I feel like this might be mistakenly conflating the strength of the diversity of the fediverse with the convenience of using a single platform or UI for "everything".
I don't think the former necessitates the latter. Moreover, I suspect that the former is suppressed by the latter. Feeding blogs, groups and forums, microblogs, video+audio platforms etc all into a single twitter-like UI/platform ... seems like maybe a bad idea.
The first thing it misses, I think, is that platforms naturally develop vibes and cultures and that many naturally learn to match a particular activity and persona to a particular platform/vibe.
Along those lines, it would completely make sense for people to be a bit silly and shitpost-y on mastodon and then more academic over on a blogging platform.
One could even argue that this isn't just natural but healthy, where more focused vibes create more coherent interaction.
Presuming that a platform is a suitable "master" UI for everything looks to break this utility of platforms and online "spaces".
Moreover, mistaking that a "master platform" is possible for the promise of the fediverse may very well be dangerous if people embrace it with enthusiasm and hype to then be disappointed at how it doesn't work well and then question the value of decentralisation.
And I think that's important because federation doesn't guarantee a good UI. Probably the opposite.
We've seen this already with the integration between the threadiverse (lemmy etc) and mastodon/microblogs.
It basically sucks because the platforms are fundamentally incompatible despite how close the protocol brings them together.
Incompatible platforms don't work together.
Federation and the protocol don't change that. People will just reroute around UI friction and basically ignore whatever federation is offering if its UI sucks. The lively app+frontend development indicates the same.
Beyond having compatible UIs (which is tough if you're aiming for something relatively universal), there's then the issue of feed management.
The more that's pumped into your feed the more you need to filter and separate it out. That's a big UI challenge fediverse platforms don't seem up to either and which is generally tough. Not to mention that separate platforms or "spaces" actually become a feature here for helping one's feed management, as annoying as all the apps can be.
So, is the promise of a diverse fediverse a pipe-dream? Are the platforms up to the challenge of integrating with all the others? Or are people happy with a single UI?
I think it's "no" to all three. Which means something is being missed here (this is new after all).
A similar conversation happened recently over on #bluesky. It's a UI issue but at a system level and I'm not sure anyone has good solutions or is even thinking seriously about it.
I fear this betrays the web2.0 origins of the fedi and may be short-sighted.
I don't think federating blogs into mastodon is going to be that great (hot take maybe). Too complex or confusing for many to manage and different platforms+accounts for different purposes is just natural/easy.
I personally (and prob naively) look to the web browser's power to bring us the whole internet as an exemplar.
I think the fedi needs to be more about clients/apps than it is currently.
I think the magic of the fediverse's diversity doesn't materialise until it gets stitched together in the user's client ... and that we're still in an early phase of just laying out infrastructure in the cloud.
Federation is cool, but mostly just the beginning IMO.
@maegul I think you're right on the wider point that federation doesn't always mean useful interaction, with Lemmy as an example. However in the case of blogs and blog feeds, lots of people already use their microblog feed as a proxy for RSS feeds, and sharing links to websites is another central part of microblogging. So I think the friction should be minimal. People will keep on tailoring the feeds they want, and some will ignore blogs and blog feeds and others will follow some or a lot.
@maegul Yes maybe WordPress and others are just federating because they have FOMO and we'll get a 'fediverse of things' with lots of pointless dead connections that no one uses.
@maegul No, I'm serious. I think those kinds of dead connections are what we got with Lemmy. Federation in theory but no one actually using it because it doesn't meet any needs. The main way for Reddit to be shared on twitter was screenshots and that's probably what would work best between Lemmy and Mastodon as well. Or Tumblr and Mastodon.
I still think blog feeds is more likely to be useful, but that's also because I dislike using RSS readers because I can't deal with many apps.
