I agree. Multi communities are great. But managing a community’s connectivity with such features makes a lot of sense too!

That is interesting! Thanks for the tip!

Also, it’s their icon a community reference?

Could be a pretty easy flag to be displayed on any community. Basically last time the mod logged in or was active (should be available).

Awesome to see TBH. Friendica is kinda the platform that the Fedi forgot and it might be a better place if it got more love.

Ha. Thanks … I guess! It was right there and I just happened to notice. It was definitely weird to see people using a word you made up though.

And yea, I stand by the idea of giving us forum like platforms a name against the weird Twitter obsession decentralised platforms have

Well I’ve been saying for a while that the fediverse needs to move on from Mastodon in order to grow, so this is a good sign. Though this is total users, not active users AFAICT.

Appreciated my friend!

It’s not BlueSky making the Reddit alternative, it’s third party devs. There are a few alternative apps being built on BlueSky architecture and ATProto right now.

And yea, it definitely could overtake and harm lemmy, if there are people here into the BlueSky approach (which likely suits Reddit-like apps, I think I’ve seen some say BlueSky has a Reddit flavour to it).

Honestly, given the dominance Mastodon has in AP and the shitty interop it has with lemmy, migrating to ATProto wouldn’t be the most insane idea for Lemmy IMO. Relying on BlurSky’s relay wouldn’t be for everyone. But some sort of multi-relay set up seems plausible and might be cool to see.

Just to add to the many responses here with a simple quip on this issue (which I’m taking from one else)

The fediverse presumes people care more about independence than socialising. For most it’s the other way around.

IE: it’s about the socialising “stupid”.

Even for us techy types happy with the system here … it means we get to socialise with like minded people. The independence we have here is often secondary, I’d wager, to what we all get out of this.

I mean, I hear you (we’re both here after all), but honestly, I think this is a bad take and approach (if getting more users is a goal.

It’s not the 90s anymore. And even email services are given to you by your employer or selected from the closest big brand provider (Google etc).

All of which is a far cry from “nerdygardeners.io” administered by some rando anonymous account you’ve never heard of before.

For mainstream success, the instances thing was dead on arrival. Just was and is. Which is fine, the Fedi can be and arguably should be something else.

IMO the success of BlueSky is good for the Fedi. It can take the “let’s be the next mainstream thing” monkey off of its back and just be itself.

It’s not too hard. There are a bunch of different platforms one might experiment with as well as instances. Some will use multiple accounts for different needs or interests. On lemmy, multi accounts are useful for have different feeds, for example. I probably have 7-10. I’ve probably forgotten about a few of them. If you’re curious, it happens.

By the same token Evan seems a bit self centred and egotistical about his projects. Of you look at his comments about BlueSky it seems he’s pretty bitter that someone dared to make an alternative protocol that so far has a decent amount of users, when a acceptance of multiple systems experimenting and borrowing from each other for the good of the open web is right there as a natural position.

The catch is that the whole system is effectively centralised on BlueSky backend services (basically the relay). So while the protocol may be standardised and open, and interpreted with decentralised components, they’ll control the core service. Which means they can unilaterally decide to introduce profitable things like ads and charging for features.

The promise of the system though is that it provides for various levels of independence that can all connect to each other, so people with different needs and capabilities can all find their spot in the ecosystem. Whether that happens is a big question. Generally I’d say I’m optimistic about the ideas and architecture, but unsure about whether the community around it will get it to what I think it should be.

Suspicion is totally fair re BlueSky IMO. The system they’ve design seems to me (and others AFAICT) to have the potential to include interconnected components or sections with various degrees of independence.

The elephant in the room, which I point out on BlueSky whenever I can, is that no one seems to really be trying to build the hard parts of that out. Which is a shame because it could be interesting.

EG, there’s a chance that a hybridised system running both BlueSky’s protocol and the fediverse’s could be viable and quite useful. Add to that the integration with some E2EE, and it finally feels like an actual attempt at building something new for the modern internet.

Fortunately there is some noise around these ideas, so hopefully their system can outlast their finances. But yea, a rug pull is definitely not out of the question.

If there is a platform that does it better, I bet people will start to notice.

Yea … I suspect it’s a protocol problem more than any one platform, because there’s just too much flexibility in the protocol and so any inter-platform transfer is necessarily noisy. Multiplied by the number of platforms, and you get quite a bit of noise.

To your point though, a new platform that kinda does it all on its own could likely take off quite well and then set a new de facto standard around how to do things. Bonfire seemed to be that, and may still be. AFAIU, they’re trying to solve performance issues right now before properly opening up.

Definitely interesting idea (I hadn’t really quite seen it formalised like this)! I’ve kinda had vague similar-ish thoughts along these lines too.

Any chance you’d be willing to go into any more detail, or point to specifics? I’m not familiar with what’s going on over on bestiver or programming.dev in the way of service-type things.

Just feels like every attempt at alternative social media is dying as the internet shrinks to a few corporate websites that control everything.

Yea … it’s sort of a lens for me as I view/critique the actions and decisions of people building alt-social … this stuff is hard and fragile but also important … so not fucking around with it kinda matters (to me at least).

The hate toward BlueSky from mastodon/AP people, for example, is misguided I think. The, IMO, general lack of concern for inter-platform interop across the fediverse bothers me too, where I ask whether a platform is being a good “fediverse citizen”. And some of the “cultural purity through vigilance” culture out of the mastodon/microblogging crowd is, IMO, short sighted.

A common thread being a readiness for negative behaviour and effects rather than building and supporting.

As in a new one would be necessary to do the sorts of things I’m suggesting … or the current moment requires a sort of rebranding and pivot that is best served by a new platform?

In general, this is true of the broader population as a whole. Mastodon got the size that it’s an actual place (and I think this applies to lemmy/threadiverse too). But it’s by no means “THE place” or even categorically a big public place. More like old-school forums that have a particular user base and vibe that you visit from time to time.

For the fediverse, the “migration” was exciting and successful, but compared to big-social, a drop in the ocean. And the biggest clue for that is that the people most excited about Threads joining the fediverse are Evan (author and lead “advocate” of ActivityPub) and Gargron (masto CEO/founder) … they want to taste that big-social scale and know that they don’t have it and likely never will.

I don’t think this is true, maybe not at all.

Academia, by its nature, is socially exclusionary. So what they want/need is the ability to have flexibly closed spaces as well as very public spaces. Big-social never really provided that and in many ways I think academia is being kinda left behind by social media.