"Nothing to see here" @social.librem.one?

[dcnorris]

Why do I see no local activity at the @social.librem.one Mastodon instance?
Tootle screenshot:

(I note additionally that the browser interface presents no UI to access local toots.)

[tracy]

I guess since someone famous didn’t buy it, nobody’s talking there.

[leetaur]

Librem Social is an “opt-in” version of Mastodon. You only see toots from people you follow. There are no local or federated timelines in it.

From https://librem.one/

Safe.

Follow and hear from friends only. Watch the internet blow up only if you want to. Block anyone.

[prolog]

I don’t understand the reason for that. Maybe just because of misunderstanding of mastodon or lack of experience with it.

I totally agree that there should no manipulating algorithm pushing content and there obtrusive practices should be avoided somehow, ideally by design.

But social media is about networking and connecting people. How can users discover interesting people and content without a place to look for such? Okay I can look outside the fediverse e.g. in this forum and may find some. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a place inside mastodon i.e. local and federated timelines? That is under the assumption that those timelines don’t bother users. They can go there and have a look but are not forced to do so. That way users can find people to connect to, e.g. follow them.

What are the use cases of mastodon? What I imagined was (despite direct messages):

1. Discovering unknown interesting people and content. AFAICS this is only possible via the search function on social.librem.one.
2. Publishing content. AFAICS if I would post something nobody will see it without using the search function. Hence it may never be discovered by others at all and nobody will follow a user. Also I could imagine that for some people mastodon could possibly be an alternative to running their own blog. Unfortunately some (most?) instances have a length limit for posts. That makes only limited sense to me. If I have to say a bit more, why not letting doing so? I saw multiple times people spread their writings over multiple sequential posts, which belong together. Isn’t this silly. Twitter has often been criticized for that limit because complex subject can be discussed in such short posts.
3. Debating/discussing. I guess that works pretty much, I could imaging that mastodon will appear as a comment section below blog articles and other content, although I haven’t seen it, yet.

Also the server instance is not running the latest version, which is 4.1.0 according to Wikipedia. I haven’t researched any details but other instances seem to have useful features like following hashtags. Hence I encourage Purism to look into it and possible upgrade.

Right now I follow only a few people/organizations to stay up-to-date. I don’t need mastodon for that. I can use an RSS client, which gives me the same without need for registration.

I can hardly discover new content on social.librem.one. And I don’t see how to reach the intended audience on social.librem.one or on other instances.

Maybe I miss(understand) something, but AFAICS mastodon is of really limited use for me.

[OpojOJirYAlG]

There’s also the option of joining one of the instances that has one of these timelines you desire instead of trying to get Purism to change their instance to fit you.

Just something to consider.

[prolog]

Yes of course I could move to another instance. I could even run my own. I think now the reason for deactivating the public timelines came to my mind: Moderation. Moderation can be a huge burden. Without public timelines Purism doesn’t need to moderate.

[leetaur]

Other people can still see toots from Librem Social, so moderation of Social’s members is still needed, to a limited extent, if a complaint comes in from another instance.

Purism actually branched the Mastodon code to make Librem Social a fully opt-in social network, where you would not see anything unless you chose to. Purism also chose not to block any instances, leaving it up to the user to decide what he/she wanted to see, not a central entity (censorship that has been growing on things like Twitter and Facebook).

Purism discussed why they got rid of the timelines in this post -

Opt-IN, No Ads, and No Tracking Solve a Lot of Problems in Society – Purism

From the post:

There are plenty of social networks that are trying the traditional opt-out approach. We are trying something completely different at Librem Social: disabling timelines altogether . That way you only see content you have explicitly opted into (posts from people you follow). We are also working on additional features to give you even more control over how you view and filter content in a decentralized way instead of relying on a central authority to dictate what should and shouldn’t show up in your feed. In addition to blocking users, Librem Social will offer flagging of content for DMCA copyright violations, spamming, harassment, and illegal activity.

In our view, the advantage of full opt-in control over your feed outweighs the downside of not being able to discover some content you like (signal) in the public feed amongst all the content you don’t (noise). Popular content can still spread through the network via organic boosts from people you already follow instead of artificial boosts from relevance algorithms or advertisers.