I'm aware of kbin, mastodon, and lemmy. Are there any other federated applications out there?

Pickle_Jr@lemmy.world to No Stupid Questions@lemmy.world – 385 points –

Applications, social media interfaces, instances, I'm not sure what the correct word is 😅.

Pretty much title!

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Tree diagram of federated software, separated by protocol and use case, including ActivityPub and Matrix protocols.

Very neat, thanks for sharing! What do the dotted lines between non-Fediverse protocols and Fediverse platforms represent? Do those platforms use multiple protocols?

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What are the common attributes between each app that allows them to be federated with each other? Users, a post with multimedia support (images, links, maybe videos), a comment thread, and what else? Can an app deviate completely from this user/post/comment model and still be federated? Do each app need to manually integrate with another app to be considered federated or is any app using ActivityPub automatically integrated to your app?

Do each app need to manually integrate with another app to be considered federated or is any app using ActivityPub automatically integrated to your app?

ActivityPub provides the framework, but a platform also has to be designed to support another platform. It's not automatic.

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My favorite is PixelFed. I'm an artist, so Instagram was important for me, but for a few years now it's absolutely terrible (no reach at all with their special algorithms). PixelFed fixes all that, it replicates the feeling of IG as it was 8-10 years ago: chronological feed, tag-based, no extraneous features. I'm really enjoying it, as I can finally grow again my followship as an artist: https://pixelfed.org/

Is there interoperability between pixel fed and lemmy at all? I'm so sick of Instagram, this piques my interest

There is interoperability between PixelFed and Mastodon for sure. I often get a lot of likes from there, rather than PixelFed itself.

Any great FOSS apps for that one yet?:)

https://pixelfed.org/mobile-apps

Hm, is there a play store link? I'm not sure how to put an app on my phone that's not from the playstore

Don't know about Pixelfed specifically (dont have it installed) but you can get FDroid from the play store and then use it to install other packages not approved by googul

but you can get FDroid from the play store and then use it to install other packages not approved by googul

Where do you live where F-Droid is in the Play Store? In the US, you have to download the apk from the F-Droid website.

France... , didn't know that. Probably antitrust laws in effect

Not yet, because it hasn't officially released yet. Will happen soon(ish) though I think. Some mastodon clients work with pixelfed as well, although not perfectly.

the official app works great on Android

Do you have any suggestions as to how to find people on there? I have it installed and am trying it out, but I'm running into a lot of the same problems I was having on Mastodon; it seems difficult to discover engaging content.

You can follow me if you like book illustration art: https://pixelfed.social/EugeniaLoli Another way, is to search for tags. For example, if you like fishing, you search for that tag, and then you find ppl that post interesting fishing stuff.

So much good photos on there no generic popular spam crap like you get on Instagram

Here's a list of 130: https://the-federation.info/#projects

One I like not mentioned so far is bookwyrm, which is like a federated goodreads (track books you're reading, review them, read other's reviews).

Edit: the flagship instance is https://bookwyrm.social

I think it's worth noting that Mastodon is by far the most mature. Everything else is buggy and may not always work the way you might expect but I think many are still worth using if you can put up with the quirks.

Also worth noting that BookWyrm can import your books from a GoodReads export, so you can try it without risking much.

Akkoma is also very stable and much faster than Mastodon.

https://akkoma.social/

Still not sure what this is supposed to do based on the site? It's some kind of all-in-one fediverse thing? Doesn't help that they reference a ton of federated services that I've never heard of in the website

Ya that website is totally useless if you don't already know what Pleroma is, it explains what the fediverse is like 4 times but never explains how the app integrates with it lol

Implements ActivityPub, you can do Twitter-like messaging with it and define the maximum length of the text. The client API is the same as with Mastodon, so you can use any Mastodon app with it, or even run the Mastodon web frontend.

It is written in Elixir instead of Ruby, so it is much faster and uses less resources than Mastodon. Supports quoting and emoji reactions like Misskey does. Super easy to install.

