Just because you wish to talk about your own country does not mean I want to listen to the politics of a country I am not a citizen/resident of nor have ever set foot in. That’s what content warnings and other functionality allow me to do. Unfortunately, Lemmy.

(Also notice how I specifically single out “US politics” and not “politics” in general. That is a different thing where “politics” is sometimes used to mean “anything I don’t like not from a white cis het from the upper middle class person”. That is not the case here. I am simply tired of hearing about Trump and Biden and Harris and whoever the new VP is or whoever the Republican Main Character of the day is or the Democrat Main Character of the day is)

True, that will at least let you figure out what is a fediverse link and what isn’t. Most implementations I know either use the same URL for both the AP representation of a post and it’s HTML one (differentiated by the Accept header), or have a redirect from the HTML view to the AP representation when an AP type is requested (or, very rarely, the via Link header/<link> html tag), which means you can reuse code used for the “search URL to load community” feature in order to make this possible.

Given the list of fedi instances your instance is aware of is already present in the API, clients already have the tools to do this, I believe.

How do you expect for that auto-detection to work? Just a regex on example.com/c/community? What happens when some other instance software decides to use a different URL format? Or do you just assume Lemmy is the only thing out here?

Doesn’t help. Everything from the meme/joke/fun communities you’d expect people to use to tune out The Horrors™ to discussion about the ActivityPub standards (what little exists that doesn’t conflate it with Just Lemmy or Just Mastodon) devolve to US politics in like two comments. For me at least this entire section of fedi is a US politics-radioactive one I try spending as little time as possible (that includes posting non-politics!)

I find myself having significantly more fun on the microblogging side of the fedi, ruining jokes to ground in like 4 minutes with my oomfs and making followup meta jokes about how jokes only last 4 minutes. People actually use content warnings to hide away The Horrors™ when they want to talk about it, which means filters actually work. (Things like alt text for images also helps with word filters!)

Which instances did you try? I want to check if it was the background radiation of USpol inherent to most online communities you’re sick of (which there really isn’t a solution beyond keeping up with the newest buzzwords to add to your filters for from what I can tell) or the dot-social/kolektiva/twitter-like “my political happenings are too important for a content warning and must be boosted to everyone’s eyes 24/7” variety of USpol (which there is a ton of in Lemmy as well but i don’t think most people are ready for that debate yet)

The second one can be ameliorated a little by picking a smaller, sillier instance (hint: the weirder the domain, the better) and not following The Same Large Accounts Everyone Does.

In fact, I would advise against Mastodon the software altogether and instead point you towards instances of Akkoma or one of the not-Japanese Misskey forks such as Sharkey, Firefish, or Iceshrimp. The vibes of most instances I’ve seen seem to be cozier, and the Bubble timeline (called Recommended Timeline by some software) helps with discovering people to follow beyond the said Large Accounts.

Look into opening an account on an Iceshrimp instance like https://fedia.social, or an Akkoma instance like http://pleroma.envs.net. Their APIs are an extension on top of the Mastodon APIs (and both support Markdown and should expose them to apps). Sharkey also has some Mastodon API compatibility but it’s quite broken and might require some odd workarounds to get stuff working.

That said, for rich text, parsing the HTML will be more than enough for nearly all cases.

nah, there are plenty of truth wannabes (freeze peach bigotry safe havens) that actively federate. just look at literally any competent server’s blocked instances list and you’ll see a few examples. there’s a reason why nobody* runs completely open federation

*: aside from people who’re friendly with that crowd ofc

(vanilla) mastodon does not have markdown, and content from other instances (marked up or not) get transmitted as HTML over the wire (and the mastodon API serves sanitized HTML to apps).

mastodon forks like glitch, and clones of the mastodon API like those on pleroma/akkoma and iceshrimp do serve the markdown source AFAIK, but unless OP’s looking to… idk, support MFM (which, on a non-web app would be difficult) I don’t really see the point in that.

mastodon doesn’t “discover” akkoma content and won’t show anything unless you’re following a user from there, which kinda sucks.

I mean – that’s how all of them work. Even Lemmy. Unless your instance administrator joins relays (which have tradeoffs between privacy / effectiveness of blocking) your instance is only ever aware of posts from followed people (and reply threads followed people are involved in)

(also MUCH lighter on server resources, compared to most other twitter-like alternatives)

Mastodon is just unusually heavy, really. Even Misskey & forks are lighter than Masto on the server side (preferring being bloated on the client instead)

Mastodon feels like a fucking funeral.

