As more and more instances are providing multiple services under the same management, we need a term to talk about this type of arrangement. A Fediverse Galaxy is a collection of federated software that is provided by the same admin or collective.
The table does not capture the fact that e.g. @stux is hosting several Mastodon instances. Should those instances hosted for others as a service be counted as part of the same galaxy?
Or would this be a Fediverse family (in analogy to Tor where relays run be the same entity are called a family).
@christian feel free to play with the term. I was just trying to document a thing I was seeing and give it a name. Not really that familiar with the Tor world
I would think of a galaxy as being some kind of "zone" on the fediverse. Though instances can interact with each other, not every instance interacts with every other one.
Think of a niche subject (a group of instances, or a goup of managers, with interests only related to a particular religion, or political view, or collectors...), their instances might not interoperate with more generic ones and only interoperate between themselves.
Usenet had the notion of an island for groups of servers disconnected from the rest of the "world".
That's what I would call a galaxy.
I would find another term for your notion, like a "group", or "local group". There has to be a better term.
@liaizon@fediverse I think k Jerry runs a WriteFreely instance too. I was but wasn’t thrilled with it. Although not strictly Fedi, need Matrix on here too.
@laurenshof hrm - that's a bit odd - everything looking good over here, i see good flowing traffic, limited errors, etc. Try requesting follow the other direction?
@derek neither mastodon.social nor calckey.social can find my account (laurens@ourselves.social) at all, so seems like some part of federation not properly working yet?
@laurenshof confirmed! Something with DNS has gone wonky in the past 12 hours. The /.well-known endpoint for ourselves.space has vanished. Our custom domains services continue to work just fine for our paid subscribers. Funny, it's the same system, so, digging through the code to see what could be amiss with our defaults.
@laurenshof example - you can find me @derek no problem - that's one of the custom domains for us. same system, proper webfinger results. Will keep ya posted!
@derek following from takahe towards pixelfed, mastodon and calckey work. Following from mastodon also works. From calckey it stays stuck on processing. Getting a notification that my calckey account is following on takahe, but posts dont actually appear in my feed. Not sure if its a takahe or calckey issue yet
@liaizon
this is a really good idea. Say #kolektiva providing a mastodon, lemmy, funkwhale, pixelfed, peertube etc. to all users. I think any communities that do this in an organised fashion would gain a lot of new users..... but it is a lot of work. Would love to see mastodon.art do this.
@fedi I had Kolektiva on this list before actually but then I wanted to only list instances that show a "person" behind the admin account. I do want to make some graphics that show instances that have more generalized groups of admins and I dont think they need to be single people at all but I just hadnt designed for that
@liaizon@Fediverse@fediversereport the more I think about it, the more important and relevant this feels, especially regarding the entire discussion about meta and federation.
Meta joining means that admins cannot be just system administrators anymore, but will have to make policy choices that are contested, and publically communicate them. Saying that transphobia is banned is a relatively easy policy as all sensible people agree, but either choice regarding meta will come with pushback from current users.
I think this is a healthy move for fedi. It also means that once servers start to define an identity ('we're privacy focused!', or 'we contact with everyone, including meta, nostr, bsky, etc'), it also makes sense to establish this as a brand. And once you've established a brand and identity, it makes perfect sense to export that to the other software.
And thats the point where you're galaxies come in. Not 100% sold yet on the name, but it gets the point across well.
I think most galaxies you've identified so far seem like they would not defederate from meta instantly, which creates significant space for other admins who do want to defederate to offer galaxy services that all defederate.
@laurenshof I agree the name is mostly a placeholder for the concept. I had been thinking about the concept for years and had written a bit about it ages ago but then @e posted about how they were starting a new galaxy and it fit really well with my line of thinking. it's impossible to talk about something that has no name! but really I think we should come up with neologisms for a lot of these things, including "the fediverse" in general cause the semantic drift is already too strong
@liaizon would it be an idea to hold an audon.space talk with some involved people so we can just pick each others brains a bit about current naming issues? Agreed with semantic drift on fediverse. Now we're getting threadiverse as well, and galaxies. Think it would be interesting to just publically chat with some people about names
@liaizon cool! think somewhere in EU evening timezone gives some better option for others to participate as well? Tomorrow doesnt work well for me, after that lot more space
@laurenshof@liaizon@Fediverse@fediversereport
Another thing that has to be adresse:
The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) by the EU will have to be follow by a big Corp like Facebook. How does this interact with AP and the rest of the fedivers ? Will there be GDPR Compliant "Galaxys" and how do they federate with servers in the US or other parts of the World?
