very limited ability to self-brand

I mean, yeah. Especially when the content of your flawlessly customised site is federated to thousands other activity pub enabled sites with different stylesheets and aesthetics. That isn’t a problem with Mastodon per se, it’s just the nature of federation.

I do agree with your broader point that Mastodon has become synonymous with fediverse microblogging, which again is what most people associate with the fediverse, period.

Oh, still is.

“Lemmy is terrible!”

“Have you tried kbin?”

“kbin isn’t developed, try mbin”

“I tried mbin, but piefed is better”

“I only use the comments section of federated Wordpress blogs, by email”

“Zomg you guys, somebody launched qbin”

30% self-congratulatory talk about how popular bluesky is this week.

TBF, Mastodon was the same when I joined. I just muted all mention of “mastodon” + variations, Bob’s your uncle. Navel gazing meta discourse is the least exciting updates on any platform.

It is still funny to visit random egg profiles on there and see they only tooted once, two years ago, saying “so this is mastodon, wonder how this works” and then never again.

I’m not criticising my right to put in extra work to make promising efforts available on platforms that do not track users; I criticise the fact that the developers didn’t do this in the first place.

But good work putting the onus on me, you complete corporate rando.

Nice idea, will follow how this develops, but — FFS, the pack CSVs are all on Google Docs.

Independent, trustworthy repository, plz.

Same, I stay away from /all and only follow my subscribed communities by new.

This is the exact reason email never took off. /s

You say “chance”, I read “intent” 🤷 Mainstream isn’t what it’s cracked up to be.

While true, covering up fundamental faults to keep afloat is hardly an example of best practice.

Same. My web host is already creaking under the strain of Wordpress, I’m not going to chance it by adding two-way federation to the rickety database.

I understand the ease from an admin POV, but besides locking users into a third party, corporate suite, everything UX about Office365 sucks balls.

That is certainly an improvement over Signal, yeah.

Yeah, “Matrix as IRC” with general interest rooms is an unmonitored cesspool. “Matrix as IM” for staying in touch with mates is doing just fine.

“Slightly biased”, yeah.

There is also MicroBlogPub, although development has wound down in the past year. I spun up a test instance before that, though, and it does what it says on the tin.

Of late I’ve tried out the Translate You Android app. Not necessarily an endorsement of the app itself, but it offers a selection of 9 translator services, a few of which are libre.

Certainly LibreTranslate and Lingva [my bad, it’s a GTranslate front-end] Apertium are open source, probably a few more on their list. Give them a try and see which works best for you!

Looks like Mastodon have been hiring accountants 😆 https://mastodon.social/@Mastodon/112769333503182077

I mean, Deepl is useful, and more accurate than Google Translate — but I’d prefer a libre alternative. Haven’t found one yet that hits the mark.

But anyway, that’s OT for the Fediverse sub 🙂

Yeah, for one thing deepl is defo not part of the fediverse.

Fwiw, I found this project that may or may not make a batch export possible (but I can’t tell if that includes front matter): https://github.com/kursad-k/joplin_batch_exporter