Quite possibly a luddite.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • I’m not sure I see the benefit of this. The point that Wikipedia might eventually become corrupted is made moot by the permissive licensing of the information there. The main challenge of the Wiki format is with fact checking and ensuring quality, which is only made more complicated by having a federated platform.

    ActivityPub is great for creating the social web. The added benefit of ActivityPub for non-social services is not obvious to me at all.

    That said, it’s a cool proof of concept, and I’m sure it can be useful for certain types of federated content management - I just don’t see how it could ever make sense as a Wikipedia alternative.


  • I’m currently experimenting with Seppo for my website, which is… not ready yet. So maybe not the greatest suggestion. But development is happening fast, and I like it for a couple of reasons.

    1. It’s incredibly easy to install. Just upload a file, set permissions, and open it in the browser. I’m somewhat incompetent, so I appreciate that even though deploying WordPress is obviously not very difficult either.
    2. Content is stored in basic XML files, making it easy to access with just basic PHP and an XSLT stylesheet. Basically it easy to incorporate posts into your site however you want it.
    3. It federates with ActivityPub, so people can follow your blog directly and get the content directly into their feeds.
    4. It’s lightweight - very little bullshit.

    Basic functionality such as editing and deleting posts does not work yet, so it’s absolutely not ready for primetime. But it’s a project worth following, especially for those of us with an interest in the social web.

    Edit: I guess this would be more if you wanted to create a basic website yourself, and add a tool for content management to it. I read the post a bit too quickly - if you’re not interested in writing some code there are much better options to go for out there. Seppo I think is nice for those who actively want to tinker a bit. :)






  • I think a lot of the “conflict” was based on people expecting the threadiverse to be user owned Reddit, without understanding how the Fediverse operates. As people start understanding the nature of how this place works, one would expect them to also calm down a bit about different communities having different moderation strategies.

    Then again, it’s the internet. Some people are not exactly keen to understand.




  • It’s also not a huge mystery that what is essentially a one-man hobby project will slow down development in some periods, and speed up in others. I’m sticking with Kbin.social because I’m happy with the experience here despite some rough edges, but of course there are other platforms better suited for people who are unhappy about being beta testers of slowly developing software.

    (For anyone interested, Fedia.io is the largest mbin instance!)




  • All subreddits are run by Reddit; if Reddit decides to overrun it with ads, require you to use their app, make content impossible to enjoy, or incorporate some awful AI bullshit, nobody can really do anything about it.

    Over here, you are in charge of your own user experience. You’re reading this content from dbzer0; I’m using an entirely different application called kbin. We have completely different user experiences, and some users might be banned on my server but not on yours (or vice versa).

    Others might get different user experiences through apps or front-ends such as Old Lemmy or more experimental stuff. It’s basically going to be a lot more difficult to enshittify as everybody is chosing their own experience.

    As for the communities, they are indeed at the mercy of whoever runs a particular server. If the lemmy.world admins go a bit crazy, users might for example respond by jumping ship to the !fediverse community on a different server.


  • There’s a flip side to everything of course:

    It is a little more inconvenient if your server dies, but other servers survive.

    Assuming the server is going to die, it’s arguably more convenient on the Fediverse as most communities won’t die with it. If Reddit disappears the entire site will be gone; if lemmy.world dies the Threadiverse will continue on without too much trouble.

    It is a little more inconvenient if your server blocks other servers and you don’t agree with the reasons why.

    That’s true, but the added convenience is that you can join a server where you agree with moderating decisions. Content moderation is not one size fits all; at least on the Fediverse it’s theoretically possible for everyone to end up on a server they’re happy with.