Thoughts on the Fediverse?

Federation is a neat concept but I found the available implementations to be pretty poor experiences. However, for the most part, they work as expected and can replace proprietary social media silos (assuming you can find the people/content you want, it's still a relatively small space).

Some other thoughts:

• It's difficult to pick an appropriate instance.
  • A new user will not know the difference between Mastodon, Pleroma, Misskey, Peertube, Funkwhale, Plume, or whatever. They may not even know that all these services can talk to each other.
  • Instance themes for smaller instances seem to be gimmicks. Larger and more established communities (Fosstodon, Mastodon.art, etc) do have meaningful themes.
  • Many smaller instances do not actually edit their terms of service or tell you what their privacy practices are. One should assume that anything and everything that goes on a server is public since the nature of federation means the data will be handled by many 3rd parties.
  • There's no way to gauge the competence of the admins and mods (afaik there is no way to see a list of them either). Additionally, if you don't host your own instance there is no guarantee the server will stick around.
• Bugs: Pleroma occasionally acts up with every update, Mastodon had an endless page refresh error, things get weird when someone starts deleting their old statuses en masse, rendering huge conversation threads can be problematic.
• Content discovery: If you're new, your initial instance is vital to seeding your timeline since the users on it and their follows are what the server is able to show (as such smaller instances may not show much activity). Additionally, finding accounts who do not get statuses shared on your instance is painful. I know Trunk exists (it's a list of fediverse accounts listed by topics) but there seems to be little curation. Those accounts just asked to be put on a big list and the end user has no idea if any are worth following without investigating each account one by one.

I think there are two parts to this question:

1. How is the current use experience, especially on Mastodon?
2. What kind of future possibilities there are for federated social media and ActivityPub

For background, I have been using Mastodon for about a year, and have enjoyed it very much.

My experience with Mastodon

The current userbase of Mastodon is mostly LGBT people, leftists and techies. As you can imagine, the intersection of the groups is rather large. Because I'm all three, Mastodon feels like a nice place just because of that.

The content is mostly positive shitposting, but also honest discussion. Current political commentary is usually expected to be hidden behind content warnings, as people often prefer positive content over the repetive outrage that dominates Twitter. As a rather new community, there's less focus on social capital and influencers. The community has also been fairly active in preventing these things from starting.

Of course the content depends heavily on who you follow and when looking at the local feed, what kind of instance you are on.

Mastodon also has many small features that make it better than Twitter: content warnings, better tools for moderation, setting image focus points, link verification in profiles to replace the Twitter's checkmark and other small features that are developed actively all the time.

But yes, the specific people you know already are unlikely to all be on Mastodon, but as an opportunity to meet new people it's great.

Personally, Mastodon is very valuable to me. But I understand that it may not yet be for everyone.

Future possibilities of the Fediverse

The possibilities of federation are amazing. Being able to follow and reply to people on other platforms is a very cool experience. Imagine if the current social media was federated: You have your Twitter account, but your friend posts mostly pictures on Instagram. But because of federation, you could see all the imags right there in your Twitter client, without ever needing Instagram account. And like and reply to their posts too!

And then repeat this to all future social media platforms: new services come and go, but your social graph stays intact.

And because federation allows everyone to run their own instances, this returns the social power to the users. Self-hosting social media is now possible, without worrying about network effects because it's now all connected.

So yes. I'm both happy with the current situation and excited for the future!

Hi, I run a low-activity mastodon instance (3 regulars other than me, about 10 active users per month), I feel like federated social networks are the future of social networking in general. Feel free to ask me anything about running an instance if you want.

Mastodon did a lot to make it more approachable than previous attempts (GNU social suffered the GNU-UI plague) and ActivityPub is a very flexible protocol that networks can build upon.

Other projects like PixelFed and such could likely provide the functionality of other networks like Instagram or Reddit on top of AP as well, and it would federate with Mastodon. Federation relays are a thing too now and they solve the "new instance with 1 user doesn't get a lot of content" problem.

Right now the problem is users and content, there isn't a lot of users and content isn't that high quality. There is lots of spam instances or just uncomfortable instances. In most cases I silence them (instead of banning them) unless they post illegal content. Moderation is quite neat and I can easily handle my workload, about 2-3 spambot signups per week, about 1 instance ban per 2 weeks and usually less than 1 report every few months.

I would love if tildes would eventually atleast partially integrate ActivityPub.

The ActivityPub protocol seems to have potential, and I applaud people for making open source and decentralized social networks.

