I've been enjoying Mastodon for a few days, starting by joining an instance targeted to a community that I already...
I've been enjoying Mastodon for a few days, starting by joining an instance targeted to a community that I already associate with, and then poaching people from the federated timeline. After a couple of days, the feed seems ... useful and busy enough.
It isn't a G+ though, it's a Twitter. There are some thoughtful conversations, but there are lots of throw-away tiny posts that don't necessarily add to your life, just like Twitter :-)
There may be some use of #tags, but I don't see much like Communities.
Pleroma and GNU Social seem to be in the same format, with small UI differences (yes there are probably significant structural diffs, but ...).
I'm looking for the form of G+, not necessarily the number of users. Does anyone here have more suggestions for me? :-)
It isn't a G+ though, it's a Twitter. There are some thoughtful conversations, but there are lots of throw-away tiny posts that don't necessarily add to your life, just like Twitter :-)
There may be some use of #tags, but I don't see much like Communities.
Pleroma and GNU Social seem to be in the same format, with small UI differences (yes there are probably significant structural diffs, but ...).
I'm looking for the form of G+, not necessarily the number of users. Does anyone here have more suggestions for me? :-)
Try Friendica. It's another facet of the Fediverse, compatible with both Mastodon and Diaspora. I've been there since shortly after the shutdown was announced (specifically, social.isurf.ca) and I'm really pleased with it. It's not nearly as polished as G+ or MeWe, but that's to be expected.
ReplyDeleteIn terms of UI experience, diaspora is most immediately familiar. The pluspora.com - pluspora pod, in particular, is a mass migration destination of G+ folks.
ReplyDeleteIn fact, early G+ was a disapora clone, and it shows. The big differences are:
1) There are no Communities; the closest equivalent are followed hashtags
2) There are no explicit Collections, but followed hashtags do a similar thing in a superior (IMO) way. You don't have to pick and choose just one Collection to categorize a post with - you can include as many hashtags as you want.
diaspora Aspects are the same as G+ Circles. The way posting and commenting works is G+ like. The UI is organized similarly, it's pretty lean and mean, and pretty fast and efficient to use. No multi-column Stream, though.
There are a number of things which are better - the way you can include in-line images is a big deal for me. The lack of in-line images was very limiting to me, with longform posts.
Following hashtags and putting hashtags in your Profile are the two big killer features of diaspora. It's what makes it easy to find people who share your interests, and for people to find you.
When you're a new user, you can follow hashtags on topics you're interested in and you immediately get interesting content in your Stream. Do a few hashtag searches, and you see people who have those hashtags in their profiles - a quick way to find people you'd find interesting.
To me, that's a heck of a lot better than the Mastodon model of browsing the firehose Federated stream and overhearing stuff that may be interesting to you. Ugh! The time and effort! Hashtag searches give you so much more bang for your buck, if people actually use them. Fortunately, diaspora gives users a lot of incentive to use them.
Take a look at Hubzilla too. Features are similar to Friendica. Number of users is still nowhere near Diaspora or Friendica but I like the ability to clone our profile into several instances and in case one of them goes down our cloned profiles will remain intact in other active instances.
ReplyDeleteIsaac Kuo thanks for detailed yet concise explanation.
ReplyDeleteThe active last month user base of Hubzilla is similar to Friendica - both are around ~1500. I chose to try Hubzilla because of the live sync cloning feature.
ReplyDeleteIts a bit of a learning curve, though, and discovery is a problem. Few people from diaspora or hubzilla notice me, basically no one from Mastodon notices me.
But if you must have something like Communities, you can't create them on diaspora. You can actually participate in them from diaspora but it's not immediately obvious how.
Hubzilla has an edge over Friendica in terms of creating Forum channels, because you can have multiple channels attached to a single account. With Friendica, you have to log out and log in as a completely unrelated Group user in order to make a forum.
