But we are not going to get “niche” users if we don’t get large numbers of users. Niche interests will only come up here when the population is so large that even the long tail ends up with critical masses.

Those defending “quality over quantity” miss this exact point.

I think this is yet-another reason to have a separation between users and communities at the instance/domain level.

Setting up a server should require one top-level domain and two subdomains:

• https://myserver.com/ would be for webfinger and the actual backend.
• https://groups.myserver.com/ would be the subdomain for the AS2.Group actors
• https://people.myserver.com/ would be the subdomain for the AS2.Person actor

I sound like a broken record, but none of this would happen if the devs took a good look at RDF before throwing everything into objects/classes and ORMs.

I’m working on something that aims to be compatible with Lemmy’s API, and my models are based on the context definitions first. This means that it becomes impossible to have communities and users with the preferred_username, because they are both actors.

That might work, but it’s never a good idea to write your code against a specific implementation. Plus, it seems that in this case the Lemmy devs shot themselves in the foot: why allow to create two different types of actors with the same name?!

I am not so sure Mastodon is at fault, here. Going to https://lemmy.world/.well-known/webfinger?resource=acct%3Avinyl%40lemmy.world, this is the result:

{
  "subject": "acct:vinyl@lemmy.world",
  "links": [
    {
      "rel": "http://webfinger.net/rel/profile-page",
      "type": "text/html",
      "href": "https://lemmy.world/u/vinyl",
      "template": null
    },
    {
      "rel": "self",
      "type": "application/activity+json",
      "href": "https://lemmy.world/u/vinyl",
      "template": null,
      "properties": {
        "https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams#type": "Person"
      }
    },
    {
      "rel": "http://ostatus.org/schema/1.0/subscribe",
      "type": null,
      "href": null,
      "template": "https://lemmy.world/activitypub/externalInteraction?uri=%7Buri%7D"
    },
    {
      "rel": "http://webfinger.net/rel/profile-page",
      "type": "text/html",
      "href": "https://lemmy.world/c/vinyl",
      "template": null
    },
    {
      "rel": "self",
      "type": "application/activity+json",
      "href": "https://lemmy.world/c/vinyl",
      "template": null,
      "properties": {
        "https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams#type": "Group"
      }
    }
  ]
}

So, lemmy is just providing two different actors for the same subject name and saying they refer to the same account.

Looking at the list, only AndStatus and Evan’s CLI tool speak activitypub natively. Everything else depends on an application API.

Please, use the lemmy test instances

• https://voyager.lemmy.ml/
• https://enterprise.lemmy.ml/

If you don’t, you will end up having your instance blocked.

One use case: get posts from sports commentary that are on Bluesky and cross-post them to relevant communities. Half of reddit’s NBA posts is just someone taking tweets from NBA reporters and posting there for discussion. With the bluesky integration, I could see this being done very easily.

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.