The Verge - The fediverse, explained

Reading this article got me to try out Lemmy again, and I'm pleasantly surprised.
- It’s a lovely place these days. Welcome back.
- What app are you using? I highly recommend Voyager
  
  I'm using Sync. Makes me feel like I'm using the Relay for Reddit app back before Reddit forced them to charge for it.
  
  Been test running various Lemmy apps, I think Voyager is nice but for some reason it bothers me that I can’t see the user name that submitted a post when looking at the feed. Doesn’t seem to be any settings to correct that.
  I seem to be at a stalemate where I like features for various apps, but just still haven’t found my all in one favorite.
- Re-welcome. Hope you enjoy lemmy like am I.
- Welcome back!

What is it with me and using the least popular thing. I'm sitting here on a Mac, writing Ruby, and posting on Kbin. All my favorite shows get cancelled. None of my favorite musicians are terribly well known. Every new car looks horrible to me.
I think if you want something to be successful, make it as unappealing to me as possible.
- You might be what is called a "harbinger of failure". A type of consumer that continuously and unwittingly buys failing products. https://scienceblog.com/479872/harbinger-of-failure-some-consumers-unerringly-buy-unpopular-products/
  
  This sounds more like me than "hipster." It's not that I like things that then get popular, only to not like them. I like things that haven't been and will never be popular, just because I like them. I'd love if people started enjoying the things I like because it would help them survive.
  Anybody have something they hate they want me to buy so it can be destroyed?
  
  Crystal Pepsi was good.
- You're clearly a hipster. Don't ask for sympathy from us, you've made your choices
  
  The real fediverse hipsters use lotide: https://narwhal.city/
- unappealing to me as possible
  explains the lemmy interface for me
- The real fediverse hipsters use lotide: https://narwhal.city/

I skimmed through it, it's actually a decent article.

@davidpierce@mastodon.social has been pretty bullish on the fediverse for quite a while now. It's come up a few times on the vergecast over the last year or so. I'm not surprised he wrote this decent explainer!

The fediverse is as if you took X, TikTok, Snapchat, Instagram, and Facebook and made them all interoperable so you could post anything from anywhere, and all your followers would be guaranteed to see it.
I think the one thing that still confuses people is the concept of instances with platforms like Lemmy and Masto. It’s like there are multiple Reddits and Multiple Twitters, and what differentiates them confuses newbies.
- What I don't understand is why I only see Lemmy content when browsing through Sync. If Mastodon is connected to the fediverse, how do I find that content?
  Also, as far as I can tell, most of the fediverse is basically more like Reddit than anything else.
  
  ATM, you can't. Normal mastodon posts are not understood by lemmy servers. They don't know how to handle content that is not associated with a community.
  Most of the fediverse is like twitter. Users making posts to their own "microblogs"/profiles, following each other or browsing a timeline of all posts by everyone. That's mastodon, and it has by far the most activity.
  Lemmy doesn't support profile posts, and you can't follow users, only communities.
  Basically, all content on Lemmy is posted to groups, while all content on Mastodon is posted to the users own profiles. While the networks are technically connected, the content type is not compatible.
  I hear mastodon is getting support for groups, though, which might be something that can be interoperable with lemmy communities. Then they could look at communities as if they were user groups, and post to them, and we could sub to mastodon user groups, and see their posts and feeds as if they were communities.
  But until Lemmy implements support for "user" posts and "user" following, we won't see the majority of content of that type, coming from mastodon.
  There's already some funky interoperability that comes from the underlying structure of communities kind of being user accounts, where mastodon users can follow Lemmy communities, and post to communities by mentioning them. But it's not pretty.
  
