Why aren't you following @FediTips @FediFollows or @FediVideo yet?
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@FediTips @Mrfunkedude
Yes, I had a similar thought. And I did come across your blog post, I hadn't realized you were the one who wrote it. There are many servers based on geography that would be the first most obvious thing to suggest the newcomer to join a server where people are discussing their local issues in their language. The site could then also suggest interests, and show relevant servers based on that. I later saw that Lemmy does exactly that. -
I run a website at https://fedi.garden and an account at @FediGarden to help people find such servers.
And to be fair, there is something similar on Mastodon's official website at https://joinmastodon.org/servers (though that tends to emphasise the biggest servers and doesn't list non-Mastodon servers).
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@FediTips @FediGarden
Great, thanks! I have also stumbled upon a few other ones. I was pretty frustrated that as a new user I had to go through plenty of extra websites to understand how to use this social network (and I'm overall more tech savvy than the standard person probably not on the fediverse where tech backgrounds are everywhere). I was thinking to myself, as a social network, this back and forth experience with dozens of other tabs would turn away anyone but the most convinced. -
It's very different to centralised social networks, but people do use decentralised networks too, so perhaps people can get used to it if they want to? There's a good short vid about it: https://tilvids.com/w/wx2iLhD3pTipbKFJKLyx5t
Choosing a server is similar to choosing an email provider or phone provider, as the network structure is similar.
"this back and forth experience with dozens of other tabs "
I'm not sure how you are using this place, but most people just use it in one tab?
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@FediTips @FediGarden
The back and forth between tabs was trying to figure out what servers to choose since the mastodon website doesn't provide enough information, trying to understand how to link accounts and migrate them to other servers, trying to figure out which mobile apps to use because the official one lacks what I would think to be core functionality to navigate between servers feeds, trying to understand what is federated between different social media types and what isn't... -
Part of the complications come from people being used to being on locked-down platforms where they have no options at all. So, when they suddenly have choices they aren't sure what to do as they don't have a reference point.
Once you get used to the concepts, it becomes a lot easier to cope with this place.
If someone said everyone has to use one phone model with one network provider, a lot of people would be annoyed because they are used to choice. People can get used to it
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@FediTips
I guess. I for one welcomed the choices but the lack of useful information surrounding it was the problem. Is a choice really a choice if I tell you pick in a random list of names but give you no information around that choice and what consequences that choice will have on your experience?I had to go find other websites much like yours that gave me more insight about my choice but at that point I had already chosen the main server. And that's where the dark forest effect began...
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What kind of information would you want to see?
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@[email protected] @[email protected] can't speak for Tom but on bluesky I discussed the possibility of having a "preview" where instances opt in to have their local feed displayed on a tool like fedi observer so you can get a rough idea of what their community is like without having to visit a bunch of different domains and navigate through them
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@puppygirlhornypost2 @TomBardout
Some third party apps let you follow Local feeds from remote instances, sounds like such a tool would be a variation on that? If so it should be very do-able
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@[email protected] @[email protected] yeah it should be doable you'd just have to account for a variety of instance software. https://docs.joinmastodon.org/methods/streaming/#streams (you'd look at public:local within mastodon's api.). I don't know much about mastodon's rest api. I know if you wanted to do polling (just do a request for the latest 100 posts, every T interval or something) you could look into https://transfem.social/api-doc#tag/notes/POST/notes/local-timeline (this is just our copy of the api docs). The streaming endpoint exists on misskey as well (and you can subscribe to the local channel to get a live feed). Entirely possible just needs some abstraction between different instance software.
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@[email protected] @[email protected] https://docs.joinmastodon.org/methods/timelines/#public yeah here's the REST version of the streaming endpoint.
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@[email protected] @[email protected] alternatively - what you could do is operate a relay displaying public posts from instances who have opted in by joining that relay. probably the least amount of work (making instance software specific code) but it raises the problem of now you're operating a relay and the traffic that comes from that. either way there's a ton of neat approaches to this
