A frog who wants the objective truth about anything and everything.

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 4th, 2023

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  • Strange. I don’t consistently use it myself (I’m more a Lemmy type person), but it always worked pretty okay in my testing. I tried it again just now, and I was able to respond to someone and visit my profile without issue. Perhaps there is an issue with your friendica instance? I did my testing on friendica.world.

    I’m using the older 3.1 version from f-droid, so maybe there was a regression in the 4.0 release as well, if you’re using that.



  • I feel like more people using smaller instances is a good thing, as it helps them become one of those desirable instances, and helps keep the Admins of those small instances motivated to maintain their instance (since they see their efforts being rewarded).

    I do get that a bigger instance provides a smoother experience out of the box, but with Lemmy Federate and Lemmyverse search, I feel like it’s easier to overcome a small instance limitation on lemmy compared to a small mastodon instance.

    That’s just my two cents though.






  • The Bluesky firehose throughput is massive and any home ActivityPub instance that tried to enter the network would easily be overwhelmed just loading the basic home page feed.

    AKAIK, activitypub (on mastodon) only requests and receives content from individual users that have been followed by someone on the local instance, it wouldn’t load all of bluesky at once, it would just need to have an up to date database of bluesky’s users so they are easily searchable. With that model, even crappy PC’s can interact with the mega servers.

    Plus, many ActivityPub folks don’t want to federate with big companies anyway.

    With the OP’s point of ATProto being open-source, I assume the thrust of the argument is that at done point there would be a community hosted instance, which were it compatible, I think most activitypub se rvers would gladly federate with.

    I don’t think ActivityPub is made for large servers

    Ideally there doesn’t need to be any, as the conglomeration of all smaller instances should be able to act as a large server. Unfortunately as it currently stands, the UI of most fediverse software makes interacting with that wider pool more difficult than it needs to be, and thus punishes smaller Mastodon servers with more difficult discovery of interesting topics or people to follow. But I think that can be overcome simply with better UI design.

    AP works well for following friends and family, it’s kind of terrible for the tailored topic based social media feed most people want out of social media apps these days.

    Again, I think that’s a UI problem. I don’t use mastodon myself because of it, as I find it difficult to find people that interest me. However, Lemmy’s use of Topics, and more critically, the existence of Lemmyverse.net which searches across all instances, make finding interesting things possible regardless of the size of your home instance. It’s criminal that that functionality is not a native feature in the standard lemmy Ui, and I’m not aware of anything similar for mastodon.


  • I’d rather that ATProto was just compatible with activitypub to begin with, or allowed for meaningful federation.

    The ability to scale up into a behemoth like twitter will only be viable for a minority of people who can afford the infrastructure to do so, and with that level of centralization comes a certain level of control and allowable viewpoints. Not the worst thing if the people running it are good folk, but that’s always reliant on luck, and your chances to roll a good team lessen dramatically with such a small pool of servers. Not to mention the inherent problem of adequate moderation on mega servers, where the ratio of mods/admins to users can quickly become overwhelming, especially if reliant on volunteers who don’t like the feeling of just being a cog in a greater machine.

    ActivityPub, on the other hand, allows for anyone to host an instance with an old laptop, while still having access to the big picture.

    The argument should not be to tolerate ATProto since it’s easier to use, it should be to rile up support to make Activitypub’s interconnections so intuitive and smooth to use by default, that it can easily offer those ‘big social media vibes’ to those who want it.

    The potential social benefits of truly federated, Citizen Owned media cannot be overstated.







  • Unless an instance enrolls in Lemmy-federate, the default behavior is that a user, even on the /all view, will only see local communities, and outside communities that another local user has sought out and subscribed to.

    If a newbie joins a small instance and doesn’t know how to seek out communities that interest them with lemmyverse.net, they would likely have a very small range of content in their feed.

    Lemmy-federate helps by auto subscribing an instance to participating communities, seeding a wide range of content immediately.

    A large instance would offer a good experience either way, but would encourage centralization without Lemmy-federate existing.