What Is the Fediverse?
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framatube.org
At some point, users of the mastodon.social instance where most of the left-leaning crowd gathered, got their admin to preemptively silence the inditoot instance on mastodon.social[1]. This meant that all toots from the inditoot instance were effectively blocked on mastodon.social, and the two sides were operating in separate bubbles.
A few months later, the Indian userbase on both mastodon.social and inditoot was dead, and everyone was back on twitter, fighting and clawing and tearing at each other.
Moral: If you remove the communication links between those nice round planets shown in the animation, they become drab and dreary, and not worth having at all, and you're back to twitter. If you keep the links, then there's no difference between federated instances and twitter, and you're back to being twitter anyway.
Surely it couldn't be that they disliked the UX, that their other friends failed to move over, or that those indie-operated websites lacked in performance. No, of course we must assume it's the lack of fighting.
Twitter ist just a toxic hole with groups of people that seems to have nothing more to do than to annoy and harm you.
I had a think about it and deleted the app the next day. You can blame twitter’s users if you want. I blame twitter’s algorithm for actively finding the most vile stuff and shoving it in everyone’s faces.
However, it is necessary to curb bad-faith actors: users who don't engage civilly and get in the way or overwhelm other types of civil discourse.
Disconnecting between instances should be reserved to such extreme cases. Otherwise, (if there are too many bad-faith actors in a single instance), you should leave to individual users.
Moderation is an important concept. How do you promote a healthy atmosphere? Downvotes are a kind of crowd-sourced moderation that seems to work well. In a federated context, you could assign weights to votes of different instances (i.e. trusted instances get some weight, untrusted instances carry none).
It seems to say a permission check was added for those users, so they had to accepted as followers by people on Mastodon.social before they could interact with them or view their posts.
That's a divisive thing to do, but it doesn't seem the same as a full disconnection - if there's anybody you know on the other server who wants to talk to you, or if there's anybody you were already happily following & talking to there then everything continues working just fine.
It's just that when you try to follow new people then they get a prompt to decide if they want to let you do that first, effectively making their profiles default-private. I don't know anything about the specific objections at the time so I can't comment, but in general that seems like a fairly sensible way to deal with bad actors.
Not exactly. Requiring follow requests be approved, and defaulting new posts to other than fully public status, both exist as orthogonal profile settings in Mastodon and all forks of which I'm aware.
I don't have any specific familiarity on the Inditoot situation, but it sounds like the action taken by mastodon.social admins amounted to effectively overriding the "follow requests have to be approved" setting to true specifically for requests from Inditoot members. That seems fairly reasonable to me, too.
True, if you are the toxic community that was cut out. You know who still thinks the Mastodon is worth having? Mastodon.social users, who were able to protect themselves from unfriendly/unwelcome users, and didn't have to go back to Twitter.
Also, you gave an extreme example, of a left-leaning and right-leaning instances not agreeing with each other. But I see no reason why an instance mainly populated with geeks and an instance mainly populated with gamers/musicians/sport fans can't peacefully federate.
Per the parent anecdote, nobody thought Mastodon was worth having. The users all went back to Twitter, along with all the unfriendly/unwelcome users, because that was where the action was. I also suspect a few dropped out entirely.
It was just the Indian users that went back to Twitter, as per: https://mastodon.social/about
83.7K active MAU
The greater group of people on mastodon.social stayed.
It's the same at the beginning of every social network. When I joined Twitter or Facebook early, I did not expect to find people I knew either. People are probably joining instances where their friends are already registered, unless you're the first among your circles.
Also, you can be logged into multiple instances at the same time – just like you're probably connected to a personal and a work mailbox.
substantive reply: history begs to differ.
You can connect your twitter account, and find all your followed accounts who have also connected their twitter accounts.
I feel like it would be much better if I could use a single identity and a single "ActivityPub server" for all my applications.
