12 ms·

The Many Branches of the Fediverse

166 points by nafnlj 4y ago

skybrian 4y ago
I wonder which of these are also RSS readers? That might be a good combination.
- nafnlj 4y ago
  Hubzilla allows you to subscribe to feeds as "channels," but it doesn't provide a great feed reader experience from my limited use. I have only made accounts with Mastodon, Pixelfed, and Hubzilla, so entirely possible that some of the others do interesting things with feed subscriptions/reading.
  - aliqot 4y ago
    feed reader on Vivaldi is also pretty bad. Right off the top of my head: - no right click to adjust poll interval, default is every 5 minutes(!) - no ability to re-poll a single feed - no right click to edit interval, must use main app settings - subscribe button doesn't allow interval settings - no feed categories - no feed ordering There's more but I feel like a jerk just going off about something free that nobody asked me to try. I want to investigate submitting a PR, but I am in limbo as I'm precluding from consorting with G.
- remram 4y ago
  I would rather have my microblogging system look more like a feed reader than the opposite. E.g. folders, search, notes, re-export multiple curated feeds...
- friend_and_foe 4y ago
  Most servers implementing ActivityPub also allow RSS/Atom subscriptions.
caycep 4y ago
How "fediverse-ey" was say, USENET, Napster or Bittorent back in the day?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- haunter 4y ago
  >Bittorent back in the day What do you mean by this? Torrent never went away, there are countless high quality private trackers and even some really good public ones But considering piracy + fediverse then DC++ was the most fediverse-y one https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DC%2B%2B https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DC%2B%2B You could connect to any given X server where you could share your local drive + chat with other users too. It's still really good to find some extremely niche stuff but torrent basically "won" because of the hash based seeding system (as in multiple user can share and peer the same stuff). DC was just seeing others' HDD and find whatever you can and directly download from there. But you didn't know that Joe's "Movie2012x264.mp4" and Jim's "Movie2012.mkv" are the same thing or different.
  - hauxir 4y ago
    it was like that in the beginning of dc++ but they later introduced hashing which did infact figure out the commonality between the two.
- bombcar 4y ago
  IRC was not even fediversed, it was independent fiefdoms, but it was fun.
  - remram 4y ago
    For a little while it was an open federation of sort. The problem is that it had a single namespace of user and channel names, so misbehaving servers would cause chaos. Wikipedia has a summary: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Relay_Chat#EFnet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Relay_Chat#EFnet
- 4y ago
friend_and_foe 4y ago
Hubzilla notably is building the Zot protocol, IMO the coolest and most underrated federating protocol put there.
serverholic 4y ago
Honestly, after using mastodon I'm a bit more bearish on the fediverse. It's too complex for your average user and there are still significant centralization risks. Sure anyone can host a server but obviously that's pretty technical. If you don't host your own server then you place a lot of trust on whoever owns it. They own your data and they decide which external servers to share data with. Want to add a video game centric mastodon server to your feed? Well you better hope your server decides to partner with that server. Not to mention that servers cost money, so you have to be sure that whoever is hosting it can continue to pay for it. Mastodon the organization is a non profit. Do they have the funds to host millions of people? Probably not. Which means people have to find a smaller server and hope that it stays funded. This makes choosing your mastodon server a pretty important choice. Most people seem to be going for mastodon official servers which is causing them to be overloaded.
- feet 4y ago
  Most of us carry internet connected computers in our pockets now. How difficult would it be to automate setting up a server on android or iOS? Could someone just install an app and have a server available?
  - csande17 4y ago
    The main problem with this idea is battery life. Mobile devices are designed to go to sleep really often to conserve battery, and you can't do that if you're running a server. iOS in particular heavily restricts when and how apps can do stuff while the screen is locked.
    - 40four 4y ago
