What is a Fediverse Galaxy?

As more and more instances are providing multiple services under the same management, we need a term to talk about this type of arrangement. A Fediverse Galaxy is a collection of federated software that is provided by the same admin or collective.

[posted to the @fediverse Lemmy group]
#fediverse #FediverseGalaxies #FediDev

  • @[email protected]
    9•1 year ago

    I feel like calling it a galaxy makes it sound like its a bigger deal than it actually is, but I like it.

  • fedi :fediverse:
    5•1 year ago

    @liaizon
    this is a really good idea. Say #kolektiva providing a mastodon, lemmy, funkwhale, pixelfed, peertube etc. to all users. I think any communities that do this in an organised fashion would gain a lot of new users… but it is a lot of work. Would love to see mastodon.art do this.

  • wakest ⁂OP
    5•1 year ago

    @fediverse If you have any feedback on this idea I am just now playing with it. The term was mentioned months ago by @e and it had resonated with me since then and I have been wanting to try to give it a more formal definition since then. This is an idea in progress and I welcome any feedback you may have. Is this a useful concept to work on? Should we come up with a different name?

    • @vidarh
      1•1 year ago

      I’m running my own Mastodon instance and might run a Lemmy instance and others in the future, and there are a few immediate issues I’m already concerned about in that I’d love to be able to avoid having a whole bunch of unrelated usernames.

      But webfinger responses only distinguish between mime types, and provide no additional hints, so while I now forward my webfinger queries from my main domain to my Mastodon instance, I’m not sure if I can replace that with a response that lists both Mastodon and Lemmy without breaking both (I also don’t know whether or not Lemmy handles aliasing the same way Mastodon does, but that’s me being unfamiliar with Lemmy). It’d be really nice to be able to have an alias point at multiple different fediverse accounts if you want to.

      But that also raises additional usability issues with respect allowing picking which account to follow if there are multiple compatible options in a webfinger result…

      There are many additional usability challenges there. E.g. if my Mastodon followers come across a Lemmy post I make on Mastodon, it’d be nice to have a mechanism to resolve back to my preferred alias (and vice versa) so they knew I’m me even if it’s coming from another platform. It’d be really hard to get all of this flow smoothly without confusing users.

      But it’d also be enormously powerful if this is addressed even if only partially, because if admins can optionally be able to offer users unified identities across platforms they provide (or even aliasing to other instances entirely), it instantly turns the Fediverse from a collection of different platforms to something much more comprehensive that none of the centralised Twitter, Reddit, Instagram etc. “alternatives” can even hope to try to compete with.

      • iameru
        1•1 year ago

        @liaizon @fediverse as a newb to this (see my other post), what do they federate? Like from what I understand, Lemmy is a forum software. When I federate my Mastodon with someone’s Lemmy, what do I see? Can I join in on threads on the Lemmy forum with Mastodon? and the other way around? Maybe I’m not getting the fediverse yet.
        Not asking your precious time to guide me through this but that information would also be helpful in a visualisation like yours

          • iameru
            1•1 year ago

            @bloodaxe @liaizon @fediverse ah thanks. So basic content is shared or made sharable, like favorites getting read by Lemmy as upvotes.
            Btw, I use Mastodon aswell and isn’t this a Mastodon thread? Or is this Lemmy and it’s already so integrated I don’t even recognize it? Are there hints to which service im talking to?

            • wakest ⁂OP
              1•1 year ago

              @iameru @bloodaxe @fediverse its both a mastodon thread and a lemmy thread cause we are all in the same fediverse! I started this lemmy thread from mastodon by tagging the lemmy group in the origonal post.

            • arcturus
              1•1 year ago

              complicated, I’m on Lemmy rn talking to you

      • @wason
        1•1 year ago

        And kbin too please.

        • wakest ⁂OP
          2•1 year ago

          @wason Yes very much. I just started with one graphic, but I want to make a whole bunch to easily visualize different types of federation

    • iameru
      1•1 year ago

      @liaizon @fediverse @e Like the idea very much!
      On a side note: What I could need is an actual easy to understand “what is this even”. I’m probably not the target audience but I don’t understand the difference between #Mastodon and #calckey for example. and what most of these other tools do. But I’m also somewhat new to social media so maybe it takes time.

    • wakestM
      3•1 year ago

      no sadly the fediverse doesn’t really work like that. tho there has been talk for a long time about attempting to do something in this direction

  • Christian Pietsch 🍑
    1•7 months ago

    @liaizon @fediverse

    Sounds like a useful new term.

    The table does not capture the fact that e.g. @stux is hosting several Mastodon instances. Should those instances hosted for others as a service be counted as part of the same galaxy?

    Or would this be a Fediverse family (in analogy to Tor where relays run be the same entity are called a family).