NodeBB

@fedify Very cool, congratulations on the launch, @hongminhee!

@LianaBrooks I am, and I'd say it's mostly working!

The specific corner of the fediverse I'm in is very welcoming, encouraging, and engaging.

The main downside is that not everyone has the same experience as I do, and it's really hurting the diversity of our community.

@lucid00

Right, I guess it's been indefinitely paused. I suppose there's still hope!

@liaizon @ruben

@ruben All very good points!

And honestly, I also care less about fediverse being mainstream than about growing the diversity here.

But also, I really do want us to move beyond corporations being the middlemen of our social connections. Honestly, if ATProto takes off, Bluesky eventually folds, and the future is independent Atmosphere communities, that's really not so bad.

I care a lot less about the tech stack than who controls it.

(Okay, I will never get used to the ATProto-style usernames, for that reason alone, I hope the fediverse "wins".)

@dansup Very cool!

@liaizon

@dansup Really nice to see someone taking safety features seriously!

Do hidden comments federate? That is honestly a great feature to have, I only thought of this recently during a conversation around reply controls, as a potential way to deal with the delay caused by the roundtrips needed to verify if a reply can be posted.

(Presumably this works differently on Loops, definitely curious to learn more.)

@liaizon

@liaizon Yeah, if I had the time and resources, I'd set up a server with GoToSocial and a Phanpy frontend, gave it a cool modern name, and try to lure in normies, without advertising the whole federation thing too much, just as an added bonus.

Alas, I really don't want to deal with content moderation.

@liaizon @ruben I think fediverse could still become mainstream, but clearly not through Mastodon.

I had pretty high hopes when Tumblr originally announced integrating ActivityPub, of course that's not happening anymore.

Less so with Meta's Threads, given the company's history.

Flipboard and Ghost are still putting in the effort, which is great, but those are not platforms used by regular social media users.

We really just need a new fediverse platform that's user-friendly. Seems like that's nearly impossible without VC money though, so I don't know.

@liaizon We've really fumbled the big Twitter/X migration, and just learned nothing.

@liaizon Yep, said pretty much the same thing the other day.

To me, the one key feature we need is the ability to disable replies, and maybe also control who can reply, those are top 1 and 10 requests on Mastodon's GitHub, and both have been open for several years.

The team's response: it's too hard. Which, fair enough. But putting any effort into UX/UI polishing, as needed as that is, will be wasted as so many people already left because of the constant harassment and gatekeeping.

I also pointed out that by the time Bluesky's VC money runs out, there might already be enough independent communities running the full ATProto stack, so people will just be able to migrate without needing to ever look at the fediverse again.