#discoverability — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #discoverability, aggregated by home.social.
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Users Are Too Dependent on Centralized Techno-Fascist Corporate Structure to Ever Leave Discord
I’m watching people scatter into countless real-time chat alternatives to Discord after Discord started pulling the age-verification and age-gating card.
It’s very frustrating because people are entirely missing the point of a community and how social networks work. Real-time platforms and social media networks only work well when a large number of people share the same space at the same time. If everyone creates separate servers or competing apps, the result is fragmentation that makes it unviable.
One reason why Bluesky became so successful is the invitation and starter-pack move. It essentially allowed people to move collectively as cliques. Bluesky used invitations and starter packs to move groups of friends together. This kept communities intact. Moving as cliques preserves network structure, whereas random scattering does not. People aren’t do not seem to intend to move as cliques or subgraphs of networks off of Discord. And the whole reason people were on Discord was to host their communities, so an alternative becomes pointless if your community doesn’t remain intact.
Instead of an active, strongly connected, possibly distributed network, you get dozens of small pockets. I am referring to a potential distributed network rather than a single centralized platform, because Matrix is an example of a decentralized chat protocol. Not all alternatives have to be centralized like Discord. Technically, many older chat protocols, such as XMPP and IRC, are examples of federated real-time synchronous messaging. They allowed communication between users on different, independently operated servers. Federation means that multiple servers can interconnect so that users from separate networks can exchange messages with one another seamlessly.
Decentralized alternatives would not be a problem if people moved to the same distributed network as cohesive groups. However, what I am seeing is that people move in disconnected and stochastic ways to entirely separate distributed networks, so communities are not kept intact. For example, when people move to XMPP servers or Matrix servers, it bifurcates and disconnects social networks. Notice I said XMPP or Matrix, which logically means people are on Matrix but not XMPP, or they are on XMPP but not Matrix. That implies a person would need to be on both Matrix and XMPP to speak to their original community from Discord if it split down the middle. To synchronize conversations in chats, there would need to be a bridge. It’s a pretty complicated solution.
The likely outcome is that people will remain on the dominant platform because of its scale and structure. The deeper irony is that while people may want independence from corporate platforms, they often struggle to organize effectively without the centralized structure those platforms provide. They’ve become so dependent on corporate structures to support their communities that they have no clue how to organize their own social networks in a sustainable way.
I’ve always been an internet nerd, but most of my social life has been offline. I view my interactions with the social app layer of the internet as a game, so losing that domain of the Internet is not devastating to me.
I’ll give you an example. This is a WordPress site. You hear this insincere nostalgia from Millennials and Gen X for a simulacrum that never was, especially concerning forums. Check this out: when you go into the plugin installation section of WordPress, this is on the second row you see:
That means any WordPress site has the capability to host a forum. They’re nostalgic for a setup where you can use a simple install script on any hosting service to install WordPress. After that, you can then just add a plugin to turn it into a forum. Hell, they can do this on WordPress.com if they don’t want to self-host.
You can make a forum, but no one will use it because they’d rather use a centralized platform like Reddit. Users have become so dependent on corporations to structure and organize communities that they can’t do it themselves. It’s sort of like the cognitive debt that accrues when people outsource their thinking to AI.
The issue is not that forums are hard to host or create; rather, the issue is that people have become so dependent on centralized corporate structures that they can’t maintain or organize their own communities, which is why everyone ends up on Reddit or Discord. A reason I keep hearing for why people don’t want to leave Discord is that it’s hard to recreate the community structure that Discord’s features provide. They claim that they want independence from corporate platforms, but rely on the centralized structure those platforms provide to function socially.
People say they want decentralized freedom, but in practice they depend on centralized platforms to maintain social cohesion. Stochastically scattering to the digital winds of the noosphere destroys the very communities they’re trying to preserve.
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@cloudskater wrote:
Some instances are run by bad people. Hell, a few projects like Lemmy and Matrix are DEVELOPED by assholes, but the FLOSS and federated nature of these platforms allows us to bypass/fork them and create healthy spaces outside their reach.