I have two main points regarding my (very limited) experience:

1. I've found that the users and content on most instances right now isn't worth the effort of joining or creating an instance. You'd need a specific reason to join.
2. Needing multiple accounts for multiple instance types, and having them be able to communicate with each other, doesn't sit right with me for some reason.

Am curious about the whole concept; still ignorant about how it's supposed to operate; and anxious about joining, because it's a commitment I'm not sure is going to pay off.

Twitter as a concept seems okay, and not have to use the real Twitter to send out messages is appealing in this context. I'd taken a look at Mastadon a while ago, and it seemed messy. On a single instance, people "tweeted" in different languges (most of those I don't speak), and on an array of subjects (not all pertaining to the idea of the instance). Some of the tech ones felt like advertising boards, with devs only posting updates to their software - which is boring, considering how much there is to talk about in front-end development alone. Non-tech instances... I don't even know.

I’ve been in Mastodon for a little while and I’m kind of down on the whole concept. It’s fine for what it is, but I’m coming around to the idea of a “universal” social media platform (anyone can connect to anyone and post everything to potentially everyone) is just flawed at its core.

The main problem is that people aren’t just one version of themselves in all contexts. I behave and speak very differently in professional contexts than I do with my own family, and that’s different from my “birth family” (parents) and that’s different from extended family which is different from friends. Even within friends, I’m different around people I’ve known since high school versus people I’ve met after college.

The take home message is that we aren’t the same in all contexts, our personalities differ based on who we are with. But the way social media is designed, by attaching our entire “social graph” to a single profile account, tries to collapse all of our context dependent personalities into one universal thing.

That was kind of okay in the early days, when the range of our engagement was narrower. When Facebook was just a public profile with the highlight reel to your life it represented just a specific “public face” of our identity. But as we engage with these services more, post a larger array of experiences and thoughts, and put more of ourselves into them, it just stops working. They’re just not set up to provide the depth of social interaction they want to.

I have no experience with federated social media software, but I do have a strong opinion.

Federated social media is like a couple groups of friends going to the pub, but actually staying at home and attempting to have the normal interactions between groups via supersonic carrier pigeon (I can't think of anything both fast and slow that spreads one idea at a time, but hear me out). You have rapid interactions in the group, but slow interactions between groups as data has to be pulled from one and deliberately sent to another.

Looking into ActivityPub (@Liru, really, it's a cool concept I wouldn't have heard of if you hadn't mentioned it), it speeds the transfer up. Ideally, with this system, each instance could block undesirable content, and the market would determine where in the federation the users went, and you would potentially have a somewhat fragmented, but probably all happy userbase.

I've dabbled with Mastodon on and off for a couple of years. I really like the idea of a non-centralised social media platform, and being able to spin up a new one as and when you want. I think there's great power in something like that.
But the issue that I had (and that I often have when looking to check out new social media platforms), is that none of my friends are there. And none of them are there because none of their friends are there. For something like peerTube, it's that the content I want to watch isn't there.
You can argue (rightly I'd say) that the opportunity lies in meeting new, and like-minded people via the platform. And you'd be right. But the things I'm interested in (music, programming, writing, minimalism, amongst others) already have very good, dedicated spaces on the web already (forums, subreddits, Stack Overflow, etc), and the Mastodon instances dedicated to these things either end up ignoring them, or devolving into self-promotion without much other interaction. So the instance is either very quiet, or very noisy, without much signal.

Perhaps the problem is that federated social media (at least the ones that I'm familiar with) appear to be just copying other platforms, and adding federation on top, without much else to differentiate from the mainstream alternative. And without there being something tangible to offer that's different from Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, or whatever... I'm not convinced that we'll ever see federation take off in a big way, and it will forever remain the purview of techies, and FOSS enthusiasts.
I do genuinely hope that one day we see Facebook able to communicate with Twitter (or something), without having to use a third party service to bodge the functionality. But for the time being I remain unconvinced that these companies will ever allow for people to leave their walled gardens.

Mastodon is big, just not big for the average joes. So it's not a lack of user problem, it's a lack of the users i want to have contact with problem.

I joined two times to support it, but like twitter, i can't see the reason to use it.

I had a pixelfed account and it was the same. In the end i deleted even my instagram.

I don't think pixelfed will take off because people want flashy things and to replace big rich companies with bandwidth, big servers and money is impossible. Instagram is big on videos.

Mastodon has a chance, but i think Twitter is not something that has major scandals and it's ingrained. That said, Mastodon already has it's users and is well stabilished.