The Hubzilla way has its annoyances also, though. When you switch channels, it switches you on all browser tabs. You can't just leave one tab open set as a Forum channel while other tabs are set as your individual channel.
But in any case, user discovery is a problem. You can't just get up and running quickly with hashtags the way you can with diaspora.
Isaac Kuo sounds like pluspora is a possible starting point for me from the way you describe. Are hubzilla / friendica being developed much? IE much chance of extra features in the near future?
ReplyDeleteAs I gather, diaspora, Friendica, and Hubzilla all have very active development now, and they've all kicked up in development activity in recent months.
ReplyDeleteWenn es für Foto und Kunst aller Art sein soll, dann ist das kostenlose Flickr Konto eine gute Alternative.
ReplyDeleteDie Bilderpräsentation ist fantastisch!!!
Bildtitel, am Foto sichtbar...
Kurze oder auch längere Bildbeschreibung/Texte, unter dem Bild ohne Probleme eingeben!
Kommentare unter den Bildern...
Hashtag [dort Tag genannt] setzen...
Plussen [dort Favorisieren genannt]...
Die eigenen Bilder privat halten oder öffentlich teilen, beziehungsweise sehr leicht auch ein paar Kreise einrichten...
Sehr bequem Sammlungen [dort Alben genannt] und Community's [dort Gruppen genannt] erstellen...
Das kostenlose Konto hat jetzt, nach aktueller Regeländerung, Platz für maximal 1.000 hochauflösende Fotos/Videos...
Wenn die 1.000der Grenze erreicht ist, kann man alte Bilder löschen, um neue Bilder hochzuladen.
Die eigenen Bilder belasten das eigene Konto nur einmalig... Man kann unbegrenzt in eigene Alben und in Gruppen teilen!!!
Falls der Platz mit 1.000 nicht ausreicht, kann man ein unbegreztes Pro Konto mit diversen Zusatzoptionen für $49,99 nehmen.
Bis zum Monatsende gibt es das Angebot, das kostenlose Konto, mit 30% Rabatt gegen ein Pro Konto zu tauschen.
Momentan ist Flickr noch mit Yahoo verbunden...
Falls du keine Yahoo Registrierung willst...
Gehe diesen Weg !!!!!
Verwende eine beliebige, eigene E-Mail-Adresse...
Gehe über deinen eigenen Browser direkt nach Flickr.com ...
Registriere dein kostenloses Flickr Konto mit deiner eigenen E-Mail-Adresse...
Dann kommt eine automatische Routine Weiterleitung zu der Yahoo Registrierung...
Du musst es nicht registrieren!!!!
Klicke einfach nur auf das blaue Feld weiter ...
Du bist sofort auf deiner Flickr Profilseite!!! ;)
Bitte!,... Klicke auf dein kleines Avatar oben neben der Benachrichtigungsglocke!!!
Es öffnet die "inneren Profilseiten"!
Dort erkunde alle Seiten über Menüband und nutze die sehr umfangreichen Möglichkeiten der Kontokonfiguration!!!
Auf der letzten Seite hast du dort auch die Möglichkeit, andere Websites in dein Flickr Konto einzubinden!!
Danach kann man beide Zugangsmöglichkeiten, also über Browser oder über App verwenden...
Je nachdem, was man gerade machen möchte, ist das eine oder andere praktischer!!
Über Browser hat man etwas mehr Möglichkeiten...
Über App ist ein kleiner Teil schneller zu erledigen.
Man sieht schnell, die jeweiligen Vorteile! ;)
Viel Spaß und beste Grüße : ))
Thanks Isaac Kuo, pluspora certainly looks much more like G+; a post followed by comments.
ReplyDeleteThere are still lots of "micro-posts" and #too #many #tags #being #used, but that's a user behaviour, not a platform issue. I found initial content quickly (lots of crossposted things I'd seen on Mastodon, they probably came from Twitter in the first place) and I'll give it a couple of days to see how it goes :-)
ReplyDeleteIsaac Kuo good news then about development. Maybe the demise of g+ will be a good thing in the long term if these platforms develop further enough to fill the gap or even surpass it.
