this post was submitted on 16 Jan 2024
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Fediverse

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A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).

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Learn more at these websites: Join The Fediverse Wiki, Fediverse.info, Wikipedia Page, The Federation Info (Stats), FediDB (Stats), Sub Rehab (Reddit Migration), Search Lemmy

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Change my mind: The Fediverse is not as connected as were told, and it's splintering even more. (lemmy.world)
submitted 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) by PlasticPigeon@lemmy.world to c/fediverse@lemmy.world
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This is what makes the Fediverse so frustrating, been using: #Kbin #FireFish #Mastodon #Friendica #IceShrimp #Lemmy.

And no, they don’t speak to one another / find one another or are able to follow / like / reply to one another as one is told the Fediverse works.

The truth: some speak to some, and it rarely works both ways. Eg. Mastodon can do a lot more interacting with Lemmy, but not the other way around.

And then there are those that defederate from their own kind / federated social network, splintering the Fediverse even further apart.

Have had to either join new servers + delete current accounts, just because the server that was suggested, happened to be a server that others chose to defederate with.

Now with many accounts + many instances, been trying to find the best place to just have one space in the Fediverse + be able to communicate, follow and interact with other Fediverse users.

Maybe it’s this is wrong, but this has been the experience for almost a year now.

EDIT: APOLOGY

Seems like there are multiple posts, that was not the intention. :-(

English isn’t first language. Was trying to do the “change my mind” meme format they use on other sites to ask someone to prove you wrong, which is what was hoped for.

Apologies again.

This makes no sense, really sorry. Made a post and when looking for it, it just showed nothing. Look here is a screenshot of my personal feed. It only shows the comment on a fediverse post, which I then created into a stand-alone post, in hoping someone would be able to explain or prove me wrong.

And I can’t even go and delete the posts, as when looking inside the posts on my profile, it shows nothing either.

REALLY sorry for the multiple posts, thought the app was bugging out. :-(

Really sorry. Will check on laptop to see if I can find and delete the multiple posts from there…

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[–] Blaze@discuss.tchncs.de 11 points 10 months ago

If you have been here for a year, you must have been there during the huge influx in June, we came a long way since then.

It is true that similar platforms work best with each other: Lemmy with Kbin and Piefed, Mastodon with IceShrimp, Misskey etc.

I personally use mostly two accounts, one on a Lemmy instance (this one) and another with an IceShrimp instance. And I can talk to everyone on those two "sub universes". But that's probably expected as platform developers prefer to focus on one aspect (threads or micro blogging) at a time.

Defederation is a marginal event, especially now that Lemmy and Kbin both support instance blocking at the user level.

[–] Steve 9 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

The idea that you might want Lemmy and Mastodon to work well together is honestly kind of silly to me.

They are structured and built from the ground up to be entirely different kinds of social platforms. Mastodon is structured around people publishing their thoughts. Fundamentally it's simply a kind of blog network. Lemmy is structured around topics and conversation. It's essentially a forum network. I can't see a way they could blend seamlessly, forget if they should. (They shouldn't)

[–] Marsupial@quokk.au 4 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Kbin already integrates Mastodon. It’s seamless enough that I find myself commenting on people’s toots without even realising.

[–] Steve 3 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Can you Boost, favorite, mention, or direct message them? No not really. It's a very limited subset of the Mastodon experience. They have vastly different feature sets, mostly without corresponding analogs. That's not remotely what I would call seamless.

Or maybe it literally is seamless. There are lots of missing and incomplete pieces that would need to be stitched together, but aren't.

[–] Marsupial@quokk.au 3 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I just checked and yes, yes, didn’t try but have seen others do so before, and yes.

[–] Steve 2 points 10 months ago

That impressive then. I don't know.

[–] oxjox@lemmy.ml 9 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

Thankfully, this part of the Fediverse is working...

[–] PlasticPigeon@lemmy.world 2 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

This makes no sense, really sorry. Made a post and when looking for it, it just showed nothing. Look here is a screenshot of my personal feed. It only shows the comment on a fediverse post, which I then created into a stand-alone post, in hoping someone would be able to explain or prove me wrong.

And I can’t even go and delete the posts, as when looking inside the posts on my profile, it shows nothing either.

REALLY sorry for the multiple posts, thought the app was bugging out. :-(

Really sorry. Will check on laptop to see if I can find and delete the multiple posts from there…

EIDT: forgot screenshots:

[–] Blaze@discuss.tchncs.de 5 points 10 months ago (1 children)

No worries, you should be able to delete them once on your laptop

[–] PlasticPigeon@lemmy.world 4 points 10 months ago

Thank you for your kindness and understanding. :-(

[–] Jilanico@lemmy.world 6 points 10 months ago

It's not essential for me that these different platforms talk to each other. A microblogging platform doesn't need to (maybe even shouldn't) integrate with a forum or vice versa. Each has its own role and muddying the water doesn't bring any real benefit imo.

