Is the Fediverse stalling?
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Muntedcrocodile: "I believe in the right to spread hatred as long as it's not calling for violence."
Lemmy: "Um, okay. Let's give that a try. We hate hateful right wing views, and call people with those views total assholes."
muntedcrocodile: "Wait, not like that! You should tolerate us so there's a diversity of views!"
Ironic.
Nice straw man.
U see I also believe in equality (of opportunity) if you have the right to spread hate against right wing views then said right wingers should have said right to spread hate against your views.
I'm tolerant of your hate speech and combat it with ration argument. Your not tolerant of my speech and combat it with deletions, bans, and personal attacks. We are not the same.
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When do you think Bluesky started? It was already a known place by many before the 2024 US election, and was founded by the ex-Twitter co-founder. The people behind it were several orders of magnitude more well known.
When do you think Bluesky started?
It was announced in 2019 as an internal Twitter project, but it became its own thing in 2021-ish. Then they spent two years reinventing a bunch of things so that they could keep Twitter's original view - i.e, a system where they could delegate all the boring/liability heavy parts to users (identity, UGC) while keeping them in control of rent-seeking toll gates (the AppView).
The people behind it were several orders of magnitude more well known.
It takes more than money and a good contact network to build something that can attract people. Jack nowadays is pushing for Nostr, but as a product it is a lot less appealing to the masses compared to Bluesky.
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Ahh I see what ur saying now. Yeah the actor id is hard as it needs to be an actual dereferenceable uri as actors need an inbox and outbox of activities.
I don't think u can maintain cross instance actor ids. The only issue I see with having multiple actor ids for the same user is that they will have their content and profile split across multiple instances.
I guess u could have a meta id that dereferences to all ur actor ids?
I guess u could have a meta id that dereferences to all ur actor ids?
Yes, that would be ATProto's did:plc system.
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When do you think Bluesky started?
It was announced in 2019 as an internal Twitter project, but it became its own thing in 2021-ish. Then they spent two years reinventing a bunch of things so that they could keep Twitter's original view - i.e, a system where they could delegate all the boring/liability heavy parts to users (identity, UGC) while keeping them in control of rent-seeking toll gates (the AppView).
The people behind it were several orders of magnitude more well known.
It takes more than money and a good contact network to build something that can attract people. Jack nowadays is pushing for Nostr, but as a product it is a lot less appealing to the masses compared to Bluesky.
I mean Bluesky had 1 million registered users in September 2023, and 3 million in February 2024. It clearly had a higher base level footprint than Lemmy has ever had.
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I guess u could have a meta id that dereferences to all ur actor ids?
Yes, that would be ATProto's did:plc system.
Ahh I see I've never looked into how atproto works might need to look into it and sees if some of its systems can be adapted for Activpub. Thx for the info
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Whatβs nodebb? I thought it was like a deadish lemmy clone but it seems to be the second most popular software here?
It's old traditional forum software, they recently added ActivityPub support
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It's old traditional forum software, they recently added ActivityPub support
Interesting. So like federated foss xenforo?
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Tbf Idk what you imagine Lemmy can somehow do to entice new people
wrote last edited by [email protected]Better UX I think would help slightly, not easy when we have such good decentralization. Maybe PieFed will end up hooking people better?
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I mean Bluesky had 1 million registered users in September 2023, and 3 million in February 2024. It clearly had a higher base level footprint than Lemmy has ever had.
But why are you comparing Bluesky's numbers with Lemmy's. A more apt comparison would be against the whole Fediverse. We had ~2 million people in early 2023, and we've gone down since then.
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Bluesky blew itself up cos they failed to be sufficiently decentralised and became an echo chamber. Activpub systems are less echo chambery but still have a very strong left lean that is significantly effecting out ability to grow especially among the centre who represents the majority. We need more right wing opinions and allow said right wing opinions if we want the majority of people to adopt it.
The fundamental failure of the fediverse that is limiting us is that accounts are not transportable. We need some decentralised ledger of accounts that can be cryptographically verified with a zero trust system. U just set up a oidc server to do that auth and that plugs into every single fediverse application everywhere.
The fundamental failure of the fediverse that is limiting us is that accounts are not transportable. We need some decentralised ledger of accounts that can be cryptographically verified with a zero trust system. U just set up a oidc server to do that auth and that plugs into every single fediverse application everywhere.
I've never felt this was as important as people say, at least here in the Threadiverse I don't see it being important. Can you explain how this would help Lemmy/PieFed?
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But why are you comparing Bluesky's numbers with Lemmy's. A more apt comparison would be against the whole Fediverse. We had ~2 million people in early 2023, and we've gone down since then.
You initially made the Bluesky comparison. And to be clear, by "Lemmy" I did mean the wider Fediverse.
In any case, Bluesky itself is also flatlining and declining anyway.
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Interesting. So like federated foss xenforo?
