Fediverse

If your idea of a federated Twitter is a bunch of mini-Twitters that sometimes exchange indirect replies or something, then the Fediverse fulfills that purpose completely. Mission accomplished, we can all go home now.

If your idea is that the replies to every post look the same to any user, anywhere, at any time, even the thing Mastodon merged half a year ago that supposedly fetches all replies if you remember to navigate to the topmost post, and wait up to 15 minutes for your view of the thread to coalesce, falls short.

And this is why hosting Mastodon is cheap, it fundamentally cannot provide the functionality BlueSky offers. Of course, you might think that such functionality is not desirable anyway, and that's entirely fair. But if you're looking for the immediacy that centralized Twitter gave users, I don't see a way for Fedi to ever provide that, whereas there is a path to BlueSky decentralization. It's a fact that your UX is diminished if all of your followers and followeds are not on the same instance.

But in the end, I think there is space for both.

Im trying to get more content on a few hobby communities on lemmy. I’m not really a big poster. I love to comment. But I’m willing to go through and start trying to build some momentum.

ok, but, does ActivityPub have portable identity and/or content addressability yet, so that when some of those servers (which are often hobbyist-run and/or tenuously funded) inevitably cease operating their users can continue on a different server? 👀

It's a rhetorical question, and the answer is no.

otoh, atproto's PLC DID method is also not really decentralized... but at least the rest of their system is actually substantially more decentralized architecturally than AP is.

To anyone interested in reading a very informative in-depth discussion of this topic, I recommend the blog post How decentralized is Bluesky really? by ActivityPub co-author Christine Lemmer-Webber (followed by this and this).

For those who enjoy in-depth write-ups, Christine Webber has looked at how decentralized BlueSky is really, before: https://social.coop/@cwebber/113527462572885698

It is my understanding Bluesky outright is not decentralized. It may have an API that allows satellite instances but if the main official instance goes down the platform dies.

Mastodon, Lemmy and their siblings are decentralized in that no one instance is sacred. If sh.ijust.works were to go offline right now, the rest of Lemmy would keep right on trucking. Hell, all of "Lemmy" could die and Mastodon and Peertube et al would keep right on trucking.

WHEN YOU SEE IT

Which server is representing 25% of the index on the Fediverse?