#onlinecommunities — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #onlinecommunities, aggregated by home.social.
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Stack Exchange brings together hundreds of open communities where people ask questions, share expertise, and solve problems across technology, science, culture, and more. Explore the network: https://stackexchange.com/sites 🌐💡 #StackExchange #KnowledgeSharing #OnlineCommunities
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Show Me Where It Hurts
I have been building and moderating conversation on the internet since the internet had conversation worth moderating, and one quarrel from those years has never let me put it down. It happened on Reddit, in one of the medical-advice communities, the ask-a-doctor kind, and the room's name has dissolved from memory while its images have refused to leave. People arrived with photographs of their own fresh cuts and posted them for assessment, and the moderators split over what they were looking at. One camp called the pictures fine in a medical setting: a patient presenting an injury to doctors, the oldest transaction in medicine arriving through a new door. The other camp read performance, attention pursued through injury, and wanted every image gone. I stood with the second camp's verdict while distrusting its reasoning, because the deletion seemed right to me for a reason neither camp was saying: whatever any single poster intended, the gallery was awe-inspiring to the wrong eyes. I could not have defended that instinct with numbers then, and now I can, so here is the argument laid out in full, the folk theory measured, the audience counted, the room itself put on the scale. […] -
Viral gardening grandad sets out to inspire the young https://www.allforgardening.com/1911724/viral-gardening-grandad-sets-out-to-inspire-the-young/ #garden #gardening #GeraldStratford #harvest #OnlineCommunities #SocialMedia #stratford
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The case for MUDs in modern times
https://www.andrewzigler.com/feed/the-case-for-muds-in-modern-times
Comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49034217
#HackerNews #MUDs #ModernGaming #OnlineCommunities #RetroGaming #GameDesign
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Today on NovaLandia: "My Experimentation with Bluesky is Over"
The extremely cool and awesome villain in Farcry 3 once said, "Do you know the definition of insanity?" Doing the same thing over and over again, and expecting different results. And I feel like I've ...
https://mkultra.monster/socialmedia/2026/07/20/bluesky-done/
#bluesky #twitter #onlinecommunities #socialnetworks #toxicity
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A Trip to 90s Kansai: Exploring the XD FirstClass Network BBS
https://cdrom.ca/games/2026/05/30/xd.html
Comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48901083
#HackerNews #90sKansai #XDFirstClass #BBS #RetroGaming #OnlineCommunities #TechHistory
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Big Tech thrives on division and on treating us as isolated individuals—so why do we still trust its platforms to hold our communities together?
Join the next #RABT online workshop, “Strengthening Online Communities,” on July 29th at 3pm UTC to brainstorm ways to build digital spaces that truly serve our movements rather than Big Tech’s business model.
Details and registration: https://howto.riseagainstbig.tech/pub/online-workshop-strengthening-onlline-communities #RiseAgainstBigTech #OnlineCommunities #OpenSource .
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Why Are Communities Becoming More Valuable Than Audiences?
For many years, building an audience was considered one of the most important goals in business.The logic was simple.More followers meant more visibility.More visibility meant more opportunities.More opportunities meant more growth.This approach helped countless creators, entrepreneurs, and businesses build successful brands online.Today, however, another trend is emerging.Communities are becoming increasingly valuable.Many business owners are discovering that a smaller, highly engaged […] -
South Korean Forums Will Need to Scan Every Images with AI Censorship Tools
#HackerNews #SouthKorea #AI #Censorship #OnlineCommunities #PrivacyTech #DigitalRights #ImageScanning
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Bluesky – Do people still use it
So ever since blueSky came out when Twitter went to hell (Again, again), a lot of people went to Bluesky because it was going to be the next safe space, the next Twitter because X or Twitter has become a breeding ground for negative and hate. So I guess I will ask. Is BlueSky still Alive? https://media1.tenor.com/m/2ZuUWp5LDfIAAAAC/konata-lucky-star.gif I ask this because not counting users who moved to BlueSky to get away from Elon Musk, nazis, and whatever new term people throw out that […]https://onychaos.wordpress.com/2026/05/26/bluesky-do-people-still-use-it/
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How on earth can anyone call
lemmy.world,wizard.casa, andgotosocial.socialanything but absolute rubbish? They’re a total disgrace, a complete waste of time and effort. It’s astonishing how these so-called platforms can still be allowed to exist when they’re nothing but worthless, ruined excuses for social spaces! Absolutely infuriating!#Fediverse #Lemmy #GoToSocial #SocialMedia #TechFrustration #InstanceDown #SoftwareCritique #WebDevelopment #UserExperience #OnlineCommunities #Decentralised #TechThoughts #Rant #SocialPlatforms #FOSS
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I've witnessed that Fediverse servers have shut down... Some have returned online...
#Fediverse #Mastodon #ServerDown #Decentralised #FOSS #SelfHosted #TechCommunity #DigitalResilience #Hosting #OpenSource #Federation #Instance #SysAdmin #NetworkOutage #OnlineCommunities #WebHosting
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I am grateful that I survived character assassinations made by
lemmy.worldandwizard.casa. I am still alive despite my overwhelming moments. They are not there to bring justice; they are managing risks to their survival by attacking my character and exploiting me. I know who the admin is, and who they are. They take for granted my effort in making things right. They think they can make me forget.Edit: Still,
lemmy.worlddid not return my data despite my explicit request to them, and they blamed their nature, stating that they are unpaid and minimising the seriousness by returning my data after approximately 28 days. However, I did not accept this because they violated the set deadline of 3 days.Edit 2: Also, one user was also harassing me through DMs when I was being vulnerable. The Fediverse instance is
gotosocial.social. For them, perhaps the harassment is cool, harmless, and democratic—until someone does the same to them, at which point they might label it as trolling.#fediverse #mentalhealth #onlinecommunities #dignity #trauma #survival #selfawareness #reflection #internet #humanity #harassment #healing #identity #justice #resilience #fediverse #lemmy #mastodon #onlinecommunities #mentalhealth #trauma #healing #resilience #survival #selfawareness #reflection #humanity #dignity #identity #justice #harassment #cyberbullying #internet #socialmedia #decentralization #selfhosting #psychology #wellbeing #recovery #emotions #discussion #ethics #community #voice #truth #growth #neurodiversity #support #accountability #online
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🌐 Ah, the internet is dying—much like my interest in Terry's essay on the "boring" web. Apparently, nothing is sacred, and everything you once loved is now a ghost 👻 of its former self. But hey, who needs vibrant online communities when you can have #bots fighting over ad space instead? 🤖💸
https://www.terrygodier.com/the-boring-internet #internetdying #boringweb #onlinecommunities #adspace #HackerNews #ngated -
"After years of too-online hyper-optimized isolation, people are rediscovering that life is better when somebody nearby knows your name and your general comings and goings.
They might not be your closest friend, but they show up anyway — sometimes awkwardly, sometimes imperfectly, sometimes just to stand there and witness."
(paywalled) https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/486133/what-is-neighborism
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I will never forget that
lemmy.worldandwizard.casachallenged and stripped down my dignity. This is inappropriate and dehumanising.#fediverse #lemmy #onlinecommunities #dignity #mentalhealth #respect #boundaries #socialmedia #experience #reflection #humanity #ethics #internet #wellbeing #voice
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May 21 will mark 25 consecutive years that I've managed the same online community. Can I make it to 50?
We're working on some plans to celebrate the occasion. It's interesting to get into generational online community. Not just because your community attracts people of different ages but because different people were born after it launched, and they are now participating in the community.
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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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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.
