Alongside others mentioned (tags/flairs, multi-communities, keyword filtering, etc.) another feature I’d like to see added/improved is notification settings.

Something like…

In account settings:

• Enable/disable all notifications.
• Enable/disable post reply notifications.
• Enable/disable comment reply notifications.

For others’ posts/comments and per posts/comments:

• Enable/disable post reply notifications.
• Enable/disable comment reply notifications.

With those settings you could more easily tune out all notifications or only opt into those you’d like to see, and opt out of those you’re done with (say your post/comment got popular and you’ve had your fill from the replies).

Unrelated to notification settings, it would also be nice to be able to block communities from the front page via the … More menu in the default web UI.

“Behold, I’m a unicorn!”

To add to this, I think as long as decentralization involves having to know how to and have the money to operate a server, it’s not going to reach the point some may hope for. The monetary costs may be lower than ever, but that doesn’t address the knowledge requirements (not to mention time for setup and upkeep).

Even one of the more user friendly attempts at this so far (AT Protocol) doesn’t address this in a meaningful way, as one still has to get into the weeds of server config, domain leasing, etc.

Yeah, keyword filtering isn’t a default feature (yet) @Varyk@sh.itjust.works. I’m not sure which apps/frontends enable keyword filtering, but I think Voyager on mobile does, not sure which web frontends do.

I think it may also be worthwhile to toss in Bonfire, if looking for some pieces designed to hack together into a fediverse app. As I was looking up software the other day, I also saw some developing their software with Fedify, so there may be some resources to pull from there.

Tossing a mention to ya OP so you may catch this as well: @sentient_loom@sh.itjust.works

For people finding you, it means having to interact more in ways that encourage them to follow/subscribe to you, similar to how it goes now. For you finding stuff, it’s also similar in that you’d want to follow/subscribe to those that introduce you to others to follow/subscribe to. It’s really more for those that don’t mind putting forth effort to have their own online social space, much like the setup involved in having any online space.

It shines when you want to host multiple users with multiple different domains and identities.

Emphasis added. It’s that last part that drew me to include it. A single individual can prefer to portray themselves in multiple ways, particularly for different fediverse software (or even just different projects), so that’s why I included it.

Going to guess it’s one of the UrbanDictionary definitions, or in that vein…

Here I was thinking Ktistec was the most unfortunate, mainly as it’s awkward to remember & write.

I think a better title & question would be, “Why is Mastodon struggling to thrive?”

It’s surviving no problem, but it’s not thriving for a multitude of reasons. Some are pretty well covered across comments here & in the linked discussion, and are more or less reiterations of prior discussions on the matter.

Ultimately I think as much as many of those reasons are correct, the biggest reason is the same as ever: network effects. All the jank and technical details could be endured and adjusted to if there was sufficient value to be had in doing so, i.e. following accounts of interest/entertainment, connecting with friends, etc. That’s proven to varying degrees by those that have stuck with Mastodon. In turn, however, it’s also clear by how many bounce off that for many there’s still insufficient value to be found across Mastodon instances to justify dealing with all the rough edges.

If Mastodon had enough broadly appealing/interesting people/accounts across its instances, people might deal with the various technical and cultural rough spots the same way they deal with similar on other social networks they may complain about yet won’t leave. There still aren’t enough of those sorts on there for many though, so Mastodon simply survives but doesn’t thrive.

Yes but no. Due to architectural differences, federation under AuthTransfer protocol is simply different compared to ActivityPub. In its own terms it is federated as individuals’ data is stored in personal data servers (PDSs) connected to a relay, which currently is only the Bluesky relay, that roughly speaking connects them to other personal data servers.

You can technically operate your own personal data server apart from those operated by Bluesky, but I think it’s fair to say the vast majority on there don’t. It’s not clear yet, apart from fully holding your own data, how useful it is to operate your own given you only have one relay to use anyway at the moment.

So even in its own terms Bluesky really isn’t federated in much of a meaningful sense yet. The problems are twofold: a major part of their pitch is making federation Just Work™, keeping the underlying tech out of mind to mitigate confusion, but you can’t have your cake and eat it too here. Eventually, if you’re really committed to meaningful federation, you have to teach people about the value of operating their own personal data servers, at minimum, otherwise what was the point in separating it out in the architecture?

Problem is, that goes against their pitch to their audience and spoils the appeal. It’s telling a good joke only to kill it by explaining to the one person that went, “I don’t get it.”

Secondly, they’ve already upfront said that relays may be cost prohibitive for many people to operate, resulting in only a few ever being spun up. If that remains the case and is true, then even if a few were spun up, that’s not any more federated or distributed than the rather consolidated web we see now. How much of a difference would it make if the social web was running on AuthTransfer and the major relays were owned and run by Meta/Facebook, Twitter/X, and Google?

