@sabreW4K3 Plume doesn’t appear to be active, unfortunately 🥺

There’s a notice on the official Join Plume website saying the former developers don’t have the time to maintain it anymore. Most of the former public instances now throw up errors of various kinds.

WriteFreely ( @writefreely ) is alive and well. I was seriously toying with the idea of setting up a blog through its main instance, which is called Write.as Professional. The sticking point for me was that the official on-platform monetisation tool (Coil) appears to be dead, and doesn’t support members-only posts (like Ghost).

Ghost, when federation goes live, looks like it will be the best option for my blog.

WordPress plus @pfefferle 's plugins is another great option, depending on what you want to use it for. (There’s no shortage of WP plugins!)

As for Lemmy, I could see a blogging-focussed front end being created for it, in the same way FediBB put a traditional message board front end on it, but one doesn’t appear to exist at present.

@lemmyreader Here’s a starting point for a fediverse StackExchange: Make sure it’s interoperable with Lemmy.

Now, you may not get the full feature set on Lemmy, but you should be able to interact with it from Lemmy as if it’s a group on there.

#StackExchange #Fediverse #Coding

@politics There’s more…

“Rebekah Mercer, the 47-year-old daughter of major Republican donor Robert Mercer, is a founding investor of Parler. She increasingly pulls the strings at the company, according to people familiar with the company who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private business matters. She holds the majority stake in Parler and controlled two of three board seats as of early February — a board to which she recently appointed allies.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/02/24/parler-relaunch-rebekah-mercer/

"Prominent conservative venture capitalists including Peter Thiel and J.D. Vance are investing in free speech-oriented video streaming site Rumble Video, the company said Wednesday.

"The deal, first reported by the Wall Street Journal, marks PayPal and Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel’s first investment in a social media company since he bought a large stake of Facebook as an early investor in 2004. It also means that Thiel is supporting a competitor to Facebook while he sits on Facebook’s board.

"That represents a major boost for Rumble, which aims to challenge the dominance of platforms that conservatives claim unfairly restrict free speech, including YouTube and Facebook.

“Rumble’s users include popular right-wing internet personalities like Donald Trump Jr., former Trump strategist Steve Bannon, commentator Dan Bongino and writer Dinesh D’Souza.”

https://nypost.com/2021/05/19/facebook-director-peter-thiel-invests-in-conservative-rival-rumble/

"Last year, Rumble received a major investment from a venture capital firm co-founded by J.D. Vance, the Republican Senate candidate in Ohio. The firm, Narya Capital, got a seat on Rumble’s board, and its more than seven million shares place it among the company’s top 10 shareholders, according to securities filings. Mr. Vance also took a personal Rumble stake worth between $100,000 and $250,000, his financial disclosures show.

"Narya is backed by the prime patron of Mr. Vance’s Senate campaign, the billionaire venture capitalist Peter Thiel. And it was Mr. Thiel who played a leading role in Narya’s Rumble investment last year, becoming what the platform’s chief executive described as its first outside investor.

“The investment fits into an enduring narrative of Mr. Thiel, who has expressed skepticism of democracy and advocated keeping the airwaves open for hard-right voices since his student days at Stanford.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/31/us/politics/jd-vance-peter-thiel-rumble.html

"Peter Thiel didn’t just wake up one day with a net worth of roughly $4.9 billion.

"His claims to fame largely start as the don of the PayPal Mafia — a nickname embraced by PayPal’s slate of co-founders, which also included Elon Musk. Though the digital banking service raised just $3 million in venture capital on its launch in 1999, PayPal was ultimately sold in 2002 for $1.5 billion. Thiel’s 3.5% stake brought him an estimated $55 million which he used to start his empire.

“Then there was the $500,000 “angel investment” he gave Mark Zuckerberg in 2005. That 10.2% stake in Facebook turned into more than $1 billion in 2012.”

https://www.salon.com/2023/03/27/what-does-peter-thiel-want-hes-building-the-right-wing-future-piece-by-piece/

@thegiddystitcher @helenslunch I think hashtag feeds being overrun with vertical videos is an excellent point. (One I hope @dansup considers!)

But beyond that, I think vertical videos through Loops on the Fedi are likely to be far less obtrusive than they have been on other platforms.

What’s so annoying about them on Instagram and YouTube is that the algorithm automatically drops vertical videos into my feed.

And there’s *lots* of them in my feed, often on topics I’m not interested in.

They’re not there because I’m interested, but because they serve the commercial interests of the social media app’s owners.

Hashtags aside, on the Fedi, they’ll only appear in your feed if you follow a Loops account you’re interested in, or someone you follow finds one interesting enough to share.

And if people on your Mastodon server all find them really annoying, there’s always the option to just block the Loops servers and be done with it.

@deadsuperhero @nutomic I think the concept of a TikTok on the Fediverse is solid. And if short form videos help to get more people on the Fedi, and engaging with the Fedi, that’s a good thing in my book.

@nutomic That last question was me trying to get my head around how this works.

Will each page have a username, in the same way each Lemmy group has a username, which can be followed from Mastodon?

If you follow that username from Mastodon, will you see a series of posts? If so, will they contain page edits or something else?

What happens if you tag that account in a post from Mastodon? Or reply to one of those posts?

@nutomic Looks like an interesting project!

Will there be a mobile-friendly version of the front end?

And will you be able to follow Ibis pages (or perhaps edit them?) from Mastodon? Or potentially even Lemmy?

@ada @haui_lemmy This is where it’s a bad thing that Tumblr hasn’t federated with the Fedi yet.

Having the “original” Fedi apps (including Mastodon) plus Tumblr would better balance the size of Threads.

@janAkali @maxprime You certainly can follow Lemmy groups from Mastodon. And you can reply to Lemmy threads from Masto.

In fact, take a look at my account — I’m doing it right now…

@Sina @Blaubarschmann Google is more like a restaurant that has a large chalk board covered with specials. The kind that has a soup of the day, and a fish of the day, and a chef’s special.

There are a few core menu items that are perennials on its printed menu. Search, maps, photos, ads, Gmail, Google Docs, Chrome, Android, Chromebook, YouTube…

Then there’s the messaging app of the day, the TV platform of the day, the flavour-of-the-month device selection…

@vhstape @lmorchard What it means is that every interesting conversation also adds an interesting conversation to Mastodon.

People can interact with those discussions on the platform that suits them best.

So if you’re an ex-Twitter user on Mastodon, it appears as a post. If you’re an ex-Redditor on Lemmy, it appears as a thread.

And the magic of the Fediverse is that those ex-Redditors can engage with ex-Twitter users in conversations that wouldn’t take place had they remained on Twitter or Reddit.