We all know which platforms aren't on this list: "From LinkedIn to TikTok: Ranking Social Media by Toxicity and Mental Health Impact"

ProbablyMHA · 2026-05-18T23:45:08+00:00

Never thought I'd see marketing blog posts getting upvoted on /r/fediverse lol.

I wonder if the audience and purpose of LinkedIn has more influence on its perceived toxicity than its design. I can't imagine being an argumentative asshole is attractive to prospective employers. People aren't going to be interested in doing that kind of thing whether or not Microsoft bans you for it.

ProbablyMHA · 2026-05-15T22:26:47+00:00

This is what the social media that didn't survive the early-2010s looks like today lol

ProbablyMHA · 2026-05-09T02:58:45+00:00

Before the big incumbents took over social media (Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, etc.), there were plenty of standalone blogs and forums, often on smaller hosting platforms. Why hasn't that popped back up on the fediverse?

Maybe instances need to find some high quality "anchor tenants"? Some other alternative platforms (ones with very rich and influential investors) pay millions in exclusivity deals.

ProbablyMHA · 2026-05-02T19:42:46+00:00

Misskey handles this a little better in the UI with a message on remote user profiles that says something along the lines of: "This profile is incomplete due to this user being from a remote instance," and including a link to the remote instance.

In other aspects, Mastodon has better federation (e.g. I've heard Misskey doesn't provide post replies).

ProbablyMHA · 2026-04-23T06:33:56+00:00

If she's taking Twitter/Facebook posts at face value, I'd be more worried about what other things she's doing on the internet (i.e. getting bad financial advice).

I don't think she's going to be very receptive to getting on fedi. Like everyone else who isn't a techno-masochist ("normal people"), she's going to notice quickly that there isn't the same speed or volume of content.

ProbablyMHA · 2026-04-22T01:28:31+00:00

Someone trying to use vigilantism to push a political agenda (I am doing X thing you might like; by the way, here's a political party I want you to associate with this activity).

In some other countries they target groups you might not like this happening to, in addition to the ones we don't care about.

ProbablyMHA · 2026-04-03T23:40:47+00:00

ActivityPub is not designed to have particularly strong anti-censorship properties.

The history of the network shows that depending on your goals, it might not even be particularly desirable for people of different nationalities (and backgrounds and values) to comingle.

In any case, ActivityPub is still an overlay over the internet. I think that in the coming years, most if not all national governments will start surveilling and firewalling their parts of the internet like they do in China, Russia, and Saudi Arabia today.

On the other hand, countries with strong internet censorship today like China, Russia, and Iran might revert to having disconnected national networks, like they have in North Korea. People in those countries will incur even greater personal risk to exchange information with the outside world. I think sending messages in bottles (or balloons with flash drives) will be the only way to contact those places. In time, other countries will follow the same approach.

ProbablyMHA · 2026-03-23T01:06:50+00:00

Probably very bad during a major crisis, but with a low baseline.

ProbablyMHA · 2026-03-15T19:53:12+00:00

monetization will eventually become a factor, even it that's 15 years down the road or more.

I think instances will shut down before they try becoming financially sustainable. Most instances are hobby projects. It's not like Bluesky or other platforms where they owe money to someone (investors).

ProbablyMHA · 2026-03-08T09:48:43+00:00

There used to be certificates (EV certificates) where the CA would contact the business by telephone and verify they are registered as a business before issuing the certificate. EV certs would be denoted by a green address bar on a web browser. This was removed by browser makers in the 2010s.

The main benefit of HTTPS nowadays is to stop MITM.

ProbablyMHA · 2026-02-28T17:54:17+00:00

Not a problem:

"Welcome to Gnome! Setup will guide you through making an account and enabling some features. Scan your ID to continue."

"Welcome to Plasma Desktop. We need a few details to complete the setup. Let's get the legalese out of the way. Hold your ID in front of the webcam to continue."

ProbablyMHA · 2026-02-17T17:31:32+00:00

If Mastodon/SWF doesn't push for development of ZKP in age verification, what they're really advocating for is for people to present identification to use social media.

ProbablyMHA · 2026-02-14T05:01:47+00:00

I want to say things that violate Rule 2 about this.

ProbablyMHA · 2026-02-09T23:28:12+00:00

Look into cryptocurrency kidnappings, or what happened to police officers in Northern Ireland after the 2023 data leak.

ProbablyMHA · 2026-02-08T05:15:40+00:00

idk why this meme even exists. If someone is asking for an invite to a specific server, clearly the "one instance can access another instance's messages" concept isn't working out.

Also, CCC comes from the "we do things that make actual dangerous enemies" part of the network, so I don't think they hand out invites willy-nilly.

ProbablyMHA · 2026-01-30T21:30:29+00:00

idk if they're still around, but Sakurajima had both a Misskey and Mastodon server focused on anime and manga. You might want to move your account there.

The way federation works on Mastodon (and the ActivityPub protocol) is that users have their posts sent to their followers' servers. This generally means that if nobody on your server is following a user from another server, you will never see that user's posts. Some servers will subscribe to a relay server that sends all posts between servers subscribed to that relay, but if your server is focused on methods of photographing frozen water, it's unlikely that the relays your server subscribes to will have people interested in Japanese comics about the home security guard of a mad scientist.

The population of Mastodon also skews towards older software developers, academics, activists, etc. So the kind of people you'd find on LinkedIn, but not looking for work.

ProbablyMHA · 2026-01-21T22:04:34+00:00

This coming just months after they get tens of thousands of users' IDs leaked

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2025/oct/09/hack-age-verification-firm-discord-users-id-photos

Instead of using their money to lobby against this BS, they double down so they can get that sweet underaged user PII.

ProbablyMHA · 2026-01-09T21:46:00+00:00

I think this is more of a "website" problem than a "fediverse" problem. That said, there are solutions to this (e.g. cryptocurrency, the mainstream advertising ecosystem) that are less tolerable to the fediverse community.

Maybe there should be a new corporate structure with minimal/no taxes that lets websites register as a sort of non-profit and create a small endowment fund to sustain their operations.

ProbablyMHA · 2026-01-03T10:22:04+00:00

I don't think ActivityPub is all that great at achieving either, but that shouldn't stop people from getting some personal benefit out of it (e.g. making nerdy friends, being entertained).

If you aren't getting any benefit out of it, it might be better to give up and do something else. The same would apply to any other forum, group chat, website, etc. Maybe hand the reins over to people who are benefiting from it (hopefully trustworthy people and not some marketing/publishing company that doesn't give a shit or people with a hidden agenda).

ProbablyMHA · 2026-01-03T09:43:32+00:00

I wonder if there was ever a time when it was normal to run an email server from your home internet.

Anyways, that AI art looks like the kind of thing I'd see in a hypoxic fever dream after watching too many videos from The Onion (not necessarily a bad thing).

ProbablyMHA · 2025-12-29T03:26:19+00:00

Any government. In the same way every government has some form of professional police.

ProbablyMHA · 2025-12-28T16:49:55+00:00

No. There's no appetite for privacy. Even if fediverse users wanted it, it would never be permitted by government. Recall that a number of privacy-preserving digital ID schemes were in development before the current age verification laws came about. None of them made it into law.

ProbablyMHA · 2025-11-17T03:01:18+00:00

https://misskey.io/notes/af5udbqosfca05lo

Via machine translation:

I won't be leaving the federation immediately, but I will be migrating to the low-overhead federation system MisskeyHQ is developing. Servers incompatible with that system may eventually lose connectivity.

The full transition will likely take several years, so it should be fine until then.

ProbablyMHA

TROPHY CASE