In the current situation, being able to retweet my PeerTube video from my Mastodon account has little advantage about just tweeting a link to it. Likewise, commenting on a Lemmy thread from my Mastodon account is ok but I can't really see the thread as a thread without logging into Lemmy. Watching a PeerTube video, I can post a comment using my Mastodon account but that requires 5+ click and a change of application.
I am not sure why the ecosystem went this way. The client-to-server protocol was readily available when the Fediverse was kickstarted.
When Gitea implements federated merge requests and tickets, you will be able to follow repositories from Mastodon and comment on issues from there. That's great! But to do anything else (create/assign/close issues, open/review merge requests, ...) you will have to create a separate Gitea account and use it to interact with Gitea users. This is a serious limit to "interacting with a whole diverse universe".
The microblogging platforms ingest most types of posts from the other activitypub softwares, but the other platforms don't ingest posts from the (micro)blogging platforms. With the client-to-server API, the other platforms would just be clients on top of your Friendica account.
There can, theoretically, be a "dumb" AP server that implements both S2S and C2S and expects the client to do all the heavy lifting. In practice, all current ActivityPub servers are "smart". They treat the S2S protocol as more of an API, and have their own web UI with a specific user experience (Mastodon, Pleroma, and Misskey are microblogs, PeerTube is a video platform, Lemmy is a link aggregator, Smithereen is a social network, and so on). Interactions between these different experiences generally work on a best-effort basis. You can't shove Reddit into Twitter UX and expect something nice to come out, no matter how hard you try.
What I would like is to run a "dumb" ActivityPub server that would hold all my activity and federate, by receiving and sending arbitrary JSONLD documents. This would be my only identity. Then, other servers like PeerTube, Gitea, etc can talk to that server for their federating needs.
When I stumble on a video post on Mastodon, I would have a link to open it in my PeerTube instance, where peer-to-peer video transmission would be implemented; but whether I retweet or reply from Mastodon or PeerTube, the same identity would be used. When I stumble on a merge request on Lemmy, I would have a link to open it in my Gitea instance, where Git repositories would be supported; but whether I upvote it from Lemmy or approve it from Gitea, the same identity would be used.
This would fit the narrative of the video.
> Imagine if you could share videos, events, instant messages, microblogs with the whole universe. Imagine if it didn't matter which planet you came from.
> Your login on any of those services allows you to interact with a whole diverse universe.
Why not? it's text; you could make the same exact post on reddit and twitter (barring the length, which could be truncated in a federated context). Link aggregation is basically just microblogging with the extra constraint that the initial post has to have a link.
> Smithereen is a social network
What does this mean? Every other platform you mentioned are social networks. On all of these platforms, a user posts text or media posts. Displaying them in a different UI doesn't make them radically different.
The UX is important. It's important that all users have the same one. For link aggregators, you want comments displayed as a tree. For microblogging, flat lists work better, especially when people post "threads", which they do.
> What does this mean? Every other platform you mentioned are social networks.
I meant a Facebook-style social network.
That's subjective and exactly the type of thing that could be handled in a client. In both cases you're displaying the exact same data. A microblogging thread may be displayed as a flat list, but it's still a tree like a link aggregator thread.
> I meant a Facebook-style social network. So a platform to post what are essentially blog posts. In ActivityPub, that would be the Article type, which, according to the spec, has no semantic difference from Note. An Article could be created as a Note and vice versa with no semantic difference or loss of data. Just like above, the data is the same and the only distinction is the visual presentation of it.
There needs to be a web UI of some sort. You need to be able to send people links to things that they can open in their browser with nothing extra installed. It's a hard requirement. You can't require the use of a client app.
Here's a video of mine supposedly on PeerTube:
https://video.hardlimit.com/w/peBesyAgtzfRWS5FnDQQtn
Well, it's really on Hardlimit, which just outsources some of the playback bandwidth. I can't, as far as I know, play that without going to Hardlimit's web site. I can't even embed it without getting Hardlimit's branding. (Getting to full screen mode on mobile is really hard because their top and bottom banners get in the way of the video controls.) I ought to be able to put that long random key into other PeerTube sites and play it, but that does not seem to be possible. This is not "federation". It's a walled garden with outsourcing.
