Besides, if you were to introduce RSS and/or Atom as protocols on the Federated Social Web, you'd have even more of an #xkcd927 situation than already now.
Before ActivityPub and Mastodon became a mass phenomenon together, the "holy trinity" was #Diaspora, #Friendica and #Hubzilla, all connected via the Diaspora* protocol and, ironically, connectors not developed by the Diaspora* team. #StatusNet was kind of dragged in, too, but couldn't connect to Diaspora*. And after identi.ca had switched from StatusNet to Pump.io, StatusNet barely mattered anymore anyway.
That said, nobody called it "Fediverse" back then.
@Ben Pate ? Ideally, a Fediverse search engine would be decentralised and federated itself, and ideally, the code would be maintained by "the community" rather than one individual. But I guess that'd be hard to achieve.
Even then, such a search engine probably wouldn't be able to index the entire Fediverse right away and all the time. If you want tiny new instances of even the most obscure Fediverse project to be crawled right after they've come alive on someone's Raspberry Pi for the first time, you'd have to include support for such a search engine in the projects themselves. Instead of users or instances, the projects would have to opt in.
@Chris Trottier I expect this to introduce yet another forum/group standard to the Fediverse in addition to the several incompatible standards we already have.
#Guppe has its own standard which is created around #Mastodon and Mastodon only. #Friendica has its own standard. #Hubzilla and #Streams have their own common standard. #Lemmy has its own standard.
And now #Discourse will most likely create an entirely new ActivityPub-based forum standard from scratch, disregarding any compatibility to the projects mentioned above. I wouldn't be surprised if the Discourse devs didn't know there's more to the Fediverse than just Mastodon, that there are already forum standards. Either that, or they know, and they can't decide which one to adhere to, so they make a new one from scratch. Or they simply can't make Discourse compatible to any one existing standard, and they're forced to make a new one.
Just to illustrate the problem: Hubzilla is technically a fork of Friendica. Both have forums which are nothing but regular accounts/channels with special rights settings. But Hubzilla's backend was largely rewritten, and internally, Hubzilla uses an entirely different protocol than Friendica. Before #ActivityPub came around, Friendica and Hubzilla used the #Diaspora protocol to federate, so much different are they.
@Fediverse News is a forum on Friendica. Hubzilla, however, doesn't recognise threads from Fediverse News as such. Each post shows up separately as an individual, stand-alone post on my stream, cluttering it. I have to look up the sources (which almost always lead me to Mastodon) to be able to see them in threads.
@Ben Pate ? Maybe it's because Hubzilla and Zot were too obscure back in the day for anyone to know them. After all, still today, I guess every other Friendica user hasn't heard of Hubzilla yet. And back when Mastodon was designed, nobody even knew Friendica.
Or maybe it's because Zot would have been considered utter overkill for something as simple as microblogging. Had they only known how many people struggled with moving between Mastodon instances in the last months...
@Ben Pate ? This isn't about Google. This isn't about search-indexing.
Imagine Tootfinder being non-opt-in, non-opt-out like the earlier centralised searches. Imagine Tootfinder firmly embedding itself into every last Fediverse project from Mastodon to Streams to the point of everyone and everything relying on it.
Now imagine Google buying out Tootfinder in a hostile takeover.
This would mean that Google ASSUMES FULL CONTROL over the entire Fediverse.
This is what we want to keep from happening. This is why we don't want anything central in the Fediverse.
We do NOT want the Fediverse to be controlled by any one central instance. Especially not by Google. Or Apple. Or Facebook. Or Amazon. Or Microsoft. Or any other corporation. Or some greedy VC vultures.
Or imagine Google assuming full and direct control over all e-mail. Not only Google Mail, but also Outlook Mail, Yahoo! Mail etc., including privacy-oriented paid providers in Europe, including every last little private personal mail server run by geeks in their homes.
@Stark There is, for example, #Zot. Zot was created along with a #Friendica "fork" (actually almost complete rewrite) named #RedMatrix which, upon its 1.x release, become #Hubzilla.
I don't have the exact technical specs, but it should work similarly to #ActivityPub. It's much much more powerful, though.
For starters, Zot was created for something that goes even beyond federation, namely #NomadicIdentity. Not only does it facilitate the move an entire channel from one instance to another, it lets you have your channel on multiple instances at once and automatically keeps all copies in sync. If the hub with your main channel on it goes down, doesn't matter, you have an identical clone or several.
Besides, Zot was not only designed for messaging. After all, Zot can keep channel on that monster named Hubzilla in sync. With everything on them. Not only posts, entire threads and contacts, but articles, wikis, notes, the content of your WebDAV-equipped cloud file storage, your public event calendar, your private CalDAV calendars, your private CardDAV address book etc.
This gets really interesting if you're on Hubzilla, and you have another Hubzilla channel amongst your contacts. That channel may have a number of nomadic clones, but you only see one of them as the main one. The channel owner can seamlessly change which one is the main, and all you notice is that the hub URL has changed.
The current and last version of Zot is Zot6, originally developed for and with the Hubzilla successors #Osada and #Zap, then backported to Hubzilla.
