Topic-based mailing lists and IRC channels were a huge part of the Internet when I grew up. For those a li’l younger, think subreddits or tumblr tags, or Discord servers. Now, ActivityPub doesn’t support hashtags well but FEP-1b12 can be the ticket here.
To me this is a throwback to when the internet was manageable and cozy and fun. Yeah, yeah, there are some super toxic subreddits and tumblr tags and there were some epic and super damaging email flamewars. It doesn’t solve everything. But it’s damage control.
It’s also the kind of discoverability that I think is good: topic based, rather than “trending” algorithm based, or, worst of all, “promoted”.
This is what I’m kinda looking forward too the most, if the tech improves a lot. Right now on Akkoma I don’t really feel like assigning my posts to groups because ideally I also want them to stand on their own just the way they are now. I want them to both be posted to relevant groups and to be part of my own personal li’l microblog mix.
It also doesn’t make sense to strive for a Fedi where every server mirrors every post. It’s just that architecturally, email was a much more scalable model: each server had their accounts and each topic list sent only to the relevant accounts. IRC works similarly, as does XMPP.
Fedi even has the potential to be even an even more scalable implementation of this model than email since on email, list email was typically still duplicated for every user in the spool (you can’t rdfind them since the headers are not identical) but on Fedi, the back end is relational so there only has to be one entry per post. I know, I know, penny-wise department, but still.
Here is a timeline I do not want to head down. One of the worst parts of the post-September internet are these huge celebs. Instead of “Here is the mailing list for Werewolf: the Apocalypse, let’s talk together” it’s “Hello adoring fans here are my favorite brands of the day”.
I’m into participatory culture, and this is not that.
This is what Instagram, Twitter, BSky and Threads are set up to be, and YouTube too. “Viral” successes. Do not want.😰
There’s some enthusiasm for authorized fetch now and I’m a li’l hesitant to get behind that. Authorized fetch is fine on its own, good even 👍🏻,and I’ve got it on too, but when you combine it with the “disallow unauthenticated API access” setting, the only way to interact with a post is if it has gotten onto your server somehow, by someone on your server following the account.
That really pushes the network towards a handful of larger servers all mirroring each other.
It’s not Fedi, is the problem. It’s taking the underlying tech stack from Fedi and using it to create basically private web forums. A more confusing and slow version of phpBB.
I don’t blame anyone for wanting this because heaven knows the untamed Fedi is a horror-ridden place but it’s kind of off-topic to a discussion of what Fedi should be. It’s using the server stacks (like Mastodon) to build something that’s not federated or only semi-federated.
Overall, I’m not super happy about this timeline either.
My dislike of the wide-open Fedi-world is clashing a bit with my FOSS-brained fear of silos here. I think having multiple servers hook up and talk to each other is just neat. It’s something the web 1 era did great and something the web 2.0 era lost.
I normally use Fedi in a really “indie web” style way: I browse other instances through their public interfaces or through RSS/Atom and when I find something I wanna reply to or favorite, I import just that one post to my instance. The import is still gonna work through authorized fetch, but finding the post in the first place is gonna get blocked if the only way to read the post is through authenticated API access.
To get specific, this works whether or not AF is on:
wget https://idiomdrottning.org/users/Sandra/feed.atom
While this only works when AF is off:
wget --header \
'Accept: application/ld+json; profile="https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams"'\
-qO- https://idiomdrottning.org/users/Sandra
If Bonfire’s tech had panned out, that would’ve been a much better to have a li’l bit of a private life in a federated world. There could be Diaspora-like circles to have different parts of our lives, having some things public and others friends only. I never used Google Plus but I got the impression that it worked similarly.
Combining that with topics and that might be the perfect life right there.
The UX could be “I want to post this to friends, fam, and these three world-readable topics: RPG, D&D, OSR” or “I wanna post this one to fam only”. Pretty great, right?