distant plant

I’d like less focus on the network and more on individual servers, with their own names, policies, and reputations. Then users aren’t thinking about whether to join one huge network - they’re thinking about whether that server is the kind of place they want to be. (https://wandering.shop is a good example of an instance that is explicitly going for certain vibes.)

It would allow individual pre-existing communities to create their own spaces, ones which would prioritize those communities’ experiences and needs over their connection to the rest of the fediverse. I’m imagining something like Dreamwidth or Fur Affinity or the many old-fashioned forums out there, just with the ability to follow users or navigate to topics on other instances if you know their names or URLs. I’m really not worried about discoverability outside the instance - to me, the instance is the platform, and anything outside of it is just an additional thing I can get to if I want it.

That being said, I think this approach is probably incompatible with trying to create a general-purpose social media site that also attracts a large number of users, at least not without a hefty marketing budget.

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I think the biggest issue is HTTP Signatures - they’re not part of the standard, they’re not well-documented, and without them your server won’t federate with anything and so you have no idea whether it works.

Plus sometimes an implementation works with Mastodon but not something else. I think Mastodon just uses certain headers when calculating the signature, but Bridgy Fed also includes the URL or something. The C# code I’d copied was programmed to exclude the URL always, so I had to change that, but it took a while to figure out that that was the issue.

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Perhaps for images they’d have to federate just the text and a small thumbnail, and then just the people interested would click through. I wonder if that’d be enough.

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Of note: ActivityPub (the protocol) has its own logo, seen in https://activitypub.rocks/ and other places. The protocol and the community are absolutely separate things, so this is really good.

I’ve never really linked the rainbow star icon, just because I don’t really like rainbows (IMO the ace flag is the prettiest but I might be biased). I’m also still not convinced that Meta’s icon is even supposed to represent the fediverse, as opposed to just a Threads feature that lets it connect to the fediverse. So overall I’m a fan of this proposal, although it does bug me that it uses 6-pointed stars in the font on the webpage and 5-pointed stars in most other typefaces. The 5-pointed stars create some nice negative space.

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@[email protected] @[email protected] Sure, although I had forgotten that the community shares replies to, so it actually does federate out if I tag it.

ActivityPub addressing is really somewhat complex and pretty much any server is going to abstract it with things like at-mentions, sometimes making different assumptions. When I reply to lemmy posts from my microblog.pub server, I sometimes need to make sure to include both the user (@[email protected]) and community (@[email protected]) if they happen to be on different domains. Otherwise my server’s addressing won’t send it to the right place. And I doubt other lemmy instances will see this post unless I tag them too.

@[email protected] @[email protected] - https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks is a place where people discuss various ActivityPub implementations and potential improvements - primarily from a technological perspective (how the software is written), not as much from a cultural perspective (how users use the software), so it doesn’t directly answer your question, but it might still be helpful in some cases

@[email protected] DeviantArt - I like separation between art, literature, and regular status updates, and the ability to group posts in your inbox into folders by who posted them. Or, more realistically, any of the various furry sites that work on a similar model and have less potential for cultural conflict.

@[email protected] one advantage to a system like this, is that you don’t need it to catch on in a bunch of different communities for it to work. It can catch on even in one place, and it will already be useful for the people there.

@[email protected] Very nice! I might switch my single-user server to something like this someday - it’d be nice to have something I know how to make changes to. Also looks like the database and cache dependencies all run through ASP.NET Core stuff so they could be replaced (although I know from experience that just because you’re using Cosmos DB thru EF Core doesn’t mean you can write your schema the same way!)

@[email protected] microblog.pub has RSS feeds. you do need to self-host it though. That’s what I’m running on this account if you want to see an example

@[email protected] I’ve implemented the “log in with Microsoft”, “log in with Google”, etc buttons in ASP.NET Core + Identity before - most of them just use OAuth2, which works pretty much the same way no matter what provider you’re using.

OpenID Connect is an authorization layer built on top of OAuth2, so it could give you information about the user beyond just “they logged in and here’s an access token”. Maybe an OpenID Connect provider would be helpful in this use case - it seems to be designed to solve a problem much like this.

@[email protected] I think part of it is the “branding” of Mastodon - if everyone someone follows uses a Mastodon server, they might just think of “Mastodon” as the social network they want to join, and never really consider that other people on the network might be using something like Firefish or Pixelfed or microblog.pub. After all, most Mastodon servers’ web UIs look pretty much the same and the default Mastodon name and graphics are often pretty prominent.

I don’t think this is usually an issue, but there are some Mastodon instances out there whose names are `mastodon.[something] and I think that can mislead people into thinking that’s the one they “should” join just because it seems “official”.

@[email protected] @[email protected] neat, I never realized that micro.blog could federate itself in addition to crossposting to mastodon.