#Streams, basically a code repository which evolved from Zap through another two steps, already uses #Nomad, a kind of successor to Zot which nonetheless can communicate with Zot. Streams shows what Nomad is capable of: Instead of a "fully-featured" server platform, Streams is meant to be a code base for advanced Fediverse projects, i.e. you can strap onto it whatever you want to develop. Whatever it may be, Nomad can keep it in sync between multiple instances.
Technically speaking, the #Fediverse includes all #federated instances of all projects that use certain protocols. But it's hard to say where the borders are.
It's true that the Fediverse is more than just #Mastodon. Many Mastodon users still don't know that because they haven't heard of any other Fediverse project yes, some even reject it and want the Fediverse to be Mastodon and Mastodon only.
So for starters, the Fediverse contains everything that uses #ActivityPub, that has federation on, and that isn't widely defederated/Fediblocked.
This also includes services which don't have ActivityPub as their core protocols, but which understand them: #Friendica (core protocol: DFRN), #Hubzilla (core protocol: Zot6), #Streams (core protocol: Nomad). Whereas Friendica and Streams have ActivityPub always on, it's optional on Hubzilla, both hub-wise and channel-wise. Most hubs have it installed, though, and most channels have it on.
By the way, if you say that Friendica is not in the Fediverse, then this entire thread doesn't happen in the Fediverse. @Fediverse News runs on Friendica.
Now it gets complicated: Is #Diaspora (the "Facebook killer" spectacularly crowd-funded in summer 2010) part of the Fediverse, or isn't it?
Diaspora* is decentralised, distributed and federated all within itself. Still, it was designed as a walled garden. Diaspora* was never meant to connect to anything else. It's like XMPP without gateways or Matrix without bridges.
Then came Friendica which, at that time, had the goal to federate with just about everything that moved. Diaspora*, still an alpha release, didn't have an API. So the Friendica devs reverse-engineered Diaspora*'s protocol, developed a connector and federated Friendica with Diaspora*.
To this day, not much more than Friendica and Hubzilla can federate with Diaspora*. But you may still find a post from a Friendica user in your Mastodon timeline with a comment from a Diaspora* user. Diaspora* doesn't federate with Mastodon, but that comment went from Diaspora* via Friendica to the ActivityPub-speaking parts of the Fediverse.
So on the one hand, Diaspora* is connected to projects that speak ActivityPub. On the other hand, this has never been Diaspora*'s own development or achievement, and it doesn't directly federate with Mastodon or any other Fediverse project, save for those select few.
Besides, if Diaspora* counted as part of the Fediverse, then so should e-mail, WordPress and everything that uses RSS. Friendica and Hubzilla federate with these as well. Those of you who follow me should find in their Mastodon timelines two automatically reposted blog posts per week from a blog which I've subscribed to via RSS. Hubzilla can do that.
Speaking of Hubzilla, entire hubs without ActivityPub are another edge-case. They don't connect to any projects that only know ActivityPub. However, they, too, can indirectly communicate with ActivityPub instances through either Friendica (by means of the Diaspora* protocol unless that's turned off, too) or Streams-based instances (Streams' Nomad is basically a newer version of Hubzilla's Zot, so both speak a common language).
Nonetheless, I dare say there's no denying that Hubzilla itself is part of the Fediverse.
@Scott, present & accounted for No, it's controversial because some people don't want the FULLY DECENTRAL Fediverse to depend on and be controlled through a CENTRAL service.
And some other people want the whole of the Fediverse to be one big centralised, monolithic Twitter-clone silo for their own convenience.
@Codex ☯️♈☮ The "anti-search" minority is not anti-search per se.
But Fediverse-wide search is only technically possible with something central. And what these people do not want is any kind of central elements in the Fediverse.
Anything central, be it search or whatever, will allow one single person or one group of people to assume control and power over the whole Fediverse. Some say that Eugen Rochko already has too much power as he a) is the developer behind 99% of the Fediverse, b) can basically dictate in which way all other Fediverse projects develop, otherwise they stop being compatible with Mastodon, and c) runs the two biggest Mastodon instances.
It's even worse when some happy-go-lucky fellow who seems to neither know nor care about FLOSS launches a no-opt-in, not-even-opt-out central search engine for the Fediverse and makes it proprietary and closed-source. Not only could he take over the whole Fediverse, but you can't even check the inner workings of the search engine to see whether or not it's prepared for just that.
A central search engine could also be or become the property of a for-profit company. For one, this means that search results are being filled with ad spam by paying customers, and/or searches are being sold to Google or any other Big Data hoarder and broker. Besides, the for-profit that runs the search engine could be bought out by some Silicon Valley gigacorporation. And with it essentially the whole Fediverse because the whole Fediverse depends on it.
Allegedly "anti-search" people only appear to be anti-search because all attempts at creating a Fediverse-wide or even only Mastodon-wide search functionality were centralised. And because all widely-known attempts at creating something central were search crawlers.
As I've said elsewhere, there can be assumed to be only two kinds of Android apps on the Google Play Store.
One, those that are also on F-Droid. F-Droid requires everything to be #OpenSource, for F-Droid compiles all apps itself. You can't submit binary blobs to F-Droid, even if they're licensed under the GPL.