Nope, that is actually what is killing the fediverse. I just explained here:
The issue is the divergence in semantic interpretation that emerges at the interpretation layer. ActivityPub standardizes message delivery and defines common activity types. However, it leaves extension semantics and application-layer policy decisions to individual implementations. Servers may introduce custom JSON-LD namespaces and enforce local behaviors, such as reply restrictions, while remaining protocol-compliant. But, the noise created by divergences are problematic, because it creates unexpected, unintended, and unpredictable behavior.
Divergence appears when implementations rely on non-normative metadata and assume reciprocal handling to preserve a consistent user experience. Behavioral alignment then varies. Syntactic exchange succeeds, but behavioral consistency is not guaranteed. Though instances continue to federate at the transport level, policy semantics and processing logic differ across deployments. Those differences produce inconsistent experiences and results between implementations.
That leads to fragmentation, specifically semantic or behavioral fragmentation and an inconsistent user experiences. ActivityPub ensures syntactic interoperability, but semantic interoperability (everyone interprets and enforces rules the same way) varies. This creates a system that is federated at the transport level yet fragmented in behavior and expectations across implementations. It is funny how the thing that the fediverse touted has made the entire thing very brittle. ActivityPub technically federates correctly, but semantically falls apart once servers start adding their own behavioral rules.
https://neon-blue-demon-wyrm.x10.network/archives/16932
FYI, I’m not doing culture wars or political debates. I’m just saying this idea of “forking away” from them is literally breaking the fediverse’s distributed network and creating all kinds of issues with semantic interoperability. Yes, federation is still happening at the delivery level, but the semantic issues are out of fucking control. You are a federation by the very sheer skin of your teeth.
The reason why developers are leaving the fediverse is because you folks don’t take criticism. You respond to criticism with — I’m being so serious right now — political manifestos and harassing developers. ActivityPub developers and authors oversold you folks on the capabilities of ActivityStreams. They flat-out lied to y’all.
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ActivityPub Server’s Custom Reply‑Control Extensions Undermine Federation
It seems like Activitbypub developers are extending ActivityPub with optional metadata to fix a lot of its issues, but that is still problematic. Trying to add moderation tools and user control to threads seems to be the ongoing battle. I am fascinated by dumpster fires, so I’ve started looking at the ActivityPub protocol in detail. I tend to become fascinated with things that are going down in flames.
As a brief recap of the problem:
So, one of the very popular features on Bluesky—also popular on Twitter—is the ability to select who can reply to a post. A major issue in the Fediverse is the inability to decide who can reply, and once you block someone, their harassing reply is still there. I honestly thought it was simply a case of them choosing not to add or address it for cultural reasons. What is clear from that thread is that they were always aware that the ActivityPub protocol and most Fediverse implementations don’t provide a universal way to control reply visibility or enforce blocks across instances.
An ActivityPub server that has reply control is GoToSocial. ActivityPub, as defined by the W3C specification, standardizes how servers federate activities. It defines actors, inboxes, outboxes, and activity types (Create, Follow, Like, Announce, etc.) expressed using ActivityStreams 2.0. It also specifies delivery mechanics (including how a Create activity reaches another server’s inbox) and how collections behave.
The specification does not include interaction policy semantics such as “only followers may reply” or “replies require manual approval.” There is no field in the normative vocabulary requiring conforming servers to enforce reply permissions. That category of rule is outside the protocol’s defined contract.
GoToSocial implements reply controls through what it calls interaction policies. These appear as additional properties on ActivityStreams objects using a custom JSON-LD namespace controlled by the GoToSocial project.
JSON-LD permits additional namespaced terms. This means the document remains structurally valid ActivityStreams and federates normally. The meaning of those custom fields, however, comes from GoToSocial’s own documentation and implementation. Other servers can ignore them without violating ActivityPub because they are not part of the interoperable core vocabulary.
