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The Many Branches of the Fediverse (axbom.com)
166 points by nafnlj on Nov 4, 2022 | hide | past | favorite | 111 comments



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.


Couldn't all those things be said of centralized services?

I always have the same concerns as you're pointing out, so I don't mean this critically, but reading your comments made me realize most of them could apply equally to either type of system.


Exactly, this is just our boiler plate response to new things and we should ignore it. There are definitely criticisms and conversations to have about the fediverse but you are completely right, this is just an unintentional distraction.


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?


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.


I think you are misinterpreting what the parent comment is suggesting. You for sure can’t host a Mastodon server off of a mobile device. I think they were suggesting ‘how hard would it be’ to make a mobile app that would allow anyone to spin up their own Mastodon instance in the cloud.

I’m not sure I know the answer to that question. It’s definitely not a trivial problem to solve, but also not so crazy that it couldn’t be solved with some concerned effort. There are already some 3rd party services that will host your Mastodon for you, but as far as an easy to use mobile app, could be a good business opportunity for anyone with the right motivation.


I don't think that works. The problem is that your server needs to be online 24/7, because any time someone you follow posts a message your server needs to be online and ready to accept effectively a webhook from them.


> your server needs to be online and ready to accept effectively a webhook from them.

The obvious answer there is "ActivityPub over SMTP". There is literally nothing that could go wrong![1]

(Basically a service which holds "ActivityPub postboxes" which collect events when you're offline and you pick them up in a batch when you're back online. The XMPP people already solved this one, IIRC.)

[1] Ok, there might be -some- problems.


Not sure if this might be related, but there is a project who proposes to use XMPP instead of ActivityPub for the ActivityStreams vocabulary: https://inqlab.net/2022-01-17-activitystreams-over-xmpp.html


That’s not what they were saying. Of course, your Mastodon instance need to be hosted on some remote Linux server in the cloud. But imagine you could use a mobile app, that provides the service of handling said instance, & exposes the front end client in the same mobile app? It’s totally feasible.


Can you get a static IP address from a mobile carrier?

Also, you'd need a backup server to render the "I am hiking or driving through a tunnel" error pages.


A raspberry pi is only like $40 also


It's a bit technical to set up. Maybe sell rpis that are already set up to host? Plug n play somehow


Where can you buy a pi for $40?


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.)


Correct me if I am wrong, but while IIRC most (but not all) Mastodon clients (more or less) blocked Gab by default, it was then Gab that chose to fork the protocol and break compatibility (completely ?)


The way I've put it in other threads is: the "free speech" fediverse, the "safe space" fediverse, and the MAP fediverse.

It's a bit unfair to solely consider American politics - there are plenty of Europeans on the fediverse, on both sides of the divide. And not everyone who prefers the more chaotic free speech servers are alt-right, unless you're one of those people who considers all non-leftists to be alt-right nowadays.


What's the value of narrowing down the fediverse (or any social platform) into three subjective categories like that? To counter the validity of your particular ternary delineation, relatively speaking all communities are a "safe space": they all have their own idea of what is accepted and what isn't. Introducing such a "polarized" view to newcomers to the fediverse seems like a huge disservice and gives them a falsely antagonistic sense of what they're going to experience, IMO.

At the same time, I'm not sure what framing other people approach social interaction but not once do I think things like "left", "right", or "sides"... "divide". I'm nearing 40 years old and still don't understand rationally why people lean towards these simplistic labels when people in general don't nicely fit them at all. I'll see some toot I don't like and think "oh, don't wanna see that sh*", block the user or perhaps the whole instance (if it's one where most people posting there share such stuff I don't like to see). The specific political stance of the person or instance won't even cross my mind, because why do I care? I just didn't want to see some racist or hate-propagating BS, regardless of where it's coming from or what ideologies it could be associated with.

Anyway, just my $0.02 on this topic; I didn't want to see this kind of polarizing perspective go unchallenged.


As I understand it, in the fediverse the divide literally exists in the network topology. Members of Group A share an address space with members of Group B, but the structure of the fediverse prevents them from sending messages to each other.

This is interesting to talk about because it's a pretty unique situation. Other decentralized systems have converged on a single globally connected network everyone uses; either everyone can visit your website or your website is irrelevant. (You're either allowed on Twitter or banned from Twitter.) Individual blocks exist but they aren't widespread enough to break the whole network into pieces.

