I just attended the "ActivityPub Based Forums and Threaded Discussions" call, and I really like their work on standardising the way, how forums federate.
Tbh I think the #Threadiverse like #Lemmy and #kbin would make a lot more sense if they were simply frontends and perhaps a backend too but just for the forums themselves. IOW, no accounts live in Lemmy or kbin, all users post from their preferred #fediverse account instead.
Sure you can already technically do that from your #Mastodon or #Misskey or whatever fedi you're in, but that means using whatever app you're on right now, which almost certainly means it's not a #linkaggregator UI. Not ideal at all.
If I had any good programming skills I'd make it so that the link aggregator is merely a client that uses the Mastodon (with #Pleroma extensions too) and Misskey APIs, treat (almost) all #ActivityPub actors as their own forums or subs, and each post would be a boost from said actor. Users authenticate from their preferred fedi account. Voting would be tallied by few special actors, which internally receive votes via direct messages (the app will make this transparent, but this also means you can technically vote without the app if you know the exact command), which will effectively make votes secret to non-admins like in #Reddit. Users can also choose which vote counters they want to rely from.
This would make the fediverse-powered link aggregator very flexible and minimal, imo. It may look janky but that's the general idea I have. :seija_coffee:
So, @eatyourglory and I were discussing Lemmy and he had a good question/idea. Could Lemmy communities technically be subdomains? Like instead of Lemmy.world/c/example, it could be example.lemmy.world?
Would this be something that could be theoretically built into Lemmy or is there some kinda technological limitation, making this not a thing..? I think it's a neat idea.🤷♂️🤔
Excited to see the work that @julian, @angusmcleod, @rimu, @evan and many others are putting into this initiative and will be following with excitement for the future standardization and interoperability in the #fediverse thru #ActivityPub that will hopefully follow.
Seems like an interesting effort. A developer is building an alternative Java-based backend to Lemmy’s Rust-based one, with the goal of building in a handful of different features. The dev is looking at using this compatibility to migrate their instance over to the new platform, while allowing the community to use their apps...
If you’re interested in checking out a #fediverse-based alternative to Reddit, come check out infosec.pub! It hosts a number of communities including one I’ve stood up for #cybersecurity / #infosec!
"Care has been taken to construct it in the simplest way possible, enabling contributions from programmers of all skill levels and keeping server costs down. This will greatly speed PieFed's development process and widen its adoption."
Clever move by @rimu Lemmy's development is struggling.
The most popular instance, lemmy.world (>25% monthly active users), is still on a previous release. The current release, 0.19.1, has broken federation for the past couple weeks. Up-to-date instances are hobbling along by being restarted every few hours.
Tried hacking on Lemmy myself... I've got many thoughts but not sure if/how to write them down.
Looks like the #threadiverse has been widely used by the #Lemmy and #Kbin communities for years, but now it's slowly being co-opted (including by #Meta staff) to refer to the #federation of #Threads.
I predict a complete takeover of the #hashtag, and term in general, before the end of 2024.
Trying out #Lemmy and #Kbin and my first impressions is that both are aggravating. Each has some positive aspects. But, besides both feeling very quiet, each one has UI aspects that drive me up the wall. I have followed the same 13 or so communities in each and I'll give it a go. But I think it might be a better tool for a distinct community rather than to replicate the #Reddit experience.
We experienced the #RedditBlackOut and we want to give the power back to the users.
We just granted €3000 to @LemmyDev and €333 to @ernest to support the new #threadiverse who already has hundreds of "subs" and thousands of users.
This grant is part of our engagement with the @copiepublique initiative that gathers companies who pledged to share profits to grant #FLOSS and #digitalCommons.
Nous avons assisté au blackout #reddit et nous avons souhaité redonner le pouvoir aux utilisateurs ! ✊
Nous versons 3000 € à https://join-lemmy.org et 333 € à https://kbin.pub qui proposent des alternatives avec déjà plusieurs dizaines de milliers de "sous" et de membres actifs de ce nouveau #threadiverse 🧵
Cela fait partie du 1% de notre chiffre d'affaires que nous versons tous les ans avec @copiepublique et on est pas les seuls !
