this post was submitted on 30 Dec 2020
33 points (100.0% liked)

Fediverse

18068 readers
55 users here now

A community dedicated to fediverse news and discussion.

Fediverse is a portmanteau of "federation" and "universe".

Getting started on Fediverse;

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
[email protected]
[email protected]
33
Out of curiosity, why do you guys think the Fediverse is still not taking off? (lemmy.ml)
submitted 4 years ago* (last edited 4 years ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
65 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

I've thought about it a bit and the Fediverse has been around for a while now. There are some really cool applications being made to replace the mainstream ones, but they just aren't taking off.

Why do you guys think that might be? Ease of use? Addiction to the mainstream platforms? Lack of marketing?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 7 points 4 years ago* (last edited 4 years ago) (6 children)

I think one of the issues is the tech angle. Everybody uses the federation aspect as a selling point, but:

  • most people don't care about that
  • it doesn't work seamlessly in practice

If it worked seamlessly, I think the benefits would be obvious, even to those people who don't care. But you still need a separate account on every one of these platforms to interact fully.

Some of the things that don't work seamlessly:

  • The microblogs (pleroma, mastodon, etc) don't show lemmy posts and can't comment on them (I know this is possible and on the roadmap, but it doesn't work now so new users don't care); see how the blog platforms (write.as, plume) allow following and commenting from a microblog account
  • A microblog acct can follow a pixelfed acct, but as far as I can tell, there's no way to discover those accts. Pixelfed doesn't allow viewing posts from its web interface without signing in. (I'm also not sure of the point of Pixelfed, since it's just a microblog can only post photos. It seems like it was made to just be an Instagram clone. In my mind, it could have just been a client for the existing microblogging servers)
  • When a new project is started, they try to federate with mastodon first. So everything is oriented around mastodon and its quirks. (WebFinger is required, their signatures are apparently out of date, etc). Some projects just don't work with pleroma and others.

To sum up, every fediverse project is basically a clone of an existing big name company, but doesn't do anything better. And since they're all small, open source projects, they have less resources and develop features slower. There's also the culture/personality issue, but that's also a huge topic and this post is long enough

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 years ago (1 children)

Can't exactly agree with the seamlessness because federation as is is still more seamless than centralized services. I can't post on Twitter and Instagram when I only have a Reddit account, it doesn't seem like an option at all. Federation? Anything is possible.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 years ago* (last edited 4 years ago)

I agree, anything is possible, but the fediverse has never actually lived up to that. The only good example is posts showing up in microblog timelines and commenting on them, but that's limited to blogs, videos, and Pixelfed. And on Pleroma, I still don't see videos showing up in my feed, despite following peertube accts. Federation has a lot of potential, but it's never been fully expressed, and isn't enough to overcome the missing features that each platform has.

EDIT: Here's an example of what I'm talking about. All of these services "federate", but it's hard to understand how they all interoperate. Everybody is looking at them as individual platforms, but to me, the grand idea is that the fediverse could be a single platform and each of these services is just a set of additional features I can use.

load more comments (4 replies)