Today we are beginning to open Flipboard to the Fediverse, a rapidly emerging part of the Web which includes social services like Mastodon, Threads, Pixelfed, Firefish and PeerTube all built on a revolutionary open protocol called ActivityPub.

When and how is this going to happen? The process of opening Flipboard to the Fediverse is called “federation” and it will happen in three distinct phases between now and April:

Phase 1 (Today): We are federating 27 publishers and creators so that we can test and gather feedback
Phase 2 (January): We will enable anyone in the Fediverse to follow and engage with any public curator on Flipboard
Phase 3 (April): We will enable anyone on Flipboard to follow and engage with any public account in the Fediverse

Starting a test where posts from Threads accounts will be available on Mastodon and other services that use the ActivityPub protocol. Making Threads interoperable will give people more choice over how they interact and it will help content reach more people. I'm pretty optimistic about this.

- Mark Zuckerberg (@zuck) on Threads

An explanation of two problems inherent to social media platforms from @[email protected]

scale has social effects. Most technical people know that scale has technological effects. Same thing's true on the social side, too.

difference in perspective between the governance parties and the end users

Explanation starts

End of thread

https://www.threads.net/@potus (2 Million followers)

https://www.threads.net/@vp (1.7 Million followers)

https://www.threads.net/@whitehouse (616 Thousand followers)

Notifications are a pain point:

giving people the ability to curate their notifications. Notifications are what’s driving them nuts. Not posts, not even the technology of Mastodon – it’s replies from assholes.

They need notifications grouped, they really do. Hell, I want that enough that I mostly look at replies from my phone, where I have an ap that groups them.

They need to be able to turn on something like Twitter’s old “quality replies” filter, which served as a junk filter, and a block against pointless below-ban-level negging.

And they need to be able to do it at scale, because if you have 100,000 followers, you can’t reasonably do it one at a time. It’s simply not possible.

cross-posted from: https://sopuli.xyz/post/5730013

Before sharing a link I would like to determine whether the website excludes people from access, and who is excluded. I can test for myself whether the Tor community is excluded, but what about:

• VPNs
• i2p
• public libraries
• #cgNAT issued IP addresses
• various regions
• particular browsers (e.g. lynx, w3m)

for example? I cannot check all those means of access. If a website is implementing some form of digital exclusion, I would like to ensure that I am not helping the exclusive website gain visitors.

#askFedi #netneutrality

LemmyWorld is a terrible place for communities to exist. Rationale:

• Lemmy World is centralized by disproportionately high user count
• Lemmy World is centralized by #Cloudflare
• Lemmy World is exclusive because Cloudflare is exclusive

It’s antithetical to the #decentralized #fediverse for one node to be positioned so centrally and revolting that it all happens on the network of a privacy-offender (CF). If #Lemmy World were to go down, a huge number of communities would go with it.

So what’s the solution?

Individual action protocol:

1. Never post an original thread to #LemmyWorld. Find a free world non-Cloudflare decentralized instance to start new threads. Create a new community if needed. (there are no search tools advanced enough to have a general Cloudflare filter, but #lemmyverse.net is useful because it supports manually filtering out select nodes like LW)
2. Wait for some engagement, ideally responses.
3. Cross-post to the relevant Lemmy World community (if user poaching is needed).

This gets some exposure to the content while also tipping off readers of the LW community of alternative venues. LW readers are lazy pragmatists so they will naturally reply in the LW thread rather than the original thread. Hence step 2. If an LW user wants to interact with another responder they must do so on the more free venue. Step 3 can be omitted in situations where the free-world community is populated well enough. If /everything/ gets cross-posted to LW then there is no incentive for people to leave LW.

Better ideas? Would this work as a collective movement?

Seems fitting to share this now that Social.Photo is live. It’s our newest addition to the fediverse.

We launched a new Pixelfed instance. This is a newly growing community. Most Mastodon Apps work with it if you already have a favorite app like Ivory by Tapbots. They have a PixelFed official app that is about to launch.

Checkout Social.Photo today!

We now have a Pixelfed instance. Check it out!

Social.Photo. Signup is open!

Is Lemmy a replacement for Reddit or just something different?

Before Reddit was Digg. Before Facebook was MySpace. Before Mastodon there was Twitter. Before Lemmy there was Reddit. It's fair to say that each of these sites was or is going to be replaced. The time it takes for the migration is typically slow as the new system gains traction and features. I don't believe they are direct replacements. If there was a copy of the existing site there would be no need to leave. Lemmy is different. Lemmy replaces a need not a site.

When I was growing up the internet was created by the people. Corporate sites were rare and far between. They didn't dominate. People would visit Geocities, Newgrounds, IRC, etc. The biggest players were AOL for chat and Yahoo for sports, news, & search. No site was perfect and beautiful and people didn't care. It was wonderful. This all changed.

It feels almost instant; however, I believe it was slow. Sites like Facebook promised to be the people's network. Youtube took over as this amazing video hosting service. No more Flash! People thought the rough edges of the internet were over. They traded their personal information for free sites. They didn't know what they were giving up.

Over time these "small" sites became the Internet. 5 sites now are the internet to some people. It's time for the internet to return to the people like it was before. Rough & personal.

Lemmy replaces that need people have to connect on common topics and to gather news. It's the newspaper of the people.

Lemmy isn't a Reddit replacement... it is filling a need that Reddit has failed to fill. Reddit became like Facebook, Google, Twitter, and Youtube. It wanted to be more than what people wanted it to be. It changed, so people are leaving. The fediverse is the future. It's time to take the internet back!

cross-posted from: https://feddit.it/post/253571

Why isn't anyone talking about this? It looks like Meta wants to compete with Twitter with a new Instagram microblogging app which will probably be compatible with Mastodon

Key Point of the article:

*“Soon, our app will be compatible with certain other apps like Mastodon,” Instagram’s slide says. “Users on these other apps will be able to search for, follow and interact with your profile and content if you’re public, or if you’re private and approve them as followers.” *

The Verge - This is Instagram’s new Twitter competitor

cross-posted from: https://discuss.online/post/49400

cross-posted from: https://kbin.social/m/[email protected]/t/83649

A warning and a perspective from an insider who has been through this before.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/1372067

I've been waiting for this to be made by someone! Finally.

Extension to make it easy to interact with different Lemmy communities

Would it be fair to say that Lemmy is just a client of the fediverse? Technically, someone could create a new client that interfaces with Lemmy perfectly on ActivityPub.

Seems like we should be pushing fediverse not just Lemmy.

I'm trying to come up with a simple way to explain how it works. How to describe data masters and such.

How do you explain it to people? I see many very long posts or huge infographics that are too overwhelming to catch someone's interest. I want to make it simple.

Elevator-pitch type stuff with pictures.