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#Mastodon's first annual report! Read about our financials, accomplishments, and plans. Available under:
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more than just cool, impeccable timing too. the third aquarium group i’m in on facebook just got banned for “sale of live animals” and their admins banned for a month from facebook. dumbest fucking rule ever. all fish hobbyists have abandoned traditional forums and moved to facebook, and now they’re all getting shut down and the hobby decimated.
groups on Mastodon could have a massive shift in users since the only reason facebook remains relevant today is due to Groups after they lost the flow war to twitter and outcompeted themselves for social photography with instagram. If more people join the fediverse/Mastodon for the purpose of groups, both lemmy and pixelfed stands to gain due to cross-community federation.
yes, and they will remain a strong presence due to ‘free basics’, while the offering violates standard expected net neutrality, these countries are entirely capitalist and privatized and there is no way around it; meaning that the internet is intentionally too expensive for the average person, but facebook is free, so for all intents and purposes, facebook ‘is’ the internet in these countries. india is one of the few places where facebook withdrew free basics, and they’re now also one of the largest userbases of the fediverse.
mastodon and similar services will never be able to achieve global adoption for as long as facebook offers ‘free basics’, and the internet remains inaccessible due to cost.
Problem is I don’t think mastodon is really a good format for groups. Lemmy is better because it actually has something you can subscribe to (and Facebook groups is basically just Facebook copying reddit these days).
An actual fediverse Facebook competitor is sorely needed but I have yet to see one. Lemmy is the closest.
EDIT: oh I missed the comment saying mastodon is getting groups. Interesting.
Problem is I don’t think mastodon is really a good format for groups. Lemmy is better because it actually has something you can subscribe to (and Facebook groups is basically just Facebook copying reddit these days).
i’m feeling pretty ancient in internet terms, and for me, the modern commercialized internet is just downright awful for data and resources. first of, you have all the blogs that makes things up just to try hit those keywords and get views to make profits, and secondly, lemmy (reddit, facebook groups, etc); all have the same issue for a resource community. the problem is the core design philosophy behind it. the idea of these platforms was to create a flow of information that will let the companies deliver ads to you, the entire design is around addiction to short snippets of information so you keep coming back, and so you keep scrolling. free services, like lemmy, have it ‘wrong’ in that way; because they are not delivering ads and thus don’t need to consolidate information in the way they are. but it is a modern expectation from users, due to the corporate internet, and there’s just no way around it to maintain modern users. but yeah, the core issues with this design is the lack of information available. i.e. if you go to any community about fish, you’ll pretty much just see the same posts over and over and over again, because it’s not designed around resource discovery. i.e. on all the guppy specialized niche groups/subs, every post is essentially “is she pregnant?”, on every angelfish it’s “what gender his my fish?”. etc. the problem here is, people are screaming the question into the void and don’t bother to try discover the answer because it’s been cleaned from the stream of data already due to the active update of the flow, like a large chat with many users, the information get quieted down. thing is, the answer to these questions which seems genuine, is the same every time. no photo is necessary for the answer, in the case of guppies, the answer is, yes, she is pregnant, becuase any guppy exposed to a male will practically immediately be pregnant and she can store sperm up to 8 months meaning that “virgin pregnancy” happens all the time. and as for angelfish, no, you can’t tell the gender of the fish unless they’re just about going to mate, where they expose their mating organs. my point is, while modern communities are addictive, on average, the same information is discussed day in and day out, for the sake of ad exposure. it’s a terrible design, but it is what it is, and it is what we have. though, i think mastodon (with groups, as mentioned), will be slightly better than lemmy, for organizing local communities. for larger discussions, it’s an entirely different matter - and facebook groups needing more space for discussion, usually use reddit already instead of facebook.
