It became the only reliable source of information I had. People posted links with a minimal amount of commentary, picking and choosing the best content from other social media networks. They’re not doing it to “build a brand” because that’s not a thing in the Fediverse. It’s too disjointed to be a place to build a newsletter subscription base.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] HAL_9_TRILLION@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 points 22 hours ago* (last edited 22 hours ago) (2 children)

Not a stupid question at all. Loosely, I think, it's any site that trades information using the ActivityPub protocol. Because they use the same underlying protocol, they can easily trade content/posts with each other and yes, Lemmy is part of the Fediverse for that reason.

This is also why you can see posts from lemmy.ca or piefed.social or whatever.domain users while browsing lemmy.world - anyone who sets up a site with the Lemmy software can participate in the network and trade posts with all the others - these are individually called instances. These sites can decide that they don't want to trade posts with certain other sites (ie: trolls set up a farm on their own instance) and exclude them from their users being able to see them, this is called defederation.

In theory, a Mastodon instance could see content from a Lemmy instance (and Pixelfed and Loops and so on) as they all use the same underlying protocol to trade information, but in practice, it seems that sites basically stick to trading with other sites in their wheelhouse.

BlueSky also started with ActivityPub but I believe they did something to their software to make it proprietary.

The usefulness of all this is: no member site can get a monopoly on content. The largest Lemmy site is lemmy.world and I have an account on there. I switched to dbzer0 because I disagreed with some of the actions taken by lemmy.world (they defederated from some content that I wanted to see) so I came over here and now I can see that content.

Anyway, that's my understanding of it.

[–] anaVal@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

BlueSky also started with ActivityPub but I believe they did something to their software to make it proprietary.

Friendly correction: BlueSky tried to use AP(ActivityPub) but they had problems with it (like user migrations). So they made their own protocol called the AT Protocol (Authenticated Transfer). ATProto is also an open protocol like AP and they are currently working to get it standardised: https://atproto.com/blog/kicking-off-the-atp-working-group

All software BlueSky uses is open source and self-hostable and already a bunch of different implementations have started to pop up independently. Sadly BlueSky still has the vast majority of users (like 90%) using their infrastructure.

While I don't like BlueSky as a company, the software they are using is open.

[–] HAL_9_TRILLION@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

All software BlueSky uses is open source and self-hostable and already a bunch of different implementations have started to pop up independently.

Oh that's cool. So where can I sign up to interact with BlueSky users if I don't want to sign up to BlueSky?

[–] anaVal@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 5 hours ago

Here is eurosky: https://portal.eurosky.tech/
Here is blacksky: https://blacksky.app/
Here is bookhive (a lot smaller): https://bookhive.social/

I found all of them by looking through the PDS index: https://atproto.at/pdses and selecting ones with enough users to signify open registration.

Here is a guide to self-hosting: https://atproto.com/guides/self-hosting#pds

All of these are links to PDS servers. These are the servers that contain all of your data. You can log into any ATProto apps using these accounts.

[–] grue@lemmy.world 4 points 21 hours ago (1 children)

In theory, a Mastodon instance could see content from a Lemmy instance (and Pixelfed and Loops and so on) as they all use the same underlying protocol to trade information, but in practice, it seems that sites basically stick to trading with other sites in their wheelhouse.

Whenever you see somebody linking to the user they're replying to at the beginning of their comment, you're likely seeing somebody posting from Mastodon because their UI is user-feed-oriented instead of thread-oriented.

[–] HAL_9_TRILLION@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 20 hours ago (1 children)

Interesting, that never occurred to me. I said that about the wheelhouse because I have a Mastodon account I read from time to time and I can't recall ever seeing any Lemmy content show in my feed. I never did Twitter though so I'm kind of lost, it might be I just don't know what I'm doing. I followed like 40 hashtags but I still don't get a huge amount of content.

[–] A_Wild_Mimic_Appears@todon.eu 6 points 19 hours ago

@HAL_9_TRILLION @grue It looks like this! I looked up the comment URL on my mastodon account, which enabled me to reply from there.