I had no idea of the size and variety of the Fediverse! It has me feeling a bit overwhelmed. I’m enjoying BookWyrm very much; it’s the GoodReads/LibraryThing replacement I’ve been looking for for years.
I love the simplicity of Paper.wf for blogging. It’s truly elegant; I just click the link and start typing. But as far as I can tell there’s no way for others to find my blog or for me to find other blogs on the site. There’s no browse or follow feature. Nor can anyone comment on my posts! Those seem to me to be HUGE omissions.
Have you used any Fediverse blogging options? What are they like? And what other Fediverse services would you recommend? Other than Mastodon, I’ve already tried that (it didn’t excite me).
Try writefreely. Its a blogging thing that supports markdown and can look super nice
Is that related to Paper.wf? The wf apparently stands for “write freely”.
Paper.wf is using Write Freely. You can see Paper.wf in their instance list here: https://writefreely.org/instances
Interesting! But do other instances have more features? Paper.wf seems incredibly feature-light. You can’t browse other blogs, you can’t follow them, you can’t comment on entries or receive comments…I mean, it’s unbelievably bare bones. Beautiful, but isolated-feeling. I’m typing into a void!
I personally really enjoy Matrix but it’s not really a “fediverse” thing but it is a federated end to end encrypted messaging platform
I personally set it up to use as a messaging aggregator. The ability to scroll past Whatsapp, Telegram, and Discord chats in the same app is hilariously cursed. There are bridges for basically everything. Though some are more complete than others.
Bridging ha also been very effective for showing people the merits of matrix. Opening schildi and scrolling for a bit has made people go “GIVE ME THAT”. Everyone is tired of having half a dozen chat apps just be able to talk to everyone they know.
I’ve been seeing things about matrix more and more and it’s seeming like something interesting. I checked out their website and, like a lot of this stuff, it’s a bit unclear for me.
So you do as you do here and set up an account on an instance and then port everything through it? Does smashing all the different chats into one list have a way to differentiate them from one another? I’m just looking for more about it to help me understand it.
I run a private personal instance. It is federated, meaning I can message anyone else on any other federated matrix node, and they can message me. But no-one can make an account on my instance without a single-use token from me, which I create using admin privileges.
The bridging is done using extensions to the matrix server, in the form of bridge bots. They will create puppet accounts for each bridged user, which they will then puppet to mirror that user for you. You also give this bot access to your external account, allowing them to “puppet” your account to the users you’re talking to. I run these on my own hardware, same as the actual matrix server, which they talk to.
You can set it up in a variety of ways, but in my case, I made it so that bridged users have their platform appended to their display names. A user from discord appears to me as “Username (Discord)”. That way, even if I have the same person on both Discord and Telegram, I can find and differentiate them in matrix.
If you want matrix for bridging, your own instance is likely the best bet. If for example, you create a user on matrix.org, I have no idea how I’d go about actually bridging any other accounts to that user, as I would not have access to managing the extensions available on the matrix.org instance.
Its possible to use the extensions of another matrix server, from another server, but this is not ideal (it comes with some access permission limitations). And finding a server with these extensions set up, and with an admin willing to let you access them, can be tricky.
That said, setting up your own matrix instance is not a complex as setting one up for the fediverse (ActivityPub). If you don’t care about federating, it’s even easier, and you can always enable federation later. You do need a domain, a permanent one. There is no way migrate the domain to another, once a matrix server is set up, at this time. The only way to do that is to literally delete everything and start over. A lesson I learned the hard way…
Feel free to dm me if you wanna know more :D
I use GoToSocial with Sempahore for my microblogging (alternative to Mastodon).
Also Owncast as an alternative to Twitch.
And then I watch tilvids.com and other Peertube instances for videos.
And of course Lemmy. :-D
Oh and then there’s Funkwhale for audio.
It’s all in different states of usability, depending on the communities involved.
Understandable. But it’s the chicken and egg problem. Creators don’t want to create content, because there’s no consumers. Consumers don’t want to sign up, because there’s no creators.
So are you the chicken or the egg? :-D
If you’re on one you don’t like anymore you could always change instances and watch videos there. If you’re worried about losing comments, well you can comment from other Fediverse servers such as Mastodon or GoToSocial and they show up on the page for the video. :-)
You know what, Peertube needs the equivalent of an acquisition and the perfect candidates would be, and I’m on record saying this before, DailyMotion and Vimeo. They’ve already got content and by implementing activitiypub integration, they can grow their audiences and compete with YouTube for once and for all.
But yeah, for me. I haven’t even found a video to watch let alone comment. That said, my YouTube is generally me watching album reactions, music videos, Hot Ones, Adam Something and Beard Meats Food.
What happens when instances die off, would their comments be deleted and you’d have threads with half conversations everywhere?
Re PeerTube, as a creator, is it worth it to try an find an instance that suits my content right now?
I never understood this ‘chicken and egg’ analogy. Dinosaurs were laying eggs millions of years before they became chickens.
Do I need to create separate accounts on each of those or can I use this one? Can I log in to Funkwhale with this account or get Funkwhale posts here on kbin, or am I better creating a separate account on each “thing”? I’m still very new to this whole fediverse thing…
One of the eventual goals of kbin is to be compatible with the rest of the fediverse and to “just work” with the rest of it. By way of comparison, Lemmy is basically just a federated Reddit, so, this is actually one of the reasons I chose to go with kbin.
From a practical standpoint, it’ll likely be a while before that becomes a reality, but I like that as a goal.
I’d say see if you can search for the instance in the search (once we’re 100% federated) and if it doesn’t work and it’s something you want to participate in, unfortunately, you’ll need to go there directly.
Also - Your kbin.social account can only log into kbin.social, you can’t use it to log into any other sites (this would include other kbin sites, lemmy sites, mastodon sites, etc…), what you can do is see content from those sites by subscribing to them or on the front page (non-subscribed)
Ah right, I understand i think, and if I do that’s very cool! I will go searching for Funkwhale and see what happens…
So nothing from Funkwhale seems to be showing up, whether I search for funkwhale, funkwhale.audio, or a randsom instance by URL (music.ppom.me) or name (spotifox). But it is early days and federation has only just been turned on, so I’ll give it a while and try again. If it doesn;t work I’ll create a funkwhale account and enjoy things there for the time being at least
I would start using Owncast however, a) my current lease at my apartment prohibits me running a server (because internet is included in the rent), and b) I don’t have any kind of computer to run a server on for Owncast.
Hetzner is $5 a month for a VPS that would run it. And what constitutes a “server”? A server is just another name for a computer.
As someone who is already in debt because of a bad month with work, I’m not sure if I’m able to put out for a VPS. And as for the “server” thing, what I meant was I don’t have a computer I can dedicate to near 100% uptime for running the instances I’d want to.
@BobQuasit I am on Friendica. It is a macroblogging platform, but more akin to Facebook in look and feel (it even somehow resembles the old Facebook, but server admins can add other themes to give it a different look). The feature set is very extensive, and it is way richer than Facebook, tho. You might find it a bit complicated at first. I would recommend anyone to watch this video series to learn more about it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qvOmvEpmgQI
After you learn all about it, you might find it your Fediverse home.
I’ve been intrigued by this one. Might give it a go! Hubzilla also sounds interesting, if a bit hard to get my head around what exactly what it does?
@tunetardis Haven’t tried that already. But their nomadic identity thing seems really appealing
I’m currently using calckey, works similar to mastodon but with a better UI and UX (IMO), although still in development
