Remix.run Logo
_wire_ 7 hours ago

Puff piece with 1000+ words that doesn't ever assert anything in particular that the author was wrong about. But if you enjoy a babbling endorsement. However you will be left hanging about what corner of the largely inscrutable "fediverse" the author is bleating about. Make no mistake, mastodon feeds are prone to shameless promotions, scams, and attention whoring that infects all social media, but it's still marginal and so seems quaint.

To get a sense of this skim

sfba.social

which is a feed of trending posts with a U.S. west coast vibe.

8organicbits 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> mastodon feeds are prone to shameless promotions, scams, and attention whoring

My mastodon feed contains only the users I follow. If they post unwanted things I unfollow them. Mastodon doesn't force you to see content from people you don't follow.

The sfba trending list has engagement-bait, but you shouldn't look there (on any social media site) if you don't want that sort of content.

dekken_ 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

For me, having been on fedi for like 7 years now, there are cool places, and there are not so cool places. I might be more lucky than most in that I barely need to curate my time there, cause I follow cool people, and so I just see what they like too

Imustaskforhelp 5 hours ago | parent [-]

> cause I follow cool people, and so I just see what they like too

Maybe offtopic but I was reading something on hackernews and thought about something like this yesterday as the world starts getting more brand-ed and corporate-y that perhaps its up to the average person to share the list of cool people/things they know.

But I don't think that a follow itself might be the largest indicator of showing others what cool people are.

Yesterday, I tried linkhut (https://ln.ht) and added it to my profile. It just has cool things that I found online and I have written minor notes below it on why I think the things are cool or not.

I am curious to know but can some idea like this take off within the fediverse community/ say personally for you?

Can you have a linkhut profile that I can just see which can have cool people that you found and why you think that they are cool? And if I think that you are cool, then I can have some of that coolness be transferred to people you think cool too?

I used to be on fediverse and I think that there are some very cool people on fediverse, its just very hard to find them sometimes.

robinsonb5 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I've had a vague idea rattling around in the back of my brain for a while now, for some kind of endorsement system using public keys and signatures, so I can apply an endorsement to a particular site (perhaps with some kind of hash of the content so that it expires if the site changes), and get recommendations from others doing the same. When visiting a new site I can see a reputation score based on how many people have endorsed it and how much overlap there is between me and them. Users would also be able to endorse each other, and exclude either other from the algorithm, too - so hopefully networks effects would form organically around topics of interest - and more loosely between topics.

Imustaskforhelp 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

archive.org + website + linkhut search + username? (Endorsements can work by having the link of ln.ht profile itself being part of another user's Linkhut profile)

For example: Suppose you went to fluxer.gg (Open source Discord alternative that I found cool)

You searched it upon ln.ht: https://ln.ht/?query=fluxer.gg

You can then find the username who uploaded it there (in this case, its me): https://ln.ht/~imafh

You can then for example, find another thing that I uploaded there about a song/musician that I found really cool :-

Fuji Gateway - Tuesdays, Am I Right? (Official Lyric Video): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ijjb_0RW28c

You can even endorse me by having my username linkhut be within your linkhut profile for example and I think I am seeing some social aspect of it in the frontpage of linkhut as well although I don't particular appreciate that right now.

Linkhut also is open source/have public API's

I found Linkhut only yesterday fwiw but its really cool and want to vouch for it. So does this work for the use case that you are mentioning?

Plus another point about Linkhut which I have talked in another comment is the note functionality. It allows me to reason (why?) I liked a particular website of say any project or any person and allows me to add words to it as well. This might be the feature I like the most because it allows me to use words to sort of actually have word-of-mouth for any cool things that we find on internet.

And this way you can also find reasonings for other websites that a person may've vouched for in a way too. I found this whole idea really elegant.

Edit: Oh btw there is also the concept of tags. So suppose you wanted more discord alternative. You could search #discord and it can for example lead you to stoat, matrix etc. from other people too.

I am not sure if there is already an extension that does it but an extension could be made to really simplify some aspects of it. I definitely feel this and there is some maybe small community on linkhut so you're not starting from scratch and also the merits of linkhut in general seem to me be good enough for average person to use.