The closest comparison I can think of is when Russia disconnected itself from the Internet. Everyone was still nominally part of "the Internet", they all still used globally unique domain names and IP addresses and stuff, but suddenly Russians could only access Russian websites and non-Russians could only access non-Russian websites.


Claude Lévi-Strauss visited an Indian tribe and asked them to draw a map of their village. Everybody draw the huts as a ring. But the ring was drawn in two incompatible ways. Some emphasized a central gathering place in the middle of the village in their drawing, and drew the huts around that, some closer, some further away. Others drew a clear line between the village: the people on one side, and others on the other side.

This is essential to how people conceptualize disagreement. At the root of the disagreement is something sacred, something taboo, which cannot be openly discussed. Some people consider others to be closer or further from the taboo. Other people think that there is a line that divides incompatible views about the taboo.

The immediate reaction to this description is very likely to be a misunderstanding if you think about it in the context of an actual divide. Nobody is above the taboo, including you, although everybody thinks they are above the taboo. You cannot escape it with "logical thinking", because both sides conceptualize the taboo in incompatible ways. The logical thinking happens within this conceptualization. The immediate reaction is to blame one of the sides of the discussion of misunderstanding.


Imagining no countries, it was necessary to create them.

This is what I was interested in - how the feudal topography had evolved in practice. Is there anything like a "map" (informatively arranged graph of federated clusters) around?


Basically the way it works is most of the servers are run by people from marginalized communities. They don't like it when people call them slurs, so they ban slur-sayers from their own servers and block the servers that won't. When a new instance with slur-sayers pops up, the mods who care notice because they start seeing lots of reported posts, so they check if the new instance has responsive mods and rules against saying slurs and if it doesn't they block the instance. Then they usually make a #fediblock post about it including the domain of the instance and what it was blocked for, and people who appreciate moderation boost the post so the mods for more instances will see it.

Of course it's not just saying slurs that instances get blocked for, but that and spam are the most common things new instances get blocked for. There are a few other common things that instances are blocked for, but since the people doing those things aren't trying to bypass blocks so they can harrass people they don't feel the need to make new instances all the time.


> Imagining no countries, it was necessary to create them.

Necessary in what sense? It's a bit like saying mosquitoes were necessary to create.

They continue to exist because they are good at perpetuating their own existence.


Mosquitos are food for many other organisms.


Yes? That doesn't mean there's any necessity involved.

(Unless you are fond of teleological reasoning.)


Well by that logic nothing is necessary.


Not in an absolute sense, yes.

But we still have relative necessities. If you want your car to drive, filling up the tank is necessary.


My observation of 'free speech' zones is that they turn into 'safe space' zones as soon as you post something left-wing in them.


I spent months starting arguments daily on Parler and Gab by convincingly playing the character of a pansexual Soros funded double vaxxed, anti-2A, pro-abortion, climate science worshiping socialist and never got shadow banned, canceled, kicked, or warned in any way.

So in my experience they very much did NOT become safe spaces, even when faced with every idea I could think of which could be considered solidly "left."


That sounds like you're playing the exact caricature of what they think 'the left' is so it's valuable to have you around as a sort of prototypical 'see, you don't want to be like him'. In other words, you help them keep people away from 'the left' so there's no reason to ban you.


Probably because you provided them the liberal fantasy they wanted to shout at.


That's an... interesting hobby.


I host my own Mastodon instance and my policy is to generally not block people. I've been blocked by more 'free speech' instances than I can count after responding to their arguments with a left-wing perspective. Yet they complain loudly about being blocked by 'progressive safe spaces'.

They also tend to speak favorably about certain U.S. Republicans whom they say are pro free-speech and when you point out they are pro banning (BDS as an example), you either get instantly blocked or they suddenly 'are tired of this conversation and no longer wish to engage'.

Oh the irony.


Did you make the arguments in good faith and in a manner inviting productive discourse, or did you mock and name-call?

I'm not saying that doing the former won't get you blocked too by rightists who basically just want their own echo chambers, but the latter seems to be the default level of discourse on Twitter when talking to the "other," so if that's what you defaulted to, I'm not too surprised you were shown the door.

Still others would rather just have a place to avoid politics altogether. My main account is on phpc.social which is supposed to be a hub for the PHP community, but recently there's been an uptick of people joining (or re-activating old accounts) and posting or reposting political nonsense. Quite annoying.


> Did you make the arguments in good faith and in a manner inviting productive discourse, or did you mock and name-call?

I specifically joined Mastodon to escape that and to try and see what the other side is really about. There are two broad categories of 'rightists' on Mastodon - the ones who are just looking to be provocative and then there are the ones who present themselves as more serious.

