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An honest discussion in the current state of the Fediverse (anarchist.nexus)
submitted 5 months ago by to c/fediverse@lemmy.world
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[–] 28 points 5 months ago* (22 children)

You are not comparing like for like.

Twitter is pretty much 20 years old, so are Facebook, Reddit and YouTube.

In addition, they were essentially first of a kind in their niche.

The fediverse is not even a teenager and the growth spurt hasn't set in and may never. In addition, the fediverse is utilitarian by comparison, not much beyond proof of concept. Apps, platforms and instances are fragile and evolving.

Basic things mostly work, but it's not "cool" enough to tempt organisations to join, media companies, etc.

We barely agree on how things interact with each other, for example, Mastodon uses hashtags, Lemmy doesn't.

Lemmy has communities, Mastodon doesn't.

It's not that one is better than the other, it's still being worked out by the community.

You also have to remember that there have been many "failures" along the way. Geocities, MySpace, Usenet, AOL, bulletin boards and bang path addressing. The fediverse might succeed, whatever that means, or it might not.

I'm a user on Mastodon, Lemmy and Bluesky, they're evolving day by day. I'm not sure if I could tell you what I like or dislike about each, they're just different.

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  • [+] [S] 8 points 5 months ago (15 children)
    [deleted]
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  • [–] 9 points 5 months ago (14 children)

    The fact that the fediverse is young and evolving is what excites me about it.

    ActivityPub has been around for 8 years, and IMO, the Fediverse is not evolving. It is not federating the way ActivityPub was designed for.

    I want Mastodon threads in Lemmy. I want PeerTube subscriptions in Lemmy. I want to subscribe to Pixelfed users in Lemmy. I want all of these different ActivityPub communities to talk to each other.

    I want to go to my front page and have it be the ultimate front page for me. Why should I be forced to use different pieces of software that pretend to communicate with the same protocol?! Lemmy is supposed to be a news aggregator, so fucking aggregate!

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  • [–] 4 points 5 months ago* (7 children)

    You can get some of those interop in Mbin and piefed. Lemmy just takes a while to develop. You can already see Mastodon threads in Mbin. But I see your point, the overall protocol implementation is ALL over the place. Its very hard to keep up with what supports what.

    It is evolving when you get on the beading edge. Its usually the even smaller stuff like snac2/piefed/mbin/gotosocial etc... its all over the place.

    Honestly what I want is the ability for mastodon to act like an RSS feed instead of one big wall. Have each individual as a separate feed. Because my current gotosocial/mastodon is flooded with people that post 30+ times a day somehow drowning out people that post 1/2 times a blue moon. Im working on something that may do the job in the future, but the code is VERY raw so it may never see release.

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  • [–] 3 points 5 months ago (6 children)

    Its very hard to keep up with what supports what.

    They may or may not be the case, but nobody is even trying. Support the base protocol for other platforms and make specific hacks for each one to fix differences. I would at the very least expect read-only support, with some banner that says "this post is from platform X and comments are currently not supported".

    I keep hearing excuses like "PeerTube can't link with Lemmy, because then it would have to download the video files", instead of just implementing the obvious solution of NOT downloading the video files and let the parent platform handle it. There's too many purists that try to implement the perfect solution and say it's impossible because it doesn't handle the edge cases.

    Even Reddit from years ago spent a lot of effort making sure thumbnails were extracted from many many different platforms, whenever you submitted a post. It didn't matter that there were a lot of different video or news platforms. It worked for almost all of the cases, and if it didn't, it got fixed pretty fast. No shared protocol for that, just hardcoded lists of domains and URLs.

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  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago* (5 children)

    Peertube videos show up en lemmy, you just have to click the link to get to the player or the home instance. Some instance have extensions for the players like chapters and such. Lemmy could at most offer a very simple player without p2p. That is more a client than lemmy issue. Videos are always links if I remember correctly

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  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago* (4 children)

    No videos, no feed

    Only video is from a year ago

    And we're not even getting to the point of clicking on a post for comment. No channel logo on any of these. No comments.

    Nobody is even trying to support this, despite being the whole fucking point of the protocol.

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  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

    Yes, synching channels does not appear to work. The communities/channels are not updated, but the posts basically work if you or somebody else on your platform enter the URL of a video into the search.

    Even if it would work, it probably would not update since nobody on your instance subscribed and I don’t think Lemmy federates posts of communities that aren’t subscribed. But I’m not sure how it is now.

