@bender@twtxt.net Mainly the bsd.cafe ones. I like how the minimalist single column profiles look. Image embeds are full width and reading through threads feels nice (as in it doesn’t feel like pealing layers upon layers of a fresh onion).

Confession:

I’ve never found microblogging like twtxt or the Fediverse or any other “modern” social media to be truly fulfilling/satisfying.

The reason is that it is focused so much on people. You follow this or that person, everybody spends time making a nice profile page, the posts are all very “ego-centric”. Seriously, it feels like everybody is on an ego-trip all the time (this is much worse on the Fediverse, not so much here on twtxt).

I miss the days of topic-based forums/groups. A Linux forum here, a forum about programming there, another one about a certain game. Stuff like that. That was really great – and it didn’t even suffer from the need to federate.

Sadly, most of these forums are dead now. Especially the nerds spend a lot of time on the Fediverse now and have abandoned forums almost completely.

On Mastodon, you can follow hashtags, which somewhat emulates a topic-based experience. But it’s not that great and the protocol isn’t meant to be used that way (just read the snac2 docs on this issue). And the concept of “likes” has eliminated lots of the actual user interaction. ☹️

@aelaraji@aelaraji.com oh fuck yea snac would be a good use of that! makes me wanna do the same… GTS also has a new profile view for profiles that shows only images which makes it great as a photo posting place

@aelaraji@aelaraji.com which snac instance did you see that looked pretty dope? On the ones I saw in the past, I found their web frontend to be rather messy (even more so on mobile).

You know what, I can always run a separate Snac instance alongside the GTS one later on if I want to, maybe even use it for sharing Phtography stuff… a pixelfed alternative on budget kind of thing. 🤡

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz That’s what I was going for at first, I already have my compose file to go up -d, but then I took a look at a couple of #Snac instances at the last second and they looked pretty dope! Now I’m stuck in my own head 😅

@prologic@twtxt.net Gemini has an answer for you:

This is a conversation thread from a twtxt network, detailing a user’s (movq) frustration with the Mastodon “export data” feature and their consideration of self-hosting a fediverse alternative. Here’s a summary:

• movq’s initial issue:
  
  • movq is concerned about the volatility of their data on their current Mastodon instance due to a broken “export data” feature.
    
  • They contacted the admins, but the issue remains unresolved.
    
  • This led them to contemplate self-hosting.
    
• Alternative fediverse software suggestions:
  
  • kat suggests gotosocial as a lightweight alternative to Mastodon.
    
  • movq agrees, and also mentions snac as a potential option.
    
• movq’s change of heart:
  
  • movq ultimately decides that self-hosting any fediverse software, besides twtxt, is too much effort.
    
• Resolution and compromise:
  
  • The Mastodon admins attribute the export failure to the size of movq’s account.
    
  • movq decides to set their Mastodon account to auto-delete posts after approximately 180 days to manage data size.
    
  • Movq also mentions that they use auto-expiring links on twtxt to reduce data storage.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de nice!!! i wanna try snac it looks sooo fun

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz Oh, yes, it’s probably going to be something like gotosocial or snac. It’s got to be as lightweight as possible. (I call this whole thing “Mastodon”, but you’re right, that’s not quite correct. 😅)

@bender@twtxt.net I have nothing against GoToSocial, but:

GoToSocial stores statuses, accounts, etc, in a database. This can be either SQLite or Postgres.

snac is simpler. Some JSON files and that’s it. I can read them with jq and less. I can use tar to back them up. I can hand edit them in a text editor.

I think @abucci@anthony.buc.ci and @stigatle@yarn.stigatle.no are running snac? I didn’t have a closer look at snac (no intention of running it), but if that is a relatively small daemon (maybe comparable to Yarn?) that gives you access to the whole world of ActivityPub, then, well, yeah … That’s tough to beat.

Yes, I am running snac on the same VPS where I run my yarn pod. I heard of it from @stigatle@yarn.stigatle.no, so blame him 😏 snac is written in C and is one simple executable, uses very little resources on the server, and stores everything in JSON files (no databases or other integrations; easy to save and migrate your data) . It’s definitely like yarn in that respect.

I haven’t been around yarn much lately. Part of that is that I’ve been very busy at work and home and only have a limited time to spend goofing off on a social network. Part of it is that I’m finding snac very useful: I’ve connected with friends I’d previously lost touch with, I’ve found useful work-related information, I’ve found colleagues to follow, and even found interesting conferences to attend. There’s a lot more going on over there.

I guess if I had to put it simply, I’d say I have limited time to play and there are more kids in the ActivityPub sandbox than this one. That’s not a ding on yarn–I like yarn and twtxt–I’m just time constrained.

I’ve only been using snac/the fediverse for a few days and already I’ve had to mute somebody. I know I come on strongly with my opinions sometimes and some people don’t like that, but this person had already started going ad hominem (in my reading of it), and was using what felt to me like sketchy tactics to distract from the point I was trying to make and to shut down conversation. They were doing similar things to other people in the thread so rather than wait for it to get bad for me I just muted them. People get so weirdly defensive so fast when you disagree with something they said online. Not sure I fully understand that.