With the increased interest in the Fediverse (encompassing applications using ActivityPub, Diaspora and others), I believe the time has come for a dedicated tag.
This will enable users to filter these stories, especially as they tend to shade into cultural/ideological discussions rather than purely technical.
Stories from the last 7 days:
- Honk into ActivityPub
- Installing Mastodon inside a FreeBSD jail
- in which legibility comes at a price [on the fediverse]
- The RapidBlock Project
- Towards End-to-End Encryption for Direct Messages in the Fediverse
- Self-hosting GoToSocial on NixOS
- Should Lobsters profiles include a/multiple Fediverse links?
- Tracking Mastodon user numbers over time with a bucket of tricks
- What are your favorite Mastodon technology/programming community servers
- Scaling Mastodon in the Face of an Exodus
- The Fediverse Could Be Awesome (if we don’t screw it up)
Makes sense to me. Given that it’s a topic with interest that’s only about to grow.
I’m all for a tag, but I suspect that normies aren’t going to stay on the fediverse. They’ll either go back to Twitter or some other corporate social media product. Fediverse just feels like people and bots shouting into the void with relatively little interaction/diaglogue. I’m sure you can curate your experience, but I don’t think most people want to go through the hassle. My suspicion is that the Fediverse enthusiasm will fade in a few months.
I have the complete opposite experience. Maybe you are holding it wrong?
How is that relevant at all? We have tags for
fortranordragonflybsdwhich are niches of niches sure we can have one for fediverse.Maybe? I’ve tried it a lot on several different servers over the years, and tried to make it work, but there was rarely any interaction.
My post literally opened with “I’m all for a tag”. 🙄 This bit was relevant because the parent claimed that fediverse was going to continue growing in popularity, and I was expressing that it’s unlikely to continue growing in popularity beyond the next month or two. You’re welcome to disagree, but I’m still on-topic.
What do you mean by “normies”, if I might ask?
I assumed “normal people”/Non-tech people.
People who stick to the mainstream as it pertains to some dimension. In this case the dimension is social media platforms, but it could be politics or something else.
It is pseudo elitist speak of people who define their identity via the obscure technologies they use.
It’s also popular among racists and otherwise antisocial online communities.
It’s a common phrase all over the Internet. I’m sure some racist somewhere has used it, but that doesn’t imply that it’s particularly affiliated with racists.
Indeed; I’ve also heard it in LGBT+ & neurodivergent communities a fair bit.
It more broadly suggests “yes, we’re different, and that’s not a bad thing (maybe even a good one).”
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I get that terms like “normie”, “muggle”, or “civilian” may be derogatory depending on context but I’m curious: what racist & antisocial groups are using that term, and what groups do they target with it?
I found this paper by googling “how to redpill normies”
Redpilling Normies: An Ethnography of Alt-Right 4chan Discourse.
Sounds like it should be a good entry point for your research.
It really got moving on 4chan. Now, some people will say that not everyone on 4chan is that way, but if someone made a racist joke at Thanksgiving dinner and you laughed, it’s both of you. I don’t break bread with those types, personally.
I’d hold off a little bit…several of those are kinda navel-gazey, and the technical ones are covered decently by other tags.
We’re currently seeing a whole bunch of noise due to the transient Twitter shakeout, but give it another month or two and I’d bet it’ll settle down. Once you add a tag, you’re explicitly giving it a home here, and as you’ve noted the Fediverse stories shade into culture/ideology stuff. Let’s not give that a beachhead simple due to a temporary event.
I’m not sure I agree here. Several of the technical articles listed above have a tag only tangentially related to the article. For example, Self-hosting GoToSocial on NixOS is only tagged with “Nix”. Most other articles with this tag are either focused on the package manager (or related operating system), or otherwise have a tag more related to the central point of said article (e.g., performance).
A similar case exists for Scaling Mastodon… with the sole tag of scaling. The vast majority of links submitted with this tag also have another tag that answers the question “scaling what?” The article Installing Mastodon inside a FreeBSD jail has only a freebsd tag, which again, is not typically used by itself for software that simply runs on FreeBSD.
Do you know of another tag that currently exists that would bring these articles’ tags more in line with those published on other topics?
I do share some concern here. I think a number of users (myself included) would like to not see this site become overwhelmed with complaints about twitter ad nauseam (which some recent posts have unfortunately been). Perhaps some restrictions should be added to the tag, such as not permitting new users to post using that tag (similar to merkle-trees).
