Mastodon.world and Lemmy.world July 2023 blog post
Mastodon.world and Lemmy.world July 2023 blog post
An overdue blog post about the finances and other news from the .world
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I wonder why Mastodon.world has done so comparatively poorly. I also wonder if Mastodon could be more integrated with Lemmy would that improve things. As awful as twitter is these days, the way it embeds so easily into other content, which lets you click straight to its comments is invaluable. No doubt its on Elon's list of things to ruin, and he'll get around to it eventually.
mastodon.social dominates for one simple reason. The Mastodon gGmbH app now defaults to mastodon.social sign ups.
Selecting instances was confusing the shit out of people, so they relented and simplified the signup process.
What is gGmbH?
The gGmbH is a non-profit company with limited liability under German law. In German this is gemeinnützige Gesellschaft mit beschränkter Haftung – gGmbH for short. Here 'non-profit' (gemeinnützig) means that the purpose of the company is to benefit the common good.
Neat! I was wondering.
That's unfortunate.
Instead of requiring an insurance selection or defaulting to one specific instance, perhaps they could have a handful of moderate/large instances that the app randomly selects between when a user signs up. That would spread out the signups from people who don't understand the instances.
Yes, that's the plan. But determining which instances are suitable isn't easy.. I'll ask them what's the status on this.
I also wonder if Mastodon could be more integrated with Lemmy would that improve things.
This won't happen. The Lemmy dev does not want Mastodon to be integrated into Lemmy. They say that plenty of other fediverse software already has this implemented, and that Lemmy doesn't need to reinvent what other software does.
The Lemmy dev does not want Mastodon to be integrated into Lemmy.
Something tells me this isn't the last word on the issue. If the fediverse concept is to succeed, then its two (current) largest players need to have some cross-functionality.
Perhaps the fediverse will get big enough that third-party developers will step in to fix this. Twitter & Reddit both benefitted hugely from the extra functionality third-party developers enhanced both platforms with.
Its anathema to the whole concept of the fediverse that one person - a lemmy dev - gets to decide something so important.
Something tells me this isn’t the last word on the issue. If the fediverse concept is to succeed, then its two (current) largest players need to have some cross-functionality.
I strongly disagree here. They might be using the same protocol, but the user expectations are something completely different. I've tried mastodon and really don't get the appeal, just like I never understood why people want something like Twitter. And I'm sure there are some Mastodon users out there who can't be bothered about Lemmy.
Forcing them into one common framework feels like alienating both to me.
Its anathema to the whole concept of the fediverse that one person - a lemmy dev - gets to decide something so important.
I should have clarified that it's 2 devs, Nutomic & Dessalines.
I am unsure if their political views have any affect on being the ones wanting to decide on important things like that. I know that they are both openly communist, and they both have Fidel Castro as their profile picture.
Perhaps the fediverse will get big enough that third-party developers will step in to fix this.
Unless they can convince the devs to integrate, I believe the third-party developers would have to fork the project and convince Lemmy instances to switch to their fork. From there, the third-party developers might change the name from Lemmy to something else.
I keep coming back to imagining if Reddit and Twitter were integrated. It just sounds like a giant mess. I guess I'm just not sure what the benefit would be, or why anyone would want it. What's the actual use case that makes it desirable?
The existing integration works suprisingly well given the different use cases. Bettet than Masto and Peertube.
Unfortunately Mastodon not supporting group actors is the main difficulty in the integration on its end. Lemmy has hacks like auto-boosting thread posts, but kbin and peertube don't so you can't get thread posts without following the post author.
I think allowing user following (allow subscribing to user pages) and handling tags (which I'm not sure the right approach, probably can fit in whatever multicommunity feature gets developed) are the only missing things on the Lemmy side.
If you want that you can check out Kbin. It's like Lemmy but also has a microblogging section that relatively flawlessly integrates mastodon content.
+1 for kbin (which I am commenting from). I initially chose kbin because I liked the UI more than Lemmy's, but I've come to really appreciate the fact that it supports microblogging as well.
What did mastodon.world do poorly?
He meant it did poorly as in is less popular than the lemmy instance
Ah OK. Yeah lemmy had a big growth past months. Mastodons growth is mostly absorbed by .social
Maybe I'm missing something, when I try to interact with Mastodon from futurology.today there's zero ability to interact. It seems to give the option to send DMs, but when I test it, they never arrive.