Kichae

“What would you rather people who struggle to stack water cases be doing to earn a living? Flying planes? Heart surgery?”

NodeBB. It’s a fairly popular webforum, but ActivityPub support is fairly new. It’s really something else to see the Fediverse through a the lens of the old Internet.

It works the same on Lemmy, it’s just that on Lemmy you subscribe to groups, and on Mastodon you subscribe to users.

Groups just forward replies and other interactions it sees to subscribers.

No, that’s ‘bitter’.

Better is an Italian firearms producer.

Have you ever seen someone with their turn light on, only for them to go straight?

The turn signal is only an assurance that the driver has made contact with the signal lever, not their intentions.

Not all tuen lanes cut across opposing traffic.

So, when you post to a community, you’re posting to the local copy of it. Your host then forwards that post to the site that houses the community. When you’re banned from a remote site, nothing interferes with this process until the local host forwards things along. By that time, you’ve already posted.

Now, the site that’s housing the community is responsible for federating content it receives back out again, so while you can continue to post to the community locally, those posts won’t make it to any other copy of the community. But because each instance’s copy of the community is quasi-independent from each other, you can, IIRC, still engage with other local users in that space.

What doesn’t make sense?

The private estate was opened to public visitation 50 years ago, but the walled garden was not. Did y’all never have one of those rooms that you weren’t allowed to play in, or friends with such rooms?

I have been told by multiple people (so, like, two. Maybe 3) over the years that things I have posted have changed their minds and their leanings on political topics. But these were not any of the people I was directly addressing. I think they may have all been before the rise of Big Social, too.

Content aggregators are not forums. Just having categories doesn’t really cover it. CAs are designed so that old posts fall away quickly, so that people will keep posting new top level content and keep people emgaged in the constant scroll, much like Twitter or Facebook. They are largely unstructured, with different “categories” behaving quasi-independently from one another.

Forums are structured spaces where the same people post stuff to the same categories, that are mostly offshoots of the forum’s core theme.

People interact with and behave rather differently in these different contexts.

It’s harder to see on a large Lemmy instance like LW, but most of the fediverse is very patchwork. The network of Lemmy sites is itself very patchwork, with the MLs, Hexbear, Beehaw, NSFW, etc. all having different defederation profiles, but the whole space is an incomplete mesh. Mastodon has more themed instances than Lemmy, more very small instances than Lemmy, and a much bigger anti-capital, anti-commerce bent than Lemmy, with many more people complaining on main about other instances rules and federation policies, so if you look, you can really see it.

But the whole fedi project is patchwork by nature.

Most of these communuties using Discord are better served by something that isn’t a chatroom. So, so, so confusingly many of them use them as a store of permanent information. Like a website+forum.

Many times the benefit of Discord is the ability to paywall parts of it with Patreon integration. We need more foss and federated options that do this.

So many AP platforms are made by a couple of guys in their garage, it’s not even funny, and the mentality of “just dicking around” means what gets used is whatever the whims of the day dictate, rather than the standard.

“If it works, it’s not stupid” and all that.

But that kind of work lacks real world testing, and depe concern for public expectaton or desire.

Plus, you have to keep in mind that the idea of interplatform interoperability isn’t this core conceit of ActivityPub. It’s a potential use case, but it’s not an expectation. There’s no reason anyone should expect interop like that, other than some developers wanted to try it.

But some didn’t, and now that their platforms are gaining audience, they’re refactoring to meet that audience’s expectations.

Eh. Notice how all the buildings are long and narrow? It’s because it’s a trailer park. So, you know, it’s tiny. The direcions are gonna be “once ya get to the park, b’y, hangs a left. It’s the blue one.”

I always like forum setups where you had limited posting privileges until you’d had a couple of posts. Usually, they’d have an introduction category where you could post, and then comment on some other users’ posts, to get your post or reputation count high enough to unlock the rest of the board.

Most Lemmy sites are small enough to have a local introduction community or other ‘free’ communities for newbies to dip their toes and acclimate. They’d be good places to centralize posts on how all of this works, too.

Wouldn’t scale to large servers, though.

I cannot stress this strongly enough: You have not been “using Lemmy” for 1.5 years now. “Lemmy” isn’t a service the same way Reddit is, it’s a web engine, like Joomla, or like phpBB.

You’ve been using lemm.ee for 1.5 years.

Nobody wants to hear this, but there’s no “Lemmy”. This emergent network of social media sites isn’t a coherent thing, and it’s not a stable concept. The attempts to make this look like a singular space are to the ultimate detriment of the network, because implicitly lying to end users about what they’re doing informs how they behave.

You’ve been using lemm.ee. Lemm.ee has copies of content on other websites, but those websites have different rules, and different expectations than lemm.ee. You don’t get to pretend otherwise because of where you’re reading the content, and there is no guarantee that you will have further access to content from any other website than lemm.ee.

This is a reality that people simply do not want to face, for some reason. Everyone wants to imagine that federation is just centralized social media with some voodoo in the background, but it is a fundamentally different paradigm, and this is the wild fucking west.

You’re going to get your toes stepped on if you treat it like something it’s not.

You should understand the rules of the places you are posting to, yes.

This is why “let’s pretend this is centralized social media and ignore the fact that we’re all on different websites” is a bad idea, actually. You don’t get to parachute into someone else’s house and expect the rules of your own home apply.

It’s very similar to RSS in concept, just two way!

If you follow a community (or a user, if you’re using something that allows following user accounts, which Lemmy does not) on a remote website, that website will send the website you’re using a copy of all future content they post, and your website will include it in your feeds (as well as in the sites’s ‘global’ feed). It doesn’t really matter what software those other sites are running, so long as they A) use ActivityPub, B) have federation turned on, and C) have not blacklisted the website you’re using.

It’s like following a Twitter user or a Reddit subreddit from Facebook. And it highlights that that’s a thing they all could have done, if they all wanted to work together to make it happen.

They didn’t. Fedvierse developers do.

So, there are different types of… the jargon term is “actors”, but you can think of them as, like, accounts. Each user has an ‘actor’ associated with it, and each ‘actor’ has an inbox. But there are also group actors, which are not individuals, but more like a system or bot account. Group actors just “boost” (reblog/re-shaere/etc.) content that is sent to them.

You can follow other actors, both on your own website, as well as on other sites. When you follow a remote account, your host site will request the remote site send all future content posted or “boosted” by that account to your host website, and then your host website will add it to your feed.

Different software allows different kinds of requests. Mastodon makes no distinction between user or group accounts, and let you follow all of them. Lemmy, though, uses group actors for its communities, and only allows users to follow groups. This means that Mastodon users can see Lemmy discussions, and contribute to them, but Lemmy users cannot follow Mastodon users or interact with their posts unless they’ve been boosted by a group actor.

Other software has other abilities. nodeBB lets group actors follow other group actors, which has the potential for mutual group synchronization. mbin has both a Reddit-like interface as well as a separate microblog feed, separating out group and user content. Hubzilla (and I think Friendica?) allows accounts to have multiple actors, letting you manage multiple ‘personas’ from a single login. And they all speak the same language, which means they can accept content from all the others.