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With this #RedditMigration, you know what people haven’t been talking about recently?

#Bluesky.

AT protocol was obviously not ready for a #RedditMigration, it’s not even ready for federation, and is years behind #ActivityPub.

Bluesky might be okay if you just want pre-Elon Twitter and to watch the old Twitter royalty do their thing. But it is not equipped to handle a variable use cases that can only happen through federation.

Each day Bluesky does not federate is a moment it’s ceding territory to #Mastodon, #Friendica, #Calckey, #Kbin, etc.

—@atomicpoet

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Cohost’s financial update is a poster child for what I and others have been saying for a long time now: the internet won’t survive without decentralization. You can’t just make the next Twitter or Reddit or Tumblr. That’s a joke. Cohost was against decentralization but they’ve now learned why centralization isn’t feasible: only massive corporations with infinite VC can afford it, and they hemorrhage that money and close eventually too.

The internet is too expensive to work this way and it won’t long term. We just got complacent while there was enough VC to go around. It’s pets dot com again. It doesn’t last.

And this isn’t even about AP/fedi, while I like fedi this is true with or without it. We have to go back to having websites. Not The(tm) website for whatever, but lots of them. If you don’t want to go to more than one? Too bad, it’s how things will be regardless. Having One website isn’t sustainable for corporations and isn’t even vaguely feasible for little guys.

You have to have lots of websites. I can run a small community for a bit of my entertainment budget for the month or donations from a handful of users who like what I’m running. You can run a mastodon instance for a small crowd for very little. You can run a website off an old laptop laying around. You cannot run a 130k user site and pay you and your friends $94k a year to run it. It’s not sustainable. I wish it was. It isn’t. Sites have to stay small, and there have to be enough of them spread out to spread out the financial load to hobbyist levels. Sorry that you can’t make a living running a site for your friends to hang out on, but it’s just how the math works out. Reddit can’t make money doing it, Twitter can’t make money doing it, Patreon can’t…they only survive on being Huge Corporations Who Can Bleed Money. You can replicate bleeding money on a small scale all you want but I wouldn’t advise it. You can however run a forum for your friends for the cost of Netflix or whatever.

—@lori

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Y’all: I have been wrestling with kbin on the fedia.io instance, but I want to take a step back and give some perspective. Kbin is new, it’s growing crazy fast, and it really wasn’t in a place to support the migration from Reddit. Despite that, @ernest has been working his tail off knocking down issues and helpings instance admins.

Reddit certainly seems to be tripling down on their position and I think kbin is shaping up to be a worthy alternative. If you like kbin (on whatever instance you use it on) and want to see it grow, may I ask that you throw some money Ernest’s way? (https://www.buymeacoffee.com/kbin)

I want to publicly thank Ernest for kbin and for his contributions to our growing fediverse community.

/back to whatever you were doing.

—@jerry

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This week we bring you Ramy in Egypt from his music studio. NVDA helps Ramy produce music and in his work as a music instructor at a university in Cairo. We whole heartedly agree with Ramy that every blind and vision person should have access to a free screen reader!
“NVDA made my life so simple” – Ramy
Thank you Ramy for sharing how NVDA has impacted you!

https://youtu.be/ucxm2pUh1nw

(And for those using captions, you’ll be pleased to know we’ve gone back to manually created ones 🙂 )

—@NVAccess

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Remember when sighted users were forced to read #AltText because pictures wouldn’t load? I kinda wish instances on here would disable all images for a day or week to demonstrate how it can benefit so many other things in addition to accessibility. Anyway, this article explains that time when images on FB wouldn’t load https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/3/20681231/facebook-outage-image-tags-captions-ai-machine-learning-revealed

—@weirdwriter

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Btw for the love of god if you’re trying to get your friends to come to the #fediverse please just stop giving them links to the “join-x” sites and just give them an invite link from your server or a link to the register page from the one you use (or think is reasonably stable for a new user).

On Mastodon doing that means they’ll start with at least one person followed, not sure about on the #threadiverse or if either of the software even have invite codes.

I think the difficulties of federation are somewhat overblown in general, but one thing is for sure: it’s not a hoop most people really *want* to jump through first. Just give them a way to explore, and let help them figure it out themselves once they’re on.

The “join” sites are an attempt to mimic a pattern of centralized sites that just doesn’t work here. They’re unlikely to ever really work.

—@megmac

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Just got an email from YouTube Creators.

"Introducing podcasts on the YouTube Music app"

"Promote your podcast on and off YouTube!"

…and then the fine print:

* Podcasts on the YouTube Music app are currently only available for listeners in the US.

💀

In case you need a refresher on what actually *is* a podcast:

https://jaredwhite.com/podcast/88/
https://indieweb.social/@jaredwhite/109753291202166582

—@jaredwhite

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Just listened to the podcast where Mike Masnick (@mmasnick) and Yoel Roth (@yoyoel) discuss moderation in a distributed environment. Fascinating discussion and well worth a listen. I’ve been diving into this topic lately as I’ve designed a collaboration tool based on #web3 technologies and want to avoid unleashing something toxic. Anyway, this is a great discussion about how hard it is to design and implement moderation practices in any environment, and the unique challenges in a distributed environment like ActivityPub/Mastodon.

Just an initial two takeaways for me personally:

Studying moderation eventually brings you directly to the need to study and understand human psychology. The really good parts and the really bad parts. Moderating social media takes a special strength to look into the abyss and wrestle with demons. Mike and Yoel touch on this in the podcast.

In this discussion I was also reminded of the anthropological and historical work studying the dynamics of family and tribal groups. The distributed Fediverse reminds me a bit of tribal organizations. I need to dig out some of that older work.

So many folks here on Mastodon are studying this topic in a serious way. Refreshing and exciting to experience the quality of discussion.

The podcast is here:
https://www.podchaser.com/podcasts/techdirt-464057/episodes/decentralizing-content-moderat-175820469

I always appreciate pointers to relevant work.

#moderation #fediverse #mastodon

—@patrick_townsend

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Obviously, given the standard ratio of 2 #Jews to 3 opinions there will be quibbles but this is one of the best short explainers I’ve read on #Jewish denominations, religious adherence vs secularization , and #zionism. I get a lot of questions given I dress as a visible #Jew and live in a Jewless wasteland of mayonnaise and treif so I might just keep this handy.
https://theconversation.com/jewish-denominations-a-brief-guide-for-the-perplexed-207297

—@dukepaaron