Congrats you have your own data in a personal data server…But are you really the one running it, or did you just opt into the PDS entryway offered by Facebook/Twitter/Google/etc. because sorry, what’s that about a server?

Great exhibit placement, looks cool in front of the windows!

If the option isn’t appearing [on going to the post], it likely means the user created the community. In that case you could try DMing them and sorting out the matter if they’re still active or, in the event they’re not, contacting the admins and I think they may be able to handle it.

Edited for clarity due to skipping steps.

Always happy to see more RSS-related tools emerge!

This is buried toward the bottom of the release notes so I’m bringing it up here:

Added instance-level default sort type

Any admins out there considering changing their instance sort settings or asking people on their instance if they’d like this changed, given that we can individually set sorting anyway? Taking into account the inclination of people to never adjust default settings (I remain deeply curious about this tendency, as an aside), I think it might be worth at least bringing up to one’s instance community.

If they decide they want it to remain the same, all good, and even better, it raises some people’s awareness that they can change it themselves.

Appreciate the adjustments and responsiveness! Gave it another try after this and the different formatting hit the spot! Still need to use more to see more finely tuned results, but dig the idea.

Also as others have already said plenty, would be cool to see this cleaned up for an open source release. If you’d like to see how some others are handling a sorta similar idea but with RSS feeds, you might look to Nunti for ideas on how to approach it.

Little feedback on the UI from taking a peek at this.

When I went into settings and adjusted post display style from card to anything else, it wasn’t clear to me that this wouldn’t apply to the new For You feed, which left me confused and less inclined to use it. I still gave it a try to make sure I wasn’t missing anything and to see how much the feed seemed to change with some light interaction, but I think you’d need to use it more than I did to see an effect.

Problem being: display settings not applying to the For You feed means I’m not going to use it much with the default card view.

Second part is that there was some comment display lag as I looked through posts, so if I looked at a post about cats with cat-related comments, those comments would linger and appear for a moment under a different post about possums. It’s just long enough to be noticeable, so thought it worth mentioning.

But compare with GOG then. They sell games, you download them with no DRM so you own the download essentially.

This is the model digital media should take, frankly. Anything less may as well be misleading marketing, as far as I’m concerned.

At a glance, Misskey and associated forks may appear to be Twitter-clones, but dig a little more and you’ll find they’re a lot more, for better and worse.

The interface is highly customizable, not just with some different colored themes nor a multi-column interface, but that you can stack page elements in columns and set up “antennae” or filters to surface posts including specified keywords and/or hashtags while excluding others via keywords/hashtags as well. There’s also what they call “channels” which I think are sort of like groups or dedicated topics apart from hashtags to post to and discuss whatever the channel topic is.

Oh, and because it seems *key wants to have a little of everything, there’s Pages, which is basically longform blog posting, and some versions include simple games. There’s also options for some other widgets I’ve not mentioned here. It’s genuinely pretty wild compared to the other federated microblogging services with how much flexibility it has and all that it has packed in.

I think the only other federated service I’ve found that’s comparable in flexibility may be Hubzilla, albeit I got the impression it’s less user friendly, but still, very customizable and a lot you could do with it.

That still doesn’t touch upon the negative to tethering users identity to instances.

Sorry, I should have been clearer. What I was trying to point to was that despite the portability of identity, the fact that you may still be highly reliant on the Bluesky relay (or frankly, any large relay), tethers your identity to them as without the relays there’s kind of no point to having a personal server at all.

Moreover, given the reference model provided via the Bluesky App, there’s a good chance you’ll run into similar arrangements on the AuthTransfer protocol where personal servers and appviews are joined together to essentially create instances (or entryway services I think they call them). One of the remaining distinctions from this entryway instance arrangement and ActivityPub then would be which relay or relays your entryway instance connects to.

Lastly I understand what you mean about people bouncing off Mastodon, but at the same time you kinda lose me here. You clearly mention the Fediverse preceding Mastodon yet then conclude with people having a bad experience with Mastodon meaning the rest of the Fediverse isn’t for them…? We’re using another variation of the Fediverse and ActivityPub here, so we’re both aware there’s more to it than that, even in the microblogging space, so I’m kind of confused on this point.

Nevertheless, I otherwise agree, it’s good that people have more alternatives to get away from the trashfire Twitter’s become (arguably even more of).

use[r] identities are not tethered to instances

Tbh while this is technically true, given the current circumstances, identities essentially are tethered albeit in a roundabout way. What I mean by that is, there’s no real point to them* without some relay and appview to work with, and for now, that’s just Bluesky.

That said, I agree that it would be better to go to them than to Twitter (if they’re not even considering stuff like Mastodon), but that’s a low hurdle to clear.

*-A caveat, supposedly it could be possible for personal data servers to connect to each other directly instead of via relays, but I haven’t come across anyone having tried this yet.