Where is the rule that says this is a serious sub? You are just making things up. Get the stick out of your ass. Any sub can have lighthearted posts unless they state otherwise.
Eh, bluesky is another federated solution, that turned out to be quite similar to activitypub. Perhaps not in implementation, but in user experience. And after having used activitypub for quite a while, I don't think it is the solution to decentralised social media.
I've been really enjoying nostr, even though it doesn't have the content or user base of the fediverse just yet.
Curious what you think the issues with AP are. Other than the nature of the fediverse being confusing to new users (not sure which instance to sign up for, etc), I haven’t had any issues with it. I would like to see community syncing between instances for more seamless discovery, though.
Complexity to new users is definitely not better on nostr, just as confusing if not worse, currently. The reason I think nostr is on a better track than AP, is because I came to AP running from problems that I had on reddit, only to find the same problems on a smaller scale. Here's what I can think of off the top of my head:
Variety of clientes
Both AP and nostr fix this.
Centralised power
Nostr fixes this, by making it so that your identity is usable anywhere.
AP kinda fixes this, but doesn't go far enough. If the admin of your instance decides to not federate with another instance, you have no say in that. Your only option is to migrate to another instance, and since AP doesn't have nomadic identities, you have to start from scratch. Mastodon's export feature doesn't go far enough.
Disagreement with mods
Nostr fixes this by offloading modding to individual users. You chose to mute what you dont want to see. A highly requested feature here on Lemmy.
AP kinda fixes this, where if you don't agree with mods, you can start a different community, or a similar community on a different instance, but then you have the same problem as with centralised power, and are at the mercy of admins.
To be truly sovereign on AP, you gotta run your own instance, which is very impractical, and lacks nomadic identities. With nostr, you own your identity, because your identity is just a cryptographic key, which can be used anywhere, on any node.
To be clear, I think AP is a clear improvement over centralised services, thus why I still use it. I won't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. I just think nostr is the better protocol to build decentralised services on top of.
I don't get the first point. Do you think having variety in clients is a bad thing or do you think the variety in clients is not big enough and actually what does this have to do with the protocol?
The other points do appear that strong to me if we talk about developing a service and more about people who don't want to host or do anything themselves but still want to have full control... Actually I think the better moderation structure that comes with AP is a plus point. I want a free web and not total anarchy in which the loudest wins.
Biggest strength of AP in my eyes is that it's a W3C standard. AT was developed by a company to fulfill that company's goal.
I think having many clients is a good thing. The reddit API debacle was the straw that broke the camel's back for me, and got me to move away from centralised services.
Actually I think the better moderation structure that comes with AP is a plus point.
I can see how some people would prefer that, but Nostr also has a solution to this need. Not as good an experience as AP, if that's specifically what you're looking for, but nonetheless. If you want a curated, modded and filtered experience, you can just connect on to nostr nodes that filter heavily.
Biggest strength of AP in my eyes is that it's a W3C standard.
I thought this when I came to AP at first too, but it's been a W3C standard for a long time, and is still very niche.
But amount of users is actually more a product of marketing than any technical protocol so I don't really see that point either. Also I don't see that being true, especially if you count in all the threads users.
My point of it being a W3C standard is more that it is a protocol that is in somewhat responsible hands. When using a protocol that was developed by and only for one (commercial) application in minds other players are always one step behind.
Mastodon (or threads) as the main platforms that implement AP don't have any more influence on the protocol than any other platform as well.
I wrote a long answer to this, but forgot to post and lost it :(. But here's what I wanted to say:
I forgot about Threads, that's indeed a big user base.
Just because the standard is managed by the W3C doesn't mean they'll do a good job of managing it, but it's probably more positive than negative.
I don't know enough about how the W3C is organised and accepts contributions, but wasn't one of the concerns of many AP users when threads announced their AP integration, that threads would immediately become a big player and essentially EEE AP? Tbh, I still fear that.
I'm enjoying this conversation, it's brought my hopes for AP a bit higher, I hope I've managed to convince you that nostr is something to keep an eye on.
Yes this EEE fear exists but I think it's unreasonable in my eyes. AP being managed by W3C is one reason for it.
Sure Meta will probably extend AP for their own use but it's not that they can simply decide that the new feature that they introduced and is at first only working on their platform is the standard from now.