Yeah I think so, although I'm not familiar with Xenforo.
Here's what it looks like https://community.nodebb.org/category/2/general-discussion
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Ahh I see I've never looked into how atproto works might need to look into it and sees if some of its systems can be adapted for Activpub. Thx for the info
If you are keen on working on something like that, let me know. I've done some preliminary work to get a DID system that would work like did:plc but I got a bit stuck trying to use a decentralized database based on IPFS as the "ledger" mechanism.
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You initially made the Bluesky comparison. And to be clear, by "Lemmy" I did mean the wider Fediverse.
In any case, Bluesky itself is also flatlining and declining anyway.
Bluesky itself is also flatlining and declining anyway.
Yeah, but my point is that they were a lot more effective in capturing mindshare when it was needed, and they didn't see growth as compromise on their values like people do here.
When the next fuckup from Big Tech comes around, do you think that people will think about going to Mastodon/Lemmy/PieFed, or they will just look at Bluesky?
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Bluesky itself is also flatlining and declining anyway.
Yeah, but my point is that they were a lot more effective in capturing mindshare when it was needed, and they didn't see growth as compromise on their values like people do here.
When the next fuckup from Big Tech comes around, do you think that people will think about going to Mastodon/Lemmy/PieFed, or they will just look at Bluesky?
wrote last edited by [email protected]The Bluesky surge happened after a massive global election result and a massive grievance from progressives/leftists over Musk and how Twitter has become. Indeed, if you think lemmy is politically partisan - then Bluesky is no different.
The Reddit -> Lemmy surge happened because of some poor Reddit admin decisions. The scale of the events were on different levels.
When the next fuckup from Big Tech comes around, do you think that people will think about going to Mastodon/Lemmy/PieFed, or they will just look at Bluesky?
It would depend on the site origin of the fuckup. If Reddit fucks up, as a reaction - Lemmy would get many new users.
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There usage numbers are dropping alarmingly. And all the famous people on it went back to twitter.
wrote last edited by [email protected]Wow... I wouldn't have expected that. I much prefer the fediverse but that's still a real shame
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Me and most others
The "most others" here is a heavily self-selected group of people who don't want to compromise on any of their values and treat any effort to grow as a threat.
All of this to say, it's fine if you say "Yes, we are small and I want it that way because if it gets any bigger we will be surrounded by people who do not uphold the same values we do". The problem is that you're arguing "We are only small because of $random_reason (network effects/evil capitalists/not enough funding/etc)", as if "being small" was determined by external factors and not something that you can control.
That's the point of disagreement. I think we can control this and we can bring more people here, but it's just that you don't want to do it if means sacrificing your ideology.
group of people who don't want to compromise on any of their values
Of course I don't want to compromise my values in order to see growth of a platform that I use precisely because it aligns with my values.
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Yeah I think so, although I'm not familiar with Xenforo.
Here's what it looks like https://community.nodebb.org/category/2/general-discussion
Oh wow this is cool!
I have one last question. How do you see other servers from one nodebb forum. I canβt find lemmy for example when scrolling through a nodebb instance.
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Bluesky blew itself up cos they failed to be sufficiently decentralised and became an echo chamber. Activpub systems are less echo chambery but still have a very strong left lean that is significantly effecting out ability to grow especially among the centre who represents the majority. We need more right wing opinions and allow said right wing opinions if we want the majority of people to adopt it.
The fundamental failure of the fediverse that is limiting us is that accounts are not transportable. We need some decentralised ledger of accounts that can be cryptographically verified with a zero trust system. U just set up a oidc server to do that auth and that plugs into every single fediverse application everywhere.
A lot of right-wing beliefs have become so extreme that I am frankly happy to not be around them, regardless of how important I feel it is to avoid echo chambers (very). Its one thing to want to be able to have conversations with people you disagree with even though it's challenging, it's another thing to constantly have to contend with people who would like to debate whether you're a human and deserve basic human dignity because you're a minority.
But I would appreciate if we could at least manage not to attack other left wing folks over not being left wing enough, or over what methods are a productive way to solve the problems we're facing.
It's kind of just a microcosm of the infighting and purity testing of the left more broadly (at least in America, I have no idea how things are with the culture of leftwing communities or voices in Europe or the rest of the world), but it still sucks and I'd like to hope we can find a way to do better.
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Isn't it a little bit sad to think that the best we can do here is to wait for everyone else to get pissed at Big Tech's fuckups?
I mean everyone already has platforms they're largely comfortable with and fediverse platforms are less accessible, smaller, and usually clones of existing formats. The primary place we compete is on not being total dogshit, so when people can forget that their comfortable platforms are dogshit, it doesn't surprise me that people wouldn't be going out of their way to venture out into a new unfamiliar thing, with a different culture and much smaller userbase
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οΈI'm happy to be here regardless of whether we're growing personally. In spite of Lemmy's challenges I enjoy it here, and that's enough for me.
