For a long time, users have been able to submit microblog-style posts to link-aggregator subs (a.k.a. subcommunity, community, magazine, etc.). Some platforms such as mbin require you to select one for your post. Previously, I’ve thought this sub selection as a special hashtag for the post. However, I’ve recently been reminded that posts actually show up in communities as full-on threads. So what do you (or the threadi gods) consider to be proper etiquette in selecting a proper sub to make your microblog post to? There’s always !random, but that feels kinda worthless…
One good option is to look for relevant groups in a.gup.pe - such as !technology@a.gup.pe. These groups are geared towards Microblog content, and give good reach on sites like Mastodon.
You can add pretty much anything before a.gup.pe, but some groups have many followers on Mastodon and some have none.
Lemmy and Mbin treat Microblog content very differently. Mbin is more similar to Mastodon in this regard, Lemmy tries to force-fit everything into the thread format. It’s not very intuitive for new users - sorry about that! :)
Heads up the project behind a.gup.pe is very much stagnated, and while it does still work, I wouldn’t encourage people use it because it has federation issues with non-Mastodon software, and the fact that it could potentially go down anytime taking the groups with it, to be clear it’s a risk with any service but since guppe hasn’t gotten much attention for a while it’s more of a risk since they might not be maintaining the site.
I don’t deny that it’s a cool service but it probably won’t last. I’d recommend people use alternatives to host groups on Mastodon, like communites on Lemmy or mbin. Ultimately though they are the same thing activitypub wise, it’s just a handle that is a group entity, rather than a user. Different services just interpret the data differently, Lemmy and mbin show a forum, Mastodon just shows boosts of user’s posts (yes it is posts, not toots, toots is an outdated term).
I wasn’t aware of this - good to know.
What’s great about using it (while it lasts) is that it boosts content to a lot of instances across the fediverse, so you don’t need to be incredibly well connected in order to have reach. Otherwise, if you post microblog posts from Mbin, you risk yelling into a very tiny void.
It’ll be interesting to see how native group support in Mastodon is going to play out.
Something I learned recently which should’ve been obvious but I guess I just never noticed it was that it seems that Guppe groups aren’t moderated, like at all. This is concerning and problematic because it basically means they could become spam and hate vectors with only the admins of individual servers able to moderate the content. Compare that to the fact that Lemmy and mbin indeed can moderate communties, remove posts, and most importantly ban users from participating and stop the group from boosting them. That’s as good a reason as any why one might want to use Lemmy or mbin to host groups on Mastodon instead of guppe.
All of Mastodon’s moderation has always been done and federated by individual instances.
The problem with Guppe is that it automatically federates all the post content unlike with hashtags which are just a marker. If someone spams in a hashtag n one server it’s going to suck but unless people follow them it’ll be limited to that server for the most part. With Guppe groups if they spam to them it gets boosted to all servers. It’s not just a tag that gets cluttered, it forces the content into all the other instances by way of boosting.
It’s tricky with guppe though, as it allows spammers a vector into instances they have no business being federated with. The #mastodonforharris hashtag has been taken over by users abusing the mutual aid group, and whenever there are apam attacks on mastodon this is how they reach the entire network rather than individual servers.
So it does confront a fundamental problem with how Mastodon works. But as long as they’re there, I guess it makes sense to use them for legitimate uses as well.
Even with the Hashtag misuse that’s not as bad as group spam, since people spamming groups can reach further than they otherwise would just spamming on their server. Which is why being able to moderate groups is important. Also with Guppe’s system you can create any group you want without authorization, that’s a problem because malicious people can create groups that aren’t acceptable including ones with racist and illegal content and use it to distribute that across the network. I found a few of these without much digging and I quickly reported them to Mastodon.social and got them suspended but they’re still there on the other servers.
Ah, yeah, that’s messed up.
I’m really happy Mastodon takes their time todevelop new features instead of rushing into things. Makes me hopeful they’ll get it right.
Yeah that is an unfortunate side effect, I don’t think guppe is fully immune to it though, its current communties have a lot of subscribers so content gets boosted very far, but if one created a new community it likely wouldn’t get very far since for federation to work you need one subscriber per server or it doesn’t show up. It’s what services like Lemmy-federate aim to solve on Lemmy and mbin, it still takes effort to grow your communities/groups but it’s easier if they’re available on the most servers possible.
Yeah, I’m very excited for that feature. Hoping it comes out soon. Could help bridging the gap between Mastodon and Lemmy if Groups/Communities could also be hosted on Mastodon. That assumes Groups will work well or be compatible with Lemmy, I hope they do and they probably will in the end but I imagine there will be a rough in-between period where something doesn’t work quite right and throws it off.
I’m not sure what to make of compatibility between Mastodon groups and Lemmy communities. On the one hand, it would obviously be a good thing if the technology would talk as much as possible. On the other, the microblog format does not look so good in Lemmy unless the author is knowingly making and effort to create a thread rather than a post, starting with a title and all that.
Compatibility between the two by default could end up flooding both services with content that looks out of place, and lowering the user experience rather than improving it. It would also subject one service to the technical constraints/decisions of the other.
I think it might make more sense to keep them somehow separate, and leave it to the different fediverse software to implement it however it would like. The priority of the Mastodon developers, in my opinion, should be to create something that works as well as possible in their ecosystem.
Then again, I could absolutely be wrong.
Yeah that is true, though in my experience from posting things from mastodon it’s not as bad as one might think. While you generally should include a title sentence separate from the rest of the post if you don’t it’ll just use the first sentence you write as the title. The biggest problem with Microblog content in Lemmy is the community mention, since if that is in the same area as the title it’ll look messed up. I think if enough people become aware of that it would help since they could just put the mention towards the bottom. Maybe even with group support mentioning the group will become not a thing anymore and will be replaced with native functionality to post to a group.
Even though some content will likely look out of place I don’t think it’ll cause much of an issue since it’ll only intermingle in groups, content outside of groups will still be the same Mastodon content, and Lemmy communities will likely enforce proper posting etiquette for Mastodon users even if they don’t do it in groups. For that reason I don’t really see it becoming a serious problem.