Help me out here. Like a lot of ex-redditors, I made my way to the fediverse to find a whole new world of social media. Is it confusing at first? Yes. It takes a moment to adjust and learn the difference between an instance and a server and all that. But the one thing that confuses all hell out of me is @name@server. Not because it doesn’t make sense. I get that on the most basic level if I wanna find user @JakoJakoJako13@mastodon.social that’s what I need to search for. But mainly because it doesn’t work in the way it’s proposed to work across all instances/servers/services. Which is if I search for @nfl@lemmy.world on Mastodon or Calckey or any fediverse server I should be able to see what they posted. Most of the time, that’s not what happens.
First we need to look at Lemmy because they’ve kinda thrown a wrench at this cog. What is this: !nfl@lemmy.world? More importantly what is [!] doing there? Well that’s the NFL community on lemmy.world. But to be super distinct, its a place. Not a person. What happens if I search for that on Mastodon? It returns nothing? What if I change that to @nfl@lemmy.world. I get a user on Mastodon with 16 posts that don’t populate on Mastodon. Same thing on Calckey but 0 posts instead of 16. Why does this happen? That user (to my knowledge) doesn’t exist. On Lemmy, it’s a place. A place where a collection of users congregated to make a collection of posts about the NFL. You could argue it’s the same thing on Mastodon but instead of a dedicated place it’s a subject and it’s out in the open.
A noun is a person, place, or thing. So far in the fediverse we’ve concentrated on a person @ and a thing #. Mainly because the groundwork is there thanks to twitter. The fediverse’s implementation of interactivity only focuses on the user. It has only looked at the @ of human interaction and not the whole noun. If this idea of connecting across servers want’s to fully work then each service needs to come to an agreement on how they want to implement places !. We’ve got the user part down. We’ve got the thing part down. Only using an @ and a # leads to small talk. Need proof. See Twitter. If you want deep thoughtful discussion, you need the !. And in my analogy that is the place. And like in real life when it’s all working together it leads to a community.
So I guess what I’m proposing, is as much as we hate reddit right now, Mastodon, Calckey, Lemmy, Kbin, and so on need to find a way to incorporate places together to get the whole idea of the fediverse walking.
I shouldn’t have to enter a full URL to get Mastodon to populate the contents of a user or place. That’s not the way we’ve been told this works. We’re being sold on the model of @name@server. Well @name@server wants to see what !nfl@server is saying about #nfl over on !different@server. Until we standardize that, the fediverse will only ever be a half baked idea.
#Mastodon #Fediverse #kbin #lemmy #reddit #federation #socialmedia #opinions #ideas
PS: And just to highlight the incoherent post I just made, I posted this from Calkey.world, it got autoboosted to #NFL on Mastodon and posted as it’s own post to NFL here on lemmy.world
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Well, the issue is that although both an instance that uses Mastodon and an instance that uses Lemmy communicate using ActivityPub, the way the might choose to display the passed info is different. Lemmy for example can have longer posts than Mastodon (a micro blogging service) can handle.
There does need to be a way to handle that but I don’t think its really in place yet. Let’s not forget the fediverse is a very young thing, not all the issues are resolved yet.
I understand the infancy part of it. It’s why I bring up the discussion. How can we as users influence development to get things the way we actually want from the fediverse. To your point, this post was posted to Mastodon from Calckey and even though it’s only a 500 character limit on Mastodon, it displays the whole thing which is almost 3000 characters. A limit set by Calckey. My bigger issue is how a user navigates from one instance to another. Clearly content is being pulled expecting user to user reception, when there’s user to place(!) and user to thing(#) applications too.
ActivityPub only helps users not to be chained to one server and one software. There will always be content that will not make sense in the context of some implementations and that is okay. The important thing is that there can be another server or another software that can make sense of the data.