      I think you are misinterpreting what the parent comment is suggesting. You for sure can’t host a Mastodon server off of a mobile device. I think they were suggesting ‘how hard would it be’ to make a mobile app that would allow anyone to spin up their own Mastodon instance in the cloud. I’m not sure I know the answer to that question. It’s definitely not a trivial problem to solve, but also not so crazy that it couldn’t be solved with some concerned effort. There are already some 3rd party services that will host your Mastodon for you, but as far as an easy to use mobile app, could be a good business opportunity for anyone with the right motivation.
csande17 4y ago
I was expecting this to be about the various Mastodon groups that have all instance-banned each other, so you can't communicate with everyone in the fediverse without making multiple accounts. (IIRC there are at least 3: the American alt-right, the American left/progressives/etc, and the Japanese instances where people draw pictures that are illegal to possess in most other countries.)
- Cyberdog 4y ago
  The way I've put it in other threads is: the "free speech" fediverse, the "safe space" fediverse, and the MAP fediverse. It's a bit unfair to solely consider American politics - there are plenty of Europeans on the fediverse, on both sides of the divide. And not everyone who prefers the more chaotic free speech servers are alt-right, unless you're one of those people who considers all non-leftists to be alt-right nowadays.
  - none_to_remain 4y ago
    Imagining no countries, it was necessary to create them. This is what I was interested in - how the feudal topography had evolved in practice. Is there anything like a "map" (informatively arranged graph of federated clusters) around?
    - eru 4y ago
      > Imagining no countries, it was necessary to create them. Necessary in what sense? It's a bit like saying mosquitoes were necessary to create. They continue to exist because they are good at perpetuating their own existence.
      - enneff 4y ago
        Mosquitos are food for many other organisms.
        eru 4y ago
cheriot 4y ago
Does anyone have DAU or MAU numbers for this stuff? I've been convinced that web3 is not going anywhere, but open to being proven wrong.
- yaomtc 4y ago
  > DAU or MAU Daily Active Users and Monthly Active Users, in case anyone else would've had to look it up
- doublepg23 4y ago
  I may be mistaken but the Fediverse are a collection of projects using ActivityPub or similar protocols. Usually they are federated not completely decentralized (or blockchain based) like "Web3".
  - klabb3 4y ago
    That sounds right. To be clear, blockchain is a solution to a subset of decentralization problems that rely on consensus. The vast majority of non-financial apps don't need to solve 1000s of global consensus problems per minute. There's tons of interesting stuff to be done in this space!
    - neltnerb 4y ago
      I may not be parsing you correctly, but in what sense do you mean consensus? I think Mastodon simply relies on there being a single authoritative source of material from any address, and then that goes out to various places local and remote depending on details. I'm not sure that's really consensus so much as message delivery, I don't think anyone would notice if posts arrived out of order (for instance). It strikes me as well enough served by a database that gets updates from users on an instance. So I guess, admittedly I may well not understand, but what does consensus have to do with it?
      - klabb3 4y ago
        Sure. I noticed that many people come from the angle that decentralization implies defi, because they've seen the last few years of decentralization practically be synonymous with blockchains. I'm just responding to that, and saying that there's lots of interesting applications possible in the decentralized space that don't involve blockchains or finance. Blockchains are just a global append-only stack of messages with global consensus. Mastodon isn't decentralized so I didn't intend to compare them at all. That said, I think federated systems are interesting and have a place, because full decentralization is often impractical.
asymmetric 4y ago
Has anyone compared the ActivityPub and Matrix protocols? Why was Matrix/ActivityPub created when the other already existed? What are the respective strengths/weaknesses/focuses? In which contexts were they created, to solve which problems?
- Matl 4y ago
  ActivityPub is very narrowly targeted at Twitter/Facebook/Diaspora type of social app. It doesn't strike me as particularly well suited for real-time or indeed any kind of secure communication. Not to say it cannot be twisted for such a purpose, but it should probably not be.
  - neltnerb 4y ago
