I thought I'd share my own patterns as a writing prompt to hear yours.

• Tildes -- This keyboard-to-keyboard connection we have here is why I loved Reddit years ago. It's slow-brain (vs. fast-brain), considerate, insightful, enjoyable, and yet doesn't waste my time.
• Lemmy -- This has my hopes up that it could be a way to find niche communities (one of the strengths of Reddit) in the federated lemmyverse, but instances large and small seem overwhelmed by users who, like me, are still figuring it out. I joined https://lemmy.one/ but I have a feeling that https://lemmy.ml/ is slightly more my style. I might jump or not, but no big difference since the federated communities that I like are available in both places. This may just be me being nitpicky over instance quirks (such as an instance that does not have downvotes or currently allow community creation).
• Mastadon -- Too Twitter for me. I never got (understood) Twitter or its appeal, and I don't understand the appeal of Mastadon, either. I deleted one account that I created and may leave it altogether. If you like/liked Twitter, you'll likely like Mastadon.
• Reddit -- niche interests and citywide subreddits are still valuable to me, but even these were and are dropping in quality due to terse Reddit mobile users and meme-culture and my interest in them is dropping in correlation. I nearly exclusively only read /r/loseit (I'm maintaining -125 pounds lost for 8 years so far) and a multireddit of local subreddits in my local area. Since the Rexxit, I don't look at much else on Reddit.
• Facebook -- like the local and niche subreddits, I read Facebook on and off (mostly off) for these as well. The Facebook Marketplace is the way I find second-hand items locally.

I'm beginning to understand why I'm not practicing my music (Barbershop Harmony) as much as I should recently!

Meta's new app, Instagram Threads, is planning to be compatible with the ActivityPub protocol. This means it will be possible to federate with services such as Mastodon.

I became aware of this as my Mastodon admin talked about being approached by Meta to discuss federation. Many other large instances have been approached too. There is a general apprehension about federating with Threads, with many instances (including mine) saying outright that they will not federate with any Meta product.

Personally, I think this is an advantage of federation. I can continue to use Mastodon and choose whether I want an instance that interacts with Meta or not.

I definitely understand the apprehension with providing all of your data/information to a company not exactly known for their good handling of data/information, but I'm also not as against it as some people seem to be. If they are going to create a service like this, I'd rather it was federated than a walled garden.

How do you feel?

There was a thread about this coincidentally exactly one year ago, give or take three hours. Ah, to be back in January 2020

I've been poking around on the fediverse again and I figured I'll never start using it unless I'm following some people. So, who here is on it? Please share some other people you follow, if you like.

I made an account a while back, and it was on the default instance since I didn't know any others to choose. I feel like it's a deliberate choice though (if nothing else it will give me a more curated timeline to scroll through) so I'd like to be deliberate about it at some point.

It's been a while since we've had a thread like this and our active users have cycled around a bit (plus there's a lot of dead links in the old threads), so who here is on the fediverse?

Connecting with some more people from here sounds nice :)

Posting this as a text post so that nobody has to go to Gab, but the source is here if you really want to. Full post copied below:

An update on "New Gab" and what to expect:

Progress on our new codebase is going well. For those who don't know, our plan is to fork existing open source software, Mastodon, which is based on the ActivityPub social networking protocol.

What does this mean in layman's terms?

• Gab will become an open source project, meaning developers from around the world can contribute the project and help us build.
• Gab will get several new features and PRO benefits, such as video uploading.
• You'll be able to log into and use dozens of existing mobile apps that exist on both App Stores with your Gab account and use Gab through these apps.
• We will be porting over all of your Gab posts, followers, etc to this new codebase.
• Gab will be getting a fresh paint job and be much more "user friendly." (See a mockup below, which isn't final.) Don't worry, it won't look anything like Mastodon (for those of you who know it is,) it will look like Gab.

What does the timeline look like for this going live?

At the moment we are working on building in Gab features that this open source social networking protocol does not currently have. Things like Gab Groups and editing. We are also finalizing a fresh redesign of the Gab interface. Once these two things are done, we will start porting over all existing Gab data. During this time we will invite Gabbers to beta test New Gab and give us feedback. Once Gabbers give us the go ahead we will finalize the transition and push it to Gab.com. All of these steps will occur over the next few weeks.

Why are you doing this?

• Moving Gab to open source brings transparency and additional help from developers in our community from around the world.
• Moving to the ActivityPub protocol as our base allows us to get into mobile App Stores without even having to submit and get approval of our own apps, whether Apple and Google like it or not.
• Ultimately we want to make Gab more user friendly, perform better, and be a product you all love. This will accomplish all of those things.

We are excited to share this with you and will have more information soon.

Thank you

This is a pretty interesting move by Gab. They had been kicked out of app stores, and like the post mentions, this will allow them to just piggyback on existing apps that work with Mastodon instead of needing their own. I saw at least one app dev say that they'd specifically block it from being used on Gab, but they probably won't all do that, and I'm sure they'll probably end up with some options.

People in the fediverse don't seem very happy about this overall, but it's probably also not a big deal. The main dev of Mastodon posted:

So Gab has decided that their own code that they spent $5M of investor money developing is so unsalvageably bad that they're going to use Mastodon's code instead, with the added bonus of leeching off of our apps (with Gab apps being banned from app stores)

This is an early warning to fellow admins to be vigilant and domain-block them on sight, when/if they appear (unconfirmed whether they intend to federate), and to app devs to consider if blocking Gab's domains from their app is necessary.

Remember that Gab is a sinking ship and they're basically grabbing onto Mastodon like a parasite in a desperate attempt to get attention from the "drama" of doing so.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/gab-is-in-full-meltdown-and-founder-andrew-torba-blames-the-deep-state

Torba has no self-awareness to see how pathetic it looks that his master race ass is incompetent at making a working website so he has to resort to using software made by a Jew instead.

App devs will block their domains, server admins will block their domains, and that'll be the end of that.

I can't shake the dejavu feeling I'm getting using any kind of messaging these days. Today we have an awful lot of messaging apps, that are all roughly the same, with similar features - Signal, Telegram, WhatsApp, Riot, etc. This happened once already, at the dawn of 200X IM revolution that deprecated SMS for good we also had MSN, ICQ, GTalk, Jabber, etc. This also was a set of very similar personal messaging clients and protocols, similar in any way to each other. It all changed when the multi-protocol messaging apps came out - Pidgin, QiP, Miranda and others made it easy to gather all your contacts from various protocols in one place and to keep in touch with everyone. Shortly after Jabber transports were made so you could congregate all other accounts into one single XMPP account. Even N900 that came out in 2009 had the ability to gather various accounts into one single contact list.
I feel like right now with all the segmented IM apps it's a good time for something like this to happen again, and Telegram already has wat-bridge.
What are your thoughts on that topic? Do you think the history will repeat itself? Would a new federated formate like XMPP rise up?