I’ll go first…
My favorite Fediverse platforms as of 2024
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Mastodon - my main social feed platform that first introduced me to the Fediverse in general.
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Lemmy - my second main social feed platform that originally substituted Reddit from years ago.
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Matrix protocol - communication platform I use to connect with users on the Lemmy instance I’m on
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Peertube - would love to get an account going and use it more often but still don’t know how but there’s FediVideo.
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Bookwyrm - Goodreads alternative that I signed up for that could use more work for a genuine reading tracker.
BONUS: my least favorite Fediverse platform lately
WordPress - because I used to run art blogs on there before I heard word about drama about the CEO of the corporation so I basically had to put out my last existing art blog…RIP.
Hubzilla. Closely followed by the intentionally nameless fork of a fork… of Hubzilla that’s colloquially being referred to as (streams).
Perks of both (excerpt):
- not based on ActivityPub, it’s actually optional; you can turn/keep it off if you want to
- nomadic identity; my channels are resilient against instance shutdown because they aren’t restricted to one instance
- multiple channels = IDs on one and the same account/login; no need to register additional user accounts for this, and you can easily switch back and forth between channels
- OpenWebAuth magic single sign-on, both client-side and server-side support
- very extensive permission settings that let me control what I see, what I don’t see and what others can see and do
- per-contact permission settings
- per-channel blacklist/whitelist filter plus per-contact blacklist/whitelist filters plus keyword-triggered, automatically generated, reader-side content warnings, supporting regex and (except the latter) a special filter syntax for extra features
- what’s “lists” on Mastodon is actually useful because you can use it both to filter your stream and to limit whom you send a post to, not to mention much easier to maintain
- a concept of conversations, you can follow entire discussions, and you generally receive all replies to a post (something that at least Mastodon doesn’t have, by the way)
- not only native support for discussion groups/forums, but they can and do host their own moderated discussion groups/forums (Mastodon has neither)
- no arbitrary character limits, characters only limited by the instance database (on (streams), that’s theoretically over 24,000,000 characters for one post)
- probably more text formatting options than your typical blogging platform and definitely more than any microblogging project in the Fediverse
- full-blown blog posts rendered gracefully
- non-standard BBcode tags for special features, often observer-aware
- embedded links; no need to plaster URLs into your posts in plain sight
- images can be embedded “in-line” within the post with text above them and text below them
- no limit on how many images a post can have
- unlimited poll options
- multiple-word hashtags
- post categories in addition to hashtags
- tag cloud plus category cloud/list
- quotes
- “quote-tweets”
- extensively customisable Web UI
- built-in file storage with a built-in file manager, per-file and per-directory permissions settings and WebDAV support that’s used for images and other media you embed in your posts (unlike on Mastodon and Lemmy, you know where your uploaded images land, and you can delete them yourself if you need to)
- federated event calendar with support for Event-type objects
- built-in CalDAV calendar server (headless on (streams))
- built-in CardDAV address book server (headless)
- support for OAuth and OAuth2
- modular; can be extended with official or, if available, third-party “apps”, widgets and themes
Extra perks of Hubzilla:
- currently more reliable
- more active development
- easier to get new users on board because hubs are listed on various Fediverse sites, and more public hubs are available
- newer and more configurable version of the Redbasic theme
- switchable night mode
- multiple profiles per channel which can be assigned to certain connections
- you can configure new connections before you confirm them
- can also connect to diaspora*
- can also subscribe to RSS and Atom feeds
- event calendar also doubles as a basic frontend for the CalDAV server
- non-federating, long-form articles
- “cards” that work largely the same
- built-in wiki engine based on either BBcode or Markdown for as many wikis of your own as you want to, each with as many pages as you want
- support for webpages (the official Hubzilla website is on a Hubzilla channel itself)
Extra perks of (streams):
- more advanced
- better integration of ActivityPub into the two supported nomadic protocols
- contact suggestions also include ActivityPub contacts
- new default theme in addition to an older Redbasic version
- reworked, more powerful but easier-to-use permissions system
- easier to use once you’re on board
- supports BBcode, Markdown and HTML within the same post
- can set Mastodon’s sensitive flag for images
- built-in announcement/boost/repost/renote/repeat remover, no need to use filter syntax for that
- extra protection against both mention spam and hashtag spam
- alt-text can be added to images upon upload, no need to graft it into the image-embedding markup code
- verification of external identities (available on Mastodon as well, but not on Hubzilla)
I feel like there’s still a pretty big gap in the drawing / art space. I want something that works like the furry art sites all work, which means (a) art posts and text posts separated into distinct feeds, and (b) thumbnails in a grid instead of a vertical timeline. I built a web app to do this but unfortunately it’s single-user (and basically locked to the Azure cloud). In the meantime, Pixelfed works pretty well for following Mastodon artists.
The problem with any media heavy content is storage. Fediverse is diy, mom’s basement servers. Who’s going to pay for all the storage?
Ackchually, most of the Fediverse runs on professionally-operated Hetzner rack iron at huge data centres in Germany.
Even if this comes from 22% of the Fediverse being mastodon.social.
