They are also very open that this is an early beta, so I'm sure things are still subject to change. But getting the handles right as soon as possible should probably be a priority.
I'm not sure what would be best with regards to the different journalists. I guess people often want to follow topics or sites rather than individual authours. I guess each post could be posted to a main site and then automatically boosted by relevant sub-users such as individual journalists and specific topics.
I agree - but I also appreciate that all instances of Mbin and PieFed combined currently have fewer monthly active users than lemmy.dbzer0.com alone, which is only the seventh biggest Lemmy instance. So for now it doesn't make much of a dent whether we're counted or not. :)
Fedidb observes 50k monthly active users. 65% of these are distributed between instances with more than 2000 monthly active users, making up the five biggest instances. Half (51%) are on either Lemmy.world or Lemm.ee, which are the only instances with more than 3000 monthly active users.
A fourth of us are on instances with less than 1000 monthly active users.
I don't think that's all that bad. But who am I to say, I'm not even part of the statistic. :)
That said, I guess people living in countries where the government is prone to censorship might do well to use smaller instances than lemmy.world, as they are more likely to fly under the radar.
Or just switch to a smaller instance if lemmy.world does get blocked, I guess.
FediLab is the app I know of that aims to support the most fediverse services. They claim to support Mastodon, Pleroma, Friendica, and Pixelfed. You could try to sign in with Sharkey as well, who knows.
I use https://phanpy.social/ with Pixelfed and Mastodon, and it works quite well with the two. I believe other services are also supported, but I have not tested it myself. :)
And that means people who are more likely to be harassed also end up having to do more of the work to prevent harassment.
This is true and a genuine problem, but also a lot better than the alternative, which is the commercial platforms where nobody gives a shit about them and they are harassed on a daily basis with nothing much they can do about it.
On Twitter, community notes were hailed as a success for giving the Community an entirely toothless form of moderation. On the Fediverse, the community has been given real teeth.
RE: Guilt by association
This has happened with several beneficial alternative technologies in the past, such as peer-to-peer file sharing, the dark web and end-to-end encryption.
Nice reminder to spread the word about the wonders of P2P, Tor, and E2EE. Some people will always believe in the propaganda of the capitalists and the authoritarians seeking to undermine these technologies, but they are all very much alive and well, and I think most people are fine with the ideas of having their nude selfies or whatever protected under E2EE.
Likewise, for sure Elon Musk will try to tell people the fediverse is full of pedos. Coming from him, that puts us in the same club as that diver who saved a bunch of children in a cave in Thailand. So in that sense I guess the point about commercial capture is more relevant: I'm more worried when people like Musk pretend to be our friends. But in all honesty, I'm not very worried about that either. I still rock an entirely independent e-mail provider, even after everything Microsoft and Google has done to undermine that technology.
It only post to communities where it has explicitly been made welcome, either after you talking to the admins or in a community you run
A lot of people, myself included, are hesitant to take the time to look at content if nobody took the time to manually share it. But for a use-case like you mentioned, for a local community that is too small to be established naturally any time soon, I think it could make sense. Especially for local news — YouTube videos should maybe still go through a human screening before being shared.
I guess it might make sense for some people, not for others. It does allow you to see things from a little bit of a different angle, especially in the all feed.
A colleage of mine working in the same field recently made a Bluesky post that I found interesting. The kinda stuff I'd share on a good day.
He got four likes and two shares - one of each came from me through Bridgy Fed. I very rarely get that little on Mastodon.
He has almost 800 followers there. I have less than 200 on Mastodon.
My takeaway is that Bluesky has this potential for posts to get pushed into every feed, but if they fall through the cracks of the algorithm they might go completely unnoticed. So you end up changing how you post in order to please the algorithm, losing yourself in the process.
Mastodon just feels chill to me. And I'm bridged, so I can always go viral on Bluesky anyway, I just won't be all that aware of it.
While it's excellent that Lemmy is getting some attention out on the capitalist web, I'm not sure I'm personally interested in hearing about what is trending on Reddit in the Fediverse community - for me, Fedibridge seems like a great community specifically for that. But I might be a minority, not trying to be negativistic! :)
Bridged Bluesky user comments on Bluesky copy of post
Profit?
It could work. If anyone on Bluesky wants to give it a shot I can make a post to some testing community - my profile is bridged. Not very interestingly so though, as I don't post microblogs often.
Edit:
I just made this post in Mbin, seen here in dbzer0's Dylan community, and here on Bluesky. Spreading it everywhere certainly worked, if a bridged user wants to respond they can share their emotions after listening to this. ;)
One can post from WordPress to ActivityPub, which could lead to blog posts ending up in Mastodon feeds. Mastodon users can then share, like, and comment.
You cannot, however, make blog posts to WordPress using ActivityPub. It's for distribution only, like an interactive RSS feed.
I love ⚝! Wasn't aware of its existence. It looks more like the full-scale Fediverse logo than ⛦, and also looks a lot friendlier. Big fan.
A star also makes sense in that one of the functions on a lot of federated platforms is to favourite posts, indicated by ☆. So using a star as a symbol for social media makes some degree of intuitive sense, perhaps. In addition to the similarity to the rainbow pentagram, obviously.
I made a slight tweak to OP's image, in case people want to share the picture on other networks. :)
Not perfectly done, but I feel like it might be an efficient way to spread the word.