ReplyDeleteJim Cheetham Mastodon is very much a microblogging platform, a' la Twitter, though it's open and federates with several other systems.
ReplyDeleteAs a part of an online strategy, it's an excellent choice. As a full G+ replacement of itself, no. Diaspora, Friendica, and Hubzilla are far more that on the Federated space.
Edward Morbius one key difference to me between Twitter and Mastodon to me is its atmosphere though. Mastodon feels a lot less like a cesspit of raving madmen.
ReplyDeleteFilip H.F. Slagter What was Twitter like in its early days?
ReplyDeleteHow much of that is engineering, vision, policy, and administration, and how much is dumb luck?
How long does a platform have to be around before that's obvious?
Edward Morbius Twitter was a lot better during its early days imho. IMHO just about every social media platform was best during its early adopters period, or at least the first couple of years. Probably up until the mainstream users start using it...
ReplyDeleteThough in Twitter's case I think their decision to piss off the third party developers by severely limiting the API limits, also played a part.
However, my bet is that the worst current culprit is Twitter's own success, as that attracts the bad bots and making it an interesting target for social engineering for not only monetary gain, but also social-political gain in particular.
Mastodon currently feels a lot like Twitter in its early days. It being distributed hopefully keeps it more resilient against all instances falling for the mainstream trap.
Filip H.F. Slagter My theory on community decline is ... I think threefold.
ReplyDelete1. You've got a founding cohort. If it's bad, then the community never attracts any positive members, tends to focus on the riff-raff, and goes downhill fast. If it is good, and more specifically, above average, then you've got the problem of regression toward the mean. If the community grows, eventually it hits the point of not being able to find members matching the initial quality, and overall quality starts trending down.
2. Inevitable effects of scale, as seen from the user perspective. Various network valuation laws (Sarnoff, Metcalfe, Tilly-Odlyzko) have value increasing as members are added. This is true only to an extent, and at least Tilly-Odlyzko's rule (V = n * log(n)) has a declining marginal value per added user. But each user adds an inevitable cost function (and some considerably more), a sort of network friction. The size of a network is bounded by that cost function. Simple message-assessment cost (is this post / comment going to be worth reading?) is itself significant, and at some point between about 10 and 1,000 messages/day, people hit psychological limits. There's only so much interaction that's positive. Overloading that, no matter how high-quality the material, is a net detriment.
3. Not everyone joins a network to participate productively. That was Woozle Hypertwin's excellent observation (and I'm relatively certain she's tired of me pinging her on it) that as epistemic (or indeed: all) systems grow, they hold an increasing appeal to those who seek extractive or other negative interaction. Trolls, advertisers, spammers, kooks, propagandists, oppressors, scammers etc. I'm seeing this at about 1,000 members (G+MM) and 100 (P:TBiN) here on G+, with spammers appearing.
On networks as a whole, somewhere around the 100k user limit seems to be a fairly noticeable threshold of moderation activities get markedly worse.
You can address some of this with moderation, but even that only to a point. Mods get tired, cranky, or burn out. Worse, they become part of the problem themselves as they're bought, bribed, or taken over by the Bad Guys (Agency Problem / Regulatory Capture).
And even without that, you reach the problem of autoimmune disorder. The system is so large, and the tolerances for annoyance so small, that even inadvertent errors or simply differences in judgement become catastrophic. Moderator A, or user-class AA, disagrees with Moderator B or user-class BB over whether or not some content is or is not transgressive. At worst, the question becomes one of "which side of the road should we drive on" or "what time should we leave for lunch". There's no objectively correct answer, but the group as a whole must agree on a uniform answer.
I think this sets up another level of determinative friction, and ultimately group size is bounded by such disagreements. The solutioin isn't better moderation, but carving out autonomous units which can operate independently, at least on these specific questions.