An actual fediverse Facebook competitor is sorely needed but I have yet to see one. Lemmy is the closest.
if we break facebook down into its modules, it’s not really that impressive.
messenger + friends : just a simple chat client
user profile : short personal posts and photos; the true purpose of the website and tied to messenger + friends.
flow : where you originally saw latest post by friends, so, pretty much tied to the user profile etc.
groups : a simplified forum designed around eyeball measure for the sake of advertisement; it’s and awful design for what it’s trying to do.
pages : just a simple html page - this is mainly targetted at countries like the philippines (to maintain monopoly and pretend to be 'the internet)
user gallery : just a photo viewer
marketplace : an awful imitation of buy and sell - this is mainly targetted at countries like the philippines (same as pages)
facebook business : tying it all together with office communication, again, goal is philippines and similar markets.
in reality, facebook has outcompeted their purpose with instagram and most users have moved to instagram for that purpose, because “it’s not facebook” lol. most of the damage came from their own awful algorithm of the flow hampering the information flow and keeping up to date with your friends. but the goal was to provide “relevant data” for ads in scroll-by. the bottomline here is that facebook is surviving solely on groups since all communities moved to facebook due to the user availability from back when it was “the place on the internet to be”. without groups (which is a poor imitation of reddit, which is a poor imitation of forums), facebook would be dead (again, except for countries like the philippines).
all of above, which, if you consider it, there is an actual fediverse competitor, and that competitor is mastodon. it offers everything that users came to facebook (and twitter) for, except for groups. the survival of facebook remains because of users, of course. but as they are slowly digging their own grave for the sake of ads, mastodon stands to gain. the main issue with mastodon and the fediverse is the lack of means to profit as a user, which has also become the expected norm of the internet. users expect to be able to profit form their content, and mastodon (and lemmy) is designed to prevent that as it is designed to prevent ads and exposure of that kind. so it’s a bit of a dilemma. it has nearly all the best parts of classic online communities and communication, but the audience is no longer interested because of the change in narrative and profits being more highlighted than ever in the minds of most. no one does anything for free anymore.
the bottomline here is that facebook is surviving solely on groups since all communities moved to facebook due to the user availability from back when it was “the place on the internet to be”.
Yeah I also think it’s a matter of groups are the only way to really scale a social media service.
Humans have baggage. They come with a certain level of social toxicity. Any community has to deal with this. Dunbars number and all that jazz.
Facebook tries to get around it by using machine learning moderation, and paying people but this isn’t a scalable solution. Trolls can always produce more filth, and the pay and work conditions of the FB moderators is famously a black eye on their public image and make them look bad. And the AI moderation simply doesn’t work, isn’t smart enough.
So the only real solution is (and has always been) self moderation. Communities have to self moderate, build norms, enforce those norms etc.
all of above, which, if you consider it, there is an actual fediverse competitor, and that competitor is mastodon. it offers everything that users came to facebook (and twitter) for, except for groups. the survival of facebook remains because of users, of course. but as they are slowly digging their own grave for the sake of ads, mastodon stands to gain. the main issue with mastodon and the fediverse is the lack of means to profit as a user, which has also become the expected norm of the internet. users expect to be able to profit form their content, and mastodon (and lemmy) is designed to prevent that as it is designed to prevent ads and exposure of that kind. so it’s a bit of a dilemma. it has nearly all the best parts of classic online communities and communication, but the audience is no longer interested because of the change in narrative and profits being more highlighted than ever in the minds of most. no one does anything for free anymore.
Yeah I hate to say it but there’s a part of me that wonders if allowing instances to run ads should be something enabled by these platforms. After all, even prior to social media the internet has pretty much always been largely sustained by ads. Blogs, flash game portals… I mean Homestarrunner was unusual in it’s day for not having ads. Do I wish we didn’t have ads? Yes. But also I can see how it might simply be the nature of the beast.
I just recently learned about Friendica which is basically a Facebook alternative. It’s neat!
This reminds me of when I wanted to gift some leftover e-cigarette parts to someone and the classifieds app didn’t allow tobacco related products and automatically removed my giveaway.
aquarium fish threatened in the wild are going extinct from habitat loss and pollution, not poaching. import and export laws make it both difficult and unsustainable to profit from trade of rare specimen. especially since fish worth good money are selectively bred into shapes and colors not found in the wild, so wild caught fish are usually far less valuable. what you generally see in the hobby are in the hobby because they can be bred. the supply companies are generally the only access for wild caught species, and they generally sell them in bulk of 1000 for a few dollars, they also have to go through official channels to sell their fish, which further limits the risk of poached specimen. an indeed, serious hobbyists generally don’t buy from the pet stores, only from other hobbyists, as it is considered animal abuse to support pet shops (which facebook is indirectly supporting by shutting down hobbyist groups and increasing the difficulty to get fish that don’t come from fish mills or the wild). so anything difficult to impossible to breed is usually of little interest for most aquarium hobbyist; with the exception of finding means to breed them in an aquarium environment. in fact, today, many species only survive in the trade and nowhere else. there was a post here last month bringing up the goodeid family and how hobbyist efforts have managed to re-establish wild populations from otherwise extinct species.