@boris Constellation is such a long word, though I agree it might be more correct but I am not sure if semantic correctness is the most important aspect of this.
What is the organization type? How is it governed? How is it funded? How is it moderated? How can members get involved? — those are some of the important questions.
@boris I agree fully that those are super important questions to answer. When I was making that chart it struck me how all of these "galaxies" have a defined single admin (cause there is no way to easily list a number of people as "in power" in most of these pieces of software. I have been thinking about how we could expand the scope of NodeInfo to include more metadata about funding and power structures and paths of involvement that can then be easily resurfaced by tracking software
@boris I wasn't proposing that 'isCoop' would be the only attribute and we could get as specific or as vague as we wanted. Right now we have no system to aggregate this type of information. And just trying to figure put what structure these things have at the moment is quite difficult even for me and I have the ability to directly ask all the people running them since I am already here. Imagine coming into the fediverse as a new comer and trying to figure out who the most collective instance is
@liaizon I’m not arguing against it, I just don’t think it’s something to automate.
If you make it some joint space (GitHub repo, shared wiki), orgs can fill it out on their own or others can ask / fill out an about page.
I’m pleased to see folks like Kissane tag CoSocial alongside SocialCoop — because it is the core of why we’re doing it. I’d love to help more co-ops take the step.
@boris I am not proposing to automate adding this information. The idea I was that if there was a way for instances to semantically describe their own structure so that information could be easily showed to outside parties who are trying to understand what instances are run responsibly and fairly and have the chance at longevity. Personally I think github is the worst place to have to go for this info. Wikis are great but unless every instance uses the same wiki we are back to the same problem
@liaizon I’ve run large amounts of “fake APIs” on GitHub. Basically a set structure that then runs a GitHub Action to turn all the info into a single JSON file that can get published.
Happy to talk more about this and get a sample going in the CoSocial repo. I’ll do an example
I understand the nuances of “GH means only devs can update” hence also my wiki comment.
@liaizon I think that’s in fact BECAUSE of the structure. They’re all un-incorporated personal projects? Or do those people run it through an LLC or Corporate structure they own? In which country’s jurisdiction?
SocialCoop and CoSocial would both have “the techops + trust & safety teams” as “admin” as they are co-ops.
And it also erases any other (volunteer? paid?) mods on those systems
@liaizon@boris "it struck me how all of these "galaxies" have a defined single admin"
Funny enough I think this is an argument in favor of "constellation" though. If something revolves around one person calling it "the constellation of [admin name]" feels more appropriate than "the [admin name] galaxy".
"The [x] galaxy" evokes more of an idea that [x] is the main topic or theme of that group of services.
@liaizon@boris agreed, and if you want to get pedantic, galaxies are the only objects in the universe which are decentralized with respect to each other (galaxies aren't revolving around anything, they are independent) so an outpost of services makes sense and you can imagine a future in many thousands of years where each galaxy is its own home to millions of its own stars. A star being a hosted instance of a federated app.
@fediverse If you have any feedback on this idea I am just now playing with it. The term was mentioned months ago by https://epsilon.social/@e and it had resonated with me since then and I have been wanting to try to give it a more formal definition since then. This is an idea in progress and I welcome any feedback you may have. Is this a useful concept to work on? Should we come up with a different name?
@iameru@bloodaxe@fediverse its both a mastodon thread and a lemmy thread cause we are all in the same fediverse! I started this lemmy thread from mastodon by tagging the lemmy group in the origonal post.
@liaizon Maybe each network of the same platform (like all Mastodon instances, all Pixelfed instances, etc) is a “galaxy”, all instances ran by the same person or org is a “constellation” or “asterism”… and the asterism typographic symbol can still be used for the full universe?
@nclm I have been meaning to make a website for ⁂ since that thread last year! I started thinking about it but got a bit held up cause there are some issues with the very idea of a fediverse "account" that doesnt specify what server type it is. Take for example Funkwhale: it has @user handles that you can see from other parts of the fedi, but if you tag it or message it those messages just disappear into the ether and you dont get notified on the Funkwhale side
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