The video plays fine. I'm now using PeerTube for my technical videos, where I need streaming but the audience is people who find out about it on technical sites.
The federated video crowd needs to 1) get their act together, and 2) get some major forum systems to recognize their URLs as embedded video, as those systems do for Youtube, Twitter, and often Vimeo. That would at least bring them up to where Gyazo is.
The video is a pitch deck. A good one. But it's a pitch deck for something that's not fully usable yet.
Most AP implementations that reshared all known content quickly discovered they were hosting stuff that made other people mad, and then those other people made lots of noise, because they couldn't tell the difference between rehosting and originating.
#!/bin/sh
PEERTUBE_INSTANCE="${PEERTUBE_INSTANCE-$1}";
PEERTUBE_QUALITY=1080;
test "$PEERTUBE_INSTANCE"||exec echo -e "PEERTUBE_INSTANCE is unset\nusage: echo shortUUID|$0 [PEERTUBE_INSTANCE]"
test $PEERTUBE_QUALITY||export PEERTUBE_QUALITY=720;
read x y;
test ${#x} -eq 22||exec echo invalid shortUUID;
z=$(curl -s "https://$PEERTUBE_INSTANCE/api/v1/videos/$x"|tr '\42' '\12' \
|sed -n "/hls\/videos.*$PEERTUBE_QUALITY-fragmented.mp4/p");
curl -4o $x.mp4 "$z";
On mobile, an app like NewPipe will also work
usage
export PEERTUBE_INSTANCE=video.hardlimit.com
echo peBesyAgtzfRWS5FnDQQtn|$0 echo peBesyAgtzfRWS5FnDQQtn|$0 peertube.ignifi.me
Because when activitypub was still getting off the ground, mastodon built their own client api. A lot of excited people built apps for mastodon so pleroma, and then others, started building Masto API support so that their instances could use mastodon clients. Now the Masto API is the de facto client api.
I super agree with you, using the client-to-server protocol so that we could have one account would be the best situation. I've been arguing that on the fediverse for a while, but all the developers in the space seem to think the client-to-server protocol isn't useful enough so you would have to fallback to a custom API for the missing pieces anyway so you might as well use the API everyone's already using.
I also gave SL and OpenSim a look, and OpenSim has been pretty fun to explore, even from the outside.
One example community: https://coopersville.mystrikingly.com/
- @marcolas@oldbytes.space
Sure, I could have had more followers on a different platform, but I'm not there to have a megaphone that I force others to listen to. This is why I doubt we'll see any major celebrities going there, since they are not on social media to have a conversation. They are there so people can see them.
I can be found here @loke@functional.cafe
I haven't found a good Android app for it yet, unfortunately.
I joined Nerdica not long after joining pluspora, but wasn't active there because the (web) UX is pretty poor. But still, it's my main sn now... besides Fosstodon, which is pretty cool.
The Web ui is fine enough (it's a bit slow and has a few warts), but I haven't found a good mobile app yet.
Ooh, this decentralized beebob could be a great place to discover and distribute Scihub content.
Ooh, I can sure imagine myself watching a sci-fi movie that's old enough to vote and buy alcohol on "Framatube."
Ooh, a filesystem suitable for multiple planets, IFF planet #2 is filled only with Pirate Party members with their force shields turned on and on constant watch for slow blades.
Ooh, a user-writable international encyclopedia that isn't... oh yeah, that actually exists because you can't copyright fucking facts. At least there's that, twenty-first century!
Edit: clarification to make exclamation even sadder
Multiple times, in fact, counting FIDO and Usenet and Bitnet as separate developments.
