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How would federation work with Tildes?
I remember seeing a comment about working some kind of federation into Tildes. How could this work? Might be interesting.
I remember seeing a comment about working some kind of federation into Tildes. How could this work? Might be interesting.
There's a platform called Prismo that is attempting to be a Tildes/reddit-style site that integrates with the fediverse. It was off to a promising start, but unfortunately the lead dev accidentally wiped everything and didn't have backups. Poor guy.
He is planning on rebuilding, and what he had before looked like a solid foundation, so it might be worth keeping an eye on if you want a federated Tildes.
Oh man, that's a disaster. I don't know how active Prismo was yet, but that's still a nightmare situation for anyone that runs a site. I'd say that's probably worth a separate submission as a topic, I had no idea that happened.
Of course, though (like everything else) there's more I'd like to do with it.
That's often the kind of thing that I'm working on in the background when it may not seem like much is happening in terms of development. It can't all be features, sometimes I've gotta work on stuff like making big loud alarms go off if my backup process ever stops working (which would have saved Prismo's author from forgetting to reinstate his).
Mainly, if someone wanted to make their own version of Tildes, would they be able to communicate with the main Tildes?
Federating Tildes isn't part of the core goals, but there's nothing stopping someone else from taking the Tildes code and federating it. One could do it in many different ways. Shared trust/users between nodes, publishing content between nodes, linking groups across nodes, etc. Thing is, none of this makes any progress on the problems of governance and beating eternal september. Without that, any federated ecosystem is just going to continue to do what all of them have done since usenet - form into silos. Any that get big/popular will simply implode with the tools to keep it all running.
I'm all for moving the internet back to federated services instead of monolithic corporate-controlled ones. Let's just not pretend it's going to change anything about online communication if we do. Federation is not a silver bullet for our problems.
What is meant by eternal September?
It's where a constant flood of new users destroys a community. More detailed explanation on Wikipedia.
Deimos is to be the BDFL. Federation is incompatible with that.
Thank you! I, for one, had no idea what a "BDFL" was.
I trust Deimos, I just hope that doesn't turn into a problem somehow.
It won't turn into a problem, but we will form a cult with @Deimos as our cult leader.
I don't think it would work at all. Federation is a nice idea, but a subpar experience from a usability standpoint. I only tried Mastodon, though.
Why do you find the experience subpar?
Each server is owned by an individual or group, that is financially and technically responsible for its hosting, maintenance, etc. This frequently means a slower and less stable experience. It is true that all nodes are connected and, in theory, it wouldn't matter that much in which node you are. But, in reality (and I can't give you details, I didn't use it recently), you end up communicating with the people in your node for the most time. And usually there's not a lot of people. At one side, this can be a good thing, because you have very specific nodes with a culture of their own, but it's also hard for new people to fit in and the echo chamber effect is real. It was like joining a group of childhood friends. You also need to make a different registration on each node, and not all of them keeps registrations open or accept your registration automatically. Like a Reddit in which you must create a new account to view each sub.
"Federationists" (:P) like to stress the integration aspect, but real usage is not that simple. The integration is much weaker than it seems at first and, and I had to create multiple accounts trying to find a place to fit in. It was neither easy nor practical, and I grew tired. I think Mastodon might be great for people deeply involved in some of its thematic communities. Otherwise, it's too much of a hassle. This might change, of course. In my opinion, federation is a good idea in need of a good implementation. Such implementation is not trivial at all, which is not in accordance with one of Tildes' technical goals.
I think that's mostly an issue with Mastodon, not federation as a whole. For instance (no pun intended) a few federated services have account migration, so it's easy to pack up and move if you need to.
For this, you might've just been looking at the local timeline, the federated one has everyone else.
deprecating your accounts and jumping from instance to instance is basically a mastodon rite of passage at this point, honestly. i am one of only a few people in the instance i'm one that doesn't either have multiple (active) accounts on multiple instances or who hasn't repeatedly moved instances.