    That the comments don’t seem to work is odd indeed.

    You can interact with any video and comment.

    I just threw the link of the newest video into the search of my instance: https://discuss.tchncs.de/c/spacequesthistorian@spectra.video

    It has one comment because I actively put https://spectra.video/w/aTouTCEzdPEdWuwsYU8LQZ;threadId=59658 into the search

    Edit: I opened an issue for starting commenting from PeerTube, since that seems to be broken

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago (2 children)

    I can't show you directly, as fedia.io requires login to access the platform (scraper protection), but I was able to open the channel by searching for their handle, the page showed up videos (also recent ones) and the video-posts had comments. The page show the channel-logo and every post had the thumbnail of the video.
    One click on the title when you have to post open, and it will open the original page in a new tab, which then can play the video. Even better: Mbin automatically inserts the embedded viewer for the posted video, so you don't even have to leave fedia.

    So please don't draw conclusions from Lemmy to all fedi projects.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago (1 child)

    I'm just talking about Lemmy, since that's the platform that I post on.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago

    ActivityPub has been around for 8 years, and IMO, the Fediverse is not evolving. It is not federating the way ActivityPub was designed for.

    From this I thought you are referring to the fedi platforms in general. I saw later you wrote specifically about Lemmy; so ok.
    Still, my example shows that the Fediverse is evolving (even if it might be slow). Lemmy and Mastodon might be the biggest platforms out there, but they might not be the ultimate prestige examples of our network.

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  • [–] 3 points 5 months ago (4 children)

    I want Mastodon threads in Lemmy.

    Won't come.

    Mastodon has no support for enclosed threaded conversations whatsoever. At all. Why not? Because Twitter has never had any either. That's not how microblogging works. And Mastodon tries hard to be minimalist, purist, old-school, original-gangsta, Twitter-like microblogging, just with a few more characters.

    Mastodon barely manages to tie its threads together with mentions. But it neither has nor supports nor even only understands the one-post-multiple-comments conversation model.

    You even have to jump through hoops both on Mastodon's Web UI and in every single last Mastodon app to see a whole thread. Like, actually the whole thread and not just the branch with the "toot" that you were just looking at.

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  • [–] 2 points 5 months ago (3 children)

    And shit like that is why the Fediverse will ultimately fail.

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  • [–] 3 points 5 months ago (2 children)

    On the one hand, Mastodon will kill the Fediverse.

    On the other hand, for the majority of Mastodon users, Mastodon is the Fediverse. (Like, they literally don't know that Mastodon is connected to something, anything, that isn't Mastodon. They think that Mastodon is its own enclosed network.)

    The irony.

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  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    I would argue that the lack of vision and the insular development culture of Mastodon combined with it claiming most of the users in microblogging fedi has done more to stunt ActivityPub than any other factor.

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  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago

    It isn't even only that.

    It's people being told that the Fediverse equals Mastodon for simplicity reasons. Because that's easier to understand than the Fediverse being a network of over 100 different apps with hundreds or thousands of servers each.

    And it's people being told that the Fediverse equals Mastodon because whoever tells them that believes it themself.

    Most Mastodon onboarding is done by people who think that the Fediverse is only Mastodon. At least half of them will spontaneously shit brix once they come across a message from e.g. Friendica or Hubzilla for the first time.

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  • [–] 4 points 5 months ago

    The fediverse is not even a teenager

    The Fediverse is literally 18 years old this year.

    Invented by Eugen Rochko Evan Prodromou. By launching Mastodon StatusNet. In 2022 2016 2008.

    Interconnectivity between different software is 16 years old as of last month. Established when Mistpark, now known as Friendica, came out in May, 2010, with support for StatusNet's OStatus protocol already built-in.

    Oh, and the term "Fediverse" is from 2022 2016 2012.

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  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago (2 children)

    Friendica is 16 years old. I started with Diaspora in 2011, but it never gained activitypub support. Friendica always had a multiprotocol approach and should still communicate with Diaspora.

    There are organisations joining. EU as well as Germany on federal level and in some states have Mastodon instances. Dunno about the other EU countries. The German Heise Magazin runs their own Peertube instance in parallel to their Youtube account

    I think it’s intentional that the fediverse doesn’t fully agree on how they do things. Lemmy and Mastodon can still communicate with each other way more than Reddit and Twitter. It was sad that PM was incompatible, but there is a lass severe cut if you switch services

    Usenet still exists afaik

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