How to keep that from descending into tribalism is another question, and I've no answers.
José Pedro Paula I've long missed Diaspora features (especially Markdown) on G+.
ReplyDeleteJosé Pedro Paula A way to emulate a restricted Collection in Hubzilla is to create another Channel specifically for the "Collection". Then use Privacy Groups (similar to Circles) to define who can see the posts.
ReplyDeleteFor better or worse, this "side" Channel is not obviously connected to your main Channel to the outside world. You can include a link to it in your main Channel's profile info, but that's something someone would have to really dig into to discover. It's not like a G+ collections where they appear prominently on your G+ Profile page.
Fundamentally, the multi-channel ability of Hubzilla accounts is a solution to the Friendica problem of needing to log out and log in to a different account to go between your normal main account and a Group account (a forum similar to a Community which many people can post to).
This feature can be used for something like Collections, but I prefer using tags/categories.
Still, using the "side" Channel method, you allow diaspora and Mastodon users to easily follow just a Collection. With the tag/category method, it's up to the follower's platform to have an ability to filter followed posts by hashtag.
Isaac Kuo Thanks very much for your comment. I can see that you are much more experienced in this than I am. I have joined pluspora and am really enjoying it!
ReplyDeleteYou state very clearly the importance in pluspora of the value of usefulness of hash-tags. I am not sure how liberal one can be in creating and using them.
Are they case sensitive?
Does one have to use trial and error in the hash-tags one follows to see what delivers the stream that is best for purpose?
Does the spelling of the hash-tag need to be exact to get a "match" or is there some machine-learning of the user's intentions?
Is there a rule for hash-tag syntax, because it seems that they always one string of characters. For example, I have assumed that is the case, and have therefore been using the hash-tag #film-photography, not #film photography?
Finally, I seem to recall that one is restricted to entering five hash-tags only in one's profile. Is that correct? Can I change those profile hash-tags at will?
Thanks for any help with this, and I apologise if I have not found the answers on pluspora itself!
Correct, you are limited to five hashtags in your profile. You can change them at any time, by editing your Profile.
ReplyDeleteYou can put any number of hashtags in a post.
Hashtags in comments are ignored for purposes of hashtag searches and following.
I don't think they're case sensitive, but here's the thing - diaspora is part of a larger Federation, so not all of your followers will necessarily be using diaspora.
So, the restrictions on hashtags may be different on your follower's platforms. As such, I think the best call is to try and go for the lowest common denominator.
So, no special characters or spaces. Try and be consistent with capitalization.
As for figuring out which ones are best to use...unfortunately that's a matter of trial and error, and trying to figure out what others are using. It works a bit better in tumblr. In tumblr, when you start to type in a tag it automatically pops up with a list of matching tags you've previously used and a list of popular matching tags (in reverse popularity order). This is great for avoiding misspelling and also great for discovering what's most commonly used by other tumblr users.
Maybe diaspora will add a similar feature in the future.
I think Mastodon also does tag autocompletion as you type. :)
ReplyDeleteIsaac Kuo Thanks very much for your advice!
ReplyDeleteFilip H.F. Slagter I'm not very familiar with how Mastodon works, but I don't notice any sort of autocompletion of hashtags on it (mastodon.social).
ReplyDeleteIsaac Kuo might actually have been one of the Android clients I'm using..
ReplyDeleteOh, that makes sense! Mastodon has a proper client API, so different client apps could have various improved capabilities.
ReplyDeleteStill not sure whether I like Mastalab or Tusky best, so I just keep using both, depending on which notification I see first.
ReplyDeleteOn diaspora, for discovery of interesting people or posts, hashtags are almost the only way. There's no other search!
ReplyDeleteThat's why I use lots of hashtags on posts.
