trynn

No, you’re not quite understanding what ActivityPub is. The data under all the fediverse services is not the same infrastructure at all. The communication between those various services just uses the same language (ActivityPub). Those various services can interpret and store (or ignore) ActivityPub messages any way they want. Service instances add another layer to the whole thing as well.

In order for an “everything app” to be successful (if you buy the argument that it feasibly can be), it would have to be a centralized service. Decentralization, by its very nature, encourages the opposite of that – want to make some niche service because existing services don’t satisfy some fringe need you have, but still want to interact with others on other platforms? You can do that with the fediverse. But that also means your new service isn’t part of an “everything app”… it just can potentially talk to one that might exist.

I don’t think this is a good idea. Keep in mind that different instances have different policies, moderators, and users. This leads to different rule enforcement, culture, and federation status. Even if a magazine/community has the same name and the same discussion topics does not mean it’s the same group of people reading those posts (some might be, due to cross-instance federation, but not all will be). In short, they are different groups and cannot be treated as the same without pissing off people.

The proper solution is to let each community just evolve until one naturally emerges over time as the go-to community or they all differentiate themselves enough to be considered different (albeit with similar names). Adding a bot to cross-post content just slows that process down and makes the problem persist for longer. If a topic is truly small enough that getting enough people for critical mass is difficult (like your DIY cobbling example), then it shouldn’t be hard to start a discussion in each of the separate communities to suggest assigning one as the “main” one and then just stop using the others. This is something that should be driven by the communities, not the software.

This article kind of misses the forest for the trees. While I agree with many of the author’s points, that’s not why the #TwitterMigration failed. It failed because Twitter/Mastodon isn’t really a social networking site, and Mastodon didn’t provide the same service that Twitter does. At its core, Twitter is about small numbers of (usually famous or important) users communicating with large audiences of followers. #TwitterMigration failed because not enough of those famous and important people moved from Twitter to Mastodon, so the average user had no content they cared to read. Seeing posts from your friends about what they had for dinner last night is all well and good, but the stuff people actually want to see is famous person A throwing shade at famous person B while famous person C talks about the new movie they’re in and important organization D posts a warning about severe weather in the area. You don’t go to Twitter to have discussions, you go to Twitter to get news and gossip direct from the source.

In contrast, sites like Reddit and kBin/Lemmy are about having group conversations around a topic. Interacting with famous people is neat but not the point. Think of Reddit/kBin/Lemmy as random conversations at a party whereas Twitter/Mastodon is some random person on the corner shouting to a crowd from a soapbox. #RedditMigration has a much better chance of succeeding simply because the purpose of the site is different. As long as enough people move to kBin/Lemmy to have meaningful conversations (aka content), it will have succeeded.