Been working on a new project the last couple of months and it’s finally ready for beta release!
#Fedimeister is a #Java based #Mastodon client (available for #Linux, #Windows and #MacOS under the Apache #opensource license) with a focus on #writing and #journalism. Features:
* Break long texts into threads
* Scheduled posting
* Hashtag research
* #Twitter quote tweeting emulation
@bgtlover @raccoon @fediversenews @fediverse Have any substantial polls been done to see what people want? I’ve seen loads of posts from people who want quote posts. A lot of new people have appeared over the past several months and what they want may differ from earlier users.
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@mathias @bgtlover @AskPippa @raccoon @estelle4565 All that as well as many are leaving twitter not because they don’t like twitter, but because they want twitter from somewhere other than twitter; and mastadon seems to be doing a very good job of giving that crowd exactly that.
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@AskPippa @bgtlover @raccoon @fediversenews @fediverse
Me, too!
I hate having to scroll back to see what my contacts were talking about when commenting.
Why be on SM if you don’t want interaction?
If you want it only for some, you can limit it to your followers.
And then, there is always #mute or #block as a last resort (spart from report).
I just had a discussion with LBTQIA+ admins and they DO want discoverability (search)…
@AskPippa
Blaming quote-posts for the demise of Twitter and its toxic culture is like blaming all car accidents on rear mirrors.
What makes Twitter bad is the algorithm and the ranking system. It promotes bad behaviour by pitting conflicting post types against each other, repeatedly, to create more interaction. It can dig up old posts, or posts from other user “circles” just to stir up some noise, all in the name of creating more interaction, which of course create more advertising revenue.
In the Fediverse we don’t have the algorithm. We don’t have a ranking system. We have a chronological timeline. When you post your post it gets its slot in the timeline and…well…that’s it.
All other text-based Fediverse services have quote-posts by the way. If it’d be the cause of the same issues as on Twitter we would’ve seen it already.
absolutelymaybe.plos.org/2023/…
@bgtlover @raccoon
@mathias @bgtlover @AskPippa @raccoon Assuming there is a single reason why Twitter failed is naive at best and self-serving at worst. And saying “this was worse than that” is an effort in futility.
Each community will have different experiences in what part of Twitter made it worse. Having been on Twitter since 2007 I will say categorically that QTs are and were used to harass and attack other people. Those who deny it, generally deny it because they want QT. In fact, most deny it because they want their Twitter and they will insist that they get it and screw the people who are already here. People who actually came here because this place was different.
And I find it particularly maddening given the fact that people who use Frendica and other services that have QT continue to insist that the world needs QT. If the world really needed it, Frendica would be experiencing massive growth and it is not.
Consent. We are built on consent. If I want to see a man’s dangly bits, I can. I can consent by opening a CW. If, for some bizarre reason I want to see your Wordle, I can. If I want a safe place for queers, I can find it here.
To date, nobody has offered a QT that will give me the right to consent to you breaking my thread so you can make a point; consent to include my posts in your thread when you QT; consent to you using my work; consent; consent. How many people have to object? How many of us who are queer or disabled or trans or a furry have to worry again about whether our true selves need protecting?
@LucyWildboots 🏳️🌈
As you can see here, at least if you open this post of mine at its source, quotes can serve a useful purpose. Like on forums, they make it possible to directly reply to certain parts of a post.
Anyways, those who have found Mastodon to be a safe haven from Twitter-style harassment and strongly oppose quotes have yet to give a concise declaration on their demands as to what should be done about quotes being an available feature on other projects, and about the possibility of using the quote feature on a non-Mastodon, but ActivityPub-supporting instance to quote Mastodon toots and have said quote appear on Mastodon timelines.
I mean, I’ve done just that. I’m on Hubzilla. Hubzilla even only supports ActivityPub through an optional per-channel app. And yet, I was able to quote your Mastodon toot. And you can see my post with quotes of your toot on your Mastodon timeline. Nothing could stop me from doing this.