Wow #Fediverse, thanks for the help! I am genuinely surprised at how close the results were. It looks like the recommendation is to try out the #Threadiverse (#Kbin and / or #Lemmy) first - but only by 1.8% over #Peertube! Y'all must know that I've been getting frustrated with #Reddit lately. I also appreciate the recommendations for other things to explore.
Now the question is Kbin or Lemmy? Or both? (any thoughts?)
differences between threadiverse folks and microbloggers on the fedi:
microbloggers boost a lot, but that's not big on the threadiverse
microbloggers tend not to like anything - neither the posts they keep boosting nor the replies to their own posts - whereas this is absolutely common on the threadiverse
microbloggers tend not to reply - whereas on the threadiverse, this keeps happening all the time
I've been thinking a bit about this post regarding #Mastodon's responsibility to be compatible with the #threadiverse (#ActivityPub thread aggregators like #Lemmy & #Kbin). Right now, a thread from Lemmy or Kbin usually federates to Mastodon with truncated text and a link to the actual thread. However, many want Mastodon to be more compatible with threads so that the people over on Mastodon interact with the threadiverse more.
I was initially in agreement as a Kbin user. But having given it some thought, I think this is an unwise approach that'll only serve to overcomplicate platforms on the #fediverse. Yes, people on Mastodon should promote other parts of the fediverse (and vice versa), but complete interoperability shouldn't be expected of every platform.
As much as many would like it, you can't have long-form video from PeerTube, images from Pixelfed, threads from Kbin, blogs from Writefreely, etc. all neatly fit in a microblog feed. These are different formats made for different platforms, and the people making them are expecting them to be interacted with in completely different ways. When someone makes a thread in a Lemmy community, they're probably expecting that the people who are going to see and interact with the thread are people that want to see threads and are thus on a Lemmy instance (or another thread aggregator). If someone from Mastodon were to interact with it as if it were a microblog post, there'd be a big mismatch. People interact with microblogs differently than they do with threads — that's why they're separate to begin with. You don't see everyone on Twitter also wanting to use to Reddit because people who want microblogs don't necessarily want Reddit-style threads, and vice versa.
The other option, then, is to separate these different formats into different feeds or otherwise make them clearly distinct from one another. Kbin does this by separating threads and microblog posts into two tabs. While you can view both in the "All Content" tab if you'd like, they're styled differently enough that it's very clear when you're looking at a thread and when you're looking at a microblog post. This distinction lets users treat threads like threads and microblog posts like microblog posts, which is really helpful since the two formats serve different purposes and have different audiences. This option — clear distinction — is a great way to solve the conundrum I've been talking about… if your platform is meant for viewing all these different kinds of content to begin with.
And that's what it really comes down to imo. Mastodon is a platform for microblogging. Most people go to Mastodon because they want a Twitter alternative, not a Twitter alternative that's also an Instagram alternative and a Reddit alternative and a YouTube alternative. Even if you put these different content types in separate tabs, it would inevitably make things seem more confusing and thus raise the barrier of entry. Add a Videos tab to Mastodon to view stuff on PeerTube, and people are inevitably going to go, "Wait, what's this? Is this like YouTube? I thought this was just a Twitter alternative! This all seems too complicated," even if you tell them to ignore it.
It's probably best to leave Mastodon as it is: a microblogging platform that has some limited federation with other formats. The way Kbin threads currently display on Mastodon is fine. In fact, when I post a Kbin thread, I'm expecting it to be viewed via a thread aggregator. If people on Mastodon were part of the target audience, I would've made a microblog post.
Now, if you want to make something that lets you view everything on the fediverse via different tabs, feel free. As aforementioned, Kbin supports both threads and microblogs, though it comes with some challenges (e.g., trying to fit magazine-less microblog posts into Kbin's magazine system). However, this doesn't mean every platform on the fediverse needs to seamlessly incorporate everything else. I'd love people on Mastodon to promote and even try out Lemmy & Kbin more, but that doesn't mean Mastodon needs to also become a thread aggregator.
In the past week or two, I've been making a lot of updates to my Kbin userstyle, idkbin, to account for all the new features Kbin has been getting. This weekend, I had a bunch more motivation to work on it, so I decided to make a bunch of additions to the userstyle and make the next version 1.3.0 (as opposed to 1.2.7, which...