    My limited experience is similar to yours I think, but I'm not sure how true this is. If ActivityPub works for these, is it doing a bad job? - Nextcloud, a federated service for file hosting - PeerTube, a federated service for video streaming - Pixelfed, a piece of social networking software which resembles Instagram (from wikipedia, surely there are more) Or I suppose maybe those count as social apps because they involve public facing posting. I definitely wouldn't use them for privacy, and only for communication with no particular expectation of promptness.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
- woojoo666 4y ago
  > Why was Matrix/ActivityPub created when the other already existed? Afaik Matrix started in 2014, Activitypub in 2016. Both were probably pretty small back then, so no reason to adopt the other's protocol when there's no guarantee of stability
- Arathorn 4y ago
  As others have said, we created Matrix 2 years before AP, targetting generic pubsub+history - but with the initial applications being Slack/Skype/WhatsApp style use cases. In fact, Element/Riot’s internal codename as a reference Matrix client was “Skype Done Right”. As a result, there was a perception that “Matrix is for chat”, even though you can do so much more - eg https://matrix.org/blog/2020/12/18/introducing-cerulean https://matrix.org/blog/2020/12/18/introducing-cerulean is a microblogging system on Matrix, and thirdroom.io is a whole virtual world implementation. As a result, for whatever reason, folks prefer to build domain-specific protocols like ActivityPub or ATProto focusing specifically on public microblogging rather than building on Matrix’s generic primitives. It’s also fair to say that Matrix wasn’t proven when ActivityPub began, and AP builds on many preexisting protocols like ostatus, rss, salmon, etc.
anigbrowl 4y ago
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike Federation is great for people who want to occupy or set up curated niches, but an uninteresting thicket for those who do not. I'm pretty sure I said the same thing about this ~5 years ago when I first tried Mastodon.
monksy 4y ago
Activity pub and the fediverse is an interesting area which I don't hear a lot of commerical interest of people getting into that.
mamborambo 4y ago
The "Twexit" event is a huge opportunity for Fediverse to pick up new users, but I fear it will be wasted because the Fediverse software is still not ready for prime time. The concept of "instances", "federated feeds", "different software for different media types" are all complexities unnecessary for the newbies.
- friend_and_foe 4y ago
  Instances, local and federated feeds are core to the architecture of the system. There's pros and cons to this UX, and just because it's not exactly like twitter doesn't mean it can't catch on. Different software for different media types... you mean like Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, Reddit, TikTok? Different media are interacted with in different ways and are optimal under different interfaces. At least with ActivityPub you can interact with all these media across the spectrum of software as you desire. Try following a YouTube channel from your twitter account. In truth, fediverse is mature and ready for prime time. And there's still plenty of novel UX approaches to be explored, and I hope people do that. But it won't pick up the steam needed to steamroll things like Twitter because it doesn't game your mind to give you the dopamine hit, and people can't ban those they salivate over causing trouble for, they can only block them. For those people using Twitter that disliked these things and didn't know there were alternatives or couldn't put their finger on what they didn't like fedi is going to feel like fresh air, for the rest "there's just something missing." I give it a month before most of the new users go home to Twitter.
  - mamborambo 4y ago
    No I mean the media-specific server app branching like pictures (pixelfed), music (funkwhale), live cast (owncast), video (peertube), links (Lemmy) etc. How do a newbie to Fediverse sensibly choose the right instance to home on, when he has to decide what media type he publish in, at the time of server instance enrolment?
    - friend_and_foe 4y ago
      I know what you meant, my point was that the non federating internet has the same thing and it doesn't stop people from using it. I'd say you do the same thing you'd do on the big tech internet: you open a YouTube account if you want to make videos, so have a peertube account. You have a twitter account for microblogging, so have a mastodon/pleroma/misskey account. You'd have an Instagram account if you want to primarily share photos, so open a pixelfed account. Open 3. Share your accounts on the others. this is not a new problem, we already do this on twitter, Instagram, reddit, etc.

