Fediverse

I’m really beginning to see how the Fediverse can be complicated for new users

The fediverse is just the internet as it was designed to be. A network, not a broadcasting medium. A place for connecting people, not just consumers and corporations.

Choice means responsibility. It's a feature, not a bug. But sure, it's also paradoxical.

In answer to your question, I'd say just slow down a bit. Forget about self-hosting. Just pick a mainstream instance like this one and jump in. That's what I did. You can make changes later as appropriate. That was impossible where you were before.

I love what Firefish is attempting to do, but I’m much more impressed with the Ice Cubes app for Mastodon. It works really well and has that ‘twitter’ feel. I’ll be honest, the official Mastodon app just isn’t very good & I think lots of folks have had a bad experience with it. It seems like when they try a 3rd party app, their experience is much better.

One of the things that really enhanced my experience on Mastodon is following hashtags. It allows you to more or less create your own algorithm to see topics you are interested in. It also seems like the importance of hashtags isn’t relayed to new users.

Fwiw. I’m on Mastodon and Firefly amd honestly they are pretty much the same. One had more features, ones more stripped down, but it’s still just share some words, maybe a photo or video & post, the people like, reblog, share, or comment/reply.

I don’t feel the need for longer post, rich text, or 1000 emoji reactions so I stuck with Mastodon.

And Lemmy/Kbin is scratching my Reddit itch, especially as I’m working hard to build an alternative music community here.

If you are into photos more, there’s also Pixelfed.

What’s great about Mastodon and Lemmy specifically though? The apps. Both have a ton! I’m on Mona for Mastodon and Memmy for Lemmy and it’s really made all the difference.

Finally - don’t worry about mastodon.art - they aggressively defederate from everyone all the time.

I was going to join calckey.social/firefish.social but I’m a little hesitant now because mastodon.art defederated with it, and I follow multiple accounts from that instance. The drama that always surrounds defederation is a fundamental design flaw in the Fediverse

mastodon.art is unfortunately run by a harebrained power mod. Their predecessor was much much better and more thoughtful in their use of moderation powers.

I wouldn't worry about mastodon.art, the owner is legitimately psycho.

I was going to join calckey.social/firefish.social but I'm a little hesitant now because mastodon.art defederated with it, and I follow multiple accounts from that instance.

I'm on calckey.world, and it seems to be federated with mastodon.art. at least post from there appear on my global feed

I’m a little hesitant now because mastodon.art defederated with [firefish.social]

It looks like mastodon.art has limited rather than blocked firefish.social. It has also limited mastodon.world for similar reasons, and journa.host for... being populated by journalists? Limited means that only your followers from mastodon.art see your posts there.

Both limits and blocks on mastodon.art have been imposed for servers failing to block other servers, which is a particularly aggressive moderation strategy even when the third party in question is particularly bad. Blocking journalists seems weird. I wouldn't take being limited by mastodon.art as a sign that a particular server is bad since they seem to have a pretty low threshold for doing that.

I initiated my Fediverse trip on Lemmy thanks to Reddit and Spez, and then "moved" to Mastodon, currently trying out some Android clients, may I ask what is bad with Mastodon?

I just discovered how the tags work, and I don't know if Twitter has something similar there (because even when I have a Twitter account my usage there is quite limited, and all points to be even less in the future lol) but I really enjoy having my customized feed, created by me and not by an algorithm.

CalcKey just rebranded to Firefish. It has a very pretty UI but UX is currently bad as there is no way to globally disable boosts so you will see the same posts in your timeline over and over and over again. Following hashtags is limited to the Antennas feature so you won't see those posts in your timeline. Until they fix these things it's unusable for me personally.

Have you tried Akkoma or Pleroma? I run an Akkoma instance at https://shrediverse.net if you want to try it out. You can use the web app or an app like Fedilab on Android.

Have you tried other ways of viewing Mastodon? Different web apps or mobile apps? Like https://elk.zone , https://phanpy.social , https://semaphore.social.

I've run a few fedi services, some a long time ago so I'm sure they've evolved since then, but generally they all serve different purposes.

Facebook/personal page centric: Friendica/Diaspora/Hubzilla Reddit/community topic centric: Lemmy/Kbin Twitter/microblogging centeric: Mastodon Instagram/photo centric: Pixelfed

Plus plenty of others, I've run all of the above at some point aside from Kbin and of them Mastodon seems to be the most polished so far, which is probably in no small part due to the massive number of users to give feedback and resulting development interest, which then draws more people to it to feed the cycle. It really depends on what you're looking for in a platform. Lemmy seems to be going through some rapid development right now with all the interest that Reddit generated for it so I'm hopeful that it'll get some more of that polished feel to it in the near future too.

BlueSky is made by Twitte- I mean X's original founder, you might wanna try that out.

Yeah, Mastodon isn't really that great. Unless you're someone like me who's trying to make a Flemish sounding nickname.

Friendica is interesting because it's fundamentally different than a lot of the others. It supports ActivityPub, but also other protocols. The view is fundamentally threaded. It supports groups so some parts of the threadiverse can federate with it in that regard and presumably it could too. It also supports RSS, so you can get content from outside the fediverse.

I liked it, especially with a custom skin I set up. My big problem was that it has a php back-end and I needed something way lighter for my tiny at the time server, so I went with pleroma.

https://trunks.social in digested mode is perfect for mastodon

From what i can see they are all very similar, I would just read through the documentation of each of them and check out their features. I'm on Hajkey (initially a custom fork of FireFish but now a custom fork of Ice Shrimp) and it was pretty simple to set up, I'm currently in the process of trying to find all the people I follow in my other social media