Just uses Akkoma or GoToSocial, setup fedifetcher or follow some relays and you can get good enough experience in Fediverse. Mastodon is literally build to handle huge amount of users so it is nowhere near efficient if used for just 1 person.
As someone who's had a single-user Mastodon instance for two years now: I love it. It's definitely not for everyone, for reasons mainly stated in the article. However, if you like a more personal, highly-curated federated timeline, a single-user instance is great.
I 90% use Mastodon to keep up with my friends' posts and see art and animal pictures (and I hate interacting with strangers LOL), so I curate my instance to only subscribe to them. For the remaining 10%, I have a secondary account on a larger instance for when I want to read the news etc. It's worked well for me, but again, it's surely not for everyone!
Interesting to note that this was originally posted a little over a year ago. I don't know if anything has changed since, as I don't self host masto and have been spending more and more of my "fedi-time" here in lemmy.
Not surprised that someone who "led AI and subscription products at Amazon for the past 8 years" ended up back on mastodon.social, but that's probably neither here nor there...
It can also be an awesome idea, depending on your perspective. Having an instance without all the cruft is a pristine peaceful thing at times. For a while I ran one of those subscriber bots on Lemmy and pretty quickly found it to be so full of shitposting spam as to be unusable. Just don't start an instance and expect it to be a raging party and you won't find it disappointing.
The only complaint on this list that, I think, is a legitimate complaint is replies not loading. Imagine if Lemmy worked that way. The rest is just how it's intended to work.
Certainly a good warning before trying to self host but this isn't broken.
The first populates the replies of the home timeline posts you see (as well as profiles of people it finds in those replies) and the second pulls down all the content from instances you select for your followed hashtags (choose mastodon.social and you can guarantee you'll see most all posts with those tags)
I don't understand the point the posts are trying to make. If an attacker can get at the SQL database, they must have remote access, i.e. the system is compromised somehow. What's stopping them from getting at anything else? Why should we concerned about the database specifically?
I think the point might be that any other program on your pc can access that db. Which would obviously be very bad. If that is the case I would think it would be patched.
More and more games are shipping with mega sus kernel level anti cheat which can (and does according to their EULA) take screenshots and files from your PC to make sure you "aren't cheating".
Valorant, for example, is made by riot, owned by tencent, owned by the Chinese government, and has a nasty kernel anti cheat in it.
So this means that with essentially no effort or changes the Chinese gov can just take this file and related screenshots of everything you do wrapped in a bow
Same idea as new-reddit with its 'views'. It doesn't make sense how some post on a local subreddit gets a few hundred impressions immediately, even when posted at 4am. Meanwhile the actual organic comments on the same post follow the average human wake/sleep cycle
I wonder if advertisers are also fooled by those numbers, or if they use a different way of measuring
Well, this tells us that more privacy minded people with a background or interest in technology tend to be more present/engaging on Fediverse platforms. Not really surprising.
Eh, bluesky is another federated solution, that turned out to be quite similar to activitypub. Perhaps not in implementation, but in user experience. And after having used activitypub for quite a while, I don't think it is the solution to decentralised social media.
I've been really enjoying nostr, even though it doesn't have the content or user base of the fediverse just yet.
Curious what you think the issues with AP are. Other than the nature of the fediverse being confusing to new users (not sure which instance to sign up for, etc), I haven’t had any issues with it. I would like to see community syncing between instances for more seamless discovery, though.
Complexity to new users is definitely not better on nostr, just as confusing if not worse, currently. The reason I think nostr is on a better track than AP, is because I came to AP running from problems that I had on reddit, only to find the same problems on a smaller scale. Here's what I can think of off the top of my head:
Variety of clientes
Both AP and nostr fix this.
Centralised power
Nostr fixes this, by making it so that your identity is usable anywhere.
AP kinda fixes this, but doesn't go far enough. If the admin of your instance decides to not federate with another instance, you have no say in that. Your only option is to migrate to another instance, and since AP doesn't have nomadic identities, you have to start from scratch. Mastodon's export feature doesn't go far enough.
Disagreement with mods
Nostr fixes this by offloading modding to individual users. You chose to mute what you dont want to see. A highly requested feature here on Lemmy.
AP kinda fixes this, where if you don't agree with mods, you can start a different community, or a similar community on a different instance, but then you have the same problem as with centralised power, and are at the mercy of admins.
To be truly sovereign on AP, you gotta run your own instance, which is very impractical, and lacks nomadic identities. With nostr, you own your identity, because your identity is just a cryptographic key, which can be used anywhere, on any node.
