Wanting to get paid for your work, so that you can keep making stuff, is in fact not the same thing as greed. We have this assumption that everything on the Web should be free, or at least helped along by donations, but it’s not sustainable.

Channel is basically a white label instance of PatchWork, which is a Mastodon fork with custom feeds and community curation tools.

The main intent behind the project is to help existing communities and organizations get onto the Fediverse, and have some curation capabilities. Ideally, it can be used to get a large amount of people and accounts onto the network with minimal friction.

I always liked the concept of Matrix, and still actively use it, but there’s some serious jank. Synapse is generally bloated and not fun to run an instance, Dendrite is perpetually in Beta, and the clients themselves range from adequate to awful. The default Element client on Android is so broken for me that I’m forced to use Element X, because I can’t even log in with Element.

It’s disappointing, but there’s a ton of issues that aren’t so easy to resolve. New Vector and the Element Foundation are basically two separate entities that have some kind of hard split between them, neither of which seems to have the money necessary to support comprehensive development. The protocol is said to be bloated and overtly complex, and trying to develop a client or a server implementation is something of a nightmare.

I want to see Matrix succeed, I think a lot of people see the potential of what it could be. I’m not sure it’ll ever get there.

Thank you! I’ve been thinking about it a lot, and I think it could be used to solve a bunch of different problems, like importing stuff from other networks, and having everything ready to go before you join an instance.

There’s some UX questions that have to be figured out, the last thing I want is some super-cluttered design that asks for a million different options. Also, platforms would need to provide some necessary APIs (for registration and data import) to make it fully useable.

My main critique is just that, within the Mastodon side of the Fediverse, the design is highly misleading about what the feature does. It resembles a normal DM feature, but the message addressing is purely handled by mentions in the message body.

Basically, it’s an antipattern, causing people to accidentally mention other people in what’s assumed to be a Direct Message. It’s less about privacy, more about poor telegraphing of side-effects.

I used to feel that way, but there’s so much crap on that timeline, especially when you’re on a bigger instance. I used to use it for the exact same thing, discovery. A lot of it is just noise to me now, though.

Well, no, this was just responding to a critique on UX shortcomings, and highlighting how different efforts could solve various problems.

It sounds more like you’re talking about one of my previous blog posts, where I was talking about a super-flexible frontend that’s basically a pagebuilder. Make no mistake, I would love to see custom profile music and radios! And I agree that accessibility needs to be way better!

Yes

Oh nice!

I think a lot of people do it because they want to build communities and bring people together. It’s easy to underestimate the workload and what kind of problems come up. A big problem is that people start instances, and gradually realize that they’re basically stuck running things until they either hand it off to someone else, or shut down.

Posting from another thread:

Her comments cover everything from “trans women are mostly autistic boys who have been gaslit” to “there are only two sexes” to “trans people are unfit to play in their gender’s sport.” However, there are far worse comments floating around out there that talk about genital mutilation and all kinds of other heinous shit.

It wasn’t just “I have a different opinion, we can agree to disagree”, it was full-fledged unhinged stuff that all followed the TERF playbook.

It’s basically an open source, federated clone of GrooveShark, which was kind of like Plex but just for music.

You might want to check out Bandwagon. It’s ActivityPub-based, and you can use it to submit your music to The Indie Beat Radio: https://bandwagon.fm/

Yeah, that was the Content Nation debacle: https://wedistribute.org/2024/03/contentnation-mastodons-toxicity/

What’s really sad is that the CN dev is actually a super nice and thoughtful dude. In his jurisdiction (Germany) he could’ve gone to prison after being caught with said materials.

Same thing initially happened with BridgyFed: https://wedistribute.org/2024/02/tear-down-walls-not-bridges/

I run Spectra Video at https://spectra.video. We have gated signups: basically, someone fills out a request form, we review it, the account gets approved within a short turnaround time, and the user’s channel gets created.

There is a PeerTube plugin for premium subscriptions that does exactly this: https://github.com/kontrollanten/peertube-plugin-premium-users

Yeah, I’d say it might have more to do with the fact that making texts posts is a lot easier than making videos. It’s still possible to introduce too much noise, regardless of medium, but there’s a lot less friction when the medium is simpler and doesn’t require much work.

It would be nice if there was an easy and straightforward way for instances to create their own shared indexes. There’s a feature for this in PeerTube, which I guess is supposed to act like instance following + a shared search catalogue. It would be handy to know how to easily make sort of the federation equivalent of a webring.

The devs are also working on a mobile app, which I think is something the platform is sorely missing.

I actually wrote a bit about this in the past: https://deadsuperhero.com/2021/10/peertubes-content-wasteland/

TL;DR - Yeah, it’s possible to fill up your local catalogue of remote entries really quickly through instance following. The problem is not a shortage of instances or videos, the problem is that cutting it down to the good stuff requires a lot of active curation. It’s very easy to just open the firehose and drown in a never-ending stream of junk.