Though I am also concerned about waiting to add the tag. If the fediverse is something that is going to be posted about with any kind of frequency, we should start tagging that now. Uninterested users should be able to filter it out, and interested users should be able to specifically search for it. If we wait a few months, we’ll have that many months of articles that are harder to search for because they don’t have the tag, and uninterested users won’t have a way to filter it out during that upcoming timeframe.
Even if/when this transient dies down, I don’t think it would necessarily be a bad candidate for a tag. We already have several tags about which stories are posted less than once per month (e.g., illumos and d).
Those tags tend not to cover a domain with a large amount of drama over politics, ideology, and parasocial relationships.
I think those are fine enough. As I understand your main complaint, it’s that you want to search for Mastodon/fediverse-flavored stuff specifically, instead of nix+plus+mastodon, bsd+plus+mastodon, etc.–e.g., you want to center the fediverse aspect of things with multiple tags.
If we wanted to have a purely technical
federationtag, to differentiate between the technical problem space of the fediverse and the flaming dumpsterfire of cliqueish highschool behavior and culturewar that it often actually represents, that might work–but in such a case, we already havenetworkinganddistributed.~
You’ve been here for four months. You and I have talked about an adjacent topic before. Perhaps take a bit more time to acclimate before insisting on further infiltration of social media topics.
I’ve been here for three years, and I would prefer that you not use someone’s length of time on the site as an excuse to silence them when you disagree with their opinions.
I haven’t “silenced” them; their posts are still here!
Length of time in a community is a valid data point when evaluating meta discussions around how a community functions.
If you mainly listen to long-standing members, you get one set of pathologies–say, not fixing broken steps. If you mainly listen to brand new members, you get a different set–say, no long-term shared identity or benefits of stare decisis.
I think that one of the great successes of Lobsters is the community-driven meta process; one of the great ways to derail that is to implement each and every brand new request from new members who don’t find it quite to their liking due to inexperience.
I don’t think that these are even particularly bad ideas but that a bit of time should be taken to suss out if the root issue is something genuinely missing in the Lobsters ecosystem or merely something they expect to be present that isn’t.
That sure sounds like your intent was to have the other person stop posting/advocating for their opinion, based on the length of time they’ve been here. And I’m telling you I would prefer you not do that.
Please don’t silence me. :)
I think that would be an equally good solution. I’m still not sure why “fediverse” came into common use, and I suspect that name was only chosen for the tag proposal because it is currently popular.
Adding a description to the
distributedtag that explicitly includes federations of servers could be a decent alternative to making a separatefederationtag. (Indeed, many posts recently tagged with distributed are about the fediverse.)@friendlysock, I think that is a rather uncharitable interpretation of my comments. I posted the adjacent topic you mentioned as an open-ended question specifically to acclimate myself to the community and determine the consensus on recent posts about Mastodon and related software. I’m not insisting that Lobsters allow social media posts. My point was that the community should take some kind of action based on this influx of new posts, and either (1) if social media talk is banned, then the posts should be deleted, (2) if social media talk is permitted, a tag should be made for it. I think you’ll find this true if you reread my original post.
From the comments in my previous post, I concluded that the community would appreciate technical discussions of social media, but not other discussions about it (which you yourself agreed with). My comments above were based on this conclusion, combined with several technical links about the fediverse listed in the original post.
No action is an action, and one that’s fine to take until we have a few more months of data between us and the current Twitter drama.
There is a range of other, community-driven actions that fall between “pushcx manually scrubs all of these from the site” and “we explicitly endorse these articles due to their tag existing; please post more!”. There are also:
Each of these has its own use in the site meta–the issue with your question in that thread (and similar to one here) is that it looks a great deal like forcing a black-or-white binary decision. The answer I gave there, and have given here, and I think others have given is “Look, we’re totally enthusiastic about the technical side of this, but are categorically unwilling to open the door for fediverse drama.”
I’m sure you’ve asked both of these questions in good faith, but if you do so a third time it goes from being “okay, this new person is asking about site stuff instead of lurking to get clarification, that’s fine” to “okay, this person seems to be really forcing this issue every time they don’t get an answer they seem to like.” This is a real social attack that happens to sites like this everywhere, so please understand why I and others might be sensitive to it.
