]

The issue with most of the Fediverse is this - Everyone not having a Progressive/Socialist-Communist/Anarchist opinion gets harassed, attacked and blocked and deleted

Then we have no reason to be there. Twitter becoming strongly politicised was one of the reasons I stopped actively using it for Pale Moon. I don't want to get into the same waters again from the other political extreme on a different platform.

Can't we just be social without bogging down into politics and tribalism? Apparently not.

Telegram requiring people's phone numbers (and therefore pretty much a direct line into every user's pocket through their phone; they don't accept land line numbers!) goes against what I'm comfortable requiring from users who want to participate in the community. Plain and simple.
Also, I'm familiar with Telegram "groups" and "group chats" on it, and it literally doesn't provide even near the kind of topic separation and ease of use we have here.

So that leaves some self-hosted solution which we already have in our forum, which can be maintained easily without too much fuss or time spent the way it is set up now.
I'm fine with discord as a backup; it has a desktop application which isn't overly heavy in use (maybe for a 15 year old potato... but come on, man) and can be used from a browser too, so no real threshold there. For now it's kept pretty much unpublished and not actively used, because, in fairness, I just don't have the time.

[Massacre]

I'm fine with discord as a backup; it has a desktop application which isn't overly heavy in use (maybe for a 15 year old potato... but come on, man) and can be used from a browser too, so no real threshold there. For now it's kept pretty much unpublished and not actively used, because, in fairness, I just don't have the time.

Their "desktop application" is Chromium/Electron that has only one purpose: execute JS and connect to discord.com, and their site is made for Chromium, but well, if you are happy with that...

[Moonchild]

Their "desktop application" is Chromium/Electron that has only one purpose: execute JS and connect to discord.com, and their site is made for Chromium, but well, if you are happy with that...

I'm not sure I understand your point. Its singular purpose being to interact with discord servers keeps it focused on just that task. There's a reason why many people use it to stream/voice/chat while in demanding games. If you issue is just "because it uses Chromium" and you don't want to touch anything remotely related to Google, then I hate to say it but that battle has already been lost. Just don't use stuff that comes directly from the commercial entity (e.g. Chromium, the google suite, etc.) if you want to avoid data harvesting.

[Eduardolucas1]

Social Networks and instant messaging are a failure and a nightmare. Bloat, awful design, awful usability.

[suzyne]

Off-topic:
On my Laptop 2 (see signature) I don't use Electron-based apps because running more than one browser instance is simply too much for the struggling Atom and 2GB of memory, so everything is a new tab in Pale Moon.

But for less challenged hardware, I understand that from the developers' perspective, often wrapping up a site as an app can make a whole lot of sense in terms of support and time to release.

[suzyne]

Social Networks and instant messaging are a failure and a nightmare. Bloat, awful design, awful usability.

What you are saying is little more than that you don't like them. Yes, there are some spectacular cases that are a nightmare. But to extend that view or experience to an entire class of media is preposterous.

It's like asserting that all cinema is dreadful because of the existence (and popularity) of the Marvel Universe franchise.

[moonbat]

But to extend that view or experience to an entire class of media is preposterous.

Not really, given the monoculture that internet discussion has become. 20 years ago no one would have believed that the internet would flip from being anonymous by default to posting everything about your life online under your real identity by default on less than a handful of platforms controlled by a few Big Tech corporations, who now require mobile number verification for their accounts and will censor or shut you down based on their Kafkaesque 'community standards' that somehow skew more towards censoring right wing/conservative content.
Online discussion and interaction before Facebook, Twitter and their clones was spread across a galaxy of communities by topic like this one, and no one could track your activity across all of them to build an online profile of you for advertising or more nefarious purposes. What information about yourself you chose to give out, if any, was entirely upto you. Now of course there are people who choose to live like digital hermits and refuse to use these platforms but it's hard to do when all your friends and family are on them and refuse to consider alternatives.

I fail to see in what way this post smartphone, post Big Tech internet is superior to what was there before, even when it was called social networking as opposed to social media. The old ones like Friendster, MySpace and Orkut tended towards connecting with people you knew in real life and sharing your photos or family events with them, not having corporate run sponsored posts and ads shoved in your face while you argue online with strangers.

[suzyne]

Off-topic:

Not really

Yes, really.

I am familiar with your distaste for the current state of the internet from previous posts, and of course, you are entitled to your views.

But you haven't addressed a single one of the qualities that my reply was challenging.

Bloat, awful design, awful usability.

Just like some who like to assert that there has been no good popular music after the 1990's (or earlier!), all programming on commercial television is rubbish, and the only decent Stars Wars movies are the original trilogy, such absolute sweeping generalisations are usually just opinions and not statements of fact.

