I would imagine that this is getting addressed in the update as well.

A significant portion of the code is available, I think it’s just a matter of getting the latest code pushed out to public release status. Judging by the server repo, seems like a lot of development is happening out in the open.

https://github.com/joinloops

I mean, all of the videos are uploaded to PeerTube, and that instance (run by me) federates across a big chunk of the network. Like, yeah, the videos themselves live in an S3 bucket somewhere, but the metadata federation and P2P video capabilities (plus the ability to mirror redundant copies) somewhat mitigates that.

Wanting to get paid for your work, so that you can keep making stuff, is in fact not the same thing as greed. We have this assumption that everything on the Web should be free, or at least helped along by donations, but it’s not sustainable.

Channel is basically a white label instance of PatchWork, which is a Mastodon fork with custom feeds and community curation tools.

The main intent behind the project is to help existing communities and organizations get onto the Fediverse, and have some curation capabilities. Ideally, it can be used to get a large amount of people and accounts onto the network with minimal friction.

I always liked the concept of Matrix, and still actively use it, but there’s some serious jank. Synapse is generally bloated and not fun to run an instance, Dendrite is perpetually in Beta, and the clients themselves range from adequate to awful. The default Element client on Android is so broken for me that I’m forced to use Element X, because I can’t even log in with Element.

It’s disappointing, but there’s a ton of issues that aren’t so easy to resolve. New Vector and the Element Foundation are basically two separate entities that have some kind of hard split between them, neither of which seems to have the money necessary to support comprehensive development. The protocol is said to be bloated and overtly complex, and trying to develop a client or a server implementation is something of a nightmare.

I want to see Matrix succeed, I think a lot of people see the potential of what it could be. I’m not sure it’ll ever get there.

Thank you! I’ve been thinking about it a lot, and I think it could be used to solve a bunch of different problems, like importing stuff from other networks, and having everything ready to go before you join an instance.

There’s some UX questions that have to be figured out, the last thing I want is some super-cluttered design that asks for a million different options. Also, platforms would need to provide some necessary APIs (for registration and data import) to make it fully useable.

My main critique is just that, within the Mastodon side of the Fediverse, the design is highly misleading about what the feature does. It resembles a normal DM feature, but the message addressing is purely handled by mentions in the message body.

Basically, it’s an antipattern, causing people to accidentally mention other people in what’s assumed to be a Direct Message. It’s less about privacy, more about poor telegraphing of side-effects.

I used to feel that way, but there’s so much crap on that timeline, especially when you’re on a bigger instance. I used to use it for the exact same thing, discovery. A lot of it is just noise to me now, though.

Well, no, this was just responding to a critique on UX shortcomings, and highlighting how different efforts could solve various problems.

It sounds more like you’re talking about one of my previous blog posts, where I was talking about a super-flexible frontend that’s basically a pagebuilder. Make no mistake, I would love to see custom profile music and radios! And I agree that accessibility needs to be way better!

Yes

Oh nice!

I think a lot of people do it because they want to build communities and bring people together. It’s easy to underestimate the workload and what kind of problems come up. A big problem is that people start instances, and gradually realize that they’re basically stuck running things until they either hand it off to someone else, or shut down.

Posting from another thread:

Her comments cover everything from “trans women are mostly autistic boys who have been gaslit” to “there are only two sexes” to “trans people are unfit to play in their gender’s sport.” However, there are far worse comments floating around out there that talk about genital mutilation and all kinds of other heinous shit.

It wasn’t just “I have a different opinion, we can agree to disagree”, it was full-fledged unhinged stuff that all followed the TERF playbook.

You’d be surprised, this has always been something of a weird schism within open source. There’s a synthesis between socialist and libertarian ideals, the overlap of which is broadly seen as a beneficial social good. So, you get contributors and users that fall on opposite ends of a spectrum. This is just as true for the Fediverse, only the dynamic is much more pronounced, because it’s a social network populated by people who got off of other social networks.

Technically, SoapBox and Rebased were forks of the Mastodon frontend and Pleroma backend by an alt-right dev that found some level of success in the alt-right part of the Fediverse. So, it’s not completely unheard of.

It’s basically an open source, federated clone of GrooveShark, which was kind of like Plex but just for music.

Yeah, the UX is historically not great. I’m also pretty sure that the federated social layer is still kind of non-existent at this point. It used to be that you could upload your own music and share it, but you’d never see replies from anybody.

It’s like someone took a Grooveshark clone, shoehorned federation into it, and then kind of made some features act like SoundCloud, if you squint. But, they didn’t really finish the transition.

Generally speaking, I agree. It’s just interesting to see a platform force a mechanism into itself that admins can’t turn off. The only thing that really bugs me about that is that admins are kind of supposed to have the final say on what their server does, and some of the infrastructure for this idea seems a bit shaky at best.

You might want to check out Bandwagon. It’s ActivityPub-based, and you can use it to submit your music to The Indie Beat Radio: https://bandwagon.fm/