166 points by nafnlj 4y ago

skybrian 4y ago

I wonder which of these are also RSS readers? That might be a good combination.

nafnlj 4y ago
Hubzilla allows you to subscribe to feeds as "channels," but it doesn't provide a great feed reader experience from my limited use. I have only made accounts with Mastodon, Pixelfed, and Hubzilla, so entirely possible that some of the others do interesting things with feed subscriptions/reading.
- aliqot 4y ago
  feed reader on Vivaldi is also pretty bad. Right off the top of my head: - no right click to adjust poll interval, default is every 5 minutes(!) - no ability to re-poll a single feed - no right click to edit interval, must use main app settings - subscribe button doesn't allow interval settings - no feed categories - no feed ordering There's more but I feel like a jerk just going off about something free that nobody asked me to try. I want to investigate submitting a PR, but I am in limbo as I'm precluding from consorting with G.
remram 4y ago
I would rather have my microblogging system look more like a feed reader than the opposite. E.g. folders, search, notes, re-export multiple curated feeds...
friend_and_foe 4y ago
Most servers implementing ActivityPub also allow RSS/Atom subscriptions.

caycep 4y ago

How "fediverse-ey" was say, USENET, Napster or Bittorent back in the day?

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
haunter 4y ago
>Bittorent back in the day What do you mean by this? Torrent never went away, there are countless high quality private trackers and even some really good public ones But considering piracy + fediverse then DC++ was the most fediverse-y one https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DC%2B%2B https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DC%2B%2B You could connect to any given X server where you could share your local drive + chat with other users too. It's still really good to find some extremely niche stuff but torrent basically "won" because of the hash based seeding system (as in multiple user can share and peer the same stuff). DC was just seeing others' HDD and find whatever you can and directly download from there. But you didn't know that Joe's "Movie2012x264.mp4" and Jim's "Movie2012.mkv" are the same thing or different.
- hauxir 4y ago
  it was like that in the beginning of dc++ but they later introduced hashing which did infact figure out the commonality between the two.
bombcar 4y ago
IRC was not even fediversed, it was independent fiefdoms, but it was fun.
- remram 4y ago
  For a little while it was an open federation of sort. The problem is that it had a single namespace of user and channel names, so misbehaving servers would cause chaos. Wikipedia has a summary: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Relay_Chat#EFnet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Relay_Chat#EFnet
4y ago

friend_and_foe 4y ago

Hubzilla notably is building the Zot protocol, IMO the coolest and most underrated federating protocol put there.

serverholic 4y ago

Honestly, after using mastodon I'm a bit more bearish on the fediverse. It's too complex for your average user and there are still significant centralization risks. Sure anyone can host a server but obviously that's pretty technical. If you don't host your own server then you place a lot of trust on whoever owns it. They own your data and they decide which external servers to share data with. Want to add a video game centric mastodon server to your feed? Well you better hope your server decides to partner with that server. Not to mention that servers cost money, so you have to be sure that whoever is hosting it can continue to pay for it. Mastodon the organization is a non profit. Do they have the funds to host millions of people? Probably not. Which means people have to find a smaller server and hope that it stays funded. This makes choosing your mastodon server a pretty important choice. Most people seem to be going for mastodon official servers which is causing them to be overloaded.

feet 4y ago
Most of us carry internet connected computers in our pockets now. How difficult would it be to automate setting up a server on android or iOS? Could someone just install an app and have a server available?
- csande17 4y ago
  The main problem with this idea is battery life. Mobile devices are designed to go to sleep really often to conserve battery, and you can't do that if you're running a server. iOS in particular heavily restricts when and how apps can do stuff while the screen is locked.
  - 40four 4y ago
    I think you are misinterpreting what the parent comment is suggesting. You for sure can’t host a Mastodon server off of a mobile device. I think they were suggesting ‘how hard would it be’ to make a mobile app that would allow anyone to spin up their own Mastodon instance in the cloud. I’m not sure I know the answer to that question. It’s definitely not a trivial problem to solve, but also not so crazy that it couldn’t be solved with some concerned effort. There are already some 3rd party services that will host your Mastodon for you, but as far as an easy to use mobile app, could be a good business opportunity for anyone with the right motivation.

