Kichae

the Fediverse may be missing a clear, cohesive narrative.

I think this is because it's not a clear, cohesive place. Developers keep trying to make it look like centralized social media, but I don't think that's going to work in the end; it certainly isn't working now. Trying to dress it up as something that it's not, just because that thing is currently popular with the masses, does nothing but set us up for failure.

Mastodon is a second rate Twitter, Lemmy is a second rate Reddit, etc. The existing model of trying to make all of this look like one, single, central location is uncanny, and people notice that.

Lemmy's got some good theming options, and the templates are there to do custom theming work. There's the potential for some real website branding there, in that. But if you look at Mastodon, the biggest player in the game right now, the developers go out of their way to homogenize the Mastodon experience. Every Masto website looks fundamentally identical to all of the others. It's doing everything it can to make it look like "Mastodon" is a place on the Internet, in the same way that "WordPress" is not.

And that's a problem. ActivityPub doesn't really support that fiction.

Some ideas have been floated around in the microblog space, and tested in some places. Having 'Local' be the default timeline has worked out pretty well on Catodon. Strong community theming has kept tenforward.social on topic, with most people there discussing Star Trek. The art-based Masto instances work well, and seem to be fairly sticky. But generic, general "Mastodon" is failing to inspire folks, and lacks the pop culture discussion that the general public wants. Journalists have bounced, due to audience engagement tapering off. Communities of colour keep getting chased off of the big instances.

Attempts to occupy the "general" space and branch out into niche interests aren't working. The focus really needs to be shifted back in the other direction.

I've been arguing for over 2 years now that the actual value proposition of the fediverse is Community+. There are several Lemmy and Mastodon instances that are built around this -- tenforward.social is a Star Trek themed and focused Mastodon site, where the vast majority of local chatter is focused on Star Trek, and startrek.website, beehaw.org, midwest.social, ttrpg.network, etc. are all community or interest focused Lemmy-based websites -- and they all seem to actually work in that model. People aren't signing up to the Star Trek Lemmy site to talk primarily about Call of Duty or American politics. They get their Star Trek community, and they can engage in those general interest discussions that are being hosted elsewhere, and everybody wins.

The key to growth, then, really is getting enough special interest and community websites up and running on the fediverse, and letting people discover the the power of being connected to people on other social media websites without having to sign up over there, too.

If Bluesky was using ActivityPub, there'd be no issue here right now. We'd all be able to get Community+Bluesky and be all the happier for it. But they've created their own system that's prohibitively expensive for the average person to utilize without having a direct connection to Bluesky's hardware, meaning the control forever remains in the hands of corporate interests and the rich. And that's just a play at being the next Amazon. We're either locked out, or we're under their thumb. And that's not really where any of us who are engaged with this fediverse project wanted to be.

It also points to what the best use of a federated content sharing network is, and it's not "create something that looks like it has unfettered access to some canonical whole". It's small networks of users with related interests having the majority of their discussions with each other, while also being able to pull content from other interest groups they may be interested in.

Like, a... to re-use a random example I pulled out of my ass in some other thread... Mazda enthusiast forum, where most people are talking about their Mazdas, but also one person's really into the New York Yankees, and another also cares about their Dodge truck. The usage case is 80% local discussion, 20% off-site.

The currently attempted model is "everything is general interest, and you have to search for your niche, and it could be anywhere", because that's how it works on Twitter, or even on Reddit (subreddit squatting, subreddit splits, and early millennial internet humour come to mind). But it's all being done to disguise what the fediverse is, and make it look like what already exists, rather than trying to usher in something different. And it just... can't compete that way.

Mirroring the entire network is what makes it act like Twitter.

I'm not convinced that that's A) something we should want, and B) a fight we can win. Trying to recreate what already exists, using technology that's not really suited for it, feels like an uncanny skeuomorphism to me.

Do the volunteers want people to use what they make?

Because, I'll be honest, based on how people on the fediverse talk about people coming from Twitter or Reddit or wherever, I'm not convinced that they do. Rather, they just want to pat themselves on the back for being high minded developers.

Everybody on Reddit is praising all the moderation capabilities of Bluesky

Bluesky is an unmoderated space. People don't seem to know what "moderation" is anymore. It's not the ability for end users to block other end users.

block lists and starter packs

This is a bigger issue than it seems, because the people building and using the fediverse care very strongly about things like trust and consent, and so discussions around stuff like this get stifled.

It's not a technological issue with Mastodon. It's a social one, with the fediverse at large. The place is swarming with people who will openly attack you for making the place more comfortable to less technically adept users, because they themselves were bullied off of Twitter.

Like, this is the real issue the fediverse can't get traction. People will overcome other hurdles, and develop work arounds for other limitations. But being treated as unwelcome tourists by the people who are already here? No, they won't do that.

The way you can verify your user by using your own domain as a handle.

This is a core feature of the fediverse. Run your own server, use your own domain. And mastodon offers secondary validation by adding an ID string to your website that it can check and verify.

I feel as if it runs against the concept of federation itself.

So, you believe that operating a website using Lemmy obligates you to host content from other sites that you don't want to have a relationship with?

Because the concept of 'federation' does not come with the expectation that you abandon editorial control over what you host. That's an expectation you're projecting on it.

They still need to know about the servers, though. There's no centralized index of servers. If you set up a lemmy-based website today, and you do nothing to make contact with the rest of the network, the network's not going to find out about you.

There's no home to phone to.

There's no canonical whole that we all have access to.

we all get the same content anyways, aside from defederation?

We don't, though. We get whatever content people on our chosen instance have subscribed to. Even without blanket server bans, there are Lemmy-based websites that your host has never heard of, hosting content you do not have access to. Someone from your server has to introduce those sites, and subscribe to the communities on those sites, for your server to have their content.

The fediverse is subscription based. Shit doesn't get sent around unless it's specifically asked for.

You've misidentified how a decentralized, federated network of content sharing works. Like many, many people, you seem to have conceptualized it as a hub-and-spoke model, with a centralized data store and remote terminals.

But it's actually a subscription-based mesh network, where each update is only sent to places that have specifically requested it. Importantly, at the moment at least, things are not forwarded along to other servers due to secondary contact. If someone on my site (A) subscribes to you (B), and someone on a third website (C) comments on something you posted, if nobody on my website subscribes to C, C does not send that comment to my website, and your website does not forward it along, either.

There's some buzz about forwarding replies and stuff like that possibly getting worked out. But even then, being on the fediverse means making peace with the idea that there's no single source of truth for the whole network. You won't see it all, ever. And it's likely, and possibly even desirable, that the network splinters into loosely connected islands. But that can't happen if what people keep demanding is a centralized service with a single benevolent dictator. And the single dictator will stop being benevolent at some point.

They always do.

The 'All' feed really needs to be renamed, because, yeah, it's not 'All', and it will never, ever be 'All', as no one AP-based website knows about the existence of any other without someone manually initiating contact between them.

There is no 'All'. There is only 'Remote content someone locally has sought out and subscribed to". Projects gotta find a more appropriate term for it.

I mean, it's still going to be years. But maybe when it happens, it won't be so damn sticky next time.