A one-man project starting from scratch is not going to be viable in this day and age.

It's a pet project; it doesn't need to be "viable".

I think this attitude is part of the reason why we have so few browsers. Every time someone tries to start their own browser, even just for fun, a lot of the response is just bitching about how big and complex browsers are and how the effort to start a new one is wasted. It makes it so that people interested in writing their own browser (for fun or profit) are less likely to share about it and probably less likely to pursue it seriously

This is nonsense. The fediverse isn't cryptocurrency. Having 51% of the fediverse doesn't give you any more control than having 1%. If your instance(s) implement a feature that the rest of the fediverse doesn't like, they can defederate.

Other instances either react by defederating, but because they only have 49 percent, due to network effects, they get extinct

If 49% of the fediverse defederates from the other 51%, it is now 100% of a new, smaller fediverse. You can't just claim that "network effects" will cause them to go extinct. Whether those instances have enough userbase to sustain a cohesive network depends on the actual number of instances/users. And the fediverse has sustained itself for over a decade with less than the current ~2 million accts and most of that time it had substantially less than 1 active accts.

Thanks for pointing out Ladybird. It's a pretty exciting project. But the author isn't early in "announcing" anything. This isn't a press release. He posted on his own blog about a pet project. That's what the web is supposed to be. Not everything has to be for a big purpose or compete with everything else.

Exactly. It's also using Spring Boot, Hibernate, and Lombok. It looks just like projects at work. It might be the first fediverse project I contribute regularly to.

The fediverse grows in waves. This was the first wave for the threadiverse, not The Big Wave. Nows the time to let the lead devs catch their breath, prepare for larger userbase and contributor base, and work on critical issues and let contributors start to polish UX issues. The next time there's a wave, this will be a much better place and we'll be ready. That's when you'll start to see a lot more niche communities able to sustain themselves

Most people are pointed to joinmastodon.org first and have to pick an instance. And since they're not familiar with decentralization, they don't understand what that means. It's especially weird that they can't directly join mastodon on the site called "joinmastodon" but have to go to another site.

Then once you get past that to make an account, you have to find people and discovery has always been one of the worst aspects of the fediverse. And the graph of instance blocks means a new user may not even be able to find the people they care about and they won't know why.

If you know all this, its easy to understand. But for people used to a centralized system and unaware of all the intricacies of the network, there's a lot of snags here.

Lemmy doesn't have to have missing features for someone to want to write their own implementation. And in a decentralized system you want multiple implementations to exist. This is a good thing

Hasbro is probably gambling that it’s the IP that made the money, and not Larian being magic in a bottle as a developer

This is probably true, but how can executives be so stupid? Every review I read praised Larian specifically and how the made a huge game with no microtransactions and tons of little loving touches. You have to be willfully ignorant to think it was the IP and not the developer and their work that people were responding to.

I don't know if you're being sarcastic or not, but just in case, that's the point of a boost. You're boosting its noticeability. It's not supposed to be private

Go for the most active one

There isn't one "most active one" because federation isn't perfect and every instance sees a different number of users/posts.

The people on the other, smaller, communities will find out about the main hub and subscribe to it as well.

You can't guarantee that. If they are on a smaller instance, their instance may not be aware of the larger community/instance.

I think decentralized systems are much better than centralized systems, but they're inherently more difficult. Also, your solution (everyone eventually just uses the same community) isn't decentralized. My proposal, which the third solution in the article is based on, enhances decentralization by allowing duplicate communities to exist but consolidate the userbase and discussion.

I downvoted because they posted about an intentionally non-federated forum in the fediverse community. The post doesn't belong here.

That wouldn't make them incompatible with the fediverse. ActivityPub can support tags with spaces, even though no current fediverse platform allows it. A post with a hashtag with spaces would still federate to other services and if that services is robust enough, should still be linked up so that you can click it to see the tag feed.

a lot of people want nothing to do with it.

And nobody is disagreeing with their right to do that. They have the tools to curate their own experience. But they can't demand the fediverse work they way they want it to and no other way.

That's not applicable. Sublinks is using the same standard as Lemmy/kbin/mbin, i.e. ActivityPub. In a decentralized system based on an open standard, plurality of implementations is a good thing. We shouldn't want lemmy to be the only one.

Kbin just released Collections, its feature to allow users to create groups of magazines. The microblogging side of the fediverse has lists. It sounds like this is basically what you're asking for.

It’s not sustainable to keep offering poorly designed solutions. People need to understand some basic things about the system they're using. The fediverse isn't a private space and fediverse developers shouldn't be advertising pseudo-private features as private or secure.