The first camp are non-serious trolls seeking to enrage, so I did not engage with them. The 'serious' ones are generally posting all kinds of things incl. toots I sometimes like and agree with and so I follow some of these accounts.

The problem with the second category is that when it comes to political discussions they tend to retreat to the same level of discourse as the trolls often. For example say a discussion turns to Jeremy Corbyn; they'll refuse to look at/read anything that suggests against him being what they believe him being, (some kind of CCP agent/extremist sympathizer/left of Mao communist that would've crashed the UK economy, ironic as that may sound atm).

Everything suggesting otherwise is some kind of a leftist rag apparently, but baseless accusation pieces confirming their bias I should take as authoritative.

Not seeing a contradiction between cheering the firing of a left-leaning professor and supposedly being pro free speech or endorsing someone who is for banning BDS as being pro free speech.

It also tends to happen that if I do admit some of their points as valid, they tend to take it as some sort of a big win and basically present it as a complete win for their argument, ignoring the points I countered them on completely. Everything seems to be a contest to own me and this is with people who outside of politics seem to be posting about tech, music or whatever.

It's extremely hard for me to find any right-leaning person on there who wants to find things we agree on, exchange civil views on things we don't and basically reach out in good faith. I know people like that are out there, but it doesn't seem to me like they number many, not on Mastodon for sure.


All right, well, I respect you for trying, at any rate. Politics just poisons everything, I suppose.


Yes the irony of r/conservatives one of the most ban happy reddits, where the posters all vehemently promote how pro freespeech they are.


> one of the most ban happy reddits

There are so many subreddits that are so ban-happy they'll ban you just for daring to participate in another subreddit that they don't like, that if one doesn't do that, I don't think it can qualify as "one of the most ban happy" ones.


'Safe space' sounds like you're biased. 'Free speech' is aspirational, but ends up being 'where the shitheads go' in practice. How about those of us that just want to hang somewhere people don't insist on injecting random diatribes against kikes in unrelated discussions?


You don’t need to read every post which is posted on instances, similarly to twitter. You don’t read every post on twitter, but instead follow people, read their tweets and retweets and build a graph which suits your likings.

You can do the same on the fediverse and create your own homogeneous feed.


It’s far easier and more appealing to simply join the community that doesn’t have shitheads in the first place.

I’ll take the “safe space” community any day. All the racist/sexist/whatever bullshit is pretty worn out anyway.

> but instead follow people, read their tweets and retweets and build a graph which suits your likings.

I’m not going to waste my time actively doing that. So while it happens naturally over time, I’d rather not see the shitheads before they get filtered out.


The safe space communities are just as bad if not worse than the shitheads you're referring to, except they isolate you with nobody but them and browbeat you into not having friends outside of their depraved circle. They're PCP being peddled in a coca cola commercial by an abusive boyfriend.


I for one enjoy having federated and local timelines where the posts don't call me slurs, are mostly about things I'm interested in, and have properly labeled images (no uncwed nsfw, so I can scroll in public). Have fun blocking hentai bot #13874828374 from your federated timeline on pl dot shitheads dot st or whatever :)


Think of what you're saying. You're saying you want someone else to curate the feed from which you curate your feed.

The federated feed is noisy, just like the real world. You pick from it and decide what you interact with. Letting someone decide what you see there, it doesn't lessen the SNR, it just lessens what you see. For every hentai bot you don't see there is at least one real person with something interesting to say that you'll never see.

I prefer to decide what information is available to me, and that necessarily means wading through things I'm not interested in sometimes.


> except they isolate you with nobody but them and browbeat you into not having friends outside of their depraved circle.

I don’t see how that’s possible in online community.


This is honestly an embarassingly bad argument/response


Embarrassingly bad? How so? Embarrass me.


I hang out on the free speech side, and I mostly avoid the JQ and edgelord types. It's not hard, you curate your own feed, and the block button is merely a click away. You run into them in threads and just ignore them, just like in real life (and up until like 6 years ago, on the internet in general).


I have never used Twitter, just never saw the appeal. But I have a question, does it also have a method to block people and conversations/topics/keywords or are you just forced to have to have algorithmically chosen tweets pushed on you?


You can block users on Twitter, yes. In fact, in some circles, "block chains" (no relation to the crypto-related tech) are popular; the idea being that you use a script to not only block one person, but subsequently block everyone that follows or is followed by that person, then block those that follow or are followed by those people, and so on to a certain level of depth - kind of a "curse you and your offspring for ten generations" sort of vibe. I suppose in a way this is functionally similar to blocking an entire instance on the fediverse.