So it isn't like this is a new idea, or like it's impossible to do with current copyright law.
ma bell was quite centralized but there were many attempts to get them to interoperate both domestically and internationally, even to the point of having a very rigorous regulation regime (nationalization too.)
Sadly it's no longer alive for its original purpose :(
If it went down tomorrow, it would certainly be mirrored and re-upped almost immediately, but it's not "federated" in the same sense as e.g. a Mastodon, IRC, email, or USENET.
Each language edition of Wikipedia is its own little island that connects with the others. Then there's Wiktionary, Commons, Wikisource, Wikibooks, Wikiquote, Wikisource, Wikivoyage and Wikidata. They all have their own policy, moderation, culture etc. but they all connect with each other.
They all link a bit more like how IRC servers come together to form a network - it's a closed system of federation rather than it being open to the world - and the Wikimedia Foundation does sit on top providing a level of governance and technical support.
Plus there was a huge community discussion - and vote - that was held in the days before the blackout. It wasn't the WMF making a unilateral decision to do anything.
You might as well argue that, because not every browser ever written has an active userbase, HTTP is pointless.
People use social media because it’s fun, it fosters connection with people they know, delivers information about news/hobbies etc., helps people find communities with shared interests and experiences, and most importantly, does it all in one easy-to-use place. Everybody knows there are better sources for everyday news than Twitter but if they’re already there interacting with people about the game last night… More importantly, it’s all conceptually easy for users to understand. You’re on Facebook, your friend is on Facebook, you find your friend on Facebook and you can interact on Facebook. If there was a bunch of Facebooks and your friends are in a different Facebook that doesn’t talk to your Facebook and the Recipe Facebook your friend likes is kinda janky and doesn’t always show up when you search for it… your average user would stop using social media altogether if that was their only option.
It can be hard for developers to imagine that, but what if it was a different realm of expertise? Imagine you had to have a rudimentary understanding of mail routing to know which post office you needed to use to mail each package and it was only conceptually documented for people who worked in the postal industry and each paragraph required background knowledge you didn’t have? You’d probably just suck it up and use UPS, especially if it was the same price. If someone wants a recipe for French onion soup, they want a recipe — not a culinary school text book chapter on soup. How much documentation or theoretical background knowledge does your average netizen need to use Facebook? Zero. None.
That doesn’t even get into the whole branding aspect. Like it or not, appeal is a prerequisite and not a bolt-on feature for a social media network. People like feeling competent and hip and hate uncertainty. They don’t want to wonder if their friends on the other mastodon and the other friend on the other other mastodon can smell, er, see their toot.
We can’t sell non-technical people on technical capability. While there are technical components to this problem, the solution will not be entirely technical. We need to give them a compelling experience first, and make that work on the tech side. Unless you really only want people in your fediverse who get satisfaction out of wrangling clunky software, that’s just the way it is.
On the other points though, I agree. Fundamentally a social network has _everyone_ on it. The Fediverse as it is now is a collection of small and medium communities. On top of this there's lots of drama in the Fediverse. The relationship that Fediverse instances have with each other is constantly changing and many of the smaller instance owners aren't exactly the most consistent mods/admins (kind of like IRC mods back in its heyday.) There's a certain kind of person that enjoys this kind of fluid, unprofessional (e.g. run by amateur staff, not a knock on the community at large) community, but it's not the experience most people who like social media are looking for.
If you're interested in trying the Fediverse I highly recommend peeking inside at the fun and chaos but if you're looking to replace traditional social media, I'd say look elsewhere.
This is going to sound flippant but I really don’t mean it to be— this is why FOSS alternatives will remain alternatives. While both related to design, branding/identity serves a fundamentally different purpose than UI design which is distinct from UX. Being similar to something else makes branding much more difficult, but branding is critical for social media. You seem not to totally grok the utility of any of those things— which is totally fine because it’s not your job, but that’s exactly why developers never, ever make these decisions in mature, accountable product development organizations.