Enforcement occurs locally. When a remote server sends a reply—a Create activity whose object references another via inReplyTo—ActivityPub governs delivery, not acceptance criteria. Whether the receiving server checks a reply policy, rejects the activity, queues it, or displays it is determined in the server’s inbox-processing code. The decision to accept, display, or require approval happens after successful protocol-level delivery. This behavior belongs to the application layer.
These are server-side features layered on top of ActivityPub’s transport and data model that are not actually part of ActivityPub. The protocol ensures standardized delivery of activities; however, the server implementation defines additional constraints and user-facing behavior. Two GoToSocial instances may both recognize and act on the same extension fields. However, a different implementation, such as Mastodon, has no obligation under the specification to interpret or enforce GoToSocial’s interactionPolicy properties. These fields function as extension metadata rather than protocol requirements.
The semantics of GoToSocial are not part of the specification’s defined vocabulary and processing rules for ActivityPub. They no longer operate purely at the protocol layer; it has become an application-layer contract implemented by specific servers.
Let’s use the AT Protocol as an example. Bluesky’s direct messages (DMs) are not currently part of the AT Protocol (ATProto). The AT Protocol has nothing that specifies anything for DMs, so DMs are not part of the AT Protocol. The AT Protocol was designed to handle public social interactions, but it does not define private or encrypted messaging. Bluesky implemented DMs at the application level, outside of the core protocol. DMs are centralized and stored on Bluesky’s servers. What is happening with servers like GoToSocial is sort of like that. The difference is that the AT Protocol was designed for different app views; ActivityPub was not.
The issue is the divergence in semantic interpretation that emerges at the interpretation layer. ActivityPub standardizes message delivery and defines common activity types. However, it leaves extension semantics and application-layer policy decisions to individual implementations. Servers may introduce custom JSON-LD namespaces and enforce local behaviors, such as reply restrictions, while remaining protocol-compliant. But, the noise created by divergences are problematic, because it creates unexpected, unintended, and unpredictable behavior.
Divergence appears when implementations rely on non-normative metadata and assume reciprocal handling to preserve a consistent user experience. Behavioral alignment then varies. Syntactic exchange succeeds, but behavioral consistency is not guaranteed. Though instances continue to federate at the transport level, policy semantics and processing logic differ across deployments. Those differences produce inconsistent experiences and results between implementations.
That leads to fragmentation, specifically semantic or behavioral fragmentation and an inconsistent user experiences. ActivityPub ensures syntactic interoperability, but semantic interoperability (everyone interprets and enforces rules the same way) varies. This creates a system that is federated at the transport level yet fragmented in behavior and expectations across implementations. It is funny how the thing that the fediverse touted has made the entire thing very brittle. ActivityPub technically federates correctly, but semantically falls apart once servers start adding their own behavioral rules.
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Roadmap 2026 — Charting the stars of the open social web
The 2026 roadmap focuses on making WordPress easier to discover and interact with across the Fediverse. Key areas include better search and recommendations through FASP support, Starter Packs to help users find communities, a more interactive Reader with reactions and replies, direct messages, and client-to-server APIs. Alongside these, we’ll continue improving interoperability, long-form publishing, and overall federation features.https://activitypub.blog/2026/02/11/roadmap-2026-charting-the-stars-of-the-open-social-web/
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Your BlueSky Feed Is Porn You Didn’t Ask For Because Your Friends Are Gooners With a Severe Porn Addiction
A common complaint I see people make on Bluesky is: why am I being served so much porn or things I am not interested in? They will incorrectly believe that the algorithm is broken. It’s not broken. You didn’t know the people you knew as well as you thought you did. Porn addiction is a thing, and porn addiction is especially common with weebs. You’re seeing deranged shit because people you follow have porn addictions and are into deranged shit. So, though you may not be consuming porn, people in your network are. That activity kicks into your feeds.
The issue I have with that is that it essentially normalizes being sex pests in a space on the Internet. That sets the expectation that it is good—attractive, even—to act like that elsewhere. That expectation alienates relationships. Bluesky creates a cultural space that offers an unrealistic, bizarre representation of social relationships, which isolates and alienates the users who stay on there consuming erotica and porn like they do.
