wut?

It’s not a Federated platform like LinkedIn, but I am working on CareerCupid , a “OkCupid for jobs” website where people can answer questions about their values and goals, and then find out people that are the most compatible to work with. The website does work with ActivityPub though, you can follow @[email protected] and you can see the new polls and job listings published on the website.

There is no such thing as a “vote” in ActivityPub/ActivityStreams. This idea of “up/down votes” is just an abstraction of a message saying “Actor A liked B”, where B is an Post/Comment (and a post/comment itself just being an abstraction of ActivityStreams objects).

That is to say: there is no way to selectively hide the content a message. If you want federation to work and you want people outside your own server to see your posts, then the server needs to broadcast the messages to anyone listening.

Tools like lemvotes are just exposing this information. There is no point in trying to censor the tool, because this information is available publicly, and any motivated person will be able to track this information.

If you are concerned about what people think of your “likes” and “dislikes”, then do not use a public social media service and only communicate with provably secure communication tools.

There is no upvote system. no favourites system, no saved posts system.

There is no such thing as “upvote” on ActivityPub. This is an abstraction on top of the “Like” activity. If Misskey UI is geared only towards reactions and doesn’t have a way for users to “like” something, this is a Misskey problem, not a Fediverse one.

My point is, this discrepancy between platforms calls for standardized system.

And what people are trying to explain to you is that this “standardized system” already exists. ActivityStreams is the standard to define a vocabulary, and ActivityPub is the standard that defines what happens when data is sent between different servers.

The issue I am taking with your comment is that it seems that you are expecting developers to start backwards from an unified product vision and then build their way down to the standard. This only works well when you have one single entity controlling everything. It’s the “Apple Way” of developing products.

So this is not a “Fediverse problem”, but a Misskey one?

It looks like that first you need to be able to better articulate what do you mean “federating everywhere”, because I can follow a Lemmy community from Mastodon just fine, and you seem to be on Misskey, and we are communicating just fine.

IOW, “federation” is already working.

Perhaps you just mean that you want the UX from misskey to change depending on the source? And you are proposing that this should be done to all software?

Implementing communities for every platform would help the Fediverse

From Evan Prodromou, 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).

The issue here is that most developers and users are still thinking in terms of the siloed networks. We don’t need “multiple, separate platforms”. We need to get rid of the platforms! We need to build our tools around protocols.

The WWW was incredibly successful because anyone could whip up some HTML and publish a webpage. The “protocol” of structured text alongside with links was simple to understand, any browser could do it. The Social Web should work the same.

You see, this is why it’s important to understand that how ActivityPub works and why we can not think only in terms of “Reddit, but federated”.

In terms of ActivityPub, a community that mirrors posts is exactly the same as someone that “retweets” a message. You may not even have realized, but it’s quite possible that your posts/comments have been replicated on mastodon. Now that they are (finally) adding support for quote-posts, this will be even more common.

What I just described to you is this “communities following communities” idea. It’s not about “giving the impression” of anything, it would be openly to aggregate all content in one single place and to avoid fragmentation.

Now, like I said in the linked discussion, I think that there is a legitimate complaint about taking content from one place and just moving it around. But at least the approach I am proposing is not fabricating anything. It’s Piefed’s implementation that is falsifying information. In my view, what PieFed is doing is objectively worse than a “reposting actor”. Just like the “private voting” feature, it is beneficial for its own users but it’s bad for the overall Fediverse.

I mean you could just copy my posts anyway manually,

No, no. By mirroring, I mean it is possible to make it look like you posted to the community.

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 [email protected] and mirror them on [email protected]. 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:

• Find your instance.
• Create an account.
• Deal with an unfamiliar interface
• Create the ticket
• Hope it gets seen.
• Potentially forget about it, unless they set up notifications.

A Federated forge solves all of that.

• You follow remote projects without having to create an account in the remote instance.
• You open an issue on the remote forge without having to open in an account in the remote instance, and you do it from your local server.
• If you have a PR ready, the remote instance gets notified.
• It makes a lot easier to separate CI/CD from source management.
• It makes a lot easier to separate source management from issue tracking.
• etc
• etc
• etc

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:

• Scroll around for a bit on the federated timeline of your preferred Mastodon instance, tell me how long it takes for someone to display an anti-business sentiment.
• There is no one coordinated movement to get creators on YouTube and tell them “hey, if you start putting your videos on PeerTube we will contribute to your Patreon”.
• Every and any effort to build a public searchable index of the Fediverse was attacked on the grounds of “I don’t want my data used by marketers”.
• The majority view on “how to best fund the Fediverse” is “set up donations”. Whenever I bring up “I think it’s more fair if everyone paid just a little bit, this is why my instance is only for paying members”, I am immediately treated as an evil capitalist pig.

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?

• Normies.
• Small business who want to have a social media presence.
• Influencers.
• Reporters.
• Anyone who is not 100% aligned with their political mindset

My biggest frustration is that I sincerely believe that I had built like 80% of the tools needed to solve the onboarding issues:

• Onboarding by signing up via Reddit OAuth on fediverser.network, so anyone had one single place to visit and “migrate”
• A website with a curated list of recommended communities, so that they would have content available as soon as they signed up.
• 15+ topic-specific instances, so that people could become familiar with the concept of federation, without having to be overwhelmed by the initial choices and/or being forced to understand the “politics” of each instance
• The “Community Ambassador” feature, to help people to organize and source content from different places and help them bootstrap their communities.

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?”