Posted by leephillips 9/7/2025
Theremin Mode: https://twitter.com/samhenrigold/status/1964464940049453153
Since covid, we no longer have assigned desks at work --- it's first come, first served. And while most are respectful of the desks we have "chosen" for ourselves, every once in a while, I'll have to sit at some other, often new desk. And that means my laptop will not recognize the monitor and that I'll have to configure it (scaling, relative position, etc).
And Windows being the mediocre OS that it is, will always select to duplicate the screens even though the logical choice is to extend. My laptop screen and the external monitor aren't even the same aspect ratio. SMH.
At least Macs have the sense to extend screens by default. Though, if I could place a Macbook on the desk, plug in the external monitor, tilt the screen back until the camera can see the monitor, the hinge sensor and cameras can work together to figure out where the monitor is relative to the laptop, and automatically determine the right settings for the monitor instead of requiring my intervention.
No ads, a timeline which isn't endless and you can actually just read. It's actually really nice! I also think the decentralized non proprietary model brings us closer to something which is becoming ever more important in this world we find ourselves in.
- isn't The Big One (defeats the point) - has a nice domain (that's your name forever) - is stable (major downtime or data loss is unacceptable these days) - is guaranteed to stick around forever (no, migration isn't solved and it will never not suck) - has rules you agree with and can guarantee you'll follow - is running the right software (no, "fedi" isn't compatible, you either run Mastodon or things will always be ever so slightly broken)
Migration is not solved, but it also doesn't suck - unless you're doing it every week nothing will break, and several people I follow have already done it and it's been just fine.
Stability is also fine - if your server is down for a couple of hours, your timeline will catch up when it comes back online, and likewise your sent posts will stay in a local outbox until they can be sent. That's absolutely no different from email or Jabber or anything else.
"Fedi" is compatible enough that I run my own GoToSocial server, which is technically still beta software, and I haven't experienced any issues following and interacting with anyone on Mastodon, Pixelfed, Pleroma and quite a few other platforms.
Would I recommend it to a non-technical user, someone who wasn't really interested in 'servers' and 'clients' and 'protocols'? Yes, although I'd suggest they just go for The Big One, as you put it. What I would say though is that this is no longer just a technology for Web nerds any longer; it's a very viable alternative to centralized platforms.
I'd love a truly decentralized model for this but fediverse isn't it, fediverse is a Hellenic League of city states where your ability to interact outside your bubble is beholden to your and their local leadership and shifting realities of protocol war jank.
If you do think my opinion is uninformed or mistaken at least know that I know many times more people who bounced off the idea for these reasons than people who actually managed to make heads or tails of this. Fwiw I don't use xitter/bsky either.
Personally I am not a fan of the Mastodon software or side of fedi, but I have had good times on the Pleroma/Akkoma side, and it all works together.
You also don't need to know everything right away. You could make every "mistake", sign up on the flagship Mastodon instance, hear about how you should have other instances, make an alt somewhere else, maybe fosstodon because you like free software, then you hear talk of Pleroma and you look into that a bit. It's fairly common to have multiple accounts, which is good because it provides redundancy. If your instance goes down, flagship or not, you ideally still have a way to view and post. They make it easy to import/export your following list as well, so migration isn't too bad.
It's pretty similar to Matrix if you're familiar with that at all. Initially my friends and I all ended up on matrix.org, then there was some downtime and I realized how fragile it was to all be on the one main big instance, so I made several alts. Now when matrix.org goes down (just happened a week or two ago), I can still post in the group chats I'm in, and anyone else on an instance that isn't down can post, and when matrix.org comes back it'll all flood in for those people as well.
I think it can work and be successful because email was quite successful. Not everyone was on the same domain but we still manage to email each other. You could argue that gmail has a monstrously large presence and that it's harder to host your own mail server these days, but it's all still possible.
No one knew Reddit boards and 4chan boards either; you just knew to go to /b/ or /r/funny. The other boards, the other fediverse servers, are just details that enable other subcommunities to survive. The major community will just route to a single server, and most will probably never use a second
A social network with just the top 1% of the geeks would be absolutely amazing.
It's really not a useful platform for publicly sharing information anymore. Drives me nuts that government agencies use it for announcements like "Here's an amber alert with a twitter link, but you can't have any of the followup information because that's only for people who are logged in."
I can't stand Bluesky, but I have an account on it. What the fuck is the big deal?
You simply see what the author posted and people's reactions.
It also doesn't load 400MB of JavaScript or whatever.
This is a semantic punt from nicer to accessible.
Just call it Twitter.