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Comment by betwixthewires | Hacker News Reader

People interested in this stuff should check out alternate software as well. Hometown is a fork of mastodon that has a few extra features but one very interesting one in particular: you can post to the local server only, which is an excellent community building feature.

There's also pleroma, which I've run and is pretty great and low on resource requirements. And there are tons of other social UX paradigms like link aggregators and even Peertube which is a tube site server on the same network as mastodon using the same ActivityPub protocol.

I'd love to see people implement novel types of social sites besides functional clones of existing social media, there are some significant architectural and UX differences in a distributed, federated social architecture that can be leveraged to great effect.

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Watchlist for ActivityPub applications:

https://git.feneas.org/feneas/fediverse/-/wikis/watchlist-fo...

This is the wide assortment of applications that speak the same common protocol that Mastodon does, as part of an interoperable social cloud. There's a Cambrian explosion of diversity in this space. Let's see more content management systems adopting this system for self-sufficient publication.

For developers there is another watchlist at https://git.feneas.org/feneas/fediverse/-/wikis/Watchlist-fo...

> ...you can post to the local server only, which is an excellent community building feature.

The idea of building a local community that you have to have an account and associated identity on a specific server to access is the kind of mal-aligned incentive that tends to cause federated systems to become de-facto centralized silos and, eventually, return to the status quo of a controlling oligopoly :(.

... but its an essential feature if you're using the software to run, say, an internal company microblogging service.

Isn't this like saying you need your own slack instance for your team? It should be IMO possible to limit conversation on mastodon to a group of people as an alternative to limiting it to an instance.

That's one take on it, and I've heard the maintainer of mastodon share similar sentiments. I disagree because as long as the servers are all interoperable and people can communicate across them they can never actually become silos.

An architectural feature of a federated system is that people congregate on servers together for whatever reasons they have. Communities are an emergent part of this architecture whether we like it or not, and this can be used to create a positive user experience that you cannot truly get on centralized services. What we wind up with is a network of communities that interact with one another, not as some people envision a network of superfluous servers that humans use simply to interact with one another, and this is unavoidable in a federated system like this. If we do want a network where the servers are meaningless to the social interaction it has to be fully peer to peer.

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