But especially the LGBTQIA+ community which fled from the harassment on Twitter to Mastodon has yet to answer this question: What, if anything, should be done about this? Should everything that isn’t Mastodon, including Friendica which has quotes six years before Mastodon was launched, be forced to remove the quote feature even for internal use once and for all? Should they be forced to defederate from Mastodon? Should Mastodon in turn deliberately be forced to become incompatible with everything else (which will not work against multi-protocol platforms like Friendica and Hubzilla)?
Where are the LGBTQIA+ activists? Why don’t they take a stand? Where is their public “quotes are harassment” campaign against Pleroma, Akkoma, MissKey, CalcKey, FoundKey, Socialhome, GoToSocial, Friendica, Hubzilla, (streams) etc. etc., openly declaring all these projects homophobic and transphobic for holding on to their quote features?
Instead, most of them still do as if the Fediverse was only Mastodon. They seem to try to convince themselves that all those projects which both support quotes and federate with Mastodon don’t exist, if they know that these projects exist, that is. I don’t know what they do if someone comes and tries to tell them about the world outside Mastodon. Do they immediately block these people? Do they proverbially cover their ears and chant?
That isn’t because the world needs something as frugal as Mastodon more than something as elaborate as Friendica.
That is purely because the world doesn’t know that Friendica exists, and it never knew. People don’t migrate by the millions to an online project of which they don’t know that it exists. Otherwise, Friendica could have exploded as early as July 2010, and Diaspora*, which at the same time was developed as the free, decentralised, distributed Facebook killer and backed by several $100,000 in crowdfunding, would have been stillborn or never released in the first place.
From late October to early December 2022, some seven or eight million Twitter users were channeled not into the Fediverse, but directly to Mastodon, often even to one specific Mastodon instance to spare them from having to choose one. None of them was told that there’s more to the Fediverse than Mastodon.
They could easily spend November, December, January, February and March “knowing” that the Fediverse is only Mastodon and not knowing about any of the alternatives. I’m pretty certain that being initially given the choice between Mastodon and Akkoma, every other one of them would have picked Akkoma just like Linus Torvalds did.
Why didn’t they pick Akkoma? Or Friendica? Because they didn’t know that Akkoma or Friendica exists, because nobody told them, because all they were ever told about was one Mastodon instance. They could easily spend three months not even noticing that Mastodon itself is decentral and has instances.
And when they finally learned about there being other stuff on the Fediverse than Mastodon after four months, it was already too late. Moving from Mastodon to another project is too much of a hassle and often not worth it, also because you can neither take your toots nor those who follow you nor your uploaded media with you.
Oh, and by the way: Just a few weeks ago, MissKey experienced an enormous wave of new users in Japan who went from Twitter straight to MissKey without any stopover on Mastodon. And MissKey has quotes, too.
@jupiter_rowland I keep hearing that it’s hard to move. But I did it. It took me 3 hours and it only took that long because I wanted to separate my following to three different services. One was Pixelfed and the other was Frendica. Perhaps it did not take me so long because I’m not as invested in my own posts as others appear to be. So this, “it’s hard” excuse feels a little weak to me.
I do not understand why it is so hard for people who communicate in the world of defederation to understand that not all tools using the fediverse need be the same. You really need to get over it. Tumblr is not going to have the same tools as Masto or Frendica and you aren’t going to require that they do. Every company that uses ActivityPub will bring different features and that’s how it should be. So why must everything be the same here?
Getting every member of the queer and trans communities to agree on any one thing is like asking all Democrats to agree on any one thing. And I think you, Jupiter, are smart enough to know that. So let me ask you, which one do you want? Peter Thiel or me? George Santos or Rachel Maddow? The fact that people were harassed is a truth. The fact that you do not know that truth speaks to your lack of knowledge, not to the veracity or the historical fact. So let me ask you a question: how many? How many people have to come forward with their moment on Twitter when they were harassed and brought to tears. How many people need to be deliberately dead named or doxxed. How many is enough for you?
