How ActivityPub is setting the stage to weave all your social media feeds together
How ActivityPub is setting the stage to weave all your social media feeds together
Twitter under Elon Musk’s chaotic reign has seemingly created an opportunity for an alternative microblogging service.
When I see great content here I can always boost via my Mastodon account. Its a great system.
How are you doing that?
Do you mean just manually copying a link, switching into the Mastodon app and pasting it in, or is there a better method?
From kbin, you can just boost it right from the web site.
I use KBin. I can boost via my KBin account, and then boost via my Mastodon account. Alternatively I search the user on Mastodon, find their comment and boost it.
From Mastodon, you can treat Lemmy communities as if they're users (the ActivityPub term, I believe, is "agents"). That means you can follow them, and things posted to the community will get pushed out to you just as if they're Mastodon posts.
You can also subscribe to communities on lemmy to mastodon, subscribe to peertube channels, and via versa. It's pretty cool!
I think that ActivityPub's path to success is to integrate multiple forms of media into a single, messy but interoperable platform. It's like Twitter, Reddit, YouTube and Blogspot in a single place, without needing to sacrifice your preferences. The success is not on specific actors like Lemmy, Kbin, Mastodon... or
ThreatsThreads.The article mentions Eugen's post on Threads joining. I think Eugen underestimates the threats.
A shrinking network is considerably worse than a stagnant one; infrastructure costs take into account the former large size, people start relying on donations and tools that won't be there any more, so goes on. And even the fact that users are leaving prompts other users to disengage, specially if they need to choose "should I spend my time interacting with people in Mastodon/Lemmy/Kbin, or in Threads?". So no, when Threads abandons ActivityPub down the line, Mastodon won't be exactly where it is now, it'll be in a far worse position.
For a simple analogy: Pre-Threads Fediverse will be like a 100k inhabitants city. Post-Threads Fediverse will be like a 1M city decimated back into 100k inhabitants.
I also think that Eugen puts too much weight on brand recognition. Specially as Mastodon is not as widely known as it should.
I also think that Eugen puts too much weight on brand recognition. Specially as Mastodon is not as widely known as it should.
Not sure this tracks. Mastodon, on the fediverse, is stupidly dominant. Like, numerically, the fediverse is mastodon with some other stuff. Even in absolute terms, mastodon's numbers alone qualify it as a social media platform in its own right, though a small one.
Part of this is mastodon's brand recognition. Eugen has been subtly but surely astute with his business decisions, I'd say, walking the line between being a non-profit FOSS project and a normal business (on the mastodon webpage, and now in media, Eugen identifies himself as the CEO).
And now, European governments are using his software to establish their presence on the web, where you should recall Eugen is European (German).
Compared to Meta/Threads, sure Mastodon's brand recognition can't compete. But I wouldn't underestimate the brand recognition he's got. Lots of people now know the name "mastodon".
By "as it should", I mean "as society in general should recognise it". Context here is important - Mastodon is dominant in comparison with other parts of the Fediverse, but still tiny in comparison with Threads, Twitter and the likes. It's a medium fish surrounded by tiny fish, saying "okay, that shark over there may join our pond".
Found out today PeerTube channels can be understood as a Lemmy community. Try this !veronicaexplains_channel@tilvids.com. Comments are even available from the PeerTube side.
@spaduf @igalmarino, almost all fediverse sites are more or less linkable (limited by the corresponding format, which are different), like Lemmy, Mastodon, Friendica, Diaspora......
This is the future!