And it's much easier to run (less resources) and easily accepts multiple frontend UIs.

is there any android app for bookwyrm?

Yes and no. Yes an app exists, but it's not official, and the app is only a wrapper for the website. It may be better to "install" the website to your home screen using the option in your browser.

If you want to check it out, it's not on Google Play, but you can get it on F-Droid if you have it, otherwise you can install the APK directly by downloading it here.

PeerTube, basically a federated YouTube-like

I looked at it and have no idea where or how to start as a creator. It's a badly federated mess as far as I can tell. Hope it improved eventually.

Why do you think it's badly federated? I've never been unable to find my peertube account from anywhere I've tried - Mastodon, Firefish, Friendica, Pixelfed, or Lemmy.

I might have no idea how it works, but I can barely ever find anything, let's say looking for crusader kings content. Either it doesn't exist (possible) or the instances are badly federated and I can't find that stuff searching on one of them.

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  • Peertube is a relatively popular federated-decentralized video platform, a couple of serious youtuber even have a mirror set there. But if you look for a place to share informal video with or without personal data it's better place than youtube (When reddit r/guitar had the weekly* first take challenge* I uploaded a few video on peertube because I don't want to tell google or the world about my bad but fun attempt jamming a guitar for an online challenge)

  • Pixelfed is a photo sharing app, I have an account there but don't use it as I am not that much in photography, They do even have an instance dedicated to artists

  • I heard about Calckey/Firefish/Misskey but not really sure what's the benefit over Mastodon

  • Diaspora* is the great old one of federated social network last time I opened it it was full of conspiracy nuts

Misskey has more features than mastodon, and firefish is a tweaked misskey fork with saner defaults, more tweaks and made by a furry

Something that's often overlooked as being federated: Nextcloud.

How exactly does federation on Nextcloud work? I use a hosted Nextcloud instance but it's just an OneDrive alternative for me.

I think it's through the nextcloud social app, I haven't installed it though because my nextcloud is slow enough without it

Edit: just checked and it has mostly negative reviews and it's listed as beta

Why is nextcloud soo slow?? Is it just bloated?

I have no idea. I'm using the fpm docker image with a redis container and it's still slow as shit. I haven't looked at APCu though so that might help.

It's just an incredible pain to set up, I'd quite like to know it's not going to run like shit if I go through all that effort ha!

I don't think it's federated but Matrix is decentralized

Federated under ActivityPub, no. But individual matrix home servers can federated with one another, so in that way yes.

Friendica: fediverse facebook

Calckey and Firefish: Mastodon but with extra bells and whistles like the ability to use emotes in place of likes.

Calckey and Firefish: Mastodon but with extra bells and whistles like the ability to use emotes in place of likes.

The Firefish interface is also waaaaaay better than Mastodon's. Mastodon feels so archaic, but Firefish actually has a very engaging UI that makes exploring the platform actually fun.

Yeah, I like the Firefish interface a lot more. I was able to follow the handful of people I followed on Mastodon seamlessly. Everything just looks better IMO.

And Firefish has so many more bells and whistles than that! Full-text search, antennas, quotes, drive, pages, channels, MFM.

Thank you for adding detail! I was dead tired.

Owncast, a live video streaming platform, has fediverse integration.

What's the difference between Owncast, and Peertube's livestreaming function?

Owncast is streaming only, PeerTube has streaming as a feature. If you're only looking to stream, run Owncast. It's lighter on resource usage, easier to set up, fewer moving parts. If you want video hosting with maybe streaming as a bonus, you want PeerTube.

Misskey and Firefish
They are microblogs like Mastodon but with much more functions.

They still communicate with Mastodon instances, I suppose ? it's all ActivityPub ? What kind of functions do they have ?

Nostr. It's a decentralized protocol working with relays and no instances.

Its filled with cryptobros and libertarians. Its a cesspool I wouldn't touch with a 10 foot pole.

With a recommendation like that, I HAD to try it! Thanks!

It has free speech and zaps are optional.