Not sure if you can block hashtags or something like that on Twitter.


Holy shit! That is interesting. So then would one still be bombarded with all the info that they don't want to see from those that they haven't been able to block yet but are topic-similar to those blocked, or can you more or less effectively make your own "silo". If the second point is true, what are people upset about if they can easily "chain block" entire sub-graphs of people that they don't want to hear from? That people other than them might be exposed to it?


Yes, on Twitter, the fediverse ("Mastodon"), and other social networking services, it's typically quite trivial to build an echo chamber such that you rarely see opinions you don't want to see.

"But nazis exist on the fediverse!" Yes, they do, just as they do in real life. But if you don't intentionally attend their rallies or whatever it is nazis do nowadays and instead stick to whatever non-nazi-aligned places and activities you feel comfortable with, you're probably not going to encounter any of them.


Yes, I have found in previous discussions about Internet moderation that while many people talk about not wanting to see certain content themselves, the actual thing they want is to control what everyone else sees.


If you host your own instance, you can have arbitrary filtering policies. In particular Pleroma has a modular and flexible system here.

https://docs-develop.pleroma.social/backend/configuration/mr...


Believe it or not “just ignore them“ doesn’t work for many people.

There’s a reason 4chan is only popular with a certain demographic.


Yah "just ignore them" really means "it doesnt effect me and I am uninterested in hearing how it actually effects you"


It doesn't affect anyone except people who want it to. It's literally some random person whispering into the wind on the internet. I'm uninterested in hearing how it actually affects you because it doesn't actually affect you, you just want to cry about something.

"You" in the proverbial sense of course, the way you used it above.


Good for you if you're not affected, I guess. For many people, Internet trolls can cause psychological harm. This is not some obscure thing. Teens have been committing suicide due to bullying on the Internet for decades.


Not going to 4chan is the same thing as just ignoring them. It works perfect.


It doesn't work, because they don't stay on the chans. They infest every space they can, doing everything they can to be unignorable. They're even on HN.


Yes, the shitheads will go where they are tolerated. So do people who aren't necessarily bad people but still want to share opinions which may be outside what is currently the orthodox way of thinking. If that alone makes someone a shithead to you…

But if you really don't want to see arguments about Jews or whatever, just don't follow anyone who posts that. And if someone you follow does start with that stuff, just unfollow them, perhaps block them. In that manner it works the same way as on Twitter; once you have a solid base of sane people you're following, it's hard to just stumble across content that upsets you unless you're actively looking for it.


I don't think 'arguments' about Jews is a me-problem. Of course, that is exactly where we disagree. But your framing is dishonest.


My framing is honest because we're not only talking about people who hate Jews here. We're talking about people who do not accept the "correct" narrative on things like the results of major elections, medical science and the involvement of large corporations therein, etc. In recent years there have been a lot of statements which have gotten people in trouble on Twitter (and, in some cases, real life) which have nothing to do race or religion.

I don't believe most of these arguments, but I still think people ought to be able to say them.


points on PC culture aside, it really bothers me to have slurs thrown out in HN comments to prove said points. i'm not usually offended by stuff, but i want this community to be held to a higher standard re: discourse


Now I want to know about the Japanese instances where people draw pictures that are illegal do possess in most other countries...


https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23 might be a safe-for-work exploration of the relevant ideas.


This was a very interesting read and I think in very good analysis of the concept.

But I can’t shake the feeling that the points are all pretty mundane: computers exist in a human world bound by human conventions. After all, computers are made by and for humans to serve human needs, and they are subservient to the rules of human society, whether or not those rules can be digitally encoded in an absolute sense.

Like much of law, intent matters and intent can’t be read from a series of bytes, but is instead often determined by a human, outside the digital realm. If our laws didn’t consider intent it would be less of an issue.

I find none of that surprising. Though perhaps that means it wasn’t written for me.


Oh, the interplay is important.

So when you are trying to hack into a security system (or try to prevent other people getting into such a system), it's important that you forget everything about intent and especially the intended abstractions.


The legality is not the primary reason to avoid it.



You may think that.


The "Twexit" event is a huge opportunity for Fediverse to pick up new users, but I fear it will be wasted because the Fediverse software is still not ready for prime time.

The concept of "instances", "federated feeds", "different software for different media types" are all complexities unnecessary for the newbies.


