Yeah, the frustrating thing is that https://activitypods.org/ already does the hard part, but we need more developers interested in creating these clients that can work well with it.

You only heard the term in context of centralized big social media so you think the term has bad connotation

Please, don’t assume things about the people on the other side of a debate. It’s condescending and it robs us all of learning.

I’m not saying that we don’t need platforms because of “bad connotation”. I’m saying it because I have worked on a “social browser” for the fediverse, an application server for using activitypub as a transport mechanism and I know that we can develop an open social web that does not rely on server-centric applications.

No, far from me saying that the clients (apps?) need to look the same. What I am saying is that the differentiation should be happening at the client, not the server.

It’s the thing with Communick. I wish I didn’t have to offer separate instances for each of the services (Mastodon, Lemmy, Funkwhale) but that every member could get one account which then could use as their main fediverse actor, regardless of “frontend” suited them best. The shell should adapt to the user, instead of the user being forced to adapt to the application.

We don’t need all fediverse platforms to be a Mastodon clone

We don’t need platforms.

We are going to build this as an opt-in feature

I think that the the problem is that it’s opt-in, when it should be the default.

What’s thr point of making pixelfed just another mastodon type app.

The problem is the Fediverse could be a lot more than just “decentralized versions of existing apps”. Most people now have this app-centric mentality because it was beneficial for Big Tech sharecropping, not because it was better for us.

We shouldn’t need different types of apps to see different types of feeds and to sort our data in ways that we want.

I don’t know if it’s good or bad, but it seems that most people forgot about https://alien.top/ and https://fediverser.io/

Take a look at https://communick.com/lemmy, I don’t have an automated way to import an existing instance but if you have a backup of your media and database we can work something out.

Meanwhile, Google/Alphabet is announcing today record revenues of U$ 100 billion for the latest quarter alone…

The less the community support smaller, independent service providers, the more we will all be assimilated by the Borg.

Federation is not the natural unit of organization, that’s a hill I’m ready to die on. The problem is that most people get hung up on the idea of instances because they’ve only experienced the two extremes of siloed networks and the “Dark Forest” of blockchain.

I think the most interesting opportunity here is that ATProto’s strength is that it was built for a “credible exit”, i.e, it allows users to migrate from any centralized network to a decentralized one.

IOW, it would be a lot easier to implement Fediverser on top of ATProto than of ActivityPub.

May I interest you in [email protected] instead? I can make you a mod if you want.

There are a lot of architecture astronauts that will keep talking about “we should develop a grand-unifying system”, but most of them are all talk and little result.

When push comes to shove, the developers that actually ship are the ones that look at problem they want to solve and work on that.

Yes, it is possible.

Whether enough people want it is a different story, and most developers are stuck in the app store mentality, so it gets difficult to get enough support for this to move faster.

Wouldn’t you agree that hardcoding one specific community to provide a feature to “try it and see it causes any problems” is yolo’ing?

I’ll code something to spread communities to other instances using an API but that seems like a lot more work.

In my view, the “proper” solution to this (and that would fit right into ActivityPub) would be simply to let the actor that represents the server to post “as:Create” for any new communities that are created and then let the other software follow these if they are interested.

It certainly would be a lot more work and it would still require others to write code on their end to look for this information, but seems like the only implementation that would seem like just another ad-hoc hack.

You think that if I paid you to remove features, you’d do it?

On the other hand, I’m see newcommunities being flooded with posts from piefed.social and thinking the following:

• If this becomes an automatic thing, I’d be less inclined to subscribe to the community.
• How is concentration around piefed.social any different from concentration around LW?

It’s funny to see these contrasting approaches between PieFed and Lemmy development.

Rimu just treats this is a hobby and goes ahead yolo’ing a bunch of these features that abuse the underlying protocol and could bring serious systemic risks if other admins start deploying it, but because the current userbase is small then there is little scrutiny and they all think it’s good to go.

The Lemmy devs are trying for years to get enough support to make a living of their work and therefore a lot more “professional” about what they do, so they would never introduce a feature that could cause Lemmy to be a “bad participant” in the network. But by not taking a more “customer-focused” approach to product development, it takes a long time to bring any functionality that makes it attractive.

PieFed is definitely taking a “Worse is Better” approach and I don’t know what to make of it. It seems to be poised to make it most popular software among the current fediverse users, but at the same time it makes so idiosyncratic decisions that it makes it hard to believe it will be usable if more people started joining in.

https://chat.piefed.social/#narrow/channel/4-developers/topic/Lemmyverse.20Community.20Discovery/near/4966

Wait, so the posts that are showing up on [email protected] are not really initiated by the user, but just the piefed server creating a post and impersonating the user that created the community?

@[email protected], if I’m understanding this correctly, it’s the second feature (the first one being the import of communities) where you have the server initiating actions but misrepresenting the true actor.

Great, that’s exactly what we need in alternative social media: more reasons for people to be angry at the world and those who do not 100% subscribe to our own limited point of view.