Pick any popular platform. There’s an OSS version of it. Increasigly, one of those OSS versions supports the ActivityPub spec and, therefore, participate in the fediverse.
There’s “can,” and the there’s “popularly do.” This comic sadly - and rather ignorantly - only addresses the latter.
There’s an AP federated version of Twitter; of Instagram; of Goodreads; of Blogger - there are bunches of them.
I don’t even know what the point of having a decentralized platform is if everyone defederates from each other and congregates in a few instances anyway.
Like you stick Timmy the MAGA nut and Bobby the tankie in the same community and somehow they’ll all just get along because it’s not Reddit.
I think the only upside is you don’t need to create as many accounts to engage with multiple communities across the verse, atleast until heavy moderation kicks in preventing this in the future.
For the exact reason so many of us had come here with recent rules changes that reddit have adopted.
Here on lemmy it would be relatively painless to move to a new instance if lemmy.world suddenly decided to ban the capital letter B. But if Spez thought it might increase his IPO, there wouldn’t be much you can do about it.
Yeah but whats the difference between switching instances when the admins get totalitarian vs switching forums. I don’t really understand the benefit of Lemmy because it still encourages the same behavior as Reddit. Yeah you can move to another instance but that’s exactly like switching forums on the old web.
I believe what will eventually happen is all the biggest instances will have a small number of whitelisted instances that can be interacted with and that’s it. Everything will be tightly controlled among the larger instances.
IMO it makes sense to federate with similar platforms. Mastodon and Firefish, for example. Or Lemmy and Kbin. But there is no point in federating mastodon with Lemmy. The format is so different anyway.
The Fediverse is not one single platform and IMO that is fine.
I feel like people really get too caught up in the interoperability promise of AP. Like yeah, it’d be neat to use my Mastodon account to make comments on PeerTube videos or Pixelfed images without needing to log into yet another server. But a better solution for that would be federated identity servers.
The real joy of AP federation is that there are dozens (hundreds?) of Mastodon servers; so you can build smaller communities with their own rules and moderation, while still allowing those communities to interconnect.
It’s true here of course too, there’s several popular communities outside the ones on Lemmyworld. So serious answer to the silly question posed in the comic: what can lemmy federated with? Other lemmy instances, also kbin instances.
There’s also the joy of open APIs. I can easily write my own application to interface with the services should the desire or need arise. Nobody can suddenly start charging me a fee to access the network or force me to go through their app or server.
I mean, it does not really work, the two services are different in key ways. How would you integrate Twitter-like posts into a Reddit-like community-based site?
It works, not seamlessly but close. Any community is considered to be an account, with any posts made to it considered to be a “tweet”. Any comments are replies to the post. A microblog account can post to a community by @ ing it, and reply to comments and posts by… replying to the post.
From lemmy to microfedi doesn’t work as well, but you can reply to posts as normal and like by upvoting.
There’s kbin, but even without that, it’s nice to know that a new app can come along and straight away join in the existing “ecosystem” with all its content and users.
its pretty subjective. i like the mbin interface better in general, but i think the microblog could be ...better managed. realistically the product is still in early stages.
the beauty is, it is actively being worked on by a small community always looking for more devs. i hear a new version is about to drop.
Out of curiosity, do you use the more mastadon-like microblogging features of kbin? Having almost exclusively used lemmy through a third party app (Sync), I’m curious how well the two kinds of content mesh.
I haven't used the microblogging features, I came from Reddit and mainly wanted to have the same experience. That said, it's as easy as switching between threads and microblog in the sidebar
I still don’t get this; who wants to log onto twitter and see reddit? Or log onto reddit and see twitter?
As somebody who never understood the appeal of twitter, I’m glad my Lemmy isn’t clogged up with a bunch of Mastadon content, personally
edit: the likelihood that I’m missing some salient point here is high, so genuinely please educate me on what I’m not understanding
edit 2: Okay, I’ve read the replies and I get it a little bit more, especially the point about additional ease in growing the Lemmy userbase during this building phase. I’m not sure I’ll ever really “get” the appeal, but you all have helped me understand the value to some degree, so thank you.
It’s about connecting with the maximum of people. You like how lemmy look but other people are used to how Twitter look and will choose Mastodon instead, but in the end what matters is that we can all talk to each other no matter our personal social media preferences.
Personally I’d sometimes appreciate it, especially from Lemmy to Mastodon. Sometimes I find something interresting or useful on Lemmy and I’d love to just boost it on my Mastodon. The way it’s now is that I post the link to Lemmy post on my Mastodon and this isn’t nice, f.e. now I have two comment sections (one on Lemmy, one on Mastodon) and if people on Mastodon want to join Lemmy discussion, they need to have Lemmy account.
Also the other way arround (from Mastodon to Lemmy) - sometimes I see screenshots of Mastodon messages. It shouldn’t be like that, we should share the original post directly in Lemmy which would credit the author and we could join discussion
Edit. But btw this is already working … sort of. In a very, very limited way. F.e. this is how I see this post in Tusky app with my Mastodon account. No image, no comments, it’s … meh. I think you can somehow join the discussion too or just reply to a single comment but again, it’s very limited atm
The core similarity of all these platforms is content aggregation. The differences come down to how that content is served, categorized, and interacted with. Federation ideally distributes content to relevant communities, based on interest, regardless of platform preference.
Edit: Also, people you don’t like will be on every site. We have tools to democratically tell those people we don’t like their ideas, so using them will make every platform better.
Mastodon is quite a bit bigger than Lemmy and if you make it easy to interact here some of the Mastodon users might decide to join Lemmy too. I’m kind of in the opposite situation, I’m on here and I don’t have a Mastodon, but if I could see more of Mastodon from Lemmy I might decide I’m interested enough in that content to make a Mastodon account. But I never really got into Twitter, even if some form of a character limit would help improve my writing.
For me, this is the opposite situation. I like long texts that detail other aspects in a topic, the writer’s intent, references, lists, etc. that make discussion matter more and hit its core aim rather than having a limited space where you can only vent your emotions in a few words or just simply talk about something in a limited, headline-esque urgency.
I think the character limit was increased a bit over the years but the short text culture persisted, even if some people try to use chain comments as a way of posting long discussion texts. The platform simply goads people into that style, which is antithetical to meaningful discussion.
That is, overall, my view of the character limit situation too, that the character limit forces nuance to be lost and contributed to some of the issues Twitter had pre-Elon (Elon’s influence on Twitter culture has been far more harmful though). More what I meant is that I’m a novelist as a hobby and I’m sometimes too verbose in my writing. An artificial character limit might help me practice writing tight, punchy sentences.
I also tend to be a bit long winded. I enjoy using a diverse diction and try to maintain some grammatical consistency. Neither of those things are well expressed on short-text platforms. Like even this comment feels too long for Twitter or Mastodon.
The point you’re missing is that it isn’t about integrating significantly different platforms like lemmy and mastodon, but rather connecting platforms that are close enough.
Mastodon federates with misskey, firefish, iceshrimp, sharkey, (all extremely featured and very similar to mastodon), writefreely (more for blogging and writing but absolutely connects), some wordpress websites (there’s a plugin), peertube (you can follow channels to see when videos are posted), friendica and who knows how many tiny custom instances.
This allows massive customisation of your experience.
Anyway, interop is more of a happy side-effect of using a common federation protocol
I am underwhelmed by the microblog half of things since that format still boring. Never got twitter either. Still cool to have around if the lemmy stuff drys up for the day.
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