A community dedicated to fediverse news and discussion.
Fediverse is a portmanteau of "federation" and "universe".
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I've just started reading, but I've already come across one issue with the article:
All posts have a character limit, so we can’t say everything we want in a single post.
If that's the case, then why did they use Mastodon? Why not Plume or write.as, which are more suited for longer blog posts?
I believe it's just Eugen not willing to remove the useless limits. People very rarely go past 400 anyway, but when you really have something to say, you have to start these stupid threads like you'd do in Twitter. I wish Mastodon would just start trunkating posts at a certain character/line limit, behind a "show more" button.
People very rarely go past 400
I have often ended up needing to shorten my toots because of It. I would indeed much prefer a way to have longer toots.
Just use pleroma, there is no capping
I was going to mention that, too... Or, as has been mentioned elsewhere, one can self-host Mastodon and raise the cap. But... why?
well , the cap is at 5000 characters by default.
Mastodon is specifically developed to facilitate short Twitter-like posts. Consider moving to a different service altogether if you keep having issues with it.
Some instances allow a longer character limit. It's really just an option that the admin decides, most admins just keep, the default. if you have a greater character limit then longer toots will be under "show more".
Mastodon no. Glitch Social (Mastodon fork) and Pleroma are the ones where you can set a different character limit even as admin.
In Mastodon, that option was hardcoded from certain begining until August 2020 when I left the network. I even remember some threads in Mastodon repository about it and Eugen not wanting to provide support.
Ok my bad. I didn't know you couldn't change it at all without using a fork. That's a bit of a shame I think. To be honest the more I think about it Mastodon isn't always the best thing to host anyway unless you are planning on a large community.
Or Friendica
I saw this article on “hacker”news. For sure there are legitimate concerns about the Fediverse to be made. Maybe point 1 is one them - not being able to migrate data. But they don’t expand or make proposals on this, and instead go off on a tangent complaining about general online discourse and Twitter style microblogging in particular.
Yeah, most of the arguments they raised fully applied to Twitter also, and some where factually incorrect. You can raise the maximum length of the posts if you self host, or chose to use something different from Mastodon altogether.
I think saying that they can self host isn't a viable in this instance, maybe they don't wanna
Worth noting that it's perfectly possible to migrate data between instances.
yeah but it doesn't migrate toots, right? It does migrate everything else though
Look like it won't migrate the data, here's what it says when I got to the option on my account:
This action will move all followers from the current account to the new account
Your current account's profile will be updated with a redirect notice and be excluded from searches
No other data will be moved automatically
However, you can do a data export and use the API to reload the data on the new account that way.
but still you can't import toots, right?
Why would you want to? Honestly asking. Toots are meant to be more in the moment.
I don't care, I think it is fine the way it is. But the first point of the article is
You can’t migrate your posts
so that's literally why I was clarifying that in the answer
Worth noting that it’s perfectly possible to migrate data between instances.
doesn't really help here, because it is just partly true.
So this is a fair point, if they really want this it's a reason to leave. A dumb one at that imo but I am being downvoted here for just stating facts.
Ok fair enough. I didn't downvote you myself honestly you are saying anything that makes it reasonable to downvote imho.
They are just butt hurt because they got some push-back against the continued miss-information and FUD they spread on their website.
What kind? Have any links I am interested
Basically anything related to XMPP on the above linked website is FUD (Note: I am not saying all is strictly speaking wrong).
Sorry, what's FUD?
Sorry, sometimes acronyms are hard to find correctly and wanted to be sure.
Most of that seems whiny and one-sided but I admire they back up the donations complaint
We don’t accept any form of financial donations or sponsorship, allowing us to remain 100% independent and self-funded.
Donations are not bad when done correctly and for all I know they are backed by some special interest but I appreciate the lack of hypocrisy in this regard.
The advice to use RSS feed readers to follow accounts if you do not intent to reply to them is a much underused one. It is a great suggestion for following project announcements for example. Of course this is missing a lot of the fediverse shenanigans one might enjoy.
I don't really get this. They're essentially picking up their toys and going home. I guess their plan is to rely completely on word of mouth? Good for them.
I am sorry but I also think this is kinda dumb.
It was like a social media website, people looked for attention and money, spread falsehoods and several users were dogmatic and had the wrong opinion.
lol
Of course it's totally fine they left. Maybe this shows that not every project/software project/activist team needs a social media account, just those who have the resources and actually like using it. But they could have known this before joining imo.
They must have had a very different experience from me if they saw people seeking attention and money on Mastodon... To be fair, mastodon is a social media thing so it's weird that criticise it for being what it is.
I didn't know them and it was a very interesting read. As other user have said, my experience in Mastodon has been very different to theirs. And, indeed, they are responding to their area of interest: privacy. However, if you go there with the political aspiration of not contributing to big data collection in the service of ads, that's a whole different thing to be on the lookout for! Still, I admire their work. Thanks for sharing this!
The author apparently had a bad experience on one instance that he joined and that's too bad but a bad experience on Mastodon doesn't justify general claims about the Fediverse as a whole. Mastodon is a very diverse network and the choice of the instance is very important for the whole experience. I happen to have very nice dialogues on my instance but I would never dare to make statements about the general 'atmosphere' on Mastodon.
Their complaint seems to be that Mastodon/the fediverse is just "Twitter but federated" which as far as I am aware is exactly what it's intended to be, and what it's advertised as.