Of course hashtags should also be narrow, (cats, blackcats, and cutecats, not cats, mammals and vertebrates for example) and should be a guess at the sort of things you'll post repeatedly and the sort of things people might search for. When you see a post you like with multiple hashtags, you can explore them all, to find more people, more posts, and more hashtags.
I haven't updated my five profile hashtags but perhaps it's worth considering cycling around a larger set. Although I'm interested in science, and to some extent that helps categorise the kind of person I am, I'm not likely to search for a science hashtag. Whereas compsci or space might be more fruitful.
I think it's a rule of see and be seen. For the early weeks and months, you need to be promiscuous. Lots of posts, follows and followbacks. And then after some months, cut things back. This applies to joining any network, I think.
Ed S I'm also making heavy use of hashtags there. True search would be a blessing. Feh.
ReplyDeleteAnnoyingly, diaspora reshares don't get a header text, so there's no easy way to reshare and tag. Likewise, commenting with a tag is not effective for making a post discoverable. Perhaps resharing an undertagged post by its URL would be the way.
ReplyDeleteDiaspora seems best, but is missing some features. That said, I haven't given Hubzilla a good try.
downside of not having a centralised domain I guess: you can't outsource search to google by doing «keyword site:join-diaspora.com»
ReplyDeleteI guess offering a hashed fallback subdomain to each instance could be a solution for that (thus having f.e. Pluspora available at pluspora.com as well as abcdef098765321.join-diaspora.example), as people could then likely just search for «keyword site:*.join-diaspora.example».
However I imagine that would not only likely hurt search ranking due to duplicate content being available across 2 domains (though maybe setting up canonical URLs could avoid that? that's something for the SEO peeps to reply to I guess), but it could also bring legal issues with it.
I can imagine for example that if they'd find out too late that e.g. the fictional Fascistpod instance with which they initially federated and offered the alias d34db33f.join-diaspora.example, suddenly has started hosting similar content that for instance got Gab into trouble, it could not only hurt their name, but also put their domain at risk.
It would also introduce other issues if f.e. the alias becomes the more popular URL, traffic could be hijacked, or the alias could become a single point of failure.
Anyway, just thinking out loud here about what is probably a Bad Idea™.
Ah, good point, diaspora pods are indexed by major search engines. I'm not too worried about not having an all-diaspora search because I wouldn't expect that. If you want to find all the people with the tags that interest you, you do already have to visit all the pods and search in each. Of course, you can't visit them all, but you can visit the big ones. Each pod knows about its own accounts and also about accounts which are being followed from there, I think.
ReplyDeleteSo, this search does turn up some posts which might be of interest to someone, and from those posts one might find hashtags and people of interest:
https://www.google.com/search?&q=site%3Apluspora.com+"atlas+obscura"
(URL is mangled by g+!)
Ed S URL-encoded it should work: https://www.google.com/search?&q=site%3Apluspora.com+%22atlas+obscura%22
ReplyDeleteEd S Public posts are indexed.
ReplyDeletePrivate, not so much.
(Mastodon is similar.)
Pluspora user base is stagnant after initial fast ramp up.
ReplyDeletemy experience is one needs a VERY broad base of users from which to select a tiny subset if folks that fit with your interests.
G+ still has a ginormous number of users. It is a heavy lift to think any of these federated social platforms will reach critical mass.
I'd be happy with a dozen or two people who share my interests. As my posts are already getting around 10 likes, it seems like that should be achievable. Further growth of the platform and more discovery should lead to improvement.
ReplyDeleteEd S Yes, that has been my experience, too, in pluspora.
ReplyDeleteI'm liking it a lot. Somehow the overall experience seems more natural and open than Google+. I also feel liberated from the sensed presence of bossy moderators.
I like, too, the leanness of the visual interface. It's lack of ornamentation lends it an elegance that appeals to me.
I am still in the "honeymoon period" so I hope my enthusiasm will continue.
Alistair Langsford Isaac is very helpful, no doubt.
ReplyDelete