I had no idea of the size and variety of the Fediverse! It has me feeling a bit overwhelmed. I’m enjoying BookWyrm very much; it’s the GoodReads/LibraryThing replacement I’ve been looking for for years.
I love the simplicity of Paper.wf for blogging. It’s truly elegant; I just click the link and start typing. But as far as I can tell there’s no way for others to find my blog or for me to find other blogs on the site. There’s no browse or follow feature. Nor can anyone comment on my posts! Those seem to me to be HUGE omissions.
Have you used any Fediverse blogging options? What are they like? And what other Fediverse services would you recommend? Other than Mastodon, I’ve already tried that (it didn’t excite me).
I’m still waiting for a really good Peertube instance.
Understandable. But it’s the chicken and egg problem. Creators don’t want to create content, because there’s no consumers. Consumers don’t want to sign up, because there’s no creators.
So are you the chicken or the egg? :-D
If you’re on one you don’t like anymore you could always change instances and watch videos there. If you’re worried about losing comments, well you can comment from other Fediverse servers such as Mastodon or GoToSocial and they show up on the page for the video. :-)
You know what, Peertube needs the equivalent of an acquisition and the perfect candidates would be, and I’m on record saying this before, DailyMotion and Vimeo. They’ve already got content and by implementing activitiypub integration, they can grow their audiences and compete with YouTube for once and for all.
But yeah, for me. I haven’t even found a video to watch let alone comment. That said, my YouTube is generally me watching album reactions, music videos, Hot Ones, Adam Something and Beard Meats Food.
Nothing stopping Vimeo from plumbing in ActivityPun amd joining the Fediverse. It’s open and the only reason no one does is because the data is valuable and they don’t want to share and play nice.
These walled gardens were not how the internet was imagined.
I’ve found several good videos/channels on urbanists.video which is kind of specific to urbanism but still there’s some good stuff. The videos have a lot lower production quality than most YouTube channels, but I actually kind of like how casual it is.
They’re just making videos because they have something interesting/funny/educational to share and they’re not out there trying to make money.
I never understood this ‘chicken and egg’ analogy. Dinosaurs were laying eggs millions of years before they became chickens.
It’s more “which came first, the chicken or the chicken egg”. It’s a useful phrase to describe a situation where two things necessarily depend on each other. Chickens must come from chicken eggs, and chicken eggs must come from chickens, and one had to precede the other.
(In the actual case of chickens, it can be resolved easily - by defining “chicken egg” as either an egg laid by a chicken or an egg which contains a chicken, you will obviously and quickly draw a conclusion.)
It comes down to language no matter how you look at it. Nothing we describe with discrete words is actually discrete. If you think of evolution, it comes down to: when did the bird the chicken evolved from become a chicken? Was there a first chicken, born of not-a-chicken? Where do you draw the line between “chicken” and “not a chicken”? Only when you find that line can you decide “the first chicken came out of an egg not laid by a chicken/not a chicken egg, therefore the first chicken came before the first chicken egg” or “A not-a-chicken laid the first chicken egg, aka the egg from which the first chicken hatched”. Which again is just another, long and roundabout way of saying it depends on if you define the egg by what laid it or what it contains, like you said.
So, “Which came first, the chicken or the egg?” boils down to just an older form of “is a hotdog a sandwich?”
Language requires words, and we treat the words like they have specific meanings to one degree or another because otherwise we couldn’t communicate, but reality isn’t beholden to the structure of our language, or to the structure of the way our brains evolved to divvy concepts up into boxes. Sometimes big boxes, sometimes little boxes, but still boxes that don’t perfectly match reality.
Tldr questions like this don’t have any true answer because the premise that there is a real, sharp border between the concept of a chicken and the concept of not-a-chicken-yet, or between the concept of a sandwich and the concept of a hotdog, is false. They can be fun to argue about, with everyone proposing different but equally arbitrary differences between the two concepts, but ultimately it’s just a linguistic amusement.
Sidenote: the chicken vs not-a-chicken-yet conundrum crops up in taxonomic classification all the time, too, even across present day species. I remember reading a Stephen J. Gould essay ages ago about some lizards; some lived on one side of a mountain range, and others lived on the other side, so the populations were somewhat separated by the terrain and didn’t intermix evenly over time.
On the far end of one side of that range, there is lizard Species A (let’s call it), and on the far side of the end of the range, there is Species B, and Species A and B are obviously different and cannot mate and produce viable offspring, so they’re clearly different species. Except, if you start at Species A’s end of the range and start looking at the lizards between them and Species B’s end, you find a steady spectrum of lizards that look phenotypically and genetically less and less like Species A and more and more like Species B, and which can still breed with each other and produce viable offspring, until at some point you reach Species B. So what do you do, if you’re trying to put animals into species boxes? Even though A is clearly different from B, there’s all these lizards in the middle that don’t fit either box. And cutting them off into a separate Species C wouldn’t make sense either because then you’d still have a species of which some members can breed only with Species C and Species A, but of which others can only breed with Species C and Species B, plus having other differing traits.
You have to pick a place to draw a line to be able to talk about the differences between Species A and B, but that line is always quite arbitrary and artificial no matter where you put it.
Tldr language and everything about the way we use it to describe the world is a social construct, more at 11.
What happens when instances die off, would their comments be deleted and you’d have threads with half conversations everywhere?
I believe once a post or comment is federated it will continue to stay even if the instance it came from is no longer in service. instances are not “streaming” the data to each other, they send copies and store it in their own dbs. So this comment right here will have a bunch copies out there on other instances.
With Lemmy I’m not actually sure. I would imagine that you would be correct. But knowledge is ephemeral and needs to be kept some other way. I think that’s a better choice than some platform that’s shutting down and selling all their data to someone else. Deleting something on Reddit or Twitter or FB doesn’t actually delete it. It’s still in the servers, it’s just not publicly accessible anymore. I’m a massive cynic though, which is why I’ve been on the Fedi for a few years already. :-D
Re PeerTube, as a creator, is it worth it to try an find an instance that suits my content right now?
If you’re putting your content up on Youtube right now, then Peertube can just mirror that content without much work. At least that’s my understanding. I’m not a Youtuber. diode.zone is one I’ve used in the past which doesn’t really have any kind of gatekeeping.
However, I personally enjoy TILVids the most. They’re curated. You ahve to talk to the TILVids admin to get access and he kind of is there to help folks get started and if you take off then he suggests you create your own. That happens with few. TechLore for instance just did this. But he does have a focus on videos that help folks learn things, but even GamingOnLinux mirrors there.
Do you have an app recommendation for Peertube on android or ios?