csande17 4y ago

I was expecting this to be about the various Mastodon groups that have all instance-banned each other, so you can't communicate with everyone in the fediverse without making multiple accounts. (IIRC there are at least 3: the American alt-right, the American left/progressives/etc, and the Japanese instances where people draw pictures that are illegal to possess in most other countries.)

Cyberdog 4y ago
The way I've put it in other threads is: the "free speech" fediverse, the "safe space" fediverse, and the MAP fediverse. It's a bit unfair to solely consider American politics - there are plenty of Europeans on the fediverse, on both sides of the divide. And not everyone who prefers the more chaotic free speech servers are alt-right, unless you're one of those people who considers all non-leftists to be alt-right nowadays.
- none_to_remain 4y ago
  Imagining no countries, it was necessary to create them. This is what I was interested in - how the feudal topography had evolved in practice. Is there anything like a "map" (informatively arranged graph of federated clusters) around?
  - eru 4y ago
    > Imagining no countries, it was necessary to create them. Necessary in what sense? It's a bit like saying mosquitoes were necessary to create. They continue to exist because they are good at perpetuating their own existence.
    - enneff 4y ago
      Mosquitos are food for many other organisms.
      - eru 4y ago

cheriot 4y ago

Does anyone have DAU or MAU numbers for this stuff? I've been convinced that web3 is not going anywhere, but open to being proven wrong.

yaomtc 4y ago
> DAU or MAU Daily Active Users and Monthly Active Users, in case anyone else would've had to look it up
doublepg23 4y ago
I may be mistaken but the Fediverse are a collection of projects using ActivityPub or similar protocols. Usually they are federated not completely decentralized (or blockchain based) like "Web3".
- klabb3 4y ago
  That sounds right. To be clear, blockchain is a solution to a subset of decentralization problems that rely on consensus. The vast majority of non-financial apps don't need to solve 1000s of global consensus problems per minute. There's tons of interesting stuff to be done in this space!
  - neltnerb 4y ago
    I may not be parsing you correctly, but in what sense do you mean consensus? I think Mastodon simply relies on there being a single authoritative source of material from any address, and then that goes out to various places local and remote depending on details. I'm not sure that's really consensus so much as message delivery, I don't think anyone would notice if posts arrived out of order (for instance). It strikes me as well enough served by a database that gets updates from users on an instance. So I guess, admittedly I may well not understand, but what does consensus have to do with it?
    - klabb3 4y ago
      Sure. I noticed that many people come from the angle that decentralization implies defi, because they've seen the last few years of decentralization practically be synonymous with blockchains. I'm just responding to that, and saying that there's lots of interesting applications possible in the decentralized space that don't involve blockchains or finance. Blockchains are just a global append-only stack of messages with global consensus. Mastodon isn't decentralized so I didn't intend to compare them at all. That said, I think federated systems are interesting and have a place, because full decentralization is often impractical.

asymmetric 4y ago

Has anyone compared the ActivityPub and Matrix protocols? Why was Matrix/ActivityPub created when the other already existed? What are the respective strengths/weaknesses/focuses? In which contexts were they created, to solve which problems?