So, user repos in Bluesky have a property for likes. Bluesky’s underlying AT Protocol stores likes as first-class structured records in each user’s AT Protocol repository. In the AT Protocol lexicon, a like is an app.bsky.feed.like record type. Unlike a simple boolean flag on a post, it is its own record with a creation timestamp and a subject field that holds a strong reference to the liked record.
That strong reference is composed of an AT-URI and a CID. The AT-URI identifies the exact record in the network by DID, collection, and record key. The CID is a cryptographic content identifier that uniquely identifies the exact content of that liked record.
These like records exist under the app.bsky.feed.like namespace in the user’s repo. Bluesky’s repo model is built so that these repos are hosted on a user’s Personal Data Server and are publicly readable through the AT Protocol APIs. Because of that, the like record and its fields can be fetched, indexed, and used by any client or service that can query the protocol.
The protocol exposes operations like getLikes. This returns all of the like records tied to a particular subject’s AT-URI and CID. It also exposes getActorLikes. This returns all of the subject references a given actor has liked. Those API calls return structured like objects with timestamps and subject references directly from the public repository data.
Various feeds hosted by different PDSs use the likes property to construct the feeds that you see. Since the likes of people you follow are included in your social graph, along with your own likes, you’re going to get served the porn they are consuming. Because likes are public and anyone can write an algorithm to see everyone’s likes, you can clearly see just how much porn people are consuming.
Honestly, what started to turn my stomach about the people on Bluesky is how they behave across different contexts. If you look through the records of the posts they interact with, you’ll see them engaging with political posts in the replies like a normal person. Then, when you look through their AT Protocol records, you see hours and hours of them interacting with every kind of porn imaginable. I am not exaggerating. Hours of likes for porn posts within 1–10 minutes of each other. Am I sex-negative? A prude? No, this site is filled with furry, gay bara porn, lol. You can have a drink without being an alcoholic. The problem with these people is like people who can’t have one drink without drinking the whole fucking day; they can’t consume porn in healthy ways.
I think people assume that their feed is customized for them and based on their likes. No—feeds are generalized based on what everyone likes and then served to your subgraph. It’s not just about who you follow; it’s about who they follow. So if you follow someone who follows a lot of people with porn addictions, you will see porn. Bluesky isn’t weighting the algorithm to do this. Basically, it’s the people in your social network with furry, hentai, or trans porn addictions who are driving it.
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Time for a "Land Acknowledgement"!
The SubStack Attempt to Avoid the ClickBait-Rage Trap Is Failing: The argument against the idea that SubStack needed to develop a social-media #discoverability layer in order to reach appropriate audience scale was that to drink from that cup was to drink from a poisoned chalice that would lead to the death of reason and discussion…
<https://braddelong.substack.com/p/time-for-a-land-acknowledgement>
2025-12-04 Th
#public-reason
#matt-yglesias
#land-acknowledgements
#ah-64-apache -
#Design #Guidelines
Designing effective contextual menus · Do’s and don’ts for secondary menu actions https://ilo.im/168rut_____
#Menus #ContextMenus #Icons #Discoverability #Consistency #Usability #Accessibility #ProductDesign #UiDesign #WebDesign -
#Design #Guidelines
Designing effective contextual menus · Do’s and don’ts for secondary menu actions https://ilo.im/168rut_____
#Menus #ContextMenus #Icons #Discoverability #Consistency #Usability #Accessibility #ProductDesign #UiDesign #WebDesign -
#Design #Guidelines
Designing effective contextual menus · Do’s and don’ts for secondary menu actions https://ilo.im/168rut_____
#Menus #ContextMenus #Icons #Discoverability #Consistency #Usability #Accessibility #ProductDesign #UiDesign #WebDesign -
#Design #Guidelines
Designing effective contextual menus · Do’s and don’ts for secondary menu actions https://ilo.im/168rut_____
#Menus #ContextMenus #Icons #Discoverability #Consistency #Usability #Accessibility #ProductDesign #UiDesign #WebDesign -
📆 Webinar coming up! Configuring and Optimizing #DOIs with @datacite in #OpenJournalSystems -- October 1st, 15:00 UTC, online
With Mary Hirsch (DataCite) and Mike Nason (PKP)
Registration: https://datacite.org/event/configuring-and-optimizing-dois-with-datacite-in-open-journal-systems/
Hope to see you there!
