I write articles and interview people about the Fediverse and decentralized technologies. In my spare time, I play lots of video games. I also like to make pixel art, music, and games.
You know, you’re not the first person to say that about something I wrote. Neither of us use general AI, and I make a point to avoid all of those tools to do things “the old fashioned way”.
It could be due to me being neurodivergent, or it could be that a certain kind of writing got slurped up by AI and that’s the default style now. I don’t know.
I work hard on everything I write.
So, I used messaging here in the broad sense. One possible application for it is instant messaging, which there are ActivityPub implementations out there doing that. But it can also be used for statuses or pretty much anything else that gets federated.
It’s not, the demo video actually shows that being one such use case. There’s nothing stopping anyone from writing a chat service in ActivityPub. But this can also apply to statuses, media, all kinds of other stuff.
Yeah, it was kind of an obscure project to begin with. Still, it struck me as an excellent way to prototype federated services that all hooked into a singular identity.
Hopefully, it inspires future work.
Nope! The main thing going for a distributed ledger would be global consistency, but there are some very negative downsides. It’s slow, scales poorly, puts a massive burden on admins operating instances, and the blocks would be effectively immutable…meaning that if the contents of each activity were fully nested inside of a block, edits or deletions would be impossible. We already see problems with CSAM showing up in various blockchains, and a Fediverse blockchain used for social purposes would be no different.
It’s just not the right tool for the job when it comes to social networks. There were a few early experiments in this area, such as Twister, which tried to build a Twitter clone on top of a blockchain using DHT. It has a huge list of limitations, though, and development stopped around 2020.
To be clear: that’s for the entire application. The ActivityPub part is here: https://github.com/TryGhost/ActivityPub
There’s still development, but a lot of it is writing test units, updating dependencies, and optimizations. Still good stuff, but all we can really see is side-effects of their development plans, not really much of a roadmap itself.
Silverpill might not like me making this comparison, but its form and function are shockingly similar to OnlyFans.
OpenCollective is a pretty solid open source contender in my experience. It’s not perfect, but it’s definitely workable.
PeerTube’s support button is, at best, a lightbox that holds a text string. It’s fine for highlighting links, but you still kind of have to dance around with having an account in another system to make the payment.
You might be interested in trying out Nostr. I know it’s more Bitcoin Lightning focused, which admittedly is not for everybody, but they’ve managed to make a lot of stuff work when it comes to paying one another.
In the technical sense, Nostr is really great.
Yeah, the YouTube algorithm itself is a huge problem. I think about the fact that there are entire slop studios out there trying to ride algorithm trends, churning out crap to push onto YouTube Kids so that they’ll do numbers and make a lot of money from it.
Like, I have nothing against the concept of a recommendation algorithm itself, but the relationship I just described is nightmare fuel.
Yeah, Wafrn uses both protocols, and basically runs its own PDS and AppView.
Remote profiles appear to show up, it might be possible to also remotely pull in posts. I didn’t see Subscribe functionality in Lemmy, but maybe PieFed or MBin support that.
Honestly, it’s a tough choice. Hubzilla can theoretically do everything you want, but there’s a steep learning curve.
One thing that might help is to narrow down what kind of features you want. What I’m seeing so far from your description is:
Friendica and Hubzilla] (and everything derived from them) are theoretically right up your alley, but each interface is kind of janky and introduces a learning curve of some kind. Misskey is extremely good, and often feels like the most polished option for long-form stuff. You’re kind of limited on clients, though, as most mobile apps use the Mastodon API. Some Misskey forks add support for it, though.
I know you said you didn’t like WordPress, and I get it. However, the actual ActivityPub integration is really really good, and continues to improve. If you self-host WordPress, there’s hypothetically enough extensibility there to build everything you want. However, WordPress as a platform can be extremely janky. We tried doing it for We Distribute, and there’s a bunch of stuff under the hood that doesn’t quite work right with Fediverse integration. Then again, we’ve been doing a lot of experimental stuff over the years, so it might be different with a fresh install.
Yeah, I was a long-term Hubzilla user some years back. There’s some really cool stuff that it can do, but it seems to get slower and more bloated the longer you run it.
Yeah, it’s not great. Unfortunately, there’s not a great way to describe this stuff without either leaning into abstract terms, or using oversimplifications.
The short of it is: only half of the ActivityPub protocol really got adopted by most of the Fediverse: the stuff that lets servers talk to each other. The other half would allow for a lot of cool things to be built, with not everything being its own Fediverse server.
Honestly, it would be kind of cool if you just had a simple app to log in with your Fediverse identity, and it rendered your existing profile on the page and allowed you to put additional links.
I don’t think it necessarily needs to federate.
Actually, there’s a pretty decent possibility of this happening! Ben from Bandwagon is currently looking into this for the underlying Emissary platform. If it proves easy enough to integrate, there’s literally no reason not to.
Proving it in one project might see adoption across similar efforts.
Support for other providers is coming. Bandwagon is in a similar situation. The overall goal is to support a multitude of options, so that no one payment solution has a monopoly.
No, I just tend to break up my thoughts into different segments and structures, because otherwise the whole thing feels like I’m just rambling about a bunch of stuff.