Giver of skulls

Verified icon

  • 0 Posts
  • 52 Comments
Joined 102 years ago
Cake day: June 6th, 1923
  • Skull giver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nltoFediverse@lemmy.world•Leveraging ATProto and ActivityPub to upend enclosed social networksEnglish
    2·
    6 days ago

    The problems that plagues Mastodon at the time have all been fixed as far as I know, but it’s too late now. Other, more difficult problems remain, like the inconsistencies between server on how many likes/comments a post has and the inevitable perception that you need to create an account on every server to follow people because the follow button doesn’t work by itself even if you’re logged into your account in another tab.

    People don’t join a social media platform to go on an adventure and see what every button does. They came looking for a new Twitter rather than a new experience and Mastodon, and kind of still is, a bad Twitter. It’s a great Mastodon, but that’s just not what most people were after.

  • Skull giver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nltoFediverse@lemmy.world•Leveraging ATProto and ActivityPub to upend enclosed social networksEnglish
    21·
    6 days ago

    I agree and I personally think the whole preemptive Threads ban is stupid in general, but at least one major bridge has had to be turned off because people on the Mastodon/ActivityPub side of things got angry. I don’t mean the people behind ActivityPub of course, I’m sure they were chuffed their protocol got buy-in from a major player.

    If anything, large corporations using open standards is better, even in situations like Google Talk where Facebook and Google dominated the protocol for a while; at least the protocol is useful for regular people.

  • Skull giver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nltoFediverse@lemmy.world•Leveraging ATProto and ActivityPub to upend enclosed social networksEnglish
    2·
    6 days ago

    AKAIK, activitypub (on mastodon) only requests and receives content from individual users that have been followed by someone on the local instance, it wouldn’t load all of bluesky at once, it would just need to have an up to date database of bluesky’s users so they are easily searchable. With that model, even crappy PC’s can interact with the mega servers.

    Yes, but that’s how you end up with the “I don’t have anyone to follow” situation that people left Mastodon for during the first wave of the Twitter collapse. Now Mastodon has a feed of sorts, but for small servers (I host my own) you have to know the accounts of the people you want to follow, nothing will show up organically.

    With the OP’s point of ATProto being open-source, I assume the thrust of the argument is that at done point there would be a community hosted instance, which were it compatible, I think most activitypub se rvers would gladly federate with.

    You can run your own ATProto servers but it the millions of accounts I think maybe 500 to a 1000 users aren’t on the Bluesky instance. You’ll have to ask the people who complained.

    Ideally there doesn’t need to be any, as the conglomeration of all smaller instances should be able to act as a large server. Unfortunately as it currently stands, the UI of most fediverse software makes interacting with that wider pool more difficult than it needs to be, and thus punishes smaller Mastodon servers with more difficult discovery of interesting topics or people to follow. But I think that can be overcome simply with better UI design.

    From my attempts of convincing people to give Mastodon a try, the federation aspect confuses and scares the normal user. It’s also what taught me that most people don’t seem to realise that you can read your Gmail email without downloading the Gmail app. And that most people don’t realise that mail servers can and will refuse email from other servers as they see fit. My expectations about how well-informed people who email every day are about the core concepts of email were way to high. It’s stupid but it explains a lot of stupid questions I’ve heard of the years.

    A large part of the problem is UX, following someone on another server is a massive hurdle that could be overcome (just register a web protocol so we can make links targeting web-activitypub:follow:user@domain, that way websites and apps can follow people without having to enter your username when you click follow…) but change is slow and there are many different projects that all have their own challenges to overcome.

    Again, I think that’s a UI problem. I don’t use mastodon myself because of it, as I find it difficult to find people that interest me. However, Lemmy’s use of Topics, and more critically, the existence of Lemmyverse.net which searches across all instances, make finding interesting things possible regardless of the size of your home instance. It’s criminal that that functionality is not a native feature in the standard lemmy Ui, and I’m not aware of anything similar for mastodon.

    ActivityPub just brings a lot of overhead. Especially with the way Lemmy uses it, which ensures that you actually get a somewhat view or the current replies on a post. My Lemmy server is constantly spiking in CPU usage because I’ve joined a few larger Lemmy instances. There’s a constant steam of opening and closing HTTPS sockets, constant TLS key exchanges, and often minutes of latency submitting posts in burst. This is tough to optimise for without reaching out and coming to an agreement with every other server owner. ActivityPub is way more efficient for small communities than ATProto ever will be (because it doesn’t take long to cache all keys and only the involved servers gain the information they need), but for larger servers that provide a more “social media” feel, you need to employ active scrapers.

    As for the lemmyverse.net thing: you can’t build that into Lemmy without sacrificing some level of independence. A fresh Lemmy server doesn’t know about any other Lemmy servers so it can’t suggest anything. You could add support for third party Lemmy directory services, but then the server owner of lemmyverse gets to decide what servers get to see what other servers out or the gate. Sounds like a good feature for the Lemmy devs to consider, but I’m not sure if they’d accept the pull request without discussing this beforehand. Plus, someone will have to update every Lemmy app as well (and apps can already integrate with lemmyverse of course).

  • Skull giver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nltoFediverse@lemmy.world•Leveraging ATProto and ActivityPub to upend enclosed social networksEnglish
    22·
    6 days ago

    ATProto exists because of ActivityPub’s shortcomings for building Twitter 2.0. The protocol is much better suited for massive websites, and the “run your own data store but let someone else do the content tagging and filtering” approach is actually not a bad idea. The Bluesky firehose throughput is massive and any home ActivityPub instance that tried to enter the network would easily be overwhelmed just loading the basic home page feed. The Bluesky servers probably wouldn’t enjoy the endless connections back home to verify the key material either.

    Plus, many ActivityPub folks don’t want to federate with big companies anyway. Threads is blocked by most small servers. A bridging service intended for allowing ATProto/ActivityPub cross communication was the center point of drama as well and had to go opt-in (and instantly became useless as a way to connect the two networks because nobody knows about the service anyway).

    I don’t think ActivityPub is made for large servers, and I don’t think the protocol can be patched to support them well without upsetting a lot of people. AP works well for following friends and family, it’s kind of terrible for the tailored topic based social media feed most people want out of social media apps these days.