Reddit has a large enough userbase that duplicate communities can each reach a sustainable size without interfering. The fediverse userbase isn't large enough to sustain even a single community for some topics, let alone duplicates. I'm in plenty of communities where there are lots of low value posts that would normally be consolidated into a single stickied post for the community but there isn't a large enough userbase to make a stickied post worthwhile despite there being multiple communities for that topic.

Also, reddit is a centralized system. A decentralized system is going to have problems that a centralized one doesn't

This is why hashtags have been suggested to the lemmy devs multiple times. Just let lemmy users tag their posts.

I agree that this is ridiculous. But I think the issue is that the "middle men" are the retail stores that are used to doing retail things like lowering the price of older goods. Digital storefronts don't have anybody going over "inventory" and checking if it needs to be marked down. And corporations being corporations, they don't care about this oversight. Why spend time/money on lowering the amount of money they'll make?

I have argued for a while that the Fediverse is way behind in this area; part of this lack of tooling and reliance on user reports, but part is architectural. CSAM-scanning systems work one of two ways: hosted like PhotoDNA, or privately distributed hash databases. The former is a problem because all servers hitting PhotoDNA at once for the same images doesn't scale. The latter is a problem because widely distributed hash databases allow for crafting evasions or collisions.

-- https://hachyderm.io/@det/110769474386499134

This is from the study's author (here's the full thread). It shows how pernicious centralization is in technology. The author is claiming the fediverse is "behind" instead of the tools behind behind in supporting decentralized services. They were developed with only centralized Silicon Valley silos in mind and now they can't keep up with a decentralized infrastructure and the authors solution is for decentralized services to centralize around these tools.

It's gotten diluted over time with each wave, but algorithms are bad was a strong stance on mastodon servers since its inception. It was one of the first "big" things touted about mastodon. Each wave brought more people from twitter that didn't care about that or actively disagreed with it so you don't see the argument as much

I downvoted you because I think your argument is off the mark, not because I'm an "individual choice" or "I can do what I want" nutjob. I believe is strong moderation.

listening to choruses of "individual choice" are how you end up providing a server for people who feel no responsibility to their neighbours and communities

Allowing a setting to not blur photos will not destory communities. It seems like most people in this thread who would like a setting for this agree that blurring NSFW photos should be the default because that is what is best for the community. Asking for a setting to suit their own tastes is perfectly reasonable. Even within a community, people can have individual needs or tastes and they should be accommodated when reasonable.

You can choose to use a different instsnce if you don't like what the admin's doing

They're not asking that all NSFW photos be shown for everybody. They're asking that they be allowed to customize their own experience without affecting anybody else. Telling them to fuck off is pretty exclusive and non-community oriented behavior.

I submitted a proposal to lemmy a while ago to fix this and it was closed. I rewrote the proposal as a Fediverse Enhancement Proposal and a lemmy dev said on the discussion thread that they would not implement it and don't see an issue with duplicate communities.

https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/fep-d36d-sharing-content-across-federated-forums/3366

Genius (the lyrics company) tried to license the content on their website and a judge said that can't be legally binding because there's no guarantee the scraper read it. It seems like the same would apply here.

They used it in a perfectly acceptable and understandable way. The definition you're describing as sarcastic is an official meaning of the word. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/patronize

The mastodon dev team is notoriously opinionated. A lot of forks/frontends start because the dev wants features that mastodon has refused.

There are 500 million posts on Twitter every day. Do you read them all? There are 2.8 million subreddits. Have you browsed them all?

Nobody subscribes to every twitter acct or every subreddit so nobody is expecting to have every single post delivered to them. The fediverse has a legitimate problem where ppl don't actually receive all the posts of accts they're subscribed to. It's silly to compare what the OP is complaining about to not being able to see every post on twitter/reddit.

There is no single list of every single ActivityPub Group (community, magazine) and there's no way to make a 100% accurate list. Any software that tries is just estimating because they can't know when a new instance is stood up until they're told about it. They're probably finding these instances by querying the API of known instances. For example, we know lemmy.ml exists so we can start there and find all instances it knows about. Then go to each of those instance, do the same query, dedupe the results, continue as long as you want. Since lemmy and kbin use separate APIs, most hobbyist focus is probably on one or the other rather than implementing two different APIs.

note: kbin and lemmy aren't the only Group implementations. There's also https://gup.pe, https://chirp.social, and something called lotide, though I've never seen that one in the wild.