these no live animal policies only makes sense in the efforts to prevent spread of invasive species with zero moderation efforts. which is understandable in a way; but it also means the animal is most likely already traded on black markets as import and export of such animals are heavily regulated. the proper way to do this, if the intent is to moderate, is to ban banned species. to ban hobbyists is potentially driving species to extinction as awareness of the species and expertise is lost over time.
i think the pet fish hobby is a lot less exploitative than other “pet” niches. it still happens, of course, but it’s transitional. since breeding is a core element to the hobby as fish don’t live too long and spending a lot of money on a fish that won’t breed and die within a few years is not a good incentive (koi is an exception here, they live for 200+ years if well taken care of, and part of the price is how old the koi is (the older the more expensive) and how beautiful the colors it has, it is also a factor to be an authentic japanese bred specimen). for other, less complicated species, mills do exist, and sell bulk to the pet stores, and since they’re from mills, they’re genetically hampered, which makes the fish “low quality” as in, die much faster and is too sensitive to parameters - so they’re usually not interesting to hobbyists and collectors. this is not saying stores aren’t important, it’s the gateway for the hobby to gain more enthusiasts, and as people get involved in the hobby through exposure from a store, they soon go into the hobby trade of good and healthy specimen. which neatly splits the “fish mill” category of unethical people who need something that is easy and fast to breed to make cash, vs the hobbyists who needs something that is sturdy, genetically variable, and more healthy; focused on species that are not too difficult to breed to sustain a population at home, and maintain genetic variance by collecting new specimens from hobbyists to add to their genetic pool, which further protects wild populations. wild caught fish is usually riddled with parasites as well, which is another risk a lot of hobbyists prefer to avoid. there is just very little incentive to work with wild caught fish unless it’s a newly discovered species, in which case the goal is usually to quickly establish an aquarium strain to avoid all the complications and dangers of a wild caught species (and for mills, to figure out how to quickly mass produce them in their vats to make quick money on the ‘newness’ of the species on the market). it should also be pointed out that saltwater is far less popular because of the inherent difficulties of breeding and maintaining a saltwater tank; even if saltwater fish is usually stunningly beautiful in their wild form.
i think, for any fish hobbyists, there are generally parameters that are important.
how does the fish look? body shape, colors, fins. it is very rare for a wild population to be as colorful as aquarium strains, have perfectly formed body shapes, and fins, and thus fortunately people don’t want wild specimen (not to mention the risk of parasites).
how healthy is the fish? health is important, people don’t want the fish to be riddled with genetic diseases. this makes mills undesired for hobbyists.
how easy is the fish to breed? if the fish can’t be bred, there is nothing for the hobbyist to do. no traits to refine. no finnage to elongate. no complicated and fascinating breeding process to establish new populations. fish who fits in aquariums normally do not live for more than 1-5 years, and then all that money invested into acquisition and maintenance was ‘wasted’.
how easy is the fish to keep/maintain? some species require a lot of specialized parameters, which may make it difficult to impossible to keep in your collection. if keeping the fish requires too much work, only hardcore specialists will focus on keeping and breeding them (i.e. Discus); and they usually don’t have time, resources, or space, to keep anything else, making them specialized on that particular species. this also means that species like Discus is rarely sold in pet stores unless the pet store has ‘personal interest’ in the species. since they’re hard to sell due to the difficulty level, and they are usually riddled with diseases and infections and need a lot of care and medication and costs of maintenance. so without access to hobbyist communities, you’ll have difficulty finding them to buy. i don’t know of any Discus mills either due to the difficulty level of breeding and cost of keeping them. this is a prime example where facebook banning groups is directly threatening the Discus continued existence of aquarium strains. to add, color and health is not always the most important factor, i.e. saltwater is notoriously difficult to maintain, and most hobbyists just don’t bother with it, unless deeply specialized, despite saltwater fish being the most colorful, even for wild caught specimen.