The fact that they are decentralized is what's important and the fediverse makes that possible for all platforms built upon it.

Moving an account from one instance to another is a real issue though, I agree with you there. Defederation would become less of a problem if you could easily move your account (with its post history) and communities you moderate to an instance that aligns with what you're looking for, assuming it exists. Ideally everyone would have their own personal instance, but that is probably not feasible for most people.

[–] pruwybn@discuss.tchncs.de 4 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (2 children)

It's a shame this is being downvoted, because I think these are interesting topics to discuss. A while back I found this article which talks about similar ideas; it's is from a few years ago but I think makes points that are still valid. It talks about how there is a lot of ambiguity in ActivityPub, and there aren't really standardized ways for different implementations to interact - a lot of it is ad hoc, and as you pointed out, doesn't always work well, or may work better in one direction than the other. Hopefully it will become more standardized in the future and remove some of the ambiguity.

[–] Deebster@programming.dev 3 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

It's been downvoted because it was posted multiple times (misunderstanding/technical error) but I agree. Each of the posts have different replies so it's a shame we can't merge them into one excellent thread.

[–] PlasticPigeon@lemmy.world 2 points 10 months ago

Thanks for your kind response, it really was not intention to upset anyone or badmouth the fediverse, it was more of a frustration from what might just be a misunderstanding of how the Fediverse / ActivityPub network actually connects and interacts, vs. what they show on wikipedia and some other sites / videos when doing research on what the fediverse is and how it works, exactly.

PS: Looked at the article and wow, it's a bit high in dev-talk, so can't really grasp what's being said, unfortunately. :-/

[–] PlasticPigeon@lemmy.world 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

HOPING TO EXPLAIN BETTER:

Sorry. Perhaps the thoughts were not clear, but have watched a lot of videos and even Wikipedia makes it seem like they are all social networks and that one can follow / post / reply on the other networks:

It isn’t about following everything and everyone, but about not wanting to have a Pixelfed account to follow a photographer, or not needing a Lemmy account to follow interesting topics, or not needing a Mastodon account to follow a blogger / writer. It is perhaps then a bit oversimplified on the “intro to the fediverse” videos / posts that’s been seen on the web. Was hoping to have one single account on any of the above, and then just interact from there, and not needing an account for every single one of them.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fediverse

[–] Blaze@discuss.tchncs.de 2 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I see where you come from. We are not there yet, but maybe in the future.

On the other side, having different accounts for different services is also to keep them independent from each other, even if connected

[–] Jilanico@lemmy.world 2 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

Hmmm what if there was a new fediverse service dedicated to hosting fediverse accounts. You would choose an instance of that service to create an account and then use that account to register with a fediverse instance of Lemmy, Mastodon, etc. Kind of like you can login to various websites with your Google or Facebook account.

That would mean a single account could be used with any Fediverse service (Lemmy, Mastodon, etc.), all post history could be aggregated, and you could easily move from one instance to another.

Lemmy, Mastodon, etc., would have to be enhanced to accept this mode of registration of course.

[–] TORFdot0@lemmy.world 3 points 10 months ago (1 children)

In my opinion a centralized authentication platform such as that requires a single point of failure or a level of trust between instances that isn't and in my opinion shouldn't be allowed as it would increase the attack surface for bad actors to exploit.

I think the best way would be for the community to create a docker image or other out of box solution that makes it easy for instance hosts to support multiple services on different subdomains from a single endpoint with shared authentication and as such your lemmy.example.com credentials would work for mastodon.example.com and would work for pixelfed.example.com and would work for peertube.example.com and so on and so forth.

[–] Jilanico@lemmy.world 3 points 10 months ago (1 children)

It wouldn't be centralized. There would be multiple instances and you'd choose which one to use to host your account.

I like your idea, though. It doesn't solve the problem of moving your account from one Lemmy instance to another, for example, but it does reduce barriers to entry for other fediverse platforms.

[–] TORFdot0@lemmy.world 2 points 10 months ago (1 children)

If it’s not centralized then that’s where the trust issues come in. How can I trust another node on the network that I should authenticate User X when I don’t have the secret key?

[–] Jilanico@lemmy.world 2 points 10 months ago

I don't really know the details of how "log in with your Google/Facebook account" works on other sites, but I imagine it'd work the same way. I'm no expert on this stuff tho.