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The Britannica entry for the Fediverse is really good
(www.britannica.com)
"Mostly Harmless"
Lemmy really is growing and I love that we're part of that
Where do you see evidence of that? I thought monthly active users has only dropped since peaking after the Reddit API debacle.
Unlike X (formerly Twitter) or Facebook, which remain in business by profiting from consumers’ personal information, the fediverse aims to give users privacy and an ad-free interface.
First I've ever heard of Soundstorm, which apparently hasn't been updated in 7 years.
Meta's Threads is also working toward ActivityPub compatibility, which would significantly expand the fediverse user base.
Um... fuck no, please and thank you!
The bad news is: you can already follow accounts bidirectionally between Threads and Mastodon. The good news is: Meta did the bare minimum and seems to have stopped development.
Back when they started on that, we were worried they were going to kill ActivityPub like how Netscape got killed by IE durring the browser wars. EEE (Embrace, Expande, Eliminate), adopt the protocol, expand its capabilities while including propriatary portions of code, and lock the competition out when market saturation is achieved.
The issue is that fedivers residents are a bunch of tech-literate weirdos and called this bullshit the second the news dropped, and are 100% the type of people who make forks as soon as something like that would actually happen. Piefed being the perfect example, this part of the internet is perfectly fine just picking up their things and making something else (and we love it here for that).
Yep a lot of us built stuff like this before and will probably do it again.
Also, Threads has introduced extremely strict rules for servers that want to federate.
Entire Fediverse server applications are incapable of following all these rules, either technologically or by concept.
For example, IIRC, Threads demanded a full public timeline. Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte do have that feature in code. But it's intentionally turned off server-wide by default, and there's a very good reason for this and for just about no serious admins of public servers ever turning it on.
You can but iirc it takes quite a bit of bidirectional effort to enable that. Thankfully!
fediverse, decentralized group of social media platforms in which each independent platform can interact freely with any other platform that is part of the group.
Great that they have an article on it, though their formatting the start of each article like a dictionary entry is a bit odd compared to Wikipedia.
If it were a Wikipedia article, it would probably need some copyediting to give it a more encyclopedic tone along with in-line citations.
Man, that "can" is doing a fuck of a lot of heavy lifting. lemmy, piefed are 100% when you start going pixelfed or loops, or mastodon the compatibility matrix stops looking like that nice spiderweb.
you're lucky if you can even finger a user between systems
you’re lucky if you can even finger a user between systems
I'm sure the gals at the blahaj zone are up for it
Can confirm. Finger me between systems, bby!
Tbh I never understood the Lemmy users can interact with all other platforms that share the same protocol.
It's not like I can view a Mastodon user's history on Lemny, right?
Lemmy and history, no. On Lemmy you can see comments from Mastodon and posts (toot with a Lemmy community pinged inside. Which is rarely done but happens). But not the toots themselves
Piefed now allows to directly follow accounts (similar to Mastodon, Friendica, etc) and you can start getting the new toots after following an account https://piefed.zip/c/microblogs
Lemmy is all about groups. It doesn't have any way to connect to and interact with single users.
Mastodon, on the contrary, is all about single users following single users. It has no support for groups whatsoever. Mastodon users can follow Lemmy communities, yes. They can reply to posts, but in a very Mastodon way (automatic mentions, they'll probably insert hashtags etc.). Seeing (almost) the entire conversation is the default on Lemmy and extremely tedious and anything but straight-forward on Mastodon. And starting a new thread in a Lemmy community from Mastodon is difficult, nobody knows how to do it right, and whoever tries it will clash with Lemmy's culture.
Stuff like Friendica or Hubzilla is somewhat more general-purpose. It can do both. But I've yet to see a Lemmy user subscribe to a Friendica group or a Hubzilla forum (the opposite does work).
From mastodon viewing lemmy stuff is nice enough. It would be great if you could seamlessly crosspost and share between platforms.
It's not like I can view a Mastodon user's history on Lemny, right?
afaik you can
how?
ehh.. just tested and it doesn't seem to work.. somehow i remembered it working but maybe i was mistaken
sorry for the misinformation
piefed is working on it at the moment. I can see some stuff working. Following/posts that make it here/etc.. its coming along pretty quick!
Yeah, I keep trying the different things. We're really not using the fediverse for all it's capable of.
We can generally see all the users on all the federated systems, but none of their old content, a limited number of systems can follow other systems and see new stuff.
I'd really like to see being able to log into pixelfed.social as rumba@lemmy.zip, post images there (and in loops.video) and reference them in my mastodon and lemmy posts.
All the interoperability is threadbare.
This kind of stuff is the coolest thing about the fediverse and ActivityPub to me.
All the things you mentioned are possible in theory but the tools and infrastructure to do it haven't been created.
Yeah, It's got some great bones. Would have been good if everyone had some interop best standards or even a skeleton framework, but i don't want my money back :)
How is the fediverse different from traditional social media?
The fediverse is a decentralized network of social media platforms that freely interact, unlike traditional social media.
I have a bit of a problem with the term "traditional social media".
The earliest popular form of social media was Usenet. The first one I ever used was web forums (run on phpBB or similar software). Those have a lot more "tradition" than Facebook or Twitter or TikTok, so why are they calling the latter three (deviations from the decentralized "tradition" of the Internet) "traditional social media"?! Is it just that they're the first form of social media that the authors of that article ever used?
Those were not considered social media in their heyday as the term was created after them specifically for sites where a user would maintain a non-anonymous profile, post content about themselves and curating a feed based on other profiles followed.
Forums and Usenet could be considered proto-social-media perhaps given they were clear precursors to it
Of course. I find "social media" a suboptimal term anyway. A good term for the concept is the "participatory Internet".
But if we are going to use it, then it's just media that is produced by society at large as opposed to paid journalists or authors. Meaning Usenet is social media.
I recommend uBlacklist to correct this.
this post was submitted on 22 Oct 2026
137 points (97.2% liked)
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