Two, everything else. Unless it explicitly says otherwise, everything else has to be taken as #ClosedSource. And non-free, closed-source apps are way more often than not ripe with libraries that "phone home" to Google and Facebook. With no user consent. With no chance to opt out other than by third-party means. Without even telling the user. In fact, even if an app is said to be open-source, that doesn't mean that the binary blob submitted to Google was built from the publicly-available sources.
iOS doesn't even have anything like F-Droid. And iOS puts obstacles in the way of providing open-source apps.
Unfortunately, he seems to refuse to react upon bug reports for fediverse.info, whether they come from the Fediverse or via Matrix.
Unlike Tootfinder, fediverse.info wasn't created for and geared towards only Mastodon; after all, it comes "from the makers of" Pixelfed.
However, it still doesn't work with Hubzilla. It does work with Friendica, but it doesn't work with Hubzilla. I've written @dansup a number of times via the Fediverse and once via Matrix. I haven't even received a reply yet.
#Proprietary, #NonFree, #Commercial, #ClosedSource iPhone and (maybe) Android apps which secretly siphon all data they can and sell it to Google and Facebook without the user ever noticing, much less consenting to it.
This is particularly tempting on iOS where it's very difficult to offer #FreeLibreOpenSourceSoftware because the Apple App Store makes it almost impossible to comply with certain #FreeSoftware licenses, and other app sources are basically illegal AFAIK.
On Android, one could say that apps on the Google Play Store are either also available on F-Droid or closed-source spyware that secretly hands your private data over to Google and Facebook.
Probably not only over the search issue, but generally over what the #Fediverse shall be.
One faction is the "old guard" that values Free Software, open-source, privacy, actual security, decentrality, federation, online services developed and run by the community etc. Many of them have been around before there was Mastodon, and Mastodon was launched in 2016. These people typically use the Fediverse through a desktop browser running on GNU/Linux.
They strongly oppose any central/centralistic structures in the Fediverse. They've got very good reasons to do so. The same goes for commercial, for-profit entities bringing proprietary, non-free products into the Fediverse.
The other faction makes up the vast majority of the #TwitterMigration newcomers. They don't care for any of the above. All they want is the Fediverse as a whole to be as easy to understand and to use as Twitter. Many only use the Fediverse through the official Mastodon app on an iPhone or a smartphone with manufacturer-issued Android.
They staunchly demand there be central structures if they make things easier for them. In fact, I guess many would love to see the whole Fediverse being reduced to only Mastodon and then Mastodon being turned into a centralised, monolithic silo so that nobody will ever have to know what instances are and choose one ever again.
Oh, and they usually absolutely despise tech-talk with a raging, burning passion. Even more so if it's about something they neither know nor understand (Free Software, open-source, Linux, Nextcloud, Raspberry Pi, anything in the Fediverse that isn't Mastodon, what happens behind their Mastodon app etc.).
Platform-wise, I can see a split happen between Mastodon and everything else. Mastodon doesn't care if it's compatible to anything else. It's increasingly becoming a walled garden within the Fediverse. I can actually see it either deliberately break existing ActivityPub standards or even fork ActivityPub or invent its own protocol if that's more convenient than sticking to vanilla ActivityPub.
The more difficult it becomes for other projects to federate with Mastodon, the more projects might decide it's no longer worth trying if it meant they'd have to overthrow basic principles of their own. They might even gradually introduce something more sophisticated than ActivityPub, e.g. Nomad, and then abandon ActivityPub, also to get out of reach of ActivityPub-introducing corporate silos such as Tumblr.
1. Correct. Just because Mastodon doesn't use a term, doesn't mean the Fediverse as a whole doesn't use it yet. For example, the community page on Friendica is pretty much the same as the federated timeline on Mastodon. And you cannot force a 13-year-old project (Friendica is older than Diaspora*, not to mention Mastodon) to change its lingo so you can re-define a word previously used by it.
2. The danger here is that most people only know the term "server" from Discord where a "server" is a glorified chatroom which resides on the same actual server as all the other ones. That's their definition. If you talk to them about, for example, your own Akkoma server, you might mean a dedicated piece of hardware, maybe a machine running at your home. They, however, are likely to believe you refer to a chatroom or community which you've created on a centralised online service.
There you have it, everyone: The term "community" is already widely being used by #Friendica and has been for longer than Mastodon has been around.
On the other hand, #Streams does use the term "community" for instances in the sense of instances connected to one particular instance based on Streams, for example, here. "Community type" refers to the project as which an instance identifies itself.
Mein "Geburtstag" ist natürlich nicht mein Geburtstag, sondern mein Rezztag. Seit dem Tag gibt es meinen ersten Avatar.Meine "Homepage" ist mein Blog zum selben Thema wie dieser Kanal, #OpenSim und virtuelle Welten im allgemeinen. Es ist im Fediverse und sollte föderieren mit Mastodon, Pleroma und Friendica, hat aber auch einen Atom-Feed.#OpenSim #OpenSimulator #VirtualWorlds #VirtuelleWelten #Metaverse #Metaversum #SocialVR #fedi22