Jerry

As one Admin to another, I’m sad to hear that we’re losing a good instance. And, I’m sorry that people ruined your fun.

Thanks for all you’ve done. All the best to you.

The key word here is “connected” instances. You don’t find hashtag-related posts from all the servers, just the servers that your server is connected to and also only posts that your server has seen from other servers.

This is why, on my instance, I relay with over 300 other instances, some of them are the larger ones. All the posts they see on their server are duplicated onto my smaller server. The impact is that while my server is small, it has the same messages as one of the large servers which makes for a better experience. Note that Mastodon.social does not relay with any other instance. Not that most instances could possibly hold all their posts and accounts anyway.

When I search for hashtags on my instance, I do get a lot of hits.

Many smaller servers do not relay as much as I do, or at all, because it requires disk space to store all the posts, images, and accounts that are streaming in constantly from all these other servers. I don’t have these concerns because I have unlimited capacity. So, the experience will vary depending on which server your account is on.

You have to use hashtags on Mastodon if you want your messages to be seen because there is no AI to fill timelines. People follow hashtags and search for them. Then you’ll get likes and boosts.

And, you control your own timeline by following hashtags, following people, and searching for hashtags. This way, unlike Twitter, your timeline only has posts that you are interested in. Once you get this set up, it’s quite nice to only see posts that you like reading, without advertising and without posts meant to enrage you.

Also you can use https://fedi.directory to find great people to follow.

OMG. Thanks for posting. I run a Mastodon server as well and, oh my, the Mastodon Developers would never have been willing to help me. A wild tale. Glad the fix ended up in the next release. Thanks for posting!

There were two screen shots. I saw them. At least one of them was doctored. That is all anybody knows. How are some people so certain which Admin doctored the screen shot?

@Chozo Interesting thought

@SamXavia I think your friend is a looney conspiracy theorist

Mine won’t nor will any of my other 3 Fediverse servers.

I know of a number of Mastodon servers that have already de-federated or limited threads.net, even though it does not yet connect to the Fediverse. Some are even limiting or suspending connections to servers that refuse to de-federate from threads.net and are trying to pressure other servers to do the same.

An Admin has no right to force their personal agendas onto all the people who are on their servers. People are competent enough to make their own decisions and can individually decide to block or limit Threads. I block servers on my server to protect members from hateful people.

I will limit threads.net if their moderation is inadequate, just as I do now for a number of Mastodon servers that don’t do much to keep hatred and offensive content off their servers. This won’t prevent anyone from following someone or being followed by someone, on threads.net. It just means that people on my server need to approve being followed and that posts from threads.net won’t show up in the public timeline.

At this point, I haven’t heard of any Kbin instances planning to de-federate but there’s a ton of yacking about it on Mastodon. I finally muted the “threads” hashtag to get some peace from it.

@stackPeek You are currently on kbin.social so I assume kbin.social has been suspended (a.k.a. de-federated or blocked) from that server. On Mastodon, “Suspended” means totally blocked. You cannot follow anyone, they cannot follow you. All communication, including API requests, are blocked.

A Mastodon instance blocking kbin.social, is, to me, irrational behavior by the Admin and an extreme disservice to those on the server.

Can you share the name of the Mastodon instance?

I agree with all that you’ve said

RE: it seems like the only way to have a reasonable chance of getting decent results for hashtag searches is to be on the biggest server

Well, yes, and no. You can relay with other Mastodon instances and they will share there traffic with you so that people on your instance will have the same content as on their instances PLUS the traffic from all the other instances that are relaying with them as well. So, your server will see a ton of stuff. No shortage of stuff coming in

There’s a number of good relays. I recommend these two at a minimum:

https://relay.infosec.exchange/inbox
https://bigrelay.social/inbox

In the Administration section, there’s a Relay page where you can put these in.

For the first one, @Jerry is the person to contact if it doesn’t enable for you. Not sure how many instances relay with him, but it must be a large number.

For the second one, which currently has 328 instances connected together, you can get more information at https://bigrelay.social/

Hope this helps

1. Before joining an instance you can go to their /terms page and see if they will tolerate you because you’re just making stuff up and your ignorance will hurt and endanger people. Most KBIN and Lemmy servers will, fortunately, not willingly host you because of this.
2. I won’t tolerate you, so don’t join my instance. So, 1 down.

I think you perfectly got it right. Everything that you wrote includes exactly the same questions and conclusions I’ve come to.

“It seems like it’s trying to be a link aggregator and a microblogging software”

I think too this is its purpose; To to be a link and content aggregator plus a microblogging platform. Therefore it confusingly has both Reddit-like and Mastodon-like behavior.

It’s almost there. If it automatically aggregated magazines and communities into one place on a server as well, I think it would achieve its purpose as an aggregator. For now, there could be a dozen magazines and communities with the same subject that aren’t connected because instances have no automated view of what is on other instances and so redundant magazines get created.

Whether we need what it’s trying to be, I don’t know. For me, I use Mastodon and so I haven’t used anything on KBIN except the magazines, at least, so far, in my one week of experience.