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What complicates matters (in a nice way as it opens up more possibilities) is the increasing role of client apps. You maybe are thinking of the current Wordpres

What complicates matters (in a nice way as it opens up more possibilities) is the increasing role of client apps. You maybe are thinking of the current Wordpress and Mastodon web UI's but a dedicated client (as those that already exist for mobile) can create any timeline illusion. But it is true that all these different type of servers have different specializations as to what type of content is easy to produce and distribute on them. A further intriguing aspect is to federate with video, image or audio sharing servers (peertube, pixelfed, funkwhale).

jeroenhd 3y ago
I mostly use Mastodon through an app, same with Lemmy and a bunch of other apps that have perfectly fine web UIs. On phones, apps just work better in most cases (though that strongly depends on what kind of company is behind those apps). From what I can tell by the comments on this article, WordPress has implemented ActivityPub for publishing posts, but you can't actually follow other people. Maybe the next update will fix all that, but no client app will ever be able to compensate for unimplemented APIs like that. Comments do federate, but it's not as "social" as most of the Fediverse.
danijelb 3y ago
It could lead to decentralization of both consuming and publishing. There could be a native timeline UI integrated into iOS/Android. Mobile network operators could host fediverse instances for text/audio/video and bundle them into phone plans which everyone already pays for. The possibilities are endless. In such scenario search engines would also play a bigger role because if people are hosting videos on 50 different services instead of just Youtube, you need a separate search engine which crawls all instances. I think the current fediverse servers like Pixelfed and Mastodon are emulating centralized services because we are used to how they function and it would be too confusing. If it catches on, then those services can slowly morph and adopt the benefits of the new paradigm

jeroenhd 3y ago

I mostly use Mastodon through an app, same with Lemmy and a bunch of other apps that have perfectly fine web UIs. On phones, apps just work better in most cases (though that strongly depends on what kind of company is behind those apps). From what I can tell by the comments on this article, WordPress has implemented ActivityPub for publishing posts, but you can't actually follow other people. Maybe the next update will fix all that, but no client app will ever be able to compensate for unimplemented APIs like that. Comments do federate, but it's not as "social" as most of the Fediverse.

danijelb 3y ago

It could lead to decentralization of both consuming and publishing. There could be a native timeline UI integrated into iOS/Android. Mobile network operators could host fediverse instances for text/audio/video and bundle them into phone plans which everyone already pays for. The possibilities are endless. In such scenario search engines would also play a bigger role because if people are hosting videos on 50 different services instead of just Youtube, you need a separate search engine which crawls all instances. I think the current fediverse servers like Pixelfed and Mastodon are emulating centralized services because we are used to how they function and it would be too confusing. If it catches on, then those services can slowly morph and adopt the benefits of the new paradigm