Instances, local and federated feeds are core to the architecture of the system. There's pros and cons to this UX, and just because it's not exactly like twitter doesn't mean it can't catch on.

Different software for different media types... you mean like Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, Reddit, TikTok? Different media are interacted with in different ways and are optimal under different interfaces. At least with ActivityPub you can interact with all these media across the spectrum of software as you desire. Try following a YouTube channel from your twitter account.

In truth, fediverse is mature and ready for prime time. And there's still plenty of novel UX approaches to be explored, and I hope people do that. But it won't pick up the steam needed to steamroll things like Twitter because it doesn't game your mind to give you the dopamine hit, and people can't ban those they salivate over causing trouble for, they can only block them. For those people using Twitter that disliked these things and didn't know there were alternatives or couldn't put their finger on what they didn't like fedi is going to feel like fresh air, for the rest "there's just something missing." I give it a month before most of the new users go home to Twitter.


No I mean the media-specific server app branching like pictures (pixelfed), music (funkwhale), live cast (owncast), video (peertube), links (Lemmy) etc.

How do a newbie to Fediverse sensibly choose the right instance to home on, when he has to decide what media type he publish in, at the time of server instance enrolment?


I know what you meant, my point was that the non federating internet has the same thing and it doesn't stop people from using it.

I'd say you do the same thing you'd do on the big tech internet: you open a YouTube account if you want to make videos, so have a peertube account. You have a twitter account for microblogging, so have a mastodon/pleroma/misskey account. You'd have an Instagram account if you want to primarily share photos, so open a pixelfed account. Open 3. Share your accounts on the others. this is not a new problem, we already do this on twitter, Instagram, reddit, etc.


mastodon can't pick up twitter users because it doesn't try to be twitter. Lots of people want the recommendations, virality and discovery of the algorithmic feed, that's what got them hooked in the first place. There is no fediverse equivalent. (That's obviously by design, but I think it's a mistake to think that it can compete. Just like carrots can't compete with sugar.)


there is a concept of "humanizing the software".

we often use geek-accepted terms because that is what you and me are fine with but newbies see this as latin.

how about "instance>server", "federated feed>feed shared across servers" sound?


You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike

Federation is great for people who want to occupy or set up curated niches, but an uninteresting thicket for those who do not. I'm pretty sure I said the same thing about this ~5 years ago when I first tried Mastodon.


I wonder which of these are also RSS readers? That might be a good combination.


Most servers implementing ActivityPub also allow RSS/Atom subscriptions.


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.


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.


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...


Has anyone compared the ActivityPub and Matrix protocols? Why was Matrix/ActivityPub created when the other already existed? What are the respective strengths/weaknesses/focuses? In which contexts were they created, to solve which problems?


ActivityPub is very narrowly targeted at Twitter/Facebook/Diaspora type of social app. It doesn't strike me as particularly well suited for real-time or indeed any kind of secure communication.

Not to say it cannot be twisted for such a purpose, but it should probably not be.


My limited experience is similar to yours I think, but I'm not sure how true this is. If ActivityPub works for these, is it doing a bad job?

- Nextcloud, a federated service for file hosting

- PeerTube, a federated service for video streaming

- Pixelfed, a piece of social networking software which resembles Instagram

(from wikipedia, surely there are more)

Or I suppose maybe those count as social apps because they involve public facing posting. I definitely wouldn't use them for privacy, and only for communication with no particular expectation of promptness.


As others have said, we created Matrix 2 years before AP, targetting generic pubsub+history - but with the initial applications being Slack/Skype/WhatsApp style use cases. In fact, Element/Riot’s internal codename as a reference Matrix client was “Skype Done Right”. As a result, there was a perception that “Matrix is for chat”, even though you can do so much more - eg https://matrix.org/blog/2020/12/18/introducing-cerulean is a microblogging system on Matrix, and thirdroom.io is a whole virtual world implementation.

As a result, for whatever reason, folks prefer to build domain-specific protocols like ActivityPub or ATProto focusing specifically on public microblogging rather than building on Matrix’s generic primitives. It’s also fair to say that Matrix wasn’t proven when ActivityPub began, and AP builds on many preexisting protocols like ostatus, rss, salmon, etc.


> Why was Matrix/ActivityPub created when the other already existed?

Afaik Matrix started in 2014, Activitypub in 2016. Both were probably pretty small back then, so no reason to adopt the other's protocol when there's no guarantee of stability


Does anyone have DAU or MAU numbers for this stuff? I've been convinced that web3 is not going anywhere, but open to being proven wrong.


