petunia

It depends on the software. Some proxy all content from remote servers so you only connect to your home server (Mastodon). Others don’t, instead they make clients load remote content themselves (Lemmy). If you use browser client you can see all the connections being made.

This list seems curated, there are some huge servers missing, so the author probably decided to include whatever they thought was notable to them.

PaperWM really should be its own DE. It’s so good, almost perfect, but held back by its nature of merely being a GNOME extension.

>The entire point of Twitter is for celebrities, brands and governments to have a single place to be able to send out a public message and for that message to be seen by everyone

Nothing about Mastodon or the fediverse prevents this. In fact government institutions are already using the fediverse this way: https://social.network.europa.eu/@EU_Commission https://social.overheid.nl/@belastingdienst There’s some companies who run their own instances also, and no shortage of individuals running single-user instances as a subdomain of the same website they use for their professional brand.

Decentralized =/= Federated. In a federated model, data is still siloed in 24/7 servers that are controlled by people or institutions.

1. This isn’t just a Mastodon problem, all fediverse softwares struggle to keep an accurate tally of faves/likes/whatevers on posts from remote instances

2. It doesn’t look like this anymore on mastodon.social

3. Search isn’t free so it’s up to the admins to decide how good/powerful they want their search bar to be.

4. It shows all followees/followers of a user if said user is local, but if the user is remote, it will only show local followees/followers of that user because knowing what remote accounts follow what remote users also isn’t free.

a twitter-like platform needs a big central algorithm that can associate posts with certain topics and interests to be able to serve up an interesting feed

I grew up on Tumblr and it thrived for the longest time with a chronological timeline.

most people are just kind of shouting into the void and that endless storm of posts has to be filtered and organized somehow

Yes, it was done through tagging. Notably, tags in Tumblr didn’t have to be inline.

Tagging died on Twitter because the inscrutable blackbox of the algorithm made people unsure if tags actually improved the visibility of their posts or not, there’s some folk-wisdom that suggests excessive tagging leads to deboosting of your profile, since it could have been considered spammy. Also, there’s only so many characters in a Twitter post and sometimes there’s just not enough left for relevant tags.

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.

Matrix tackled this UX issue in the bud relatively early with https://matrix.to/. It still isn’t ideal, but much better than expecting users to install browser extensions or OS-specific hacks to properly handle ActivityPub links.

no receipts?

Spam has consistently been the death of the open internet, even the big tech silos struggle with spam (Instagram for example – despite having incredibly invasive techniques for identifying “genuine” users – is STILL inundated with spam commenters). I think instances on the fediverse should reconsider their open registration policy, either totally close registrations when you reach an agreed upon critical mass of users, or adopt some form of invitation or application system for new users. I believe Mastodon supports both in the software.