You’re clearly nowhere near the good parts, then.

In my experience, once when you find your way into the correct circles the microblog-verse makes the “shitposting” of Lemmy look like r/memes. I do agree that discoverability could be better though, it took me 4-5 months before I got the hang of it. And now I barely check Lemmy despite my Lemmy account being older than my earliest microblog account (under this name, anyway).

One important thing is that your instance matters quite a bit more than here. Starting on a large general purpose instance (especially if it’s mastodon.social) and just following Large Accounts and Nobody Else like most people recommend for some reason is just setting yourself up for disappointment. Instead, get on a smaller interest-specific instance (rule of thumb: the weirder the domain the better your experience will be!) and follow the local timeline (and on good software, the bubble/recommended timelines). And post stuff/interact with people. Don’t be that one person that does nothing but boost news bots and occasionally butt into replies of people asking rhetorical questions they already know the answer for.

(Perhaps Lemmy is better at news or whatever, I wouldn’t know as I block all news communities I can find – I just don’t see the point as all the discussion around most news ends up predictable, unproductive (not that internet communities necessarily need to be “productive”), and unnecessarily angry)

Also in a world with usable™ Misskey forks and Akkoma I think the limitations of Mastodon the software are really starting to show, and I urge anyone who’s been disappointed in Mastodon to try other microblog software. (Quotes are already a thing if you know where to look! So are emoji reactions, because people have more emotions than :star:)

the 0.19 implementation is so half-assed I genuinely think the Lemmy devs just don’t want that functionality but expected quite a lot of backlash if they outright said as much, so they decided to implement something that ticks the box in the “wanted features” list without having any effect

afaik it only blocks communities and explicitly lets users from blocked instances through

.world is unique in that because of its size it has kinda ended up being “Lemmy” to most people. I very much doubt the people posting porn on .world care about instances and federation and just treat .world as a centralized site

I would rather imagine a cute kitten sleeping but you do you

it used to have it hardcoded in software but I believe they made it an instance option a bit before the reddit exodus

if you were to focus this on just Lemmy itself as opposed to the wider fedi (“Especially given that there was just an update allowing for individuals to block instances they don’t like” implies that’s the case) you already have nothing to worry about as you encountering a threads user here will be even slimmer than encountering a mastodon user.

threads is primarily targeting the microblog/personal side of fedi. the incentives and privacy expectations are quite different compared to this side of fedi

re active users: they’re a large open registration instance, they likely have a fair chunk of twitter people who joined during one of the many migrations and decided not to stick around.

git commit -m $(date)

well I just checked and while “sync contacts” did not turn itself on, “allow contacts to add me” did. there’s definitely something going on

They aren’t forced to do anything. Manifest v3 is just a part of the WebExtensions API (which is not a standard and is really just “whatever Chrome does except we find/replace’d the word chrome to browser”) which both Safari and Firefox chose to implement in order to make porting of Chrome extensions easier.

Before that, Firefox had a much more powerful extension system that allowed extensions quite a lot of access to browser internals, but that turned out to be a maintenance nightmare so they walled those APIs off (not a coincidence that Firefox started getting massive performance improvements after that, and extensions stopped breaking every other release) and decided to go the WebExtensions route. I have no clue what Safari was up to but I think they implemented it after.

If they don’t implement Manifest v3, extensions that want to work across multiple browsers need to support both the older Manifest v2 and the later Manifest v3, which would be a burden not many extension authors would want to bother with, which would make them just say “yeah we’re not supporting anything outside Chrome”. Firefox avoids this problem by extending the v3 API to allow for the functionality necessary for powerful ad blocking Google removed in v3 (webRequestBlocking) while also implementing the new thing (declarativeNetRequest) side by side, so extensions that want to take advantage of the powerful features on Firefox can do so, while Chrome extensions that are fine with the less powerful alternative can still be ported over relatively easily.

Firefox does have it’s fair share of extensions on top of the WebExtension API already (sidebar support for one), so adding one more isn’t too big of a deal.

https://tildes.net/invite should let you generate some