Prove it wrong: the fediverse is not as connected as we're told, and it's splintering even more now.

Submitted ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨PlasticPigeon@lemmy.world⁩ to ⁨fediverse@lemmy.world⁩

This is what makes the Fediverse so frustrating, been using: #Kbin #FireFish #Mastodon #Friendica #IceShrimp #Lemmy.

And no, they don’t speak to one another / find one another or are able to follow / like / reply to one another as one is told the Fediverse works.

The truth: some speak to some, and it rarely works both ways. Eg. Mastodon can do a lot more interacting with Lemmy, but not the other way around.

And then there are those that defederate from their own kind / federated social network, splintering the Fediverse even further apart.

Have had to either join new servers + delete current accounts, just because the server that was suggested, happened to be a server that others chose to defederate with.

Now with many accounts + many instances, been trying to find the best place to just have one space in the Fediverse + be able to communicate, follow and interact with other Fediverse users.

Maybe it’s this is wrong, but this has been the experience for almost a year now.

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ThatOneKirbyMain2568@kbin.social ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I think there are a few culprits here.

Not everything wants to be an everything app. While everything in the fediverse uses ActivityPub, that doesn't mean everything has to aim to be interoperable. I wrote a lengthy rant about this here, but essentially, it's important to have things with a more specific, restricted purpose if we want the fediverse to be accessible. If someone just wants a thread aggreegator (i.e., just Reddit's style of media), they shouldn't be forced to grapple with microblogging features more fit for a Twitter-like. There are some platforms that aim to combine different media types—Kbin/Mbin has both thread aggregation and microblogging, and I've heard that Friendica tries to work well with everything. Even so, if someone wants federated Reddit, they should be able to have federated Reddit, and Lemmy aims to provide that. The same way that Pixelfed (an image-sharing platform like Instagram) doesn't need to incorporate Reddit-style threads or Twitter-style microblogs, Lemmy doesn't have to do it all.

Federation is still in the works. Something to keep in mind is that most of these platforms are early in development and still working out a lot of bugs. Kbin (the platform I use) is an obvious example due to its currently incredibly spotty microblog federation (tho I've heard that Mbin has implemented fixes to fare better in this regard). We have to be patient while all the kinks are worked out. As much as we all wish it didn't, software development takes time—a lot of it.

Admins can sometimes be a bit trigger-happy with defederation. I don't think the fediverse has quite grasped that defederation is essentially the nuclear bomb of instance moderation tools, cutting off interaction with all users of an instance. While there are times where this is justified (even preemptively, such with Threads imo), there are times where the nuke has been threatened over a quarrel between admins or disagreements about other defederations. Hopefully, this will cool down as the fediverse matures, but we'll have to see how that pans out (especially with Threads federation growing ever nearer).
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- PlasticPigeon@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Wrote a very long reply, and lost it when starring your post… :-(
  
  In short: Thanks for all the great info and went down quite the rabbit hole with that link to your post, that linked to another person’s post. Great discussions happening there. :-)
  
  But it seems like Friendica or RSS might be the way to go. It’s not about posting videos to Peertube from Mastodon, but about having a hub to follow and interact on other networks like PF, PT, Lemmy, Kbin, FF, etc.
  
  Thanks again!
  
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  - ThatOneKirbyMain2568@kbin.social ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Oof, that's never fun. When I'm typing a long comment, I always spam copy it so that I can paste it back if I end up losing it. On PC, you can even use Windows+V to pull up a clipboard history, which has come in handy more than once.
    
    Anywho, glad my reply was helpful! There are a lot of ways to interact with the content on the fediverse, and it seems like you're well on your way to finding one that works best for you. Hope you enjoy it here!
    
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Waluigis_Talking_Buttplug@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Personally, I find it no different than how there are multiple websites and multiple forums on the internet. Reddit, stack exchange, other types of forums dedicated to specific topics, etc

You DONT need the “best” source of content, you don’t need to be connected to everyone, you don’t need to have access to all information all the time.

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- PlasticPigeon@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Understood, but this is not about getting everything in one place or being connected to everything. It’s about the fact that it sounds like you can connect to all (federated) instances and networks (Lemmy, Mastodon, Pixelfed) etc. But in reality it’s still very fragmented, and more people and servers are defederating all the more.
  
  So yes Lemmy’s aggregation makes sense there, Pixelfed’s photos, or Peertube’s videos make sense there. But a lot of sites (eg. Wiki example in original post) and videos watched on the fediverse topic, make it sound like you can create an account in one place and then reply, like, comment etc on the other networks as well.
  
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mozz@mbin.grits.dev ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
There's no real "manager" that any of us can turn this complaint in to to try to produce a solution unfortunately.

I actually decided to switch to kbin / mbin specifically because it makes an effort to be interoperable between the big 2 (Mastodon and Lemmy), so I could interact with both and specifically partly so I could try to understand what the issues are the make it this way and maybe in some small way help to make it better. Seems like mbin in particular is actually really trying hard to be well-interoperable and I have a small list of changes to mbin that would be nice for making the federation better (esp between mbin and Mastodon).

I think it'll always be this way to a certain extent; it's a little like the old web, where it was a big messy anarchy and honestly didn't always work perfectly, just because that's the nature of things.

But yes, I agree it should be better than now. Honestly it seems to me like ActivityPub was designed with a little too much looseness in it, in the name of making it possible for people to do creative stuff with it, and that's what's causing some of the incompatibility issues. But I don't even really understand the issues well enough to say that for sure, just my observations so far.

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- PlasticPigeon@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Thanks for the info, makes sense, went and read up some more on Mbin now, and strangely most of their instances are named under Kbin…
  
  Tried to do a search on Lemmy and Kbin on a post from Beehaw, and it couldn’t find anything. So will have to check if Beehaw has blocked them or something.
  
  It seems that Friendica (using it via the @phanpy@hachyderm.io 3rd part Mastodon app, that it can reach and comment on Beehaw just fine. Read somewhere on one of the replies on the post that Friendica / RSS might just be the best bet in interacting with most / everything in the fediverse.
  
  So will be doing more tests on that.
  
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  - mozz@mbin.grits.dev ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Beehaw is a server which runs on Lemmy so I doubt they have Lemmy blocked -- maybe search is just broken. I'd be very surprised to see that any servers are blocking the names of other softwares or something; that's actually a perfect example of the type of user-hostile behavior that I think you'll see less of here as compared with Reddit / Facebook. Maybe with some political issues you might see something like that but to "defeat" some other type of software? I think basically never.
    
    mbin is a quite recent fork of kbin; it's likely that some people have switched to mbin but still have their server name set to kbin from before, and don't want to change it.
    
    And yeah, Friendica might be a really good option; I know nothing about it but as I understand it, it tries to talk to pretty much everything.
    
    And you're welcome! Glad my info was useful.
    
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PlasticPigeon@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
HOPING TO EXPLAIN BETTER:

Sorry. Perhaps the thoughts were not clear, but have watched a lot of videos and even Wikipedia makes it seem like they are all social networks and that one can follow / post / reply on the other networks:

It isn’t about following everything and everyone, but about not wanting to have a Pixelfed account to follow a photographer, or not needing a Lemmy account to follow interesting topics, or not needing a Mastodon account to follow a blogger / writer. It is perhaps then a bit oversimplified on the “intro to the fediverse” videos / posts that’s been seen on the web. Was hoping to have one single account on any of the above, and then just interact from there, and not needing an account for every single one of them.

Source: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fediverse

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