Well, there are people who adore P!nk, think The Amazing Race is fun to watch, and really enjoy The Force Awakens!

The same for modern instant messaging and social media, there is no need to rubbish something because you don't feel it's a good fit for you.

[moonbat]

Bloat, awful design, awful usability.

Okay, I'll bite. This statement is so self evident I'm surprised you even have to ask; to flip it on its head, what do you find about modern social media websites (the popular ones that influence the whole internet please - not looking at edge cases that remain marginalized due to the network effect) that are the opposite of the above? Mobile first dumbed down design, Facebook is the latest to go down this path by inflicting this UI on desktop users and retiring the much more functional version that had been around from the start.

Bloat - takes 50 kilos of Javascript to render the same dumbed down UI lacking in functionality compared to the desktop version from 10 15 years ago.
Usability - don't even get me started. Gigantic fonts and controls that reduce the amount of visible information on screen and require constant scrolling, constant pruning of features to cater only to the mouth breathers that use the barest minimum. Complete removal of any sort of interoperability - used to be you could follow someone on Twitter via RSS directly from their site without relying on a third party scraper as of today, and an authenticated RSS feed of your Facebook timeline. Now they're all locked down silos that require an account to look at most stuff.

And finally as a Pale Moon user - look at how often these sites break because their developers can't stop fucking around behind the scenes and keep introducing more bugs and breakage with every update.

The same for modern instant messaging and social media, there is no need to rubbish something because you don't feel it's a good fit for you.

Yes, indeed, why have any opinion on anything at all because opinions vary?

So what do you find so wonderful about these sites that you're making invalid analogies to 'good popular music then and now' comparisons? Unless you're a 20 something who grew up using Chrome and smartphones and never experienced the earlier times as an adult (Even here there are people in this age group who still prefer the old aesthetic of both the internet and desktop applications).

[suzyne]

So what do you find so wonderful about these sites...

Thanks for the invite, but nah, I don't have the energy or interest to engage further on this topic today.

I suspect I won't be able to open your mind to an alternate view of the world where Facebook Messenger is actually very useful, Instagram has plenty of great communities and the advertising on it isn't that bad, and that tumblr and discord are wonderful platforms.

Generally, I am not wanting to go into detail about the social media and instant messaging that I use is a good thing.

Btw, I think my analogies were pretty good and do reflect an element of truth about the type of thinking that is widely shared on this forum about "old good, new bad".  You don't need look very hard to find it, again and again.

[athenian200]

Btw, I think my analogies were pretty good and do reflect an element of truth about the type of thinking that is widely shared on this forum about "old good, new bad".  You don't need look very hard to find it, again and again.

Off-topic:
Oh yeah, tell me about it... I think it would be even worse if we hadn't dropped Windows XP support. The only thing I really sympathize with moonbat on is bloat, but the problem is that that argument is too often paired with subjective arguments about design and usability, so people don't get the kernel of truth there. 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. Even if you like the flat, modern design, there are much more lightweight ways to achieve something with the same look and functionality. A lot of this is modern programmers pulling in huge libraries full of code they don't even use, which has performance penalties in a language like JS that isn't precompiled. As weird as it sounds to hear me defend smartphones, I can use those as an analogy. You know how native apps on smartphones tend to be a lot faster than using the same site in a browser (at least when the app isn't just the website)? That's because those apps are usually precompiled code (especially on iOS), while the website has to be rendered from HTML and JS in real time. That's the main reason why everything is an app, and why many services are more usable on a smartphone with a dedicated app than they are on PC via their website.

[Moonchild]

Off-topic:

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. Even if you like the flat, modern design, there are much more lightweight ways to achieve something with the same look and functionality.

It's called using CSS the right way. It has many features and mechanisms to make fully responsive, fully-styled, uniform designs, including butt-ugly mobile ones for grubby fingers on tiny screens. BUT that means they actually have to use the trifecta of HTML/CSS/JS and that's not what they want to do because then they can't put whatever they want (big data gathering comes to mind) in a minified blob of JS that's too big to audit and too complex to even analyse with tools.

[Massacre]

Their "desktop application" is Chromium/Electron that has only one purpose: execute JS and connect to discord.com, and their site is made for Chromium, but well, if you are happy with that...

I'm not sure I understand your point. Its singular purpose being to interact with discord servers keeps it focused on just that task.

Because there is no viable desktop alternative for this than it's "desktop" Electron client or a Chromium-based browser. And it is always a bad idea to try make a website into application.

The only reason people use it for gaming is its free tier. You know, there was Teamspeak (Ventrilo/Mumble/etc.) before that usually required paid hosting...