create a Lemmy instance that mirrors reddit, rather than have bots post reddit posts onto main Lemmy instances, create an instance that mirrors specific subreddits on request, including the comments of their posts, and allows Lemmy users to comment and reply back, where those comments are also propagated to reddit so that replies and discussion are mirrored also.

I guess you were not here during the alien.top debacle…

This is exactly what I was doing with Fediverser, and I was really close to implement full two-way bridging, but instead of supporting the effort the great minds of Lemmy decided that the any sort of automated content was spam and unworthy of attention. Instead of looking how the system for onboarding users would make migration 10x simpler, I had to deal with skeptical admins and users who covered their noses at anything or anyone trying to fight Reddit on their grounds.

They appear intent on recreating the problems of reddit here.

The problems regarding Reddit-the-corporation are orthogonal to the problems of Reddit-the-online-space. Which types of problems are you referring to here?

You do understand that I am describing a whole different client, right?

There is no “Lemmy Feed”, just “posts sent from individuals to a group” vs “posts sent from individuals that are broadcasting without any specific audience”

How this presentation layer would work would be entirely up to the developer/user. I can envision people that might prefer to have a separate threaded-view for group posts like we have in most forum sites, but I can also envision people that will prefer each post appearing in a “feed”, like what Facebook does for groups. I can also envison such an application providing a “image gallery” for people tthat want to see only pictures, like Vernissage does.

My point is, it would be completely up to the user how to see the data.

How? My server would be able to talk with any of the existing projects and talk native ActivityPub. It can even bridge to other protocols without forcing them to change anything on their side.

I am not sure whether “represent” is the right word here. What I mean is that all posts have a “recipient” (the audience).

For Mastodon, you have public posts where the recipient is literally a “special” audience, called https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams#Public. If you want to see a private message to alice, you just change the “audience” to contain only the https://example.com/alice actor URI.

To post to a community, it’s the same logic: if you are posting on fediverse@lemmy.world, then the message has “https://lemmy.world/c/fediverse” as the audience. This message is then sent to lemmy.world and processed.

In ActivityPub terms, there is no such thing as a “Mastodon posts” or “Lemmy communities”. You just have “authors” and “audiences”. In effect, it would mean that you emulate a “post to a community” by writting a post with the community as the “audience”, and anyone that follows the actor that represents the group (equivalent to the Lemmy Community) would find the posts.

My point is that you can have a “content-centric” application separate from the “user-centric” application, but they are just different ways to represent and interact with the data in the social graph and as such they don’t need separate APIs.

In doing so you are effectively creating a new Lemmy

Indeed, I am. But to be perfectly honest, I’m doing a lot less work that I original thought in the server side, and when I get to start working on Mastodon compatibility, I will probably just change the internal implementation of mastodon’s js sdk.

It’s the complete opposite of that.

“Use ActivityPub directly for interacting with the social web graph” is the same as saying “Use HTTP and HTML directly to interact with the world wide web”.

The reason we don’t see different websites using different versions of HTTP, or that someone can open a HTML document on pretty much website and read its contents is because we are building the application on top of the protocol layer.

I am saying is that we can have a mobile app that can do anything that Lemmy does, but without requiring a “Lemmy API” to do it.

Any “Lemmy client” could in theory read and create posts/comments/votes/moderation reports directly by interacting with the actors outboxes. The same for any “Mastodon” client, or any “PeerTube client”.

You don’t need to get rid of the server. All I’m saying is that we can have a server that uses the ActivityPub API directly instead of these ad-hoc APIs for each different use case.

Let’s stop working on “Lemmy app” , “mbin app”, “PieFed app”, “Mastodon app” and just embrace ActivityPub as the single API.

TV stations and radio channels are under government control. The government is the one who controls the licenses for spectrum.

it is a place where a very large cohort of the general public go.

Unless your are completely inept at technology and you have no regards for open standards, there is zero reason to think “just go wherever the audiences are” is a sensible strategy for public institutions.

The internet at large is still accessible. RSS is still a thing. Email is still a thing. If people really are so interested in following status updates from the government, they can easily go to the government-owned website. We are not talking about someone running a food truck and wants to reach customers to sell burritos. We are talking about entities that are so large that they make their own gravity.

How?

Twitter is not a public place and has been looking more and more like the opposite of it. Nowadays you can not even go someone’s profile to browse their timeline without logging in.

Surely you’re not saying they shouldn’t have had a Twitter presence

No, they shouldn’t have a Twitter presence. All public institutions should require full authority over the domain used for mass communication.

But again, why go through all this trouble instead of just sending money through a payment processor?

Stripe has the connected account system where they work as the money transmitter, so one could build a system where you just need to keep track of the IOUs and Stripe is the one collecting and sending payments. It’s how Github sponsors work, and it’s how I set up the Communick Collective

But when you’re talking about sending a lot more data to clients, you really need to consider what that means for the internet bill of instance owners.

I would argue the opposite, actually. A lot of this data could be distributed in a p2p manner and the client nodes would have to rely even less on the servers. The key part would be that this data would have to be self-authenticating, but we do have the mechanisms to do that (Linked Data Signatures)

How do you handle this part with the above one (exploited, manipulated) ?

It’s one thing to have systemic corruption and exploitation (what Big Tech does), it’s another to have endemic issues (bad actors, small-scale scammers, etc). The former can not be neutralized by individual/localized action, the latter can.

You can only filter and sort what was downloaded by the client. So that runs into resource constraints.

In the client, you wouldn’t need to be sorting and running extensive calculations on all data. You could, e.g, build the front-page by indexing/scoring posts and comments that have been created since your last visit with a hard cap on some time window (last 48h) or total data points (e.g, keep only the most recent 10k objects in a local hot database, freeze/archive everyhing else.)

I’m so with you. https://xkcd.com/927/

That’s what RDF/JSON-LD gives us for free. There is no need to have us arguing over what each tag means, all that developers need to do is to learn how to use the different vocabularies.

That’s more the ATproto/Bluesky vision.

Doesn’t mean that we can’t adopt it.

No, I want the Fediverse to get bigger. I don’t necessarily think its desirable to become anywhere near the size of Reddit though.

You are kind of arguing my case here: I think that the “Fediverse” should be lilke “The WWW”. Universal. The majority of people might use mobile apps for day-to-day things, but we can pretty much bet that the absolute majority of the billions of the connected people use web browsers.

So, when you say “I don’t think it is desirable for the Fediverse to be anywhere near the size of Reddit”, and knowing that Reddit is one of the smallest social networks out there (less than 100M MAU, mostly US-focused), to me it does sound like you are on the “Small Fediverse” camp.