If you are the admin and developer of the server, you can do pretty much anything with it.
For example, now that I am working on an AP server, I can take all your posts on !television@piefed.social and mirror them on !television@metacritics.zone. I could also avoid sending notifications to you, so you'd be aware of this only if you visited the site directly. How would you feel about that?
That's the answer.
That's a bad, short-sighted, wrong answer. We can have decentralized identifiers. We have more than a couple FEPs that deal with portable objects correctly, and in the last FediForum there was a lot proposed strategies to allow migrations from both dead and live servers. None of them requires a server to unilaterally steal the content from another actor and pass it as their own.
People were criticizing me like hell because of the mirror bots on alien.top, but at least the bots were stealing from Reddit and they were meant to get people to migrate. This is implementation from PieFed may have good intentions, but the will lead to bad outcomes.
I don't really care about that.
I do. I care very much about identity and authenticity in the Fediverse. A server that can take posts done in one group and publish as their own is as unreliable as a server who puts fake posts impersonating a popular user.
One of the fundamental issues with the current implementations in the Fediverse is that the server owns the keys and can do anything on behalf of the user.
That's the only major one i can think of.
again, why you are talking about Lemmy only? Mastodon instances from all sizes go down every other week.
but if you want to talk threadverse only: feddit.de. The original kbin, fmhy, one for writers that I forgot the name...
Sorry, I’m thinking strictly in terms of Reddit vs. Lemmy/Piefed/adjacent networks because they are essentially Reddit alternatives that function the same. I don’t really know much about Mastodon or other alternative networks, nor can I speak on their health - but the lemmyverse (including new piefed instances) seem to be fine overall.
From Evan, co-author of ActivityPub: The Fediverse should be more like the Facebook Platform (lots of client apps using the same social graph) rather than the Apple App Store (a bunch of one-feature apps that have to bootstrap their own social network each time).
Instead of thinking "Lemmy/Piefed vs Reddit" or "Mastodon vs Bluesky vs Twitter" or "PeerTube vs Youtube", think that the Fediverse can be so much more than a poor man's version of the proprietary networks. This mentality is still rooted in the silos created by Big Tech.
Communities can become nomadic, and that’s fine.
First, I think that community migration implementation from PieFed has very bad implications. It is literally rewriting history.
Second, if we want to make the Fediverse something really accessible, it needs to be a lot more reliable. Yeah, when we are a few thousand people it's easy to coordinate the migration of a few dozen communities. But if we are talking about millions or billions of people, we can not afford to have constant failures. People have expectations set by the corporate networks, so the whole system needs to be as reliable as them.
What advantage does a “fediverse” frontend have?
Github's dominance comes from the network effects. Everyone's on github, so if you have your project on a different repo, you won't get as many visibility. If your project is on gitlab only and someone wants to report a bug, they need to:
A Federated forge solves all of that.
Specific to the DID, I haven't published yet. But what I am doing is based on my Typescript SDK for ActivityPub, so you can follow that repo for updates.
I feel like we are talking about different things. You seem to be more focused on Reddit vs Lemmy, and I am talking about the "Closed" social networks vs the wider Fediverse.
People don’t really respond well to advertisements and influencers on Reddit either, for context.
The comparison is not to Reddit. It's Instagram/TikTok/YouTube. Maybe you heard of those: it's a place where WNBA players making $100k/year by playing can make $20k per Instagram sponsored post.
people tend to be democratic socialists/communists/anarchists”?
First, lumping together all these three ideologies as one single block is a bit handwavy. Second, I am not talking about "anti-corporate". I'm talking about anti-business. If you think that the majority of people are that extreme in their political positions, I'd guess your worldview is quite skewed.
I simply don’t believe that a paywalled system as you imagine could ever even approach Reddits numbers, or even Blueskys.
This is a strawman: I'm saying "We should not have to rely on open registration instances and hope that the admins get enough funds to keep going", which is not the same as "all instances should be paywalled".
I think if we didn't have as many open instances, we'd end up with more people self-hosting and running a server for their own friends, or we would start hearing from students asking their universities to run a server for them, or we would get hyper-localized instances where some group would pool resources to run a service for themselves, etc.
are major reddit subreddits in many cases.
Again, it's not just about reddit. Also, it's about having places where politics are not such a proeminent part of the discussion. E.g, Threads got a lot of their initial momentum by avoiding politics and getting sports journalists to post about NBA and football.
It's Fediverser. Yes, it is on github. Yes, I've posted about it, quite a bit.
I asked prolific users to join, I offered help to admins to set it up. I even offered the topic-specific instances to the wider community. None of these efforts were well received.
What’s stopping small businesses and influencers
There is nothing stopping them, but there is no one here that wants them to come:
What reporters?
There were a number of reporters from the NYT/WSJ/CNN who set up Mastodon accounts in 2022 and were harassed on Mastodon.
Does this, by the way, not depend on the instance?
Do you think that Fediverse is a good representation of the overall political spectrum?
What “different people” is the Fediverse afraid of?
My biggest frustration is that I sincerely believe that I had built like 80% of the tools needed to solve the onboarding issues:
These things are all right there. There was no single admin interested in implementing it. Everyone was just looking at their own few thousand users and never got together to think "how can we get from 50k to 5 million?"
No, no. By mirroring, I mean it is possible to make it look like you posted to the community.