how easy is the fish to collect? fish that is difficult to collect (no other hobbyists have them) usually also means difficult to find different genetic pools of. if you can’t introduce new specimens of the same strain, then your population will slowly deteriorate and eventually be riddled with genetic diseases. space helps here, many people will cross breed with multiple generations of their own population to try and spread out the genes, but even so, there is still risks of their gene pool getting bad. wild specimens are undesired because their genes usually dominate your carefully bred traits, and your strain is lost. plus, parasites.
how much do i trust the source? every time you get new fish, there is risk of introducing infections and diseases. not just genetic diseases. i.e. when you want to add new genetic materia to your guppy population, if you source it from an unknown farm/mill or unknown seller. you are taking a huge risk of losing your entire population by introducing a disease the new fish may be resistant to. it’s a pretty common problem for pet stores to have their guppy/platy/swordtail populations get decimated with each new shipment.
was it bred ethically? this is a bit of a repeat, with greater understanding of the needs of your favorite fish species, seeing the small spaces they’re housed in the pet store, the poor quality food they’re fed, and knowing how they’ve been bred by a mill, hobbyists don’t want to deal with the abuse. it impacts the fish health and stress, and the fish will usually only live a short life.
was it wild caught? wild caught means parasites and potential infections and diseases. not to mention usually don’t have the colors/fins of aquarium bred fish. this is a notorious issue. experienced hobbyists are well aware of the problem, and rarely have a reason to collect wild caught specimen. especially if it won’t breed in an aquarium environment. fish don’t live long enough to invest money, time and effort into a species that won’t breed.
TLDR; the hobby do have a lot of problems. but ethical/sustainable source is not one of them since serious hobbyists avoid pet stores and mills. facebook banning aquarium fish groups is damaging to the continued existence of species within the hobby and having the opposite effect by increasing the sourcing of specimen to pet stores, and thus, the profit to mills and wild caught specimen.
what country are you based in, you would probably need to look at government requirements for wild fish and game harvesting, animal welfare/husbandry etc
A community dedicated to fediverse news and discussion.
Fediverse is a portmanteau of “federation” and “universe”. It is a common, informal name for a federation of social network servers whose main purpose is microblogging, the sharing of short, public messages.
more than just cool, impeccable timing too. the third aquarium group i’m in on facebook just got banned for “sale of live animals” and their admins banned for a month from facebook. dumbest fucking rule ever. all fish hobbyists have abandoned traditional forums and moved to facebook, and now they’re all getting shut down and the hobby decimated.
groups on Mastodon could have a massive shift in users since the only reason facebook remains relevant today is due to Groups after they lost the flow war to twitter and outcompeted themselves for social photography with instagram. If more people join the fediverse/Mastodon for the purpose of groups, both lemmy and pixelfed stands to gain due to cross-community federation.
Facebook and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.
yes, and they will remain a strong presence due to ‘free basics’, while the offering violates standard expected net neutrality, these countries are entirely capitalist and privatized and there is no way around it; meaning that the internet is intentionally too expensive for the average person, but facebook is free, so for all intents and purposes, facebook ‘is’ the internet in these countries. india is one of the few places where facebook withdrew free basics, and they’re now also one of the largest userbases of the fediverse.
mastodon and similar services will never be able to achieve global adoption for as long as facebook offers ‘free basics’, and the internet remains inaccessible due to cost.
Interesting perspective I hadn’t thought of before. Thanks for your comment.
Problem is I don’t think mastodon is really a good format for groups. Lemmy is better because it actually has something you can subscribe to (and Facebook groups is basically just Facebook copying reddit these days).
An actual fediverse Facebook competitor is sorely needed but I have yet to see one. Lemmy is the closest.