I am finding I like Mastodon the best. Lemmy has potential, but I think the political extremism and lack of hobbyist culture here currently, mixed with the incredibly confusing on-boarding process beginners have to navigate, along with the name, all contribute to making it DOA.
I’m really new to this whole fediverse thing, but I’d love to know more. Could someone please explain to me what some/all of these applications are?
- https://joinfediverse.wiki/Main_Page (admittedly quite Mastodon-centric)
- https://fediverse.party/
I pretty much only use Lemmy but also contact friends and share photos on a Nextcloud instance one of them kindly provided (I assume it isn’t federated though?).
I would really like to start using matrix but unless I host my own instance and get everything ready I’ll never be able to convince my friends to switch, though some of them are slowly getting fed up with discord too.
Matrix means less memes, trolls, and internet stuff and more civil discussions with humans.
I mostly use Discord for a few group chats, unixporn (please post more of it to Lemmy :3 !unixporn@lemmy.world) and some BG3 stuff. If the group chats moved to Matrix+Jitsi or even some form of Signal (that is still foss and does not require a phone number, self-hosted if possible) I would barely use Discord.
Edit because somehow I missed the most relevant part: I already barely get memes or trolls so not too many changes there.
O_o
What does that face mean?
Where’s Plume? It’s better than WriteFrreely IMO
Wasn’t it discontinued?
It technically still is in development. But all the devs lack time, and the devs themselves officialy recomment WriteFreely on the Plume website.
Even though Plume has features that are nothing but TBD plans for WriteFreely (e.g. comments, built-in image storage).
Lemmy, shortly followed by Piefed.
Will probably switch once Piefed gets mobile apps support and comments view
What’s so good about PieFed?
Much more advanced moderation tools: https://join.piefed.social/2024/06/22/piefed-features-for-growing-healthy-communities/
Actual instance blocking compared to the incomplete “mute communities” instance blocking on Lemmy
Development seems fasters than Lemmy, they are almost at feature parity while being much younger
On the other hand, it has some weirdly opinionated features:
- Hiding downvoted comments (mob rule)
- Marking people with many downvotes as “low reputation”. I get it, getting many downvotes is a bad sign but I don’t think the software should try to make a ruling here, I think human moderators should look at the whole picture. It doesn’t make you a bad person that people disagree with you.
- Communities organized into “topics” - I’m not certain if these groupings are decided by the dev or the admin? Either way I find it a bit problematic.
- Marking certain communities as “low effort” and not counting “reputation” for those. I don’t feel like the software should be making this kind of value judgement.
If it helps:
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this is controlled by a user setting. I left the one that automatically “collapses” comments below a threshold at the default, but I disabled the one that “hides” comments by setting the threshold to -10000. So, far from taking away user power, it strictly enhances choices by providing new options, only at the user’s behest.
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it does have such a “reputation” feature, as too does life. Someone who constantly trolls others gets rather “known” for such. But crucially, it’s a label - it doesn’t hide anything, only enhances what is already there. And yeah it’s a bit of an experiment, perhaps it won’t work. Or perhaps it will be improved further? Based on the above and the responsiveness of the devs, I would expect complete control if features were ever added to actually do anything wrt this score.
Btw apps already have something similar, as too does PieFed, when adding a label for new accounts - bc people have asked for it, and it can be helpful to know when talking with someone that they are a new account (perhaps they are an alt, but it’s something, and again it’s just a label).
Yeah, I constantly get downvoted - and some of my posts are among the most heavily downvoted content existing in certain communities (but I also note that such things as Innuendo Studios The Alt Right Playbook got heavily downvoted by the same community as well so… I feel vindicated:-). So I mean it when I say that believe me I KNOW what you mean when expressing those concerns. Perhaps the experiment won’t work out, or perhaps it merely needs tuning - e.g. so that any one post or comment doesn’t weigh so heavily but rather only their aggregate (median rather than mean perhaps? or maybe only the binary choice of positive or negative total score, and even then perhaps not centered at zero but something more highly negative like -10?).
Also PieFed.social has defederated from hexbear.net and lemmygrad.ml, so those sources of downvoting are entirely removed. It also preferentially weights scores more highly feedback from those with high reputation already - which state I achieved in roughly a week and with only two posts, one a cross-post of the other even. So it’s not like seniors are locking out the noobs.
Anyway yes there’s enormous potential for misuse there, but it’s also something that people have been clamoring for - so it’s something that they are being responsive enough to try it out?
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I’m not sure about the categories - but again the devs are very responsive so surely easy to change things? Also I’ve definitely joined communities that aren’t in those, and while there are large federation issues with any non-Lemmy.World instance right now (I see the same from many instances including my 2 alt accounts elsewhere - so it has little to nothing to do with PieFed; especially after the enormous surge in content surrounding the USA election), I believe that they show up in the main feed.
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I have never heard that before but I would support it - more “experimental” communities should be allowed, to try things out, a “safe space” if you will:-).
All of these are valid concerns - and seem like they are being worked on.
It doesn’t really help for me, but the beauty of the fediverse is that it doesn’t have to. You can like PieFed, I can prefer Lemmy and we can both still talk :)
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I actually love Lemmy, my only problem is it’s absolutely infested with democrats and communists
And internet trolls.
Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.