I definitely agree that Nostr is something to keep an eye on but for me that's more about to see if there is stuff that works and can be introduced in AP as well. Because of all the arguments above I don't think we should all switch to Nostr now.
Sure Meta will probably extend AP for their own use but it's not that they can simply decide that the new feature that they introduced and is at first only working on their platform is the standard from now.
Maybe not formally, but it might not matter. Looking at how google implemented XMPP, then slightly changed their implemetentaion until it was incompatible, and clients tried to keep up with changes, makes me fear meta will do something similar.
But my point would be that with AP being W3C and not management by meta or a different company the ecosystem of it can survive.
And too be fair until recently I still used XMPP so it was never dead. I think it was just that almost no one ever heard about it before Google used it and also almost no one really cared about it while Google used it. So the resulting consequence was that once Google dropped off completely it went back to no one really using it (like it was before).
AP already having a decent user base (some million active users, official accounts and instances of big institutions like the EU commission e.g.) even without threads and a big eco system(very diverse platforms and projects), there is no need for any platform to adapt to anything coming from meta. Things are good (enough) how they are currently.
It's not that we need to compete or couldn't exist without Meta.
Yeah, I thought of these points too, my fear is that it won't matter that it isn't managed by meta and people will go along with whatever meta does.
Though to be completely fair, I have the exact same fear for other decentralised protocols, including nostr. Perhaps the only one I think is resilient to this situation is bitcoin, for better or for worse.
It's just another way of interacting with ActivityPub groups. Like K/Mbin or Piedfed etc. And it seems to be quite nicely integrated with Pixelfed, so making for example photography focussed communities in it (that you can also participate in from Lemmy) seems like a net-win.
Take my upvote. There's nothing about Mastodon that Bluesky doesn't do for the average user and for me it's got an actual laid-back vibe where Mastodon feels like people trying to indoctrinate me into a nerd cult.
Sidenote, it'd be nice if Pleroma or one of its forks had the stronghold on the fediverse instead. It's got a lot more features than Mastodon and Bluesky.
Your article is a pretty reasonable and fair evaluation of farcaster, but then your post saying crypto/web3 is "mostly really dumb and bad" is not very nuanced. I know a lot of people on Lemmy don't like crypto, and that's what's in the meta right now, but if you are going to give something a fair shake, give it a fair shake, don't just anticipate backlash for covering a crypto topic and preface it with "it's mostly really dumb and bad". Ya there are a lot of scams, and a lot of bullshit projects, but there is a core of really useful infrastructure there, which farcaster is using for self sovereign account registration/ownership.
I understand, don't get me wrong, 99% of stuff in crypto is hot garbage, but having a global database that isn't controlled by any one (or even dozen) entities is pretty powerful. The 2 guys that started farcaster could quit, or get hit by a bus, or decide it's not profitable enough and pivot, but at least you have control over your profile still. If reddit was decentralized more, they wouldn't be able to shut down their APIs for 3rd party clients.
Trust me I understand the criticism of block chains, but if we want open source and the internet to thrive and not be controlled by companies, we need a global layer that is neutral.
Trust, consensus, and access control are session-layer issues that don't need to be solved by a transport-layer protocol. Social networks deserve to be able to forget things.
Which is a whole lot of extra engineering that is already taken care of with a blockchain. Whether social networks should forget your username/registration is a different debate.
It really isn't a different debate when you're talking about putting them on the blockchain, and all that other engineering has already been done by other distributed social networks.
Ok, we are talking in circles, you have your opinions, I have mine. If you want to talk about this over voice at any point, let me know, I don't think text is going to get anywhere, and Lemmy has a pretty strong bias against crypto (which I understand, but obviously disagree with)
You can get specific about certain articles needing improvement, but to call all of Wikipedia generally biased without any proof seems like a pretty red lil flag
‘biased monopoly’ what are you talking about, everything is sourced and open
The heart of narrative control on Wikipedia is controlling what standards of evidence need to be met and what sources are acceptable. An easy example of this would be the argument over adding an entry for Thomas James Ball to the List of Political Self-Immolations. Before they finally gave in and accepted it, there was a push to establish a standard for entries on the list that almost no existing entry on the list met and apply that standard to determine if Thomas James Ball should be included, while painting it as though the process were neutral.
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