What are some examples of original fediverse software, not emulating existing platforms?
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One major change that has happened is: forums used to be linear with thread bumping (phpBB, SMF), now they are mostly conversation trees with sorting by upvotes or similar (Reddit, Lemmy).
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A nice example is https://castopod.org/
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The UI of misskey + forks is so gorgeous. If I enjoyed using social media, I'd definitely use it.
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How well have they done their federation? Is it half passed and still half a walled garden?
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I think that we need to talk about the history of software and social software here, because the current status is kind of crazy:
- Most of the big platforms didn't invent what they are currently doing. Reddit is basically a forum. They had a great innovation with their voting idea, but functionally there is little difference between the many webforums we had before and Reddit
- Twitter is a microblog, which already tells you about its origins. There were blogs before twitter, on their own servers, talking to each other with pingbacks and RSS
- YouTube, well, basically just shows you videos, which of course was done before by people on their own servers
So basically most fediverse is not emulating existing platforms, but trying to go back to an internet we had before the big platforms took everything over. And with ActivityPub we have the protocol to ease some of the pains that the decentralized internet before the web 2.0 era had. F.e. you had to create an account for each individual webforum, which really sucked if you just wanted to ask a question or share something. Reddit with its one login totally took over, because you could participate in many subforums. It was easier to just hop into /r/cooking to ask a question about your lasagna then to find the relevant lasagna forum and register there.
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This is helpful and I agree. You forgot Slack and IRC!
I propose this breakdown of the basic software paradigms:
- forum (Usenet, PHPBB, Reddit, YouTube, Discourse)
- blog (Wordpress, Substack)
- microblog (Twitter, Mastodon)
- chatroom (IRC, Slack, Mattermost, Clubhouse if you count audio)
God I hate it when people say "check my Substack". It's a blog dammit.
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Slack actually runs on XMPP, as does Zoom and others.... So yeah....
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Ew threads
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The Misskey forks are in English, the only bad thing is that they are a little resource intensive
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If it was soft-fork, than its fine.
Almost all previous forks are hard-forking, splitting English community into another one.A lot of FOSS project from non-English community often having hard time to broaden their community unless English community embrace them first. Helping non-English community also broaden FOSS community diversity and perspective, allowing them to collaborate and do cultural exchange.
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I'd like to try it out. Do you recommend some instance with English UI?
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blahaj.zone uses Sharkey (which is a fork of Misskey)
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That's my take on it too.
Late Web 1.0/early Web 2.0 we had a diverse ecosystem of forums, wikis, blogs (micro and macro), etc. The next logically step would have been to invent a protocol to get them talking to each other. Instead, the Big Web offered everyone convenience as long as they were happy living inside their walled garden, which was fine until it wasn't.
We're now just trying to fix the mistake of trusting the Big Web and get back to where we were before it all went wrong.
See also: [email protected].