I’m not saying designers are fundamentally more useful — If FOSS projects were primarily run by groups of designers who were as dismissive about technical improvements as developers are about design, you’d have a shitload of super duper slow electron apps that are all super neat and give you just the right controls to solve your problem but do a terrible job at it, at best… and we’d all still be using CLI utilities from the original system V.
> if you're looking to replace traditional social media, I'd say look elsewhere.
Right now, sure. That’s the problem. Luckily, you can have your own corner of the internet that will be exactly like that even if someone builds something on the Fediverse that’s also useful to people who don’t regularly read man pages.
Though I’m not interested in inter-fora drama, I am quite concerned by the very real ways for-profit no-pay social media shapes our culture and world events.
Many people in the FOSS world position various Fediverse offerings as our savior from the ills of social media and seem utterly baffled by the lack of mainstream adoption, assuming it’s a matter of marketing or some other money-related corporate magic. It’s not. Just like Gimp and every other major user-facing FOSS application that managed to remain an “alternative” despite a giant demand and the technical capability to cater to it— they only really cared if horrible-UI-tolerant developers found it usable.
This is music to my ears. I'm firmly in your camp. I just mean the current Mastodon design is such a slavish copy of the Twitter interface that there won't need to be a lot of work here to clean things up. But I agree that without dedicated design/UX work, Mastodon will continue to appeal to tech nerds.
> Right now, sure. That’s the problem. Luckily, you can have your own corner of the internet that will be exactly like that even if someone builds something on the Fediverse that’s useful to people who don’t regularly read man pages.
Oh I agree. But the Fediverse isn't the only flavor here. I think the Matrix project is also taking a great stab at making social chat (like Discord or Slack) open and usable by people who don't read manpages and worship terminals for a living.
My broader point here is that many open projects right now enable socializing "in the small" so to speak. The Fediverse, Matrix, XMPP, etc let you socialize with your friends in a small like-minded community without reading config docs (if you don't want to). These are important but don't replace true social media, where anyone can just frictionlessly join and talk with millions of others. Here the Fediverse hopes that federation can make this work and the Matrix project hopes that sending messages between homeservers can work, but both projects fundamentally don't address the "socializing at large" capability that social networking gives you. Until a free alternative to social media has been made, I still think adoption will remain small. FWIW I'm not a social media person myself but many family and friends of mine want the true social media experience, not the cozy small one on the Fediverse or Matrix.
> Many people in the FOSS world position various Fediverse offerings as our savior from the ills of social media and seem utterly baffled by the lack of mainstream adoption, assuming it’s a matter of marketing or some other money-related corporate magic. It’s not. Just like Gimp and every other major user-facing FOSS application that managed to remain an “alternative” despite a giant demand and its technical capability to cater to it— they only really cared if horrible-UI-tolerant developers found it usable.
You'll find this true of many FOSS believers. I've all but given up on FOSS movements. The movement in practice gets hung up over things completely irrelevant to anybody but themselves, such as complaining about lack of configurability, terminal interfaces, or "bloat". The community also gets very defensive and emotional the moment you point out any criticisms. This is why I see so many FOSS folks rely on "marketing" or "corporate conspiracy" as reasons why their cause is hampered. Many of them genuinely cannot see the forest for the trees.
I'm not holding my breath for FOSS personally.
On the contrary, I think this is one thing that turns social media toxic. A lot of news is inherently political and having news on the same platform as social interaction means a lot of social interaction will be about the news.
Communities focused on hobbies (e.g. forums) tend to stay a lot more civil.
Example:
May i ask respectfully, have you even seen and/or used any applications within the fediverse? Forgive me, but i interpret your statement as if you have not actively seen, used apps on the fedi...If that is accurate, may i invite you to at least test things out by joining any number of instances, and try one of the many, many apps - mobile and web - which allow you to richly interact with others across the fediverse...and i think you'll see that the experience "looks" like many things, but certainly not restricted to RSS or mastodon, etc.
