Isn't this what Friendica/Hubzilla does?
this post was submitted on 18 Dec 2024
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I don’t write you a separate kind of email because you’re on Gmail, right?
Dude gets it.
I also think the term Fediverse is to esoteric and Social web is perfect for the masses.
It’s a term for insiders. My mother will never talk about “the fediverse.”
The “Open Social Web” is a much better term. It tells you everything you need to know.
A little too long and generic. I think Fediverse is fine as long as we treat it as a name and don't force people to necessarily understand what it means. People understand names, they're the most human thing there is
Like the Internet.
It just sounds really dumb. The word "federation" was right there.
Oh, man, I hadn't heard the "it's like email" nonsense since I stopped daily driving Mastodon. Real nostalgia going on here.
What makes it nonsense?
Do people know how email works?
Well, for one, like the guy says below, it was often said to people as a means to explain how federation works, which immediately failed by way of people not thinking about or knowing how email works, either.
For another, my emails look like emails everywhere, both on source and destination. I don't have a different character limit or feature set about what I can slap into my emails depending on what client I'm using, and I'm reasonably sure my email looks the same on the other end, no mater what client the recipient is using.
So the back end may work like email (not really, but it may approximate it), but the front end sure as hell doesn't, so the explanation is more confusing than anything else.
Also, not the part of Mastodon specifically that people didn't understand, they just tried to log in, were presented with a thousand instances, told choosing which one to use was super important but also that it didn't matter and they should keep changing instances later, but also that migrating instances was not an easy process, but don't worry, it's just like email.
It was a hilarious endless loop of a conversation, like a Monty Python sketch. Or seeing people try to tell normies to use Linux.
For another, my emails look like emails everywhere, both on source and destination. I don't have a different character limit or feature set about what I can slap into my emails depending on what client I'm using, and I'm reasonably sure my email looks the same on the other end, no mater what client the recipient is using.
This is mostly the case now due to centralized email by a few providers and bountiful bandwidth, but it was certainly not the case 20+ years ago.
Also, not the part of Mastodon specifically that people didn't understand, they just tried to log in, were presented with a thousand instances, told choosing which one to use was super important but also that it didn't matter and they should keep changing instances later, but also that migrating instances was not an easy process, but don't worry, it's just like email.
People used to do the same with email before google and microsoft dominated email. It's just that in most cases, your ISP provided you with an email when you first signed up. Switching email provider currently is way more onerous than switching mastodon or lemmy providers. If each ISP nowadays hosten their own say, friendica server and provided you with a login immediately, it would have a similar effect of solving this difficulty of choosing.
It was such a thin sliver of time, and yet it's still so pungently 2023.
Look, I was there when email was a ISP thing. All emails looked the same everywhere because there was no support for anything but text, so that's a supremely nerdy nitpick that doesn't apply to the conversation.
Likewise to your other point. Nobody cares about all the mental gymnastics, the "it's like email" explanation doesn't work because no, it isn't, I can tell it isn't and no I'm not choosing anything, what are you talking about, I'm either signing up to a social network or I'm not.
Federation is a back end feature, it's transparent to users, users don't care about it. They will sign up for a thing and use it. Just like they signed up for gmail once and never thought about it again.
In any case, I'm not particularly keen on relitigating that. My solution to the concept of a social media endlessly repeating this argument and literally nothing else was to go elsewhere, so I'm good for now.
Look, I was there when email was a ISP thing. All emails looked the same everywhere because there was no support for anything but text, so that's a supremely nerdy nitpick that doesn't apply to the conversation.
I very much remember the mess when HTML and rich text emails were introduced. I remember back and forths about missing attachments. It was nowhere near as rosy as you remember.
Anyway go touch grass or whatever. My point only is that email went though similar growing pains and it was only helped in the mainstream initially due to ISPs and later on due to massive centralization. The same thing we're trying to avoid with the fediverse.
No, I'm not saying it was rosy, I'm saying it was mostly text and then it was mostly hotmail and then it was mostly gmail.
And I'm saying none of that matters, because "it's just like email" is a weird meme that people try to use to justify the weird or hard to understand parts of Masto to normie users and it has never once worked. Because it's not just like email in any way that matters to an end user.
I have, in fact, touched grass today, though. So there's that.
the use of saying "it's like email" is to explain how lemmy.dbzer0.com can talk to lemmy.ml, similar to how gmail can talk to hotmail and why in fact there's lemmy.dbzer0.com and lemmy.ml (in the same way there's gmail and hotmail). That's it and doesn't need to go deeper than that to be a useful comparison.
Well, it does if the person on the receiving end gets nothing useful from it. That's my point, the confusion around Masto specifically wasn't "why do people with different handles get to talk to each other?" That's something that enthusiasts and developers care about and users don't even notice.
The question that was being asked was "why do I need to pick an instance at all and what does it affect?" and that didn't even BEGIN to explain the mess of themed instances, personal instances, effects of instance population on post distribution, manual blocks and defederations, what things did and did not make the leap cross-instance and the whole bunch of other details that matter.
A much better answer was "it doesn't matter, just sign in to mastodon.social and call it a day", but people used to be reticent to argue for centralization, because... decentralization!, so...
Ultimately the answer to that problem ended up going to Bluesky, which I think was very much a problem with both the design and the community at Masto. I actually think the Lemmy/MBin/Fedia Reddit-like corner of federated services is much more workable than a Twitter substitute. And it doesn't even need a bad email analogy to kinda just work, either.
Eh, whether bluesky is the answer remains to be seen.
It depends on the question, I suppose, but they've clearly broken into the mainstream in a way Masto did not when it had the chance.
This is exactly what we need to get the masses off corporate social media sites.
An app that shows content from across social services has more appeal than being on just bluesky or insta.
Since I tried searching for the URL and didn't find it, but happened to see this thread, you can see more info and sign up here:
FYI, these are the current options for social networks
The blog states it's still missing a lot of stuff and it's a work in progress. If they have to implement every type of fediverse post like peertube, Pixelfed. Loops, etc it's gonna take some effort.
I assume that's the goal after reading the post but of course we will see.
i wonder if they will impliment piefed.
Yea understood all good. I just don’t really use any of those 4 currently
flipboard the everything app?
I JUST foung out about this, and was about to post this exact same thing. Except I was debating whether to post the Daily Tech News Show episode with timestamp, or if I should post the Engadget article I found.
AAAHHH!!!!! IT MAKES ME EXCITED!!!!
Please let this come to Android!!! AND!!! The Flipboard company itself is now part of the Fediverse! So this app may end up being the most complete way to browse and experience PeerTube. I've tried 3 different times now to browse Peertube, and 3 different times I've gotten WILDLY different experiences. Part of the problem is I don't have a peertube account. I don't know which instance to sign up on.
But with an app like this, I could sign up somewhere, and just pull all the feeds of my own interest into ME. I could search all the instances for my own interests, instead of searching for instances, and hoping there's something on that instance that matches my interests.
I've been in a tech mood lately. I've frankensteined the hell out of my PC.
The same Flipboard that was forced on so many Samsung phone owners? Fuuuck that. I literally rooted my phone to get rid of that shit.
Funny enough, I loved that app, and use it for news rather than Google news
Surf app is interesting.
Seems like grayjay but with more variety and based on fediverse
If this works, and works well, it could be a game changer for decentralized platforms.
One app to rule them all? Dont we need 1 account to rule them all first?
It has Bluesky support. Neat!
Found it mostly shares stories behind a paywall. Pass.