#OpenInfrastructure #OpenAccess #Discoverability #Interoperability
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🎉Thrilled to share the publication of our #OpenAccess book 'Opening up our Heritage: Opportunities in Digitising and Promoting Cultural and Research #Collections', a collection of 19 chapters written by librarians and researchers on the #digitisation and promotion of cultural and scientific #heritage.
👉 HTML: https://e-publish.uliege.be/opening-up-our-heritage
👉 PDF and ePub: https://e-publish.uliege.be/opening-up-our-heritage/front-matter/free-download-buy/#DigitalArchives #DigitalCollections #Preservation #Libraries #Metadata #Discoverability #OpenScience #Pressbooks
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You may consider hosting your social data out of the USA.
Here is a search tool of Mastodon instances that filters on country:
https://mastodon.fediverse.observer/list 🧵#howTo #EuropeanAlternatives #decoupling #nonAligned #alternatives #nonUS #MastodonMigration #search #discoverability #MastodonGuide #privacy #GDPR #Mastodon #NewHere #Newbie #beginner #FediverseTips #FediTips #FediHelp #MastodonHelp #MastodonTips #MastodonHowTo #resource #resources
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As the scope of #cataloging, as well as the depth and complexity of cataloging #standards evolve and grow, Ex Libris is working with the community to build solutions that ensure #content #quality, at scale.
👉 They are undertaking initiatives to harness advanced technologies to assist catalogers & #libraries in their quest for better #data and #discoverability in #Alma, & finally in the #Primo #discovery tool.
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CW: excessive hashtags
can we please CW excessive use of hashtags
I'm getting a stroke from reading this shit#fedi #meta #metaalert #mastodon #yasseen #fedimeta #cw #contentwarning #excessive #excessivehashtags #skibiditoilet #stroke #imhavingastroke #eyebleach #howtounseethis #problematic #content #warning #media #eyecancer #accessibility #experience #fedi2024 #fediexperience #fedilife #social #socialmedia #federation #usability #twitter #hashtag #hashtags #discoverability #mrbeast #fortnite #timsweeny
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A social media system without discoverability makes a mockery of either the word "social" or the word "media" but I'm not sure which.
Or possibly it just promises too much or too little (or possibly both at once).
But either way it won't work for a lot of people.
#fediverse #socialmedia #mastodon #search #hashtags #discoverability #findability #usability
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CW: {About #MastodonForks; #installment #2 but not last}
In the next future installment, we will #discuss #available #solutions.
This week, i am trying to clarify #safety and the problem of #governance at #Mastodon.
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#discoverability #content #frameworks #development #softwareDevelopment #Fediverse #benevolentDictator #dependencies #dev #GitHub #features #instances #MastoAdmins #MastodonAdmins #extensions #forks #forking ☕#saferAlternatives #protection #personalSafety #communitySafety #security 👇🏾 -
#Welcome to #immigrants!
You may worry that your conversation suddenly is cut off from the rest of the #Fediverse.
I like to offer solutions:
- register an account at an instance likely to stay federated: https://mastodon.help/instances/en?lang=112&desc=&minu=800&maxu=80000&minau=800&minki=8000&black=1&creg=1&appr=0&lcok=0&ord=rand&advc=1&p=1
- and go to your #MastoAdmin and ask them to improve on #moderation #guidelines.
You may build from:
https://hachyderm.io/about/more
https://zirk.us/about
https://myna.social/about
#TwitterMigration #DSA #discoverability #safety #networkPolitics #benevolence #birds #ethology -
I am quite surprised that up to now nobody among the many people coming to the #Fediverse from #Twitter has developed a script or a tool that automates periodic self #boosting and re-boosting of one’s own posts, to increase #visibility and #discoverability.
I would love to have it, but I must admit my timeline would become absolute hell.
