(…) and suggested the community’s hostility toward AI was symptomatic of a broader tendency to drive people away. The comparison he drew to the loss of Black Twitter in 2022 was badly misjudged, and the furious response was largely justified. Hannah Aubry, Mastodon’s community director, publicly distanced the organisation from his views. The thread blew up, accumulating hundreds of comments in a single weekend, most of them hostile, and the pattern of the community’s response is worth looking at closely.

The comparison may be misjudged, but his post did actually trigger the same dynamic, which facilitated/s racism on Mastodon (driving Black Twitter away) too. Toutes proportions gardées of course, as anti-AI scolding is much more bearable than blatant racism and harrasment. And genAI boosters don’t deserve a honour to be treated as another marginalised minority.

Mastodon-and-adjacement (maybe let’s call it the Feediverse, analogically to the Threadiverse) consist (like Threadi) of lots of different instances, but remains experienced mainly as one place. Maybe Mastodon has eased an onboarding too much and people want it to be moderated like a single app. Or, rather microblogging always will be experienced as the simple place? Definitely Black users have experienced racism mainly on place level. And instance -level tools and instance moderation mainly failed to handle it. The main problem, though, is:

One cannot be both a fediverse and a place.

Every initiative to make a place-making tool (but Fediseer, which has been created for Threadi and remains peripherial for Masto) has already received an opposition from communities. Every such an attempt will unwittingly head for takeover of the place by Elon-but-good-one-this-time, and defeat one of the purposes of the federation: independence of the central (not always a just) authority.

So, what to do for Black Twitter to return to the fedi?
Nothing, as now it’s too late. They have already made a home on ATmosphere and created first and main alternative ATProto instance: Blacksky. Nothing ActivityPub-based will be a better experience for them in foreseeable time.

Indeed, Mbin allows following Mastodon et co. accounts

For now, Catodon is a part of the Threadiverse at the same degree as Mastodon. At this moment it allows following/subscribing a community only.

If you are using it for organising and publishing events, then there is Mobilizon

They are breaking not only API, but also federation with v1 pods…

Anyone who is on Reddit and UpScrolled will definitely enjoy Lemmy.

well, the Lemmy UI is technically another webapp and one should be able to host it as standalone or even as PieFed frontend. That would be cursed :D

Last time when I tried to subscribe to a flipboard magazine from PieFed, I received no post from there. I have just added a ticket

Neither Lemmy nor PieFed are able to follow Mastodon users, but Mastodon is able to follow/subscribe to Lemmy/PieFed communities, post to them and talk to their users. Following a busy Lemmy community from Mastodon will make the community flood a Mastodon user’s feed, though.

Mastodon can follow any Pixelfed account and vice versa, but Pixelfed will see only posts with photos and Mastodon will see no more than 4 photos per post. Pixelfed is able to post to a Lemmy community, but I did not try to follow a comm from there.

In fact, Mastodon is able to follow any account from any fediverse app, but all the content from this will be reduced to the lowest common denominator: a post, maybe with formatting.

Very specific community.

and UpScrolled already having questionable ethics, this may be the path forward.

I am definitely Out of the loop on this.

PieFed has its own chat rooms on Zulip. You can log in there with your piefed.social credentials.

00s enbodied in an instance. Sopuli even after the Great Migrations retains its vibes, slightly different than several fledditor Reddit clones, like the largest instances. I like that.

Click at the Lemmy logo and you will be able to choose it

Misskey (and its forks) allows to pin posts of yours or other users to a Clip.

… but actually one cannot describe Lemmy’s pitch in one simple sentence, because its main difference is: Reddit but no Spez, fora but connected to each other (and we call this “federation”), and Mastodon but with better topic and content discovery. Any attempt to shorten this will be more or less inaccurate.

So, main Lemmy features, listed under the “Join an instance”, “Apps”, “Explore random instance”, etc., IMHO should look like this:

No ads. No tracking. No meddling.

Posts and comments on your feed are determined only by your settings and users’ votes. All moderation actions are public and viewable using a modlog. We do not block third-party apps. Lemmy is a free software and you can check it for yourself.

(we are practically saying Reddit without Spez)

No single overlord. No isolation

There are dozens of Lemmy websites and you can choose your experience with different vibes, topics, regions and moderation approaches. Yet every instance connects to other ones (forming the Fediverse) and allows you to seamlessly talk with each other, even outside of control of Lemmy creators!

(fora but not siloed. Discussion viewable regardless of where you are logged in)

Know the entire discussion on the topic

All the talk on Lemmy happens on communities. Subscribe to any of them and you will receive complete threads of conversation, regardless where you are signed in. A search, which actually works.* Decentralised, but not fragmented.

(Mastodon but actually not fragmented)

All three “features”/“upsides” of Lemmy are related to each other, somewhat like rock-paper-scissors. All form one pitch of a platform which combines the best features of Reddit, fora and Mastodon solving downsides of these at the same time. It would make sense to display these on the carousel.

*does the search on Lemmy work better than on e.g. Reddit? A “better search than on Mastodon” claim would be plausible, anyway

Your own discussion network

YouTube being more popular is okayish. An overtake by TikTok would be worrying…

Index of all Castopod podcasts, sortable by language and genre

Mbin federates with Mastodon & co and allows to sort microblog posts like on Lemmy.