  To be clear, the Fediverse doesn't mean that everything is interconnected. It means that everything can be interconnected, but most sites will only do a very minimal form of interconnectivity. And that's mainly due to personal choice. You wouldn't want to have Instagram posts on your Reddit feed, and you wouldn't want Tumblr posts on YouTube. You can do that, but why would you?
  So most sites will only interconnect with other sites that they deem to be similar enough in content style. Lemmy interconnects with Kbin because both are Reddit clones. Kbin interconnects with Lemmy, but it also interconnects with Mastodon. Apparently the developer of Kbin thought that Mastodon is similar enough in content style that people would appreciate having Mastodon posts appear on Kbin. And this happens for all the other sites. The Fediverse is less like a tightly connected network, and more like a loose connection of sites that could operate together, if they ever chose to do so. Like a federation, if you will
  Basically, if you're on Lemmy (which you are), you're only going to see Reddit-like content
  
  You probably have seen posts in Lemmy communities from a mastadon user without realizing it.
  
  lemmy is incapable of the 'microblog' part of the fediverse of which mastodon only uses. . there are other server apps, like kbin that allow you access to both.
  i picked mbin precisely for this reason. plus it didnt look like someone forgot the css.
  
  From what I understand, there are different content types in activity pub. Lemmy forces on viewing community groups, Masto focuses on individuals. Lemmy would need to build support for following an individual.
  They underlying technology supports it, people just have to build a user experience for it, and that hasn’t been done yet.

This is the best summary I could come up with:
It’s an interconnected social platform ecosystem based on an open protocol called ActivityPub, which allows you to port your content, data, and follower graph between networks.
You know how everyone online is like, “Give me your email, it’s the only stable thing on the web, and so it’s the most important tool for building a lasting audience” now?
And the places where you connect with your friends, or make a living as a creator, couldn’t be irrevocably destroyed by a billionaire with a sink and a bunch of weird ideas about financial products?
The ActivityPub protocol I mentioned a minute ago is a little like email: it has specifications for senders and receivers and supports lots of different kinds of content.
You can always have different accounts for different things, but I think many people will end up having one main identity — your Threads username, or your Mastodon handle, or even a domain you hook up to all of these services individually — that ports across all of these systems.
A lot of folks I’ve talked to say that, basically, if we’d built social media like this 20 years ago, the world would be better and smarter and we’d all be richer and better-looking.
The original article contains 2,713 words, the summary contains 204 words. Saved 92%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

The Verge has been all in on the Fediverse, and they're probably the biggest advocate in the media. They're also going through the process of switching their entire backend for direct fediverse support. If you have a mastodon or kbin consider boosting this at their official account (@verge@mastodon.social) here: https://mastodon.social/@verge/111891107107406018

I still haven't figured out how to get content posted on Mastadon in my Lemmy feed. I'm using Thunder for Android as my client
- You can't, unless the Mastodon user tags a community you're subscribe to.
  
  Technically you can, here's this community looks like on Mastodon.
- So, you won't see Mastodon content on Lemmy unless a Mastodon user has posted in a group (the generic term for community, subreddits, etc). For example, here's an exchange I had with some Mastodon users. Groups don't always come from Lemmy and as a Lemmy user you can subscribe to more Mastodon centric groups like !histodons@a.gup.pe or even PeerTube channels like !veronicaexplains_channel@tilvids.com. Direct user-to-user microblog style interaction with Mastodon users is not supported, and that's mostly a design choice of the devs. Projects like kbin/mbin seek to bridge the gap and directly support both experiences.
  
  Good explanation, thank you
- You can subscribe them manually via search.
  I follow several Lemmy communities on my Masotodon and Misskey account.
  
  But i wanna do the other way around--i wanna get Mastadon content on my Lemmy client

It bothers me how rose-tinted this article is. It pours praise onto the fediverse while glossing over all the major problems. They also keep saying "everything is available everywhere", which it isn't, or "you can take your account anywhere" which isn't a thing on most fediverse sites, and where it is it's limited.
I dunno, it's good to be positive, but I feel this article over-promises and fails to explain what is is trying to. If anything, it muddies some of the basics and sets people up to leave as soon as they realise the experience isn't all that or that instances don't work how they think.

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Nostr is the way. I think it’s going to end up with way more adoption than mastodon or bluesky. I wrote a post comparing nostr vs mastodon (fedi) if anyone is curious. https://lemmy.ml/post/11570081