[HN Gopher] The Many Branches of the Fediverse
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The Many Branches of the Fediverse
Author : nafnlj
Score : 68 points
Date : 2022-11-04 19:39 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (axbom.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (axbom.com)
| skybrian wrote:
| I wonder which of these are also RSS readers? That might be a
| good combination.
| remram wrote:
| I would rather have my microblogging system look more like a
| feed reader than the opposite. E.g. folders, search, notes, re-
| export multiple curated feeds...
| nafnlj wrote:
| Hubzilla allows you to subscribe to feeds as "channels," but it
| doesn't provide a great feed reader experience from my limited
| use. I have only made accounts with Mastodon, Pixelfed, and
| Hubzilla, so entirely possible that some of the others do
| interesting things with feed subscriptions/reading.
| aliqot wrote:
| feed reader on Vivaldi is also pretty bad. Right off the top
| of my head:
|
| - no right click to adjust poll interval, default is every 5
| minutes(!)
|
| - no ability to re-poll a single feed
|
| - no right click to edit interval, must use main app settings
|
| - subscribe button doesn't allow interval settings
|
| - no feed categories
|
| - no feed ordering
|
| There's more but I feel like a jerk just going off about
| something free that nobody asked me to try. I want to
| investigate submitting a PR, but I am in limbo as I'm
| precluding from consorting with G.
| friend_and_foe wrote:
| Most servers implementing ActivityPub also allow RSS/Atom
| subscriptions.
| serverholic wrote:
| Honestly, after using mastodon I'm a bit more bearish on the
| fediverse. It's too complex for your average user and there are
| still significant centralization risks.
|
| Sure anyone can host a server but obviously that's pretty
| technical.
|
| If you don't host your own server then you place a lot of trust
| on whoever owns it. They own your data and they decide which
| external servers to share data with. Want to add a video game
| centric mastodon server to your feed? Well you better hope your
| server decides to partner with that server.
|
| Not to mention that servers cost money, so you have to be sure
| that whoever is hosting it can continue to pay for it. Mastodon
| the organization is a non profit. Do they have the funds to host
| millions of people? Probably not. Which means people have to find
| a smaller server and hope that it stays funded.
|
| This makes choosing your mastodon server a pretty important
| choice. Most people seem to be going for mastodon official
| servers which is causing them to be overloaded.
| feet wrote:
| Most of us carry internet connected computers in our pockets
| now. How difficult would it be to automate setting up a server
| on android or iOS? Could someone just install an app and have a
| server available?
| csande17 wrote:
| The main problem with this idea is battery life. Mobile
| devices are designed to go to sleep really often to conserve
| battery, and you can't do that if you're running a server.
| iOS in particular heavily restricts when and how apps can do
| stuff while the screen is locked.
| caycep wrote:
| How "fediverse-ey" was say, USENET, Napster or Bittorent back in
| the day?
| [deleted]
| haunter wrote:
| >Bittorent back in the day
|
| What do you mean by this? Torrent never went away, there are
| countless high quality private trackers and even some really
| good public ones
|
| But considering piracy + fediverse then DC++ was the most
| fediverse-y one https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DC%2B%2B You
| could connect to any given X server where you could share your
| local drive + chat with other users too. It's still really good
| to find some extremely niche stuff but torrent basically "won"
| because of the hash based seeding system (as in multiple user
| can share and peer the same stuff). DC was just seeing others'
| HDD and find whatever you can and directly download from there.
| But you didn't know that Joe's "Movie2012x264.mp4" and Jim's
| "Movie2012.mkv" are the same thing or different.
| hauxir wrote:
| it was like that in the beginning of dc++ but they later
| introduced hashing which did infact figure out the
| commonality between the two.
| bombcar wrote:
| IRC was not even fediversed, it was independent fiefdoms, but
| it was fun.
| remram wrote:
| For a little while it was an open federation of sort. The
| problem is that it had a single namespace of user and channel
| names, so misbehaving servers would cause chaos.
|
| Wikipedia has a summary:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Relay_Chat#EFnet
| nemo44x wrote:
| Much of the pre-2k internet worked this way. Anyone remember
| Hotline or Carracho and dyndns.org for redirecting your dynamic
| IP to a hostname?
|
| The reason that approach ultimately lost was because it was
| federated and therefore Balkanized more or less. However, it
| was probably a better UX in many ways than putting everyone
| together in 1 room.
|
| But it was limited and cells would divide and divide further
| with no great way of interacting on common grounds topics.
|
| Maybe this is the way forward but I doubt it. I think we'll see
| better approaches at centralization because that's where the
| money is. We just need a way to digitize the norms you'd see
| from the same peoples interactions at a bar, church, DMV,
| sports venue, work, with friends, etc.
| friend_and_foe wrote:
| Hubzilla notably is building the Zot protocol, IMO the coolest
| and most underrated federating protocol put there.
| csande17 wrote:
| I was expecting this to be about the various Mastodon groups that
| have all instance-banned each other, so you can't communicate
| with everyone in the fediverse without making multiple accounts.
| (IIRC there are at least 3: the American alt-right, the American
| left/progressives/etc, and the Japanese instances where people
| draw pictures that are illegal to possess in most other
| countries.)
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(page generated 2022-11-04 23:00 UTC)