@Loukas@maegul I don't really see the issue with Lemmy being that the platforms are incompatible. It's more that there are solvable issues with the way they interoperate that have not been addressed and make the experience poor.
the way a #Lemmy community just shows up as boosts of all posts and replies to them is just not a great way to represent them here, I believe there are multiple ways this experience could be improved from either side. Already somewhat better with platforms/clients that always show the parent post that is being replied to
in order to post (a reply) to a Lemmy community from #Mastodon (etc.) you need to know you have to mention the community by name which doesn't happen automatically
for a top-level post in to a community there are formatting rules like making the first line of the content the title
Lemmy content discoverability is poor on Mastodon because hashtags aren't really a thing for it
Not all of these have to be fixed to make federation useful and to me it doesn't seem like the biggest issues are insurmountable at all... do you have others in mind or have reasons why these cannot be improved?
@vetehinen@maegul The first issue you mention is closest to what I see as the core problem, namely that what is attractive about either platform is not something that can be usefully represented on the other. I don't see how that can be solved with the best will in the world.
@Loukas Where we differ is that I don't think the issue is that it can't be usefully represented on here, just that it currently isn't. Why do you think it can't rather than isn't? @maegul
@Loukas@maegul well for me it could be as trivial as just being able to filter the replies from the top level posts when looking at a group's feed. Much more involved plans have also been drafted though, like this one: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/pull/19059
@boris@maegul Is anyone actually using Substack notes? It seemed to be an attempt to jump on the twitter exodus bandwagon and I don't see it gaining much traction.
@boris@maegul I can see how having a single social graph you can use in many places would be useful. So it's federation for the users rather than for the content.
I think the fedi needs to be more about clients/apps than it is currently.
Agreed, and I kinda touched on this earlier about how the #Threadiverse should've simply been a frontend where people just use their main fedi account instead of having to create another account for forums in a link aggregator... :sagume_think:
Tbh all the #fediverse implementations in the first place should've been backends first and foremost. Why should I not be able to have #Misskey's frontend in #Mastodon or #Pleroma? And the other way around too. This does mean that we will have to all agree on a common client API and MastoAPI will dominate, but I'd rather have Mastodon dictate client API than fediverse implementations. :seija_coffee:
> all the #fediverse implementations in the first place should've been backends first and foremost.
Yep! It seems an obvious way to go if "ActivityPub" is truly a unifying protocol.
Generic backends that afford all sorts of options for anything that can be transported over the protocol, with separate front-ends/clients (or even multiple clients) to match whatever the user wants.
Then admins pick which backends they like and users which frontends.
Lemmy seems to be doing quite well with alternative front ends.
Checkout lemmy.world, the "Alternative UIs" section of the side bar. They're running 5 alternatives, which along with the standard makes 6 UIs for people to chose.
@aliceif Perhaps. But GoToSocial seems to be doing alright where it's basically just backend and very minimal logged-out and admin frontends. And IIRC, Pleroma only did that separation very late in its development instead of from the beginning, so that one might be a factor.
But it might be too late indeed. Maybe the best we can do right now is try to limit the differences between the microblog fediverse implementations and cut down on the non-microblog ones like Lemmy, Peertube, Pixelfed, and Bookwyrm, instead making those ones client-only. :sagume_think:
FWIW, there's currently akkomane.social, which is an akkoma backend using the mangane front-end instead of the default, and it's working quite well for me.
Laughing. These kinds of things were already part of the fediverse mate. So were groups, quote posts, nomadic identity, circles/aspects, single sign-on, rich HTML content, events and shared calendars, shopping, and much, much more. We've been waiting patiently for Mastodon to join the fediverse that already existed. Maybe someday.
For whatever reason, most simply didn't adopt these platforms.
And so there's a kind of lowest-common-denominator effect, where a feature doesn't actually exist on the fediverse unless the majority of users have access to it. Which is the sort of thing that disrupts widespread interop.
Yeah, I just read the entire thread and see what you''re getting at. I actually think it can work, but people need to change their mindset to focus on cooperation over empire, and some developers are a little slow getting the message. They're still building empires. That ain't gonna' work here.
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