Matl 4y ago
ActivityPub is very narrowly targeted at Twitter/Facebook/Diaspora type of social app. It doesn't strike me as particularly well suited for real-time or indeed any kind of secure communication. Not to say it cannot be twisted for such a purpose, but it should probably not be.
- neltnerb 4y ago
  My limited experience is similar to yours I think, but I'm not sure how true this is. If ActivityPub works for these, is it doing a bad job? - Nextcloud, a federated service for file hosting - PeerTube, a federated service for video streaming - Pixelfed, a piece of social networking software which resembles Instagram (from wikipedia, surely there are more) Or I suppose maybe those count as social apps because they involve public facing posting. I definitely wouldn't use them for privacy, and only for communication with no particular expectation of promptness.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
woojoo666 4y ago
> Why was Matrix/ActivityPub created when the other already existed? Afaik Matrix started in 2014, Activitypub in 2016. Both were probably pretty small back then, so no reason to adopt the other's protocol when there's no guarantee of stability
Arathorn 4y ago
As others have said, we created Matrix 2 years before AP, targetting generic pubsub+history - but with the initial applications being Slack/Skype/WhatsApp style use cases. In fact, Element/Riot’s internal codename as a reference Matrix client was “Skype Done Right”. As a result, there was a perception that “Matrix is for chat”, even though you can do so much more - eg https://matrix.org/blog/2020/12/18/introducing-cerulean https://matrix.org/blog/2020/12/18/introducing-cerulean is a microblogging system on Matrix, and thirdroom.io is a whole virtual world implementation. As a result, for whatever reason, folks prefer to build domain-specific protocols like ActivityPub or ATProto focusing specifically on public microblogging rather than building on Matrix’s generic primitives. It’s also fair to say that Matrix wasn’t proven when ActivityPub began, and AP builds on many preexisting protocols like ostatus, rss, salmon, etc.

anigbrowl 4y ago

You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike Federation is great for people who want to occupy or set up curated niches, but an uninteresting thicket for those who do not. I'm pretty sure I said the same thing about this ~5 years ago when I first tried Mastodon.

monksy 4y ago

Activity pub and the fediverse is an interesting area which I don't hear a lot of commerical interest of people getting into that.

mamborambo 4y ago

The "Twexit" event is a huge opportunity for Fediverse to pick up new users, but I fear it will be wasted because the Fediverse software is still not ready for prime time. The concept of "instances", "federated feeds", "different software for different media types" are all complexities unnecessary for the newbies.

friend_and_foe 4y ago
Instances, local and federated feeds are core to the architecture of the system. There's pros and cons to this UX, and just because it's not exactly like twitter doesn't mean it can't catch on. Different software for different media types... you mean like Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, Reddit, TikTok? Different media are interacted with in different ways and are optimal under different interfaces. At least with ActivityPub you can interact with all these media across the spectrum of software as you desire. Try following a YouTube channel from your twitter account. In truth, fediverse is mature and ready for prime time. And there's still plenty of novel UX approaches to be explored, and I hope people do that. But it won't pick up the steam needed to steamroll things like Twitter because it doesn't game your mind to give you the dopamine hit, and people can't ban those they salivate over causing trouble for, they can only block them. For those people using Twitter that disliked these things and didn't know there were alternatives or couldn't put their finger on what they didn't like fedi is going to feel like fresh air, for the rest "there's just something missing." I give it a month before most of the new users go home to Twitter.
- mamborambo 4y ago
  No I mean the media-specific server app branching like pictures (pixelfed), music (funkwhale), live cast (owncast), video (peertube), links (Lemmy) etc. How do a newbie to Fediverse sensibly choose the right instance to home on, when he has to decide what media type he publish in, at the time of server instance enrolment?
  - friend_and_foe 4y ago
    I know what you meant, my point was that the non federating internet has the same thing and it doesn't stop people from using it. I'd say you do the same thing you'd do on the big tech internet: you open a YouTube account if you want to make videos, so have a peertube account. You have a twitter account for microblogging, so have a mastodon/pleroma/misskey account. You'd have an Instagram account if you want to primarily share photos, so open a pixelfed account. Open 3. Share your accounts on the others. this is not a new problem, we already do this on twitter, Instagram, reddit, etc.