Mastodon has the responsibility to promote diversity in the Fediverse
I love the Threadiverse. Compared to the microblogging Fediverse’s sea of random thoughts, Lemmy and kbin are so much easier to navigate with the options to sort posts by subscribed, from local instances or everything federated. You can also sort by individual community, and then there are the countless ways to order the posts and comments (which are stored neatly under the main post, by the way). That people can more easily find the right discussions and see where they can contribute also means that the discussions tend to be more focused and productive than elsewhere. Decentralisation also makes a lot of sense, since it is built around different communities. All that’s needed is users.
Things were going quite well for a while when Reddit killed third-party apps, prompting many to leave and find the Threadiverse. However, it is quite difficult to entertain a crowd that has grown accustomed to a constant bombardment of dopamine-inducing or interesting content by tens of millions of users, if you only have a couple hundred thousand people. This is causing some to leave, which of course increases this effect. The active users have more than halved since July, according to FediDB. The mood is also becoming more tense. Maybe the lack of engagement drives some to cause it through hostility, I’m not quite sure. Either way, the Threadiverse becoming a less enjoyable place to be, which is quite sad considering how promising it is.
But what is really frustrating is that we could easily have that userbase. The entire Fediverse has over ten million users, and many Mastodonians clearly want to engage in group-based discussion, looking at Guppe groups. The focused discussions should also be quite attractive. Technically we are federated, so why do Mastodonians interact so little with the Threadiverse? The main reason is that Mastodon simply doesn’t federate post content. I really can’t see why the platform that federates entire Wordpress blogs refuses to federate thread content just because it has a title, and instead just replaces the body with a link to the post. Very unhelpful.
The same goes with PeerTube. There are plenty of videos on there that I am quite sure a lot of Mastodonians would appreciate, yet both views and likes there stay consistently in the tens. Yes, Mastodon’s web interface has a local video player, but in most clients it is the same link shenanigans, may may partly explain the small amount of engagement. This is also quite sad, because Google’s YouTube is one of the worst social network monopolies out there, if not the worst.
And I know some might say that Mastodon is a microblogging platform and that it makes sense only to have microblogging content, but the problem is that Mastodon is the dominant platform on the Fediverse, its users making up close to 80% of all Fedizens. It has gone so far that several Friendica and Hubzilla users have been complaining about complaints from Mastodonians that their posts do not live up to Mastodon customs, and of course, that people frequently use “Mastodon” to refer to the entire Fediverse. This, of course, goes entirely against the idea of the Fediverse, that many diverse platforms live in harmony with and awareness of each other.
The very least that Mastodon could do is to support the content of other platforms. Then I’d wish that they’d improve discoverability, by for instance adding a videos tab in the explore section, improving federation of favourites since it is the dominant sorting mechanism on many other platforms, and making a clear distinction between people (@person) and groups (!group), but I know that that is quite much to ask.
P.S. @feditips , @FediFollows , I know that you are reluctant to promote Lemmy and its communities because of the ideology of its founders, but the fact is firstly that it’s open source and there aren't any individual people who control the entire project, and that the software itself is very apolitical. In fact, most Lemmy users both oppose and are on instances that have rules against such beliefs, so I highly encourage you to at least help raise awareness on the communities. Then, of course, there’s kbin, which isn’t associated with any extremism at all. As a bonus, it has much better integration with the microblogging Fediverse, but it is a lot smaller and younger, and still very much under development.
Anyways, that was a ramble. Thanks for hearing me out.
OC Lemmy's Image Problem (wedistribute.org)
The popular Reddit alternative's user count has grown a lot over the past year. One problem, though: users and admins can't delete images.
OC Sublinks Aims to Be a Drop-In Replacement for Lemmy (wedistribute.org)
Seems like an interesting effort. A developer is building an alternative Java-based backend to Lemmy’s Rust-based one, with the goal of building in a handful of different features. The dev is looking at using this compatibility to migrate their instance over to the new platform, while allowing the community to use their apps...
Released idkbin 1.3.0! — A few small visual improvements for Kbin (userstyles.world)
In the past week or two, I've been making a lot of updates to my Kbin userstyle, idkbin, to account for all the new features Kbin has been getting. This weekend, I had a bunch more motivation to work on it, so I decided to make a bunch of additions to the userstyle and make the next version 1.3.0 (as opposed to 1.2.7, which...