I am curious to hear your thoughts on this.

dekken_ 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

sounds like a anti-block list ;)

dekken_ 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> as the world starts getting more brand-ed and corporate-y...

I gravitate toward what I consider authenticate/consistent people which for me at least has seemed to work out as I also try to be that way.

> Can you have a linkhut profile...

It doesn't really work that way, you can see other peoples public conversations to see how they interact, as a metric for their personalities, which, might be more work. It's network effects moreso.

as for https://ln.ht, I can see it working for some people, but personally I think there's a bit too much going on, sensory overload.

Imustaskforhelp 4 hours ago | parent [-]

> as for https://ln.ht, I can see it working for some people, but personally I think there's a bit too much going on, sensory overload.

I do understand the sensory overload aspect. I personally don't use the social aspect of it that much.

Essentially the idea that I want to say was that even the people that I follow (say on bluesky) etc. sometimes I don't know why I follow them exactly either or any idea of giving this info to the world for that matter.

The idea of linkhut interests me especially with their note section: I can have a profile of cool things/people I found and I can share it to world and I can try to explain the "why cool?" so that people can judge things on that aspect and it gives more info, that's all.

Unfortunately even for fediverse/ all social media. You really can't end up writing the exact reason you follow someone as a comment everytime you follow someone. Sometimes sure but not always and those comments can get muddled up with other comments that you write while using the platform itself.

> It doesn't really work that way, you can see other peoples public conversations to see how they interact, as a metric for their personalities, which, might be more work. It's network effects moreso.

I suppose so. But I think the idea to me for using something like linkhut isn't for people to offload searching how people interact/the metric as you mention but rather the fact that we are unable to find these people/products in the first place!

There has been too much stuff going on in the world in social media that there are genuinely cool people/projects that you don't even see. My point is similar to outlinks in the sense of sharing some visibility to those who don't have such visibility in the darkness of internet sometimes.

I only sort of found it yesterday so but that's my take on it. I am curious to hear yours though.

immibis2 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Like this one: https://www.immibis.com/outlinks/

IDK about Linkhut. Why should I use a whole SaaS to manage a single page list of links?

Imustaskforhelp 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Outlinks are great too. It's just that I have found it easier with Linkhut and yea.

Linkhut is open source and seems nice to me that's all.

bigthymer 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Puff piece with 1000+ words that doesn't ever assert anything in particular that the author was wrong about

His article mostly talks about other things but I think his title is sufficient. He says that he never thought that the news would become so unreliable that he would end up getting his news from randos on Bluesky who simply share what they know without an intention to monetize it.

phaser 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Yeah, the choice of title is indeed strange. But it does convey a personal point of view about the platform very well. Largely inscrutable? Compared to what?

AJ007 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Very much the puff piece of someone living in a social media bubble. The real problem is how the fediverse is going to survive the onslaught of laws related to social media age verification, data retention, data privacy, data not-privacy (breaking e2e encryption and retaining data for a really long time to spy on users), etc. There are a lot of problematic laws right now, but the velocity of new laws is alarming.

One can make an argument that compliance is possible -- but it isn't free. I don't see how small, independent websites will survive. Operators chose not to follow the laws (which sometimes conflict with each other.) As long as you don't scale too much or the operators or anonymous they can probably get away with it.

I use Mastodon. I use Twitter. Twitter is still fine as long as you keep your follow list clean. That means unfollowing people who post noise, which somehow people haven't figured out 17 years later?? Only view the chronological feed. Could this all have just been RSS feeds? Probably.

Synaesthesia 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

>sfba.social

Seems pretty cool TBH

kgwxd 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The win for mastodon is that it's a choice to view those feeds at all. Some have none by default (e.g. librem.one), you only see who you follow. Same with bluesky. "Discover" is there by default, but can be removed. It's a tad annoying in some places, like when your feed is "empty", they still show it at the bottom, but it's a big banner which, for me, is a perfect indicator to stop scrolling. You can also hide "Trending Tooics".

gzread 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

He asserts to being wrong about the Fediverse being as bad as all the rest, because the Fediverse is full of real people instead of corporatized bullshit.

jaggs 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Thank you for your opinion.