I may be mistaken but the Fediverse are a collection of projects using ActivityPub or similar protocols. Usually they are federated not completely decentralized (or blockchain based) like "Web3".


That sounds right. To be clear, blockchain is a solution to a subset of decentralization problems that rely on consensus. The vast majority of non-financial apps don't need to solve 1000s of global consensus problems per minute. There's tons of interesting stuff to be done in this space!


I may not be parsing you correctly, but in what sense do you mean consensus? I think Mastodon simply relies on there being a single authoritative source of material from any address, and then that goes out to various places local and remote depending on details.

I'm not sure that's really consensus so much as message delivery, I don't think anyone would notice if posts arrived out of order (for instance). It strikes me as well enough served by a database that gets updates from users on an instance.

So I guess, admittedly I may well not understand, but what does consensus have to do with it?


Sure. I noticed that many people come from the angle that decentralization implies defi, because they've seen the last few years of decentralization practically be synonymous with blockchains. I'm just responding to that, and saying that there's lots of interesting applications possible in the decentralized space that don't involve blockchains or finance. Blockchains are just a global append-only stack of messages with global consensus.

Mastodon isn't decentralized so I didn't intend to compare them at all. That said, I think federated systems are interesting and have a place, because full decentralization is often impractical.


> DAU or MAU

Daily Active Users and Monthly Active Users, in case anyone else would've had to look it up


https://bitcoinhackers.org/@mastodonusercount/ but I don't know how good the numbers are.

The fediverse doesn't have monetization/currency/blockchains floating around so I don't mentally categorize it as web3, but people's definitions certainly vary.


These stats are bad metrics. Without retention information Mastodon could be shrinking despite cumulative sign-ups going up 2k/hr

Personally I've signed up four different times and only used Mastodon for a couple months one of those times. Meanwhile I've only ever signed up for Twitter once and I've been posting to it weekly for over a decade. One twitter "new user" and four Mastodon "new users" but the latter didn't retain me.


Most instances post active user counts, so theoretically we could have a bot that scraps all of those and adds them up. Can't find one, unfortunately.


Hubzilla notably is building the Zot protocol, IMO the coolest and most underrated federating protocol put there.


How "fediverse-ey" was say, USENET, Napster or Bittorent back in the day?


>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.


it was like that in the beginning of dc++ but they later introduced hashing which did infact figure out the commonality between the two.


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.


I still hang out on Hotline and KDX and my friend has been running his server continuously since 2001. There are dozens of us! I also still point a dyndns domain to my IP, but just for some games and stuff. However, it seems that as a society we've settled on the web browser being the de-facto interface to everything, and we all expect persistent server-side data accessible from anywhere in the world. That said, it's still my goal to make a web Hotline client... one of these days... haha


That’s awesome! I did a quick search and it doesn’t seem like tracker-tracker is around anymore.

What do people do there? Just old communities of people chatting, etc? Warez and mp3 were always a big draw back then but probably not relevant today.

And yeah with websockets you could make a web client!


Hmm, no, but last I checked you can use hltracker.com , which someone snapped up and my friend is running the tracker server for! :) Yeah, we just idle around and occasionally chat. Activity is extremely variable. Of course, the upside is there's the trusty News area. Most posts are "hello from [old computer] I got running with [old OS]! Hotline was the best!" , and similar such nostalgic sentiments :) haha

Indeed, well last I checked with WebSockets they're not legit TCP/IP sockets, so I'd still be stuck doing some kind of intermediary/proxy or something... Dunno, haven't looked into it that much yet. I don't know of any way to open a raw TCP socket in a browser, though maybe some obscure solution exists that I don't know about..


Man I loved Hotline. But it ended up as an instance of what jwz says about everything expanding to include email and turning into an OS.


Yeah, I guess they couldn’t figure out how to monetize it. Everyone was there for the warez and probably pr0n in many cases. But the communities were really great. But it took Facebook to figure out how to centralize that.


Usenet was technically decentralized, but in practice anchored on educational institutions that gave it a high degree of continuity. It was wonderful and freewheeling, but the advent of the web killed off a lot of the alt.binaries.* hierarchy and spam ravaged the rest of it - one piece of spam in particular:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurence_Canter_and_Martha_Sie...


IRC was not even fediversed, it was independent fiefdoms, but it was fun.


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


Activity pub and the fediverse is an interesting area which I don't hear a lot of commerical interest of people getting into that.




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