This will take place ~24 hours from now. Feel free to post and upvote questions beforehand in this post, as it will turn into the AMA tomorrow.
This is a chance for any users, admins, or developers to ask anything they’d like to myself, @nutomic@lemmy.ml , SleeplessOne , or @phiresky@lemmy.world about Lemmy, its future, and wider issues about the social media landscape today.
What could be done to improve interoperability between federated platforms?
mainly talking about Mastodon since it is the biggest one.
I have seen the Peertube dev is quite nice and approachable. And willing to improve the experience cross-platform.
Have you tried to approach @Gargron@mastodon.social? Is he willing to contribute? How could we get Mastodon to improve the user experience with federated content, eg. communities and article posts?
What about @dansup@lemmy.ml / @dansup@mastodon.social and Pixelfed?
Mastodon’s main dev isn’t really open. Have a look at the “Ego” part of this article: https://cassolotl.medium.com/i-left-mastodon-yesterday-4c5796b0f548
Misskey forks, whatever their names are today, seem more interesting
I think there’s a risk of lacking a coherent direction if decision-making is outsourced too much to the community. Furthermore, core developers might lose ownership of the project and then lose interest. As long as it’s open source, I’m pretty happy to have the core maintainers develop projects according to their own vision, and the community fork it should this vision differ too much from their own. :)
Definitely :)
The problem is, after we as users helped Mastodon to grow strong the dev thinks it is better to do stuff outside of the standards so nothing works for other fediverse platforms. He has too much power and most people are mindless.
While I agree with the content of that article I don’t know if we should give up on Eugen just yet. The Mastodon team has not disclosed what their plan is regarding the groups rework currently on the mastodon roadmap. There is an old proposal here, but I think we have good reason to believe that implementation will be revisited. To that end, it is very important to advocate for the adoption of FEP-1b12 which is the standard that Lemmy uses.
It may also be a good idea to advocate for the adoption of FEP-d36d both here and on lemmy. This is a standard for group-to-group following. Effectively allowing communities to subscribe to other communities.
Here’s a slightly older but fairly comprehensive write-up of the situation: https://blog.erlend.sh/group-convergence
That article was over 5 years ago now. I would expect that there has been massive change now that Mastodon is way more popular, and the project is way more involved. Also, blocks and mutes do work now.
Also something to be said about how a thing or two has happened in the last five years. Whatever Mastodon is doing seems to be working for a large number of users.
It’s not for everyone, and that’s fine. The freedom of choice is why we’re in the fediverse in the first place. But the fact is that quite a few people want what Madison is offering. :)
Quote posts are still not there, they are on Misskey forks
https://fedi.tips/why-cant-i-quote-other-posts-in-mastodon/
They are on the roadmap, but that doesn’t say much.
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Very interesting question since mastodon introduced groups very recently which are a direct competitor to lemmy
TIL, I’ll have to have a look
https://fedi.tips/how-to-use-groups-on-the-fediverse/
Of course not mature but mastodon can have groups without lemmy
This is not native Mastodon groups, but a third party group functionality (a.gup.pe).
Mastodon has group support high up on its roadmap (MAS-15), but it’s not implemented yet. :)
Worth noting, we are not totally sure the upcoming groups rework will actually improve federation with Lemmy. To that end, we should all be advocating for the adoption of FEP-1b12 which is the standard that Lemmy uses.
There have been lots of compatibility improvements with Mastodon from our side. However Mastodon seems to have almost no interest to make improvements from their side. I dont think there is much we can do about that, in the end project maintainers always care about their own users most.
With dansup there was some communication years ago, but it seems he lost interest in Lemmy.
Interoperability is great, but sadly there isn’t really any organized group effort to standardize more aspects / extensions of ActivityPub. AP is really “thin” in that it barely prescribes anything. There’s not even a test suite to test whether software complies to the spec of AP.
So everyone kind of does their own thing, and fixes interoperability on a case-by-case basis. This makes it kinda frustrating to spend time on - lemmy already has special cases for many different softwares (peertube, mastodon, …) and every one increases the complexity.
There are such efforts on SocialHub and on a W3C mailing list. However devs of major Fediverse projects are rarely active there, because they are all busy working on their own software.