I wanted to highlight this because I think you’ve nailed a really good incremental step that might get us 80% of the way with 20% of the effort–and honestly slightly expanding the tag definition for
distributedto onramp new folks hadn’t even occurred to me. Good thinking! :)You make a number of good points. Regarding the comment that I’ve only been here for four months: I don’t think you’re wrong to point that out. However, it would have been great if you had contributed constructively by drawing upon your eight years’ time here to share previous tag proposals that you’ve seen succeed or fail, rather than discouraging new users from posting. Regardless, I’ve looked through some past posts on tag proposals (many of which you commented on), and I feel I somewhat better understand your perspective, and why you are sensitive to these discussions.
I still have a few sticking points, though:
I don’t think “flag” or “flag and explain” are really options. The about page makes it pretty clear that flags should only be used for requesting moderator action and should not be discussed in comments (emphasis mine):
If these statements on the about page are wrong, please fix them. That page is one of the few resources new users have to learn how this site works.
~
Finally, I’d ask you to take a step back and look at my profile as a whole. You’ve stated your concern that I may be “really forcing this issue every time they don’t get an answer they seem to like” with the clear implication that the answer I want is to enable “further infiltration of social media topics.” I’ve already gotten the answer you seem to think I want: all social media is fine! (Posted by a user of this site for three years, no less.) But I haven’t commented on it nor referenced it.
Your characterization of me is just… not accurate? I don’t want more social media drivel on this site. I’ve never submitted a story or posted a comment about any non-meta discussion of social media or the fediverse. I am only active in meta discussions about them because I personally have had trouble discerning fediverse-related stories from others when picking ones from the front page to read (sometimes, I would not like to read about [whatever new fediverse platform]).
My primary complaint is that stories about the fediverse are tagged inconsistently. I’m happy to have them all move under
distributed. But to have one tagged with onlyscaling, one with onlyfreebsd, and one with onlynix, etc., and have these posted multiple times a day really grinds my gears (and I suspect a number of other users’, based on this tag proposal having >100 votes).I agree with you, but it also makes me kind of sad because there’s a LOT of super interesting tech that goes into ActivityPub and surrounding protocols, server stacks, etc. It’s also a brand new niche with tons of room for innovation as more people pile in.
Then that would be a great place for the
networkingordistributedtags.I debated merging them into weekly threads on the general topic of the twitter exodus, but it didn’t seem like they were repetitive enough to justify it. If the pace keeps up, I’ll create a tag.
I don’t think your characterization of them shading into cultural/ideological discussion is accurate; only the last of the posts you link does that. The rest have technical discussions, if any.
I think you meant to reply to @friendlysock?
It seems to me like everything that would fit in ‘fediverse’ would also fit under a broader ‘social media’ tag. So why not that? They’re alike in their potential for discussion about all kinds of nerd topics, they’re both made out of computer, they have the same problems categorically.
I think we can agree that ‘social media’ wouldn’t be a good tag to add, but it’d certainly be welcome if there was a post about, say, why Twitter wasn’t going to immediately break even after errywon got fired. That fits because it is appropriate for other tags. Imagine an article that is appropriate for ‘social media’ but not for any other tags. Bad fit, right?
Is there a difference between ‘fediverse’ and ’social media’ that would make an article with only that tag be a good fit?
Personally I would rather see an
ActivityPubtag, it’s much more technical and has narrower focus. I’m not sure if we’d have enough stories for it, though.But what about the dozens of people using Diaspora and Ostatus?
That’s not very Zot of you.
I mean I considered including Zot but there’s only red links about it on the wiki article.
And in fact, searching for “Zot” here turns up this comment, pointing to a repo site that’s currently closed for new acccounts: https://framagit.org/zot/zap/blob/master/spec/Zot6/Messages.md
This seems to be the canonical site: https://getzot.com/, which is empty.
Social media is only one possible use. There’s really no limit on what could be communicated over it. There’s already a chess server, several blogging platforms, and file sharing (Nextcloud). While these can be social, it’s not social media in a way people think when they say social media.
I agree with the proposal, but maybe ActivityPub would be a better choice, because it can be used to share more technical stories as already happen for similar tags (e.g. e-mail).
hear, hear
may be the tag should be ‘distributed social media and chat protocols’. (or a shorter version of the above), to combine posts on technologies and research in the area of distributed, privacy-enabling human interactions online.
This is a great idea.
Personally I think fediversr should get a “mastodon” tag to encompass all of it so that it will be just as dumb as having to put guix posts under nix.