The problem with building a closed social network is that it sets up an all or nothing premise for users. They might like some of the signature features but they'll leave if there's not enough people to network with. That's a shame and a huge barrier to innovation and new social products.
The #fediverse changes that forever. People can now use the features they like from a mix of apps across a common network of people. This means we can take a whole new approach to how "social" and "media" should work including discovery, user experience and monetization that will be far healthier than anything we've had in the past.
@mike the only current limitation of the Fediverse is that to fully leverage the features of one server you'll need an account there and use its frontend. I look forward at an evolution of the system where the backend is fully content-agnostic and different frontends can be used with the same account. THAT will be perfection.
@oblomov@mike I can already use whatever app (front end) I want to access my one Mastodon account. I think you mean “web interfaces”, and I don’t expect that to ever happen. Can you access your gmail account using Yahoo mail?
@clith@mike but Mastodon is only good (if at that) for microblogging. Its interface is designed for that. PixelFed, PeerTube, lemmy, kbin etc have very different interfaces optimized for specific ways to interact with posts, images, videos, etc. And while you can interact with content from any of these platforms from any other platform, the experience is … suboptimal —and that's assuming you can at all.
@clith@mike for example, Mastodon has extremely poor support for ActivityPub Image objects, which is why PixelFed actually shares Notes instead of Images (which would be more appropriate): it does it to work around a limitation in Mastodon's design that no frontend can fix, because the content mangling happens at the server (backend) level, see also https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/24079 . And if you want a more type-specific experience, you actually do need multiple accounts on different services.
@clith@mike this is overall detrimental to the Fediverse and ActivityPub. What would be a better approach? One where the server is largely content-agnostic, and just takes care of account management and content distribution, with frontends taking care of the presentation. This way you could have “the PixelFed experience”, “the PeerTube experience”, “the Mastodon experience”, “the Lemmy experience” etc all from one single account (and PixelFed wouldn't have to fake its content type).
@clith@mike there are projects working in that direction, such as Vocata https://codeberg.org/Vocata/vocata, that also draws the useful parallel on email, differentiating the MTA from the MUA.
@manlycoffee@oblomov@mike
I should also note that #Graze is a thing that exists and people should use it because it simplifies browsing other instances exactly as you described by making your Web Browser effectively act as your front-end.
@mpesce Good question. A bunch of people are working on that including @evan, @tchambers and @J12t. Making #activitypub easier to implement within iOS and Android apps could enable the kind of Cambrian explosion you're talking about.
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