I'm gonna be that guy and point out that when people say "the Fediverse" what they probably more specifically mean is "what's implemented by Mastodon, a social network built on top of ActivityPub" and that for certain conversations, this matters.
While Mastodon is the current biggest player in the space today, there's no guarantee that will be the case in the future, especially in the advent of Threads and other networks with millions of users joining.
It's important to understand that this space was built not just by one project, but by many. The Fediverse can be estimated to consist of around 90 different projects and platforms. Not all of them speak ActivityPub!
It's also kind of wild to me to hear "there's just Mastodon", when in fact we've managed to approximate nearly every kind of corporate social platform in existence.
Microblogging: Mastodon, Pleroma, GNU Social, socialhome
to be clear: Mastodon monoculture is a huge problem. A lot of platforms are built to simply be compatible with Mastodon, not each other. The lack of a platform-agnostic testing suite for developers to work against hurts us in the long run.
These are all things being worked on, and they're more important than ever. But this network has always been more than Eugen Rochko's little brainchild. Loads of people are innovating across many different efforts.
@deadsuperhero I'm just going to say that I think these applications and their usage is more on the scale of proof-of-concept in terms of ActivityPub usage, and negligible in terms of actual usage.
*Most* of them I'd also say are used mainly because they're Not The Siloed Versions, not because they're that much better on any other axis.
@Dan Hon @Sean Tilley I am sad to hear you say that, and as a fediverse user who has never touched mastodon, it kinda sucks that people are trying so hard to justifying monoculturing it
@Dan Hon @Sean Tilley 50% is definitely a lot, but I still feel like Mastodon has things it needs to be beholden to, I wish more people saw Friendica's federation statistics page
my point mainly is, regardless of what form these projects take, is that it's the effort of many people, trying to solve all variety of problems. It existed long before Mastodon, and there's a lot of amazing development going on in the background that's totally independent of it.
We try to write about as much of it as we can over at @wedistribute.
Like, practically speaking, when we say "take the useful parts of Bluesky's experiments and port them over to the Fediverse" what I think people mean in practice is "port them over to Mastodon”.
I really don't think there is a Fediverse (i.e. an underlying network-of-networks speaking a common protocol of which Mastodon is _one_ application). There's just Mastodon. That's it.
Eh, not that troubling? ActivityPub was an interesting theory, the Masto API extends it ways that nobody realized would be useful until there was deployment at scale. Fortunately, while the Masto API may in theory be controlled by Eugen & posse, it’s too late to change it now, too many different clients. Basically, whether you call it Masto or AP++, there is now a de-facto standard in place. Enough to build on?
We have a standards group at the W3C working hard on building new features for ActivityPub. Mastodon is an important part, but there are people from lots of different projects working there. It's OK if you don't see that. I'd also like to see more interesting and diverse applications built on top of ActivityPub.
I mean I see at least three other replies on here from the not-mastodon parts of the Fediverse. Problem is it's not surfaced in an obvious way to mastodon users when they're interacting with other parts of the Fediverse. As for "Fediverse" = mastodon I'd say it's the opposite for the average mastodon user I interact with. More often than not they only know about mastodon and have never even heard the term Fediverse before. It isn't synonymous for them, it's completely unknown.
at the end, hiding the technicalities is a good thing. Hopefully with time people would more often start seeing features that their platform doesn't support and become exposed to it naturally. For example I've recently seen a poll with 4+ options and got surprised that masto instances didn't struggle interacting with it. It's a silly example, but makes a point.
Maybe it's just me but by not displaying platform icons on posts / replies like every other part of the Fediverse does it just makes me think the mastodon devs want to pretend the rest of the Fediverse doesn't exist. It comes off as both user hostile and patronizing to mastodon users.
I realize I'm probably being a bit uncharitable here and certainly all the Fediverse platforms have their own individual set of flaws. It just kinda rubs me the wrong way though.
Sean Tilley
•Hi Dan, I've been in this space since about 2008.
While Mastodon is the current biggest player in the space today, there's no guarantee that will be the case in the future, especially in the advent of Threads and other networks with millions of users joining.
It's important to understand that this space was built not just by one project, but by many. The Fediverse can be estimated to consist of around 90 different projects and platforms. Not all of them speak ActivityPub!
mnemonicoverload likes this.
Sean Tilley
•It's also kind of wild to me to hear "there's just Mastodon", when in fact we've managed to approximate nearly every kind of corporate social platform in existence.
Microblogging: Mastodon, Pleroma, GNU Social, socialhome
Images: Pixelfed, Frequency
Macroblogging: Friendica, Misskey, Firefish
Music: Funkwhale
Video: PeerTube, Goldfish, Vidzy
Interest groups: Lemmy, Kbin, Mbin, PieFed, Sublinks
And this is just a short list, there's actually a lot going on.
Sean Tilley
•to be clear: Mastodon monoculture is a huge problem. A lot of platforms are built to simply be compatible with Mastodon, not each other. The lack of a platform-agnostic testing suite for developers to work against hurts us in the long run.
These are all things being worked on, and they're more important than ever. But this network has always been more than Eugen Rochko's little brainchild. Loads of people are innovating across many different efforts.
mnemonicoverload likes this.
Dan Hon
•@deadsuperhero I'm just going to say that I think these applications and their usage is more on the scale of proof-of-concept in terms of ActivityPub usage, and negligible in terms of actual usage.
*Most* of them I'd also say are used mainly because they're Not The Siloed Versions, not because they're that much better on any other axis.
silverwizard
mnemonicoverload likes this.
Dan Hon
•silverwizard
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Sean Tilley
•my point mainly is, regardless of what form these projects take, is that it's the effort of many people, trying to solve all variety of problems. It existed long before Mastodon, and there's a lot of amazing development going on in the background that's totally independent of it.
We try to write about as much of it as we can over at @wedistribute.
https://wedistribute.org
Home - We Distribute
We DistributeDan Hon
•Like, practically speaking, when we say "take the useful parts of Bluesky's experiments and port them over to the Fediverse" what I think people mean in practice is "port them over to Mastodon”.
I really don't think there is a Fediverse (i.e. an underlying network-of-networks speaking a common protocol of which Mastodon is _one_ application). There's just Mastodon. That's it.
Tim Bray
•Evan Prodromou
•mnemonicoverload
•Martin Ruskov
•mnemonicoverload
•Martin Ruskov
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mnemonicoverload
•