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What are the most used platforms on the Fediverse? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 2 years ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

15 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Are there reliable statistics that show this?

I'm trying to get an idea rolling for a mobile app that could handle the most used platforms on the Fediverse.

For example, let's assume that Mastodon, Lemmy and Peertube turned out to be the most used platforms on the Fediverse. Would people be interested in a mobile app that could properly integrate all of these?

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[–] Rentlar 5 points 2 years ago (2 children)

Would people be interested in a mobile app that could properly integrate all of these?

I like your idea. It is important to reflect as a starting point that although the platforms are compatible via ActivityPub or other federated protocols, the whole reason why they are separate platforms is that they are for different use cases.

Examples: A peertube user would want to watch videos and only comment on the video occasionally, a Mastodon user would want person to person conversations, a Lemmy user would want topic-based discussion with less emphasis on who they are talking with, etc.

Making an app that caters to all the different use-case groups seems like a difficult task to me.

With the negative stuff said, I do think this idea has some good potential. If a Lemmy client had seamless PeerTube video or other service integration that would be very interesting and cool. If there was some hybrid kind of app that gives a unifying look to different ActivityPub-compatible platforms like Lemmy and Mastodon, that would also be cool and allow for easier cross-Fediverse access, opening up a lot of possibilities.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

Thanks for those insights.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

the whole reason why they are separate platforms is that they are for different use cases.

The reason they're separate platforms is because they were developed by separate people/teams. They're not even vastly different usecases. Link aggregation isn't far from microblogging. The comment you made is even represented as a Note which is what all the microblogging fediverse platforms use for their posts. If you make a Note from a microblogging platform and include a link, that is represented differently from Lemmy's posts (which is a Page I think?) but semantically they're the same thing.

a Mastodon user would want person to person conversations, a Lemmy user would want topic-based discussion with less emphasis on who they are talking with, etc.

A conversation on Lemmy is started by a posted link, but again, there's no real difference in this thread we're participating in and a thread on a microblogging platform. In fact, microblogging users can participate in this thread. And this thread could have been started from a microblogging platform and it could be the exact same thread.

A fediverse app should display Actors (which could be a human user, Lemmy community, Kbin magazine, bot user, etc) and its list of posts and allow that actor to be followed (assuming the current user's server supports following that actor type). The functionality is basically the same on every platform and the UX should be the same; the tricky part is showing/hiding features based on what the current server allows (e.g. if the app is displaying a user, it should show a follow button on microblogging platforms and kbin, but not on lemmy) and handling the side effects which are different for every platform