It makes sense and is possible within the protocol but its not implemented by any software I know of

Just a heads up: there's a mastodon specific community at https://lemmy.ml/c/mastodon that would be more appropriate for this post.

the nature and direction of the fediverse

The fediverse is a decentralized network. It doesn't have a cohesive nature/direction. It's made up of servers providing twitter-like experiences, servers providing reddit-like experiences, forums, personal websites, video platforms, etc. You'll never know all the places your fediverse data has reached because the fediverse doesn't have hard boundaries so you can't possible measure it all.

Which is why I think complaining about other what other software does is pointless. Instead, users should be pushing their own software to adopt more features to allow them to control their experience and data.

Sorry. Any brusqueness in my post was directed at the lemmy devs, not you. It seems like such an obvious feature. I think some people on the fediverse get into the mindset of recreating corporate silos one-to-one instead of building a cohesive fediverse that has way more functionality than any one network.

But have they? I’m not qualified to say. I don’t have any actual data in front of me.

The question was do video games improve your life. I would argue you are the only person who can answer that question. This isn't really a scientific question because its purely subjective. You'd need to narrow it down and define some criteria before you could try implementing a study for it.

If video games really were an unqualified good

I don't think any sensible person would try to argue that. Nothing is an unqualified good. Watching 150 hours of tv would be just as bad as spending that time playing video games (video games would probably be better because at least you're getting more brain stimulation). You can form unhealthy habits with anything. Video games are like any other hobby; you have to balance them with other hobbies/responsibilities. It's good to know exactly what effects certain things like video games can have on your mind and body, but I don't think its that useful to compare time spent with one hobby/responsibility to time spent with some other hobby/responsibility. And it always seems like only certain things are compared like that. People rarely ask if watching tv is good for their health, even if they do it more than you or I play video games. Why would playing guitar be better than playing a video game? What makes video games the lowest value hobby? (sorry this got kinda ranty. This sparked a lot of things in me i guess)

I am suggesting that “gamers say gaming is good for them, actually” does not provide useful data for analysis or discussion.

100% This article was a waste of time. I'm not disagreeing on that. Your comment gave me more to think about than that article.

I suppose this is where the root of our disagreement lies. For me the technical network that links tools is not the fediverse. The fediverse is what is built on top of that network and it is inherently linked with the community

I wrote a long reply disagreeing with each of your points, but you're right. This is our disagreement. You're using the term fediverse to apply to a specific group of ppl/servers that share values with you and I think that's co-opting the term. The fediverse is more akin to the web (a platform based on technology that allows ppl access to other ppl and information) and it doesn't make sense to talk about it as a single organization.

I think trying to change its meaning like this is flawed and leads to issues like we're having now with Bridgy-Fed. You can't shout at everyone to use the tech in the way you want, because eventually there will be ppl/orgs that just don't listen. Instead, I think you should be pushing for existing platforms you're using (lemmy, mastodon, etc) to give you more control of your own data. There are ways to allow small-fedi users to create the exact type of spaces they want and anybody else to have the wide open fediverse they want, if the various project would implement them.

I'm happy to continue discussing this with you or leave it here. Either way, thanks for the chat and have a good one.

It's an explicit goal of ActivityPub, but mastodon implemented its own bespoke API instead of the ActivityPub Client to Server (C2S) API. Apps got developed for mastodon using its API and other services implemented the masto API instead of C2S to get app support.

And anytime you bring up C2S to current projects, they brush it off. So it seems like the grand idea of the fediverse is way far off and not likely to happen soon.

mastodon wasn't stable or performant in the beginning either. It attracted users because there weren't other well known alternatives and those users were excited to build a new place where they felt comfortable. Gargron rode that excitement and enthusiasm until it didn't serve him anymore, then he shut those ppl out

That's exactly what the third proposal in the article would do. See the proposal its based on for more detail.

The point of books like this is to underline areas where we're still woefully ignorant to guide future study. This isn't just complaining. It's taking stock of what we still need to learn.

no just like federating with mastodon.social doesn't make your instance a part of the Gargron fediverse. Meta can't control non-Meta instances that federate with them

So apparently it is “eventually” supposed to let Reddit and Lemmy users interact with each other. And this will somehow cause people to join Lemmy? If someone is a reddit user, posting in Reddit where 99% of the community is, and they happen to see a comment from Lemmy, why would they even care? Why would they leave their community with 99% of the people to move to a smaller inactive community that only has any action at all due to copying content from the site that they are already on? It doesn’t make any sense!

Because of all the recent drama with reddit and its continued enshitification. Apps that users/moderators relied on are gone, the mobile site is shit, etc. For a lot of users, there are enough pain points that mirroring the content somewhere else is enough to get them to switch.