Something to bear in mind here is it’s my impression that federation creates difficulties that many struggle with. So while it might be over simplified, the scale for me is already weighed with the possibility that we over complication that may need to be remedied.
Also, that big instances (eg mastodon.social) seem to be a natural thing even on the Fedi, there’s clearly perceived value for many there.
All of the shared/single sign on and easy cross posting would probably be trust or allow-list based.
As the platforms would be FOSS, anyone could run their own instance and start their own "circles of trust". So even with big vs small server friction, there could be a few "gardens" of small and big server networks providing different "spaces" for different purposes ... all without having to worry about defederation and the software difficulties of building against the protocol.
Otherwise, yea this doesn't sound surprising. From my recent limited experience it seems like a system held together with duck tape.
Which is funny, because if the fear from govt is to prevent people from becoming professional "dole-bludgers", making the system so hard to use that it requires special skills and experience is the wrong thing to do.
I'm sure there are all sorts of silly loop holes and bugs that plenty of people have learnt to exploit.
Yea. Generally a good demonstration of how the promise of the fediverse isn’t really there yet.
Lemmy does groups and mastodon does users with neither really understanding the other.
I think there’s more scope for lemmy to cover the user side of social media than mastodon the groups side. Kbin is an example of a continuing effort to do that.
If some keen devs got involved, I’d suspect lemmy could add some good user based functionality.The core devs have recognised it’d be good.
Friendica definitely is one of the underrated fediverse platforms.
Many bounce off of it because it seems a bit slow and its UI is dated. But in terms of the general ideas about what the fediverse can be and the functionality it’s implemented, it’s very interesting and it would be awesome for it to seem more love.
Copy the link to the lemmy post/comment, and search for it in the mastodon interface. It should get fetched and come up. Then you can just reply (and like) as you normally would.
Beyond that you can follow lemmy communities and users normally. Following communities might flood your timeline as comments as well as posts will go in there.
Honestly not sure the situation is nearly as clean cut as a blanket statement like this makes it out ... and honestly, for an ecosystem that's still trying to get off of the ground and work itself out ... the virality of "bad news" really ought to be avoided.
I could be mistaken, but the deal is that the devs have a political position, understand that not everyone shares it, and encourage new communities/instances and forks.
You may disagree, but others, perhaps many (?) see it that way and feel that the virtues of a properly designed and managed centralised social media are superior to chaotic volunteer-run decentralisation.
Maybe we should be forced to "work it all out together in the public square"?
Add up all of the design missteps or confusions (which happen), mixed and confusing but often strongly felt cultural standards, lacking or hard-to-find documentation or explanations, and, federation strangeness/quirkiness ... and you get a platform that crosses past the reasonably intuitive line.
The Fediverse's biggest mistake so far was not laying out the carpet for the Twitter et al Migrants. They were forced to recognise that the fediverse was always
"correct"/good and to simply "join" a foreign place and obey its customs.
Instead, they should have been given their own "place" (a soft Mastodon fork and separate instances) to grow, call and have a culture of their own.
If new platforms eat the fediverse's lunch (eg BlueSky), it will be by providing this experience.
The great big elephant in the room for the fediverse (apart from #Mastodon ) is that choosing an instance is simultaneously meaningless and important. But the ways in which this is so are not intuitive or even known to anyone but acolytes and admins.
5a) Proof: even if you learn the details of how instance interactions work and cause things like incomplete reply retrieval, you will forget it until reminded, because it’s unintuitive.
since MySpace, social media has been primitive in the forms of expression afforded its users … essentially plaintext and an emoji or two. This has produced exceedingly low expectations in users about the richness of what content they are permitted to author online. Damn that.
@joeldebruijn
Quick attempt at coming up with an alternative.
Something to bear in mind here is it’s my impression that federation creates difficulties that many struggle with. So while it might be over simplified, the scale for me is already weighed with the possibility that we over complication that may need to be remedied.
Also, that big instances (eg mastodon.social) seem to be a natural thing even on the Fedi, there’s clearly perceived value for many there.