@LucyWildboots@c.im Equally, there’s plenty of queer trans folk like myself who are on trans-run instances that have QTs and have never seen them used for abuse across the instances we’re federated with, despite all the panic from those who said it would bring just the same harassment against us as the other place had. @jupiter_rowland@hub.netzgemeinde.eu
@jo @jupiter_rowland I’m happy for you. I certainly celebrate those who have had that luxury. I guess that the rest of us should stop “panicking” that the assholes who did these things will come to the fediverse and do the same thing? We have consistency of application of rules across instances, right? Or perhaps we should be less hysterical in our concerns that we might get stuck on a queer instance where you aren’t allowed to discuss certain games. I mean, I hear it’s so damn hard to move from one place to another. I cannot believe you actually used panic to denigrate people who give a shit. What an entitled comment.
@LucyWildboots @jo @jupiter_rowland There are strong feelings on both sides of this, which is going to result in emotive language.
I’ve definitely seen celebrities dunking on small accounts and driving them off Twitter. But also, I use QT myself - mostly to add context or to refer back to my own previous posts.
@LucyWildboots @jo @jupiter_rowland My confirmation bias means I believe all the studies saying it’s not the tool that causes harassment, as people intent on harassing will use any method available, including simple replies, to cause harm. The fix is cultural, not technical, although speed bumps and guide rails probably help to nudge behaviour away from unwanted and towards more positive community behaviour. Maybe.
@AskPippa @raccoon @fediversenews @fediverse that’s actually very valid. Personally, even if quote posts would be a thing, I wouldn’t use them, but I just don’t see any use for them besides telling your followers, or mobs, or whatever, hey, look at this moron, let’s all trash them. I mean, that’s what I’ve seen of twitter and how it’s used there, but when the mastodon team will design a quotes system, it’ll be opt-in for users and all that stuff, that’s a much better alternative to this forced way of doing it.
@bgtlover @AskPippa @raccoon @fediversenews @fediverse
While this negative use is possible, to use it to quote interesting pieces of, say a post or an article, and then add your two cents is how I have been using it for years (with just one complaint, where mine asking permission got there too late).
I was on the #BorgSite (then #BirdSite) for years and had a pretty clear-cut political position.
Quoting was never an issue.
@bgtlover @AskPippa @raccoon @fediversenews @fediverse
In my part of Twitter we used the quote function to put a retweet in context - to explain why we were sharing it. (Yes, it could be to criticise it, but not usually.) One of the joys of Twitter was being part of different communities, but then if you shared something you wanted to explain.
@SallyK @bgtlover @AskPippa @raccoon @fediversenews @fediverse also Handy for self quoting with “see. I was right year ago”
@SallyK @bgtlover @AskPippa @raccoon @fediversenews @fediverse @HistoPol That was my experience. Well put.
@SallyK @bgtlover @AskPippa @raccoon @fediversenews @fediverse
Exactly 💯!
@SallyK @bgtlover @raccoon @fediversenews @fediverse As a science writer I generally did the same — put things into context.
@AskPippa @SallyK @bgtlover @raccoon @fediversenews @fediverse
As well.
@AskPippa @bgtlover @raccoon @fediversenews @fediverse Since exploring the feasibility of QT is now on the official dev plan, I suspect we will find out in the future. I don’t want them. I’ve seen too many people deliberately hurt by them. Do we need some functionality that will help communities develop? Yes. But I think that it is more better handled by groups which is on the active development schedule.
As for the news people who claim they absolutely have to have them, they can. On Frendica. I would take their requests more seriously if I hadn’t recently seen an article where they joked about missing Twitter and being able to sign on every morning and start QT wars. At least he was honest.
@LucyWildboots @AskPippa @bgtlover @raccoon @fediversenews @fediverse
I’ve been wondering on whether two flags should be added to the account options.
Allow quote-toots?.. Yes/No
Allow text search?.. Yes/No