EDIT: oh I missed the comment saying mastodon is getting groups. Interesting.
i’m feeling pretty ancient in internet terms, and for me, the modern commercialized internet is just downright awful for data and resources. first of, you have all the blogs that makes things up just to try hit those keywords and get views to make profits, and secondly, lemmy (reddit, facebook groups, etc); all have the same issue for a resource community. the problem is the core design philosophy behind it. the idea of these platforms was to create a flow of information that will let the companies deliver ads to you, the entire design is around addiction to short snippets of information so you keep coming back, and so you keep scrolling. free services, like lemmy, have it ‘wrong’ in that way; because they are not delivering ads and thus don’t need to consolidate information in the way they are. but it is a modern expectation from users, due to the corporate internet, and there’s just no way around it to maintain modern users. but yeah, the core issues with this design is the lack of information available. i.e. if you go to any community about fish, you’ll pretty much just see the same posts over and over and over again, because it’s not designed around resource discovery. i.e. on all the guppy specialized niche groups/subs, every post is essentially “is she pregnant?”, on every angelfish it’s “what gender his my fish?”. etc. the problem here is, people are screaming the question into the void and don’t bother to try discover the answer because it’s been cleaned from the stream of data already due to the active update of the flow, like a large chat with many users, the information get quieted down. thing is, the answer to these questions which seems genuine, is the same every time. no photo is necessary for the answer, in the case of guppies, the answer is, yes, she is pregnant, becuase any guppy exposed to a male will practically immediately be pregnant and she can store sperm up to 8 months meaning that “virgin pregnancy” happens all the time. and as for angelfish, no, you can’t tell the gender of the fish unless they’re just about going to mate, where they expose their mating organs. my point is, while modern communities are addictive, on average, the same information is discussed day in and day out, for the sake of ad exposure. it’s a terrible design, but it is what it is, and it is what we have. though, i think mastodon (with groups, as mentioned), will be slightly better than lemmy, for organizing local communities. for larger discussions, it’s an entirely different matter - and facebook groups needing more space for discussion, usually use reddit already instead of facebook.
if we break facebook down into its modules, it’s not really that impressive.
in reality, facebook has outcompeted their purpose with instagram and most users have moved to instagram for that purpose, because “it’s not facebook” lol. most of the damage came from their own awful algorithm of the flow hampering the information flow and keeping up to date with your friends. but the goal was to provide “relevant data” for ads in scroll-by. the bottomline here is that facebook is surviving solely on groups since all communities moved to facebook due to the user availability from back when it was “the place on the internet to be”. without groups (which is a poor imitation of reddit, which is a poor imitation of forums), facebook would be dead (again, except for countries like the philippines).
all of above, which, if you consider it, there is an actual fediverse competitor, and that competitor is mastodon. it offers everything that users came to facebook (and twitter) for, except for groups. the survival of facebook remains because of users, of course. but as they are slowly digging their own grave for the sake of ads, mastodon stands to gain. the main issue with mastodon and the fediverse is the lack of means to profit as a user, which has also become the expected norm of the internet. users expect to be able to profit form their content, and mastodon (and lemmy) is designed to prevent that as it is designed to prevent ads and exposure of that kind. so it’s a bit of a dilemma. it has nearly all the best parts of classic online communities and communication, but the audience is no longer interested because of the change in narrative and profits being more highlighted than ever in the minds of most. no one does anything for free anymore.
Yeah I also think it’s a matter of groups are the only way to really scale a social media service.
Humans have baggage. They come with a certain level of social toxicity. Any community has to deal with this. Dunbars number and all that jazz.
Facebook tries to get around it by using machine learning moderation, and paying people but this isn’t a scalable solution. Trolls can always produce more filth, and the pay and work conditions of the FB moderators is famously a black eye on their public image and make them look bad. And the AI moderation simply doesn’t work, isn’t smart enough.
So the only real solution is (and has always been) self moderation. Communities have to self moderate, build norms, enforce those norms etc.
Yeah I hate to say it but there’s a part of me that wonders if allowing instances to run ads should be something enabled by these platforms. After all, even prior to social media the internet has pretty much always been largely sustained by ads. Blogs, flash game portals… I mean Homestarrunner was unusual in it’s day for not having ads. Do I wish we didn’t have ads? Yes. But also I can see how it might simply be the nature of the beast.
I just recently learned about Friendica which is basically a Facebook alternative. It’s neat!
