...well, just peek at my follow list and add anyone who seems interesting. It's totally free! You can remove them at any time if you find out their posts aren't interesting after all.
@lubimaer@5tr34k_@ilwoody@patrick My biggest issue with Tusky is that video uploads almost always fail after they finish uploading. Also, adding multiple images at once seems to fail often (only one image is added).
@patrick@lubimaer@5tr34k_@codewiz thanks for pointing that out .. I couldnât find much XD btw this official iOS client doesnât seem to support that âcolumnâ concept itâs actually feels limited compared to Amaroq
@codewiz@5tr34k_@ilwoody@lubimaer Searches (including for tags) are limited to the posts that your instance has seen (i.e. posted on your instance or followed/replied to/... by somebody on your instance).
There have been a few projects to build search engines for the Fediverse but somehow all projects I find are now abandoned.
@lubimaer@patrick@5tr34k_@codewiz possible but if I look at my stream I see a lot of cats and some post in Japanese .. and Iâve no idea if those are the expected public posts or just a view of the accounts I follow (this client doesnât really help) :blobsurprised:
@ilwoody@lubimaer@patrick@5tr34k_ In the web frontend, the leftmost column is the feed from the people you follow. You can also click on the local timeline (too noisy for me) and global timeline (cover your eyes).
@5tr34k_@ilwoody@lubimaer@patrick Pleroma seems actively developed and upgrade instructions look similar to any Rails or Django app: deploy the code, then run schema migrations...
@5tr34k_@ilwoody@lubimaer@patrick That said, I wouldn't recommend running an instance for a single user... unless the goal is learning, there's too much overhead.
If you have some money to spare, donate it to the admin of your instance. If you have spare time, contribute to the Fediverse by publishing good content, or perhaps by volunteering as moderator / admin of an existing instance.
@patrick@lubimaer@5tr34k_@ilwoody Actually, we're not disagreeing: my point was that single-user instances are wasteful in terms of sysadmin time and hosting costs. I was not arguing for centralizing the #fediverse onto 3 giant instances.
There's probably an ideal size where the number of inter-instance connections doesn't grow too high and operating costs are spread among a sufficient number of users (or still low enough for a generous sysadmin to pay out of pocket).
While it's still a bit too much work to keep an instance up and running (something that should be improved), the time and/or money spent on running your own instance is a good investment in the health of the Fediverse:
The Fediverse benefits if feature development can't assume that people rally around a few big instances. It's harder to implement certain features that way, e.g. in the recent discussion around having or not having a server-local timeline really was about "topical" timelines to discover users with similar interests. However that implies that all "open source-y" folks have an account on fosstodon, all LGBT folks have an account on lgbt.io to make the "local" part in "local timeline" work.
That's bad both for intersectionality (is a queer open source activist forced to used two accounts?) and when trying to avoid network effects.
Why avoid network effects? An admin can go rogue (we've seen this often enough in the Fediverse already even though it's still tiny). It skews incentives when you have a captive audience (monetization!). It encourages incompatibility when a few large instances/implementations can decide what protocol they _really_ speak.
My ideal instance size is "group of people that already have some kind of social connection in a different context". A family, a club, a pre-existing community where people know each other... An instance with a single user is just fine, too.
@codewiz@patrick@lubimaer@5tr34k_@ilwoody it'd be cool if you could switch instances without giving up your username. But that would require some sort of global naming system or piggyback off of DNS to map username to server address, but it's probably too much to ask new users to register a domain for themselves, whether it be DNS or some blockchain based name service. That might fix the pressure toward centralization Patrick describes though.