rglullis

Oh, nice to see more topic-specific instances. Would you be interested in joining https://fediverser.network to add the instance and its communities to its database?

I don’t use my work email for private convos, just like I don’t use my junk email for coordinating group trips.

I addressed this in the final paragraph. It makes sense (to me, at least) to partition the communication medium based on the role or type of established relationship, but I don't think, e.g, that you use one account to talk to your friends from school and another to talk with your friends from the swimming club and another to send pictures to people you went camping last summer.

do you have gmail? well that says something about you. Hotmail? same thing

Hard disagree. What aspect of someone's identity can you infer seeing an email from joey@gmail.com? Can you tell their political values? Their religion? Where they were born? Their lifestyle? Marital status? Even if you were to take a jab at their gender, you'd be relying on the user part, not the domain. Saying you can know anything about someone by their email provider is no different than claiming to figuring out someone's personality by asking them their star sign.

which is choosing a topic (yourself) as the root of your identity

No. I don't have a personal domain because I want to talk about myself. I have a domain with my name because I want a stable presence and my name doesn't change, while my interests might. I don't like the idea of letting myself be defined by my interests.

Tying your identity to lemmy (or the fediverse even) is a losing proposition.

Here, we agree 100%.

You know what you’re getting when you go in (a programming forum),

Are you sure about that?

Anyway, I just wanted to say I am glad that p.d exists and happier still that is one of the topic-based instances that is thriving. I know that I am part of the minority opinion in this debate. If I have my way, soon we will have "ActivityPub Group Servers" where people will be able to setup, moderate and manage an actor without having to be in the same domain. Then it will be easier for people to find and decouple the "community" from the "instance" and perhaps more people will be interested in using the dozen topic-based instances that I created last year.

Funny, I am of the exact opposite opinion.

I don't mind topic-based instances for groups, but I really would not like to have my online identity tied to one specific, narrow interest of mine.

I am a bit confused. Why not just promote the communities in the instance?

Somewhat related: would you be interested in joining https://fediverser.network? The project is meant to help people migrate from Reddit to Lemmy automatically. People need to authenticate once with their Reddit credentials, and the system finds the best instance for them and looks at their list of subscribed subreddits to automatically find and follow the most relevant Fediverse communities.

The project is now at the point where more people can join and help spread out the word to Redditors, so the idea now is to get more people there to sign up (to help fill the crowdsource map of community recommendations) and to get more Reddit moderators who might be interested in helping their communities to move out of there.

• Bridging bots to interact with Reddit
• Bridging bots to interact with Facebook Groups
• Match threader bots for Football, Basketball, and American Football
• Bots that follow tags on Mastodon and boots them to specific communities

Sorry! I was overconfident with a change. Please try again.

I think, sadly, that either sending in your national ID

That's why I mentioned the idea of "Zero Knowledge Proofs". Using a ZK-proof, one should be able to prove ownership of an ID without having to reveal it to anyone else.

At that point, it’s not its own web app anymore, more akin to an email program.

Yes, exactly. I am not a fan of the current way that the Fediverse is working though, and I think it would be better to stop thinking in terms of "servers/clients" and more in terms of "distributed applilcations".

Can you explain more? How would this do anything to prevent sockpuppets?

Imagine something like a verification check (like Twitter's old blue check) that is exclusively associated with your national ID. You can have only one of those. If you want to create sockpuppets, you'd have to convince someone else to (a) give them access to their ID and (b) be willing to lose their ability to prove their own identity elsewhere.

It's not absolutely safe against bots and sockpuppets, but it surely makes it more expensive than even a $10/account membership.

Pixelfed has support for most of the Fediverse.

PIxelfed is still just supporting ActivityPub. I'm talking about multi-protocol communication. A smart client should be able to let you communicate with Lemmy communities, subreddits, Facebook groups and all types of different platforms from a single unified interface. There are plenty of people that think this is something undesirable (like everyone that wants instances to block Threads), but I'd argue that building these integrations with closed platforms would eventually destroy them because they would lose the monopoly on network effects.

You can’t bring an actor ID to a new domain name, can you?

No, but you could have a web server that responds to multiple domains. Ideally, the server listening and responding to the AP requests should be able to work with multiple "virtual servers", instead of having to have only one instance == one domain that we today. AFAIK, only Takahe does this for microblogging.

I agree so much with you, I am running a commercial provider for Fediverse services for almost five years. The problem is that we are still a very tiny minority relative to the amount of internet users.

To be quite honest, I wouldn't mind sponsored posts as a way to support a community or instance, as long as they were completely disclosed as so and if the sponsor had no control over the moderation.