This reminds me of when I wanted to gift some leftover e-cigarette parts to someone and the classifieds app didn’t allow tobacco related products and automatically removed my giveaway.
the free market, where only the tobacco cartel can grow and sell tobacco.
how can traders prove their fish were acquired sustainably and ethically
aquarium fish threatened in the wild are going extinct from habitat loss and pollution, not poaching. import and export laws make it both difficult and unsustainable to profit from trade of rare specimen. especially since fish worth good money are selectively bred into shapes and colors not found in the wild, so wild caught fish are usually far less valuable. what you generally see in the hobby are in the hobby because they can be bred. the supply companies are generally the only access for wild caught species, and they generally sell them in bulk of 1000 for a few dollars, they also have to go through official channels to sell their fish, which further limits the risk of poached specimen. an indeed, serious hobbyists generally don’t buy from the pet stores, only from other hobbyists, as it is considered animal abuse to support pet shops (which facebook is indirectly supporting by shutting down hobbyist groups and increasing the difficulty to get fish that don’t come from fish mills or the wild). so anything difficult to impossible to breed is usually of little interest for most aquarium hobbyist; with the exception of finding means to breed them in an aquarium environment. in fact, today, many species only survive in the trade and nowhere else. there was a post here last month bringing up the goodeid family and how hobbyist efforts have managed to re-establish wild populations from otherwise extinct species.
these no live animal policies only makes sense in the efforts to prevent spread of invasive species with zero moderation efforts. which is understandable in a way; but it also means the animal is most likely already traded on black markets as import and export of such animals are heavily regulated. the proper way to do this, if the intent is to moderate, is to ban banned species. to ban hobbyists is potentially driving species to extinction as awareness of the species and expertise is lost over time.
thanks for the detailed reply
i think the pet fish hobby is a lot less exploitative than other “pet” niches. it still happens, of course, but it’s transitional. since breeding is a core element to the hobby as fish don’t live too long and spending a lot of money on a fish that won’t breed and die within a few years is not a good incentive (koi is an exception here, they live for 200+ years if well taken care of, and part of the price is how old the koi is (the older the more expensive) and how beautiful the colors it has, it is also a factor to be an authentic japanese bred specimen). for other, less complicated species, mills do exist, and sell bulk to the pet stores, and since they’re from mills, they’re genetically hampered, which makes the fish “low quality” as in, die much faster and is too sensitive to parameters - so they’re usually not interesting to hobbyists and collectors. this is not saying stores aren’t important, it’s the gateway for the hobby to gain more enthusiasts, and as people get involved in the hobby through exposure from a store, they soon go into the hobby trade of good and healthy specimen. which neatly splits the “fish mill” category of unethical people who need something that is easy and fast to breed to make cash, vs the hobbyists who needs something that is sturdy, genetically variable, and more healthy; focused on species that are not too difficult to breed to sustain a population at home, and maintain genetic variance by collecting new specimens from hobbyists to add to their genetic pool, which further protects wild populations. wild caught fish is usually riddled with parasites as well, which is another risk a lot of hobbyists prefer to avoid. there is just very little incentive to work with wild caught fish unless it’s a newly discovered species, in which case the goal is usually to quickly establish an aquarium strain to avoid all the complications and dangers of a wild caught species (and for mills, to figure out how to quickly mass produce them in their vats to make quick money on the ‘newness’ of the species on the market). it should also be pointed out that saltwater is far less popular because of the inherent difficulties of breeding and maintaining a saltwater tank; even if saltwater fish is usually stunningly beautiful in their wild form.
i think, for any fish hobbyists, there are generally parameters that are important.
TLDR; the hobby do have a lot of problems. but ethical/sustainable source is not one of them since serious hobbyists avoid pet stores and mills. facebook banning aquarium fish groups is damaging to the continued existence of species within the hobby and having the opposite effect by increasing the sourcing of specimen to pet stores, and thus, the profit to mills and wild caught specimen.
what country are you based in, you would probably need to look at government requirements for wild fish and game harvesting, animal welfare/husbandry etc
my point being that it’s a lot for facebook to worry about, banning it in general probably stops a lot of poaching
true. Not much for them to gain from the enthusiast groups, vs the bad press from animal welfare groups