I suppose pointing out MS also owns linkedin isn’t the talk down you’re looking for?

If you’re a dev, this along with GitHub, and your employer using teams, is a pretty severe panopticon.

I hear you … most people are still there (I’ve claimed in the past that it will be the MS Windows of social media, that no one really openly talks about using but is actually everywhere).

But I feel it may be useful to distinguish FOMO and social media gossip from actual useful information. I’m not saying there’s nothing useful on Twitter (I don’t actually know). But we’re talking about microblogging and social media here.

I’ve found a fair amount of strong loyalty to the place from all sorts of people. I was never a twitter person, so I don’t understand it, but AFAICT, all sorts of people have a real emotional bond to the place, like for them it’s been their main internet experience in life or something.

Hmmm, dunno. Seems well made but also the web page seems kinda full of hype.

Thanks!

Without knowing any information about this, the hachyderm instance is one which would host such a thing. They’re tech focused, and well organised with a co-op umbrella organisation running the instance that has pretty clear rules and ideas around how incorporated entities can engage and join it. So it’ll be interesting to see where this goes.

Thanks Ernest!! Hope you’re going well and kbin development isn’t too much of a burden!!

I’ve seen that view before, and just checked it now again. It still feels like there’s more in the feed than should be. I’m probably missing some of the boosts etc that you cite, but it feels to me like some posts are coming in without it being clear why they’re there. My guess has always been that my subscriptions are playing a role somehow.

Anyway, hope the new changes go well!! And thanks for the response!

What do you mean kbin doesn’t really support microblogging?

I could be wrong about this … but as I understand, you can’t see a feed of microblogs/posts from people that you follow. Instead everything is viewed through magazines, which pickup microblogs but combine them with the ordinary threadiverse content posted to those magazines. Following people and viewing their personal posts is, I’d say, the essence of microblogging.

Not a criticism of kbin at all BTW … easily the youngest platform on the fediverse but doing quite well it seems with already a fork that’s doing well too (mbin).

Yet it’s normal for Mastodon users to join in on the conversation here.

Well, as neither of us are presenting or citing data on this, we can’t be sure.

Personally I care about this and keep a bit of a lookout for it and have in the past tried to advocate for and create more cross-platform talk. In my experience, and from what I’ve heard from others, the UX friction from the mastodon end makes it mostly a dead end. So while some cross talk certainly happens, I’d estimate it’s quite minor and meaningless in so far as we’re talking about it as a salient strength of ActivityPub compared to its competitor ATProto.

That’s a decision on the side of the developers, not a weakness of the ActivityPub protocol.

What this misses is whether the protocol makes it easier or harder for developers to ”decide” to allow for more inter-platform cross talk. Part of my critique was that the protocol and its general design isn’t making this easier. Kbin, for instance, doesn’t truly support microblogging. And the lemmy devs have acknowledged that allowing users to be followed like communities would be good but is just too hard right now.

The question then is whether the protocol could have made this easier for platform devs, either through its design or through providing fundamental tooling that enables developers more and removed the need for constant wheel-reinvention. From what I’ve heard from actual developers working with the protocol, they’re real technical critiques to be made around how hard it is to work with. So I believe that it isn’t helping anyone interested in making something new and interesting with it (which has yet to be done IMO, though kbin gets close ).

It seems BlueSky have explicit plans for their protocol to extend to all types of platforms: https://atproto.com/blog/building-on-atproto#what-to-expect

Which means they’re coming for the fediverse, and may just succeed.

I was going to say the same but don’t know enough about BlueSky’s ATProtocol to be sure about the possibilities.

In principle, you’d hope they’ve added enough flexibility on there for different platform types. If they have, next year could get interesting as they open up federation. There seems to be a bit of buzz and interest around BlueSky, and if they garner the interest of enough developers who feel like they can make new things on the platform/protocol, then new things could happen and, if they attract a sizeable Twitter migration, go kinda mainstream pretty quickly.

the strength is tooting a reply to a peertube video and having a discussion on lemmy in which all these comments are shared

I’m with you. The problem is that this promise is mostly empty, at least at the moment.

ActivityPub, from what I’ve gleaned, is too vague and open ended and under-developed in terms of software for this to be true. The result is that each platform is implementing a sub-set of the protocol and often adding their own custom twists/additions to it. Which means that just because two platforms use ActivityPub does not mean at all that those two platforms can communicate in anyway. And, even if they can communicate, there’s no guarantee at all that this will be usable.

The interaction between lemmy and mastodon is illustrative. Technically they can communicate, and at times this can work well. But the two platforms are hardly mutually enriching each other because the interactions between them are fairly limited in number. And that’s because they don’t talk to each other well. Some of that is because they’ve implemented different parts of the protocol. Some of it is also their differences in design and UI/UX that just add too much friction to consuming and meaningfully interacting with content from the other platform.

What’s more, this problem is fairly predictable and has been criticised as a false promise in the past. At the moment, I’d say it’s fair to say that ActivityPub has not been proven as a way to enable communication between substantially different platforms. That might change over time, though I suspect the load on developers to make that happen will remain high without some major foundational work.

But right now, unless there’s something I don’t know/understand, I don’t see the extra-platform capabilities of ActivityPub playin any role in the success of the fediverse in competition with BlueSky, at least as far as Mastodon is concerned which, as a platform, is relatively happy just doing its own thing.

I see this as a challenge to the fediverse? Our platforms are open and amenable to being used for AI training. Mastodon is full of human made image descriptions, some of them quite detailed.

Does the fediverse want to do anything different? Closed / private / human only spaces?