To pick any of the myriad apps and test things out, check out this collection of apps: https://fediverse.party/en/miscellaneous/
To learn a bit more behind the fediverse's history, feel free to review entries on the following page: https://fediverse.party/en/chronicles/
I certainly hope that your test run is an enjoyable one, or at least interesting and informative. While i'm a fan of the fediverse, it is not lost on me that much like other sorts of human behavior - like conventional social media silos - there is no *real* escape from trolls, jerks, awful people. Cheers!
A second hurdle is that I think most people don't want to start from scratch. I want to keep my followers and those I'm following.
For my, say, brother— the first hurdle would be processing my explanation of the distinctions between an instance, a server, and a service, plus the basics of federation. The second hurdle would be figuring out how he’ll break it to me when he gives up and re-activates his Twitter account.
So, while email is federated under the covers, users use it like it's a walled garden. In fact, if you go to a store where they ask for an email address, employees often have a hard time understanding what you're saying if you give them an address that isn't one of the three above.
Bottom line is consumers don't want or understand federated services. They don't care. That's why monopolies win.
To get people using federated services would require a massive, ongoing education effort. And, even that is likely to fail, because it just doesn't matter enough to people.
Alternate solution: governments could use antitrust to force federation.
It's a lot better than social media. I feel like the analogous situation would be being able to follow someone's twitter feed in your FB feed, or send a twitter DM to someone's facebook messenger account, and how likely is any major social media platform to allow that to happen?
Despite the concentration of power, email's federation makes it much easier to choose which provider you want to use, avoiding the network effects that come from walled garden services.
I’ve experienced Microsoft routinely blocking email from smaller domains, even when hosted at a large email provider.
I’ve seen this first hand for small hobby communities and small businesses.
The people who consider it a failure are the same people who are looking for a platform to broadcast their opinions from, rather than having an interesting conversation. Of course they're not going to find what they are looking for on the Fediverse, and that's fine. Most of people on the Fediverse are notified looking for that anyway.
1) Why would you create a new provider, why not just use [insert biggest provider name here]? In other words, whats' stopping this thing from centralization? It's not like you need to build a rocket to move to the other planet, right?
2) How do you so easily move videos from one provider to another? The amount of data is enormous, you can't just copy it everywhere?
a longer explanation would mention the different _software_ each instance might run. you might interact with very different front-ends (how they present UI themes, render threads, notifications, etc). and backends have different support too (emoji-based post reactions; quote-replies/boosts; chat features/integrations). although there's _some_ tendency for the backend features to converge, they often converge only to the level of compatibility (a :100: emoji reaction from one server will show up as a flair-less 'like' on an server that doesn't want the full feature) and sometimes one region of the space _really doesn't want a specific feature_ (Mastodon.social famously is dead-set against quote boosts). your preferences will directly shape which feature set you desire, and it'll tend to land you in an area of peers that share these preferences (shaping your local timeline and also drawing a circle around some peers where you can be reasonably confident that "this area of the fediverse will grow in a way that keeps our instances well-connected").
it's a really organic thing. your original question could just as well be framed "if the thing works regardless of provider, why isn't everyone just _their own_ provider" instead of "why doesn't everyone use _the same single_ provider". right now the forces oppose both ends, and you get a decentralized (not distributed) fediverse.
If the author of the video is around here: please, put textual transcripts for video-impaired users! (or simply, for people who do not want to launch a video and prefer to read).
curl https://framatube.org/w/4294a720-f263-4ea4-9392-cf9cea4d5277 | less
The direct URL would be: https://framatube.org/lazy-static/video-captions/2f199e59-5c...
I glanced at Mastodon when information started flowing about it but I was (and am) supremely disinterested in running / moderating my own node. But I'd be interested in joining someone else's node. What does that look like these days?
https://pleroma.social/#featured-instances https://fediverse.party/en/pleroma/
There are many implementations that uses these protocols and that can interoperate today. The most well known of these is Mastodon.