The official apps for Android & iOS are getting ready to be released for Beta testing very soon. I’m not sure but there may be a FOSS third party app out for Android already
You know, every time I’ve tried to take a look at Solid’s protocol, I find myself struggling to understand what they’re actually trying to do, or how any of it is supposed to work.
I’ve tried to read the protocol spec several times, and my brain just kind of melts. From their About page for the Solid project, I kind of get what they’re talking about, but so much of the under-the-hood stuff feels really vague.
I’m not against making a fediverse platform support Solid, if only to support the core concepts its promoting, but I feel like they have a lot of work to do to make their own project more accessible to people.
I think you’re spot on with account thing. When I first came to the fediverse, I thought the distributed system was cool, but then I saw the interoperability between different software and though ok, but why would I want to?
If someone posts a peertube video within the medium of lemmy, I also want to discuss it within the medium of lemmy, after all, there’s a reason they posted it here. I want to do it in this community, using this identity. If I wanted to comment on peertube, I would go to peertube.
So the only benefit I saw was that you could use one account for all my social media, as convenience. But of course, that’s not how it works. The interoperability is just a half baked sending messages thing. Because they are fundamentally different platforms not carefully designed to work perfectly with every other platform in the fediverse. There’s no central account, you sign up for a specific software, on someone’s instance.
I don’t necessarily think it’s a bad thing to have some platforms be specialized around really particular kinds of activities, but I have like 7 different accounts floating around. It’s tiring. I’d really just prefer a good generalist platform and a handful of different apps that all hook into the same account.
That being said, I don’t mind the concept of following someone’s Pixelfed to see their neat photography pics, or another person’s PeerTube to watch their videos. In fact, if my hypothetical server can interoperate with them without any major issues, I’d consider that a win for me.
I don’t think it’s that kind of banned from twitter. The figures behind it seem to associate themselves with Wikileaks and/or Julian Assange. Suzie Dawson, for example, is hosting the video presentations about the plaform.
To be clear I don’t mean to shit on the platform, I’m just approaching it with a lot of cynicism. I want to understand what it is and its problems and merits.
Nothing at all! If anything I mentioned it as a point of approval from me, and stating them to clearly not be in the same camp as the banned-from-twitter-because-right-wing-extremists.
Federation is critical to the development of alternative social networks. The reason people use specific social networks is because other people are on them. If there’s an open source social network app that isn’t federated, then everyone using sites powered by that app is isolated. With federation, all instances of the social network can interact with each other. Different instances can pop in and out of existence and the ones that stick around can become popular.
It’s better for new social networks to be federated then isolated.
Instance blocking and user blocking are features, not problems. Most users want to block trolls for example. If you dont like that, you can make your own instance without, or just go back to commercial social media. The rest of your rant seems exclusively to Matrix, not Lemmy. I think you should spend more time here (or on another instance) before you really judge it.
I’ve been using Mastodon for a couple of years now and it’s become significantly more active in that time from what I see anecdotally. That said, I’d say the key question for health is whether the community is big enough to support ongoing development and hosting. I think at this point the answer to both questions is a definite yes. There are millions of users in the Fediverse now, plenty of users are technical and are actively contributing.
I think we’ll see active users fluctuate over time, but I don’t see the core base of users abandoning Fediverse at this point because they’ve already established their social networks here.
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