I’ve been using fediverse stuff (Mastodon and, most recently, Calckey – I’m just going to use “Mastodon” as shorthand here, purists can bite me) for over a year now, a…
I tried Mastodon for a couple of days back when it first caught on as the Twitter alternative. It’s probably noteworthy that the whole Twitter experience has never appealed to me, and I’ve never had an account there. So I was mostly just curious about Mastodon.
I found it to be frustratingly opaque and I didn’t stay.
Pretty much immediately after spez’s AMA, I heard about kbin/lemmy and came and checked it out, and I basically haven’t left since. This is now my home.
Admittedly, the biggest difference to me is likely that I’m already very familiar with forum structure. So I could pretty much entirely focus on learning the quirks of the fediverse, which didn’t take long at all.
I suspect though that even if I was unfamiliar with forums, it still would’ve been easier to figure things out here, and by extension, that it has been easier for most people.
The fundamental difference as I see it is that forums work by first designating a place for discussion, then designating the topic(s) to be discussed there, and only then populating it with posters. So that means that right off the bat, people can go to specific places dedicated to their specific interests, then just see what’s there. The complications of the fediverse can be sorted out later - they can engage pretty much immediately.
By contrast, a Twitter/Mastodon style place (I have no idea what the generic term for them might be) starts by allowing individuals to create accounts, then those individuals write posts, then those posts are (maybe) categorized in some fashion. So to somebody new to the site, it’s just a bunch of people they likely know nothing about, and who knows what they have to say or what they’re saying it about, so there’s no particular reason to click on any one link over any other. Add in the complications inherent to the fediverse and the whole thing is just too complex to bother with.
I had the same exact thought about the fediverse early on in my discovery process. There’s a person, place, or thing dichotomy in terms of connecting with other people. They each lead to different levels of connection and discussion. Like I can be at a place and run into a person, but if we’re not there for the same thing our interaction will be nothing more than a tweet in the wind. In another place I can see the same person, but because we’re there for the same thing, that will lead to a deeper more thoughtful discussion. Or the simple possibility of being in a new place while seeking a new thing, could also include finding new people. There’s levels to this and to me the point of the activity pub and federation is trying to unify that into one true social media.
From a functionality side of the fediverse, Lemmy and Mastodon excel at two of the three dichotomies. Unifying them into all three requires an agreement across platforms. And in actuality it requires a new punctuation mark to follow the # and @. It’s pretty clear that the ! is a stand in for places. Hell it’s already used here in Lemmy. So you get the person @, place !, or thing #. The current implementations of federation is iffy in this regard. From a user perspective, it seems like there’s no agreement on unifying that functionality across websites. I should be able to search for the place !fediverse@lemmy.world from Mastodon, Calckey, or any other fediverse site and pull the stuff from that sub/group/whatever. But instead you have to search for a sub with an @ like you would a person. You get the individual posts of every person on that sub. And worse at a glance it’s out of context because the biggest most poignant thing you see is the user’s post. Which is usually the middle of the thread. There’s no thread structure on Mastodon which leads to interpolation problems with other fediverse sites. The funny part is, Mastodon has infrastructure in place to make thread like structures work. Their content warning system is just another name for title/subject. Then you expand that and boom the body of a post. There’s even rumblings of group functionality coming in the future on Mastodon.
Like wise Lemmy should be able to use #s in it’s titles and posts to be searchable on Mastodon. I tested hashtags in a title on Lemmy but got nothing in return on Mastodon. Why, because Lemmy users doesn’t use #s the same way Mastodon does. They work in the body of a post, but that leaves a lot of context off the table. Titles with hashtags do nothing at all. We want our stuff here on Lemmy to be discoverable on Mastodon but the only way to do that is for the website devs to come to an agreement on how that functionality works.
There’s work that needs to be done in unifying functionality across the fediverse. I’m sure there’s discussion behind the scenes about getting it all to work together, but from our side of the room it would be cool to know. I think we’re all guinea pigs in this experiment of a new social media, but the actual subject of the experiment is the websites themselves. The thesis is trying to find a way to make them all accessible/usable with each other from each corner of the internet. At a glance the fediverse looks like a bunch of websites trying to hold onto vestiges of old social media. Somebody threw in a wrench that screamed “talk to each other.” Meaning the users and more importantly the actual websites.