To be clear, I think AP is a clear improvement over centralised services, thus why I still use it. I won't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. I just think nostr is the better protocol to build decentralised services on top of.
I don't get the first point. Do you think having variety in clients is a bad thing or do you think the variety in clients is not big enough and actually what does this have to do with the protocol?
The other points do appear that strong to me if we talk about developing a service and more about people who don't want to host or do anything themselves but still want to have full control... Actually I think the better moderation structure that comes with AP is a plus point. I want a free web and not total anarchy in which the loudest wins.
Biggest strength of AP in my eyes is that it's a W3C standard. AT was developed by a company to fulfill that company's goal.
I think having many clients is a good thing. The reddit API debacle was the straw that broke the camel's back for me, and got me to move away from centralised services.
Actually I think the better moderation structure that comes with AP is a plus point.
I can see how some people would prefer that, but Nostr also has a solution to this need. Not as good an experience as AP, if that's specifically what you're looking for, but nonetheless. If you want a curated, modded and filtered experience, you can just connect on to nostr nodes that filter heavily.
Biggest strength of AP in my eyes is that it's a W3C standard.
I thought this when I came to AP at first too, but it's been a W3C standard for a long time, and is still very niche.
But amount of users is actually more a product of marketing than any technical protocol so I don't really see that point either. Also I don't see that being true, especially if you count in all the threads users.
My point of it being a W3C standard is more that it is a protocol that is in somewhat responsible hands. When using a protocol that was developed by and only for one (commercial) application in minds other players are always one step behind.
Mastodon (or threads) as the main platforms that implement AP don't have any more influence on the protocol than any other platform as well.
I wrote a long answer to this, but forgot to post and lost it :(. But here's what I wanted to say:
I forgot about Threads, that's indeed a big user base.
Just because the standard is managed by the W3C doesn't mean they'll do a good job of managing it, but it's probably more positive than negative.
I don't know enough about how the W3C is organised and accepts contributions, but wasn't one of the concerns of many AP users when threads announced their AP integration, that threads would immediately become a big player and essentially EEE AP? Tbh, I still fear that.
I'm enjoying this conversation, it's brought my hopes for AP a bit higher, I hope I've managed to convince you that nostr is something to keep an eye on.
Yes this EEE fear exists but I think it's unreasonable in my eyes. AP being managed by W3C is one reason for it.
Sure Meta will probably extend AP for their own use but it's not that they can simply decide that the new feature that they introduced and is at first only working on their platform is the standard from now.
I definitely agree that Nostr is something to keep an eye on but for me that's more about to see if there is stuff that works and can be introduced in AP as well. Because of all the arguments above I don't think we should all switch to Nostr now.
Sure Meta will probably extend AP for their own use but it's not that they can simply decide that the new feature that they introduced and is at first only working on their platform is the standard from now.
Maybe not formally, but it might not matter. Looking at how google implemented XMPP, then slightly changed their implemetentaion until it was incompatible, and clients tried to keep up with changes, makes me fear meta will do something similar.
But my point would be that with AP being W3C and not management by meta or a different company the ecosystem of it can survive.
And too be fair until recently I still used XMPP so it was never dead. I think it was just that almost no one ever heard about it before Google used it and also almost no one really cared about it while Google used it. So the resulting consequence was that once Google dropped off completely it went back to no one really using it (like it was before).
AP already having a decent user base (some million active users, official accounts and instances of big institutions like the EU commission e.g.) even without threads and a big eco system(very diverse platforms and projects), there is no need for any platform to adapt to anything coming from meta. Things are good (enough) how they are currently.
It's not that we need to compete or couldn't exist without Meta.
Yeah, I thought of these points too, my fear is that it won't matter that it isn't managed by meta and people will go along with whatever meta does.
Though to be completely fair, I have the exact same fear for other decentralised protocols, including nostr. Perhaps the only one I think is resilient to this situation is bitcoin, for better or for worse.
I would recommend Gancio instead of Mobilizon to be honest. Its also fediverse event software but designed quite different. You can see a pretty active server of it here https://bcn.convoca.la
its very different. I would recommend signing up to instances of both and playing around with them to get a hang of it. I really don't like the design of mobilizon I think they made a lot of confusing decisions
its funny you are saying that right now I was just reading about how many fediverse projects are there, I am sure we could get it packaged up for Yunohost if that was a stopper for you...
I am sorry! It is already packaged! I messed it up, I dont know why but I was looking for "ganzio" instead of "gancio". Thanks for the offering though!!
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