I tried Mastodon for a couple of days back when it first caught on as the Twitter alternative. It’s probably noteworthy that the whole Twitter experience has never appealed to me, and I’ve never had an account there. So I was mostly just curious about Mastodon.
I found it to be frustratingly opaque and I didn’t stay.
Pretty much immediately after spez’s AMA, I heard about kbin/lemmy and came and checked it out, and I basically haven’t left since. This is now my home.
Admittedly, the biggest difference to me is likely that I’m already very familiar with forum structure. So I could pretty much entirely focus on learning the quirks of the fediverse, which didn’t take long at all.
I suspect though that even if I was unfamiliar with forums, it still would’ve been easier to figure things out here, and by extension, that it has been easier for most people.
The fundamental difference as I see it is that forums work by first designating a place for discussion, then designating the topic(s) to be discussed there, and only then populating it with posters. So that means that right off the bat, people can go to specific places dedicated to their specific interests, then just see what’s there. The complications of the fediverse can be sorted out later - they can engage pretty much immediately.
By contrast, a Twitter/Mastodon style place (I have no idea what the generic term for them might be) starts by allowing individuals to create accounts, then those individuals write posts, then those posts are (maybe) categorized in some fashion. So to somebody new to the site, it’s just a bunch of people they likely know nothing about, and who knows what they have to say or what they’re saying it about, so there’s no particular reason to click on any one link over any other. Add in the complications inherent to the fediverse and the whole thing is just too complex to bother with.
I had the same exact thought about the fediverse early on in my discovery process. There’s a person, place, or thing dichotomy in terms of connecting with other people. They each lead to different levels of connection and discussion. Like I can be at a place and run into a person, but if we’re not there for the same thing our interaction will be nothing more than a tweet in the wind. In another place I can see the same person, but because we’re there for the same thing, that will lead to a deeper more thoughtful discussion. Or the simple possibility of being in a new place while seeking a new thing, could also include finding new people. There’s levels to this and to me the point of the activity pub and federation is trying to unify that into one true social media.
From a functionality side of the fediverse, Lemmy and Mastodon excel at two of the three dichotomies. Unifying them into all three requires an agreement across platforms. And in actuality it requires a new punctuation mark to follow the # and @. It’s pretty clear that the ! is a stand in for places. Hell it’s already used here in Lemmy. So you get the person @, place !, or thing #. The current implementations of federation is iffy in this regard. From a user perspective, it seems like there’s no agreement on unifying that functionality across websites. I should be able to search for the place !fediverse@lemmy.world from Mastodon, Calckey, or any other fediverse site and pull the stuff from that sub/group/whatever. But instead you have to search for a sub with an @ like you would a person. You get the individual posts of every person on that sub. And worse at a glance it’s out of context because the biggest most poignant thing you see is the user’s post. Which is usually the middle of the thread. There’s no thread structure on Mastodon which leads to interpolation problems with other fediverse sites. The funny part is, Mastodon has infrastructure in place to make thread like structures work. Their content warning system is just another name for title/subject. Then you expand that and boom the body of a post. There’s even rumblings of group functionality coming in the future on Mastodon.
Like wise Lemmy should be able to use #s in it’s titles and posts to be searchable on Mastodon. I tested hashtags in a title on Lemmy but got nothing in return on Mastodon. Why, because Lemmy users doesn’t use #s the same way Mastodon does. They work in the body of a post, but that leaves a lot of context off the table. Titles with hashtags do nothing at all. We want our stuff here on Lemmy to be discoverable on Mastodon but the only way to do that is for the website devs to come to an agreement on how that functionality works.
There’s work that needs to be done in unifying functionality across the fediverse. I’m sure there’s discussion behind the scenes about getting it all to work together, but from our side of the room it would be cool to know. I think we’re all guinea pigs in this experiment of a new social media, but the actual subject of the experiment is the websites themselves. The thesis is trying to find a way to make them all accessible/usable with each other from each corner of the internet. At a glance the fediverse looks like a bunch of websites trying to hold onto vestiges of old social media. Somebody threw in a wrench that screamed “talk to each other.” Meaning the users and more importantly the actual websites.