nodebb and discourse are working on activitypub support. See https://crag.social/@devnull/111732273308478221

Entirely unmoderated tags are not an option for lemmy as the moderation workload would be too much. Additionally users being able to type out tags themselves introduces splintering in the tag contents due to typos. A better solution is a curated list of tags users can attach to their posts

I vehemently disagree with the main idea behind this RFC. Just let users put arbitrary tags on their posts and other users can search for whatever tags they want. The rest of the fediverse has unmoderated hashtags and it works fine. I don’t see a good reason hashtags should require moderation. And typos can be corrected by editing the post.

Adding those restrictions just makes this feature more complex than it needs to be and reduces compatibility with the fediverse. Users of any fediverse software can create a post in a lemmy community and those posts may have arbitrary tags. Why should lemmy users have less capability on lemmy than external users?

Finally, hashtags could be a useful way to filter posts within a community if these restrictions are dropped. I posted this in the github thread, but imagine a general programming community. Posts could be tagged with a language, paradigm (OOP, functional, etc), or whatever else to allow users to browse subtopics within a community. Having to request moderators add a tag is an unnecessary extra step.

This is exciting. I think code forges are one of the biggest opportunities for ActivityPub to really go mainstream and change the internet. Not only because it’ll make working with open source way easier since you can work with any compatible forge, but developers will be more exposed to ActivityPub just by working with the software and so more likely to participate in AP dev. It will be interesting to see what effect this has on the fediverse. There’s been a lot of talk from various organizations/companies but this will be the first large project adopting AP. I’m interested to see how development goes for them and for other fediverse projects.

I wonder what changes it will force on Mastodon. Masto won’t be the biggest project anymore and won’t be able to throw its weight around as much. Just like the recent influx of users forced the implementation of full text search and has reenergized conversations about quote posts, I think federated gitlab would force masto to rethink some things.

Not really. There was a recent article that came out that said tumblr is still losing money. I don’t see them spending time and money on something that doesn’t have a direct monetization strategy, especially since their userbase isn’t actually asking for ActivityPub

The numbers for lemmy are probably way outdated. Take a look at https://lemmyverse.net/communities. It lists 636 instances but FediDB only has 302. And remember most of this growth has only come in the past week or two.

Also, mastodon only has 1.25 million active users according to FediDB, though that’s probably outdated too.

This article seems needlessly antagonistic. Lemmy and kbin are new software (kbin has been live for about a month). Of course there are incompatibilities right now. Those will be worked out. Also, I’m not really sure which incompatibilities they’re talking about. Lemmy/Kbin posts show up and can be replied to on other fediverse services. you can even create a post in a lemmy community from a microblog acct.

A key thing to remember is that the entire fediverse is built by hobbyists. Gargron and mastodon did a bunch of marketing to get grants/donations but the rest of the fediverse is built by individual people in their free time. Fixing these issues will take much longer than a corporate network would take.

Sidenote: There is no primary fediverse application. I know they meant mastodon because its the most well known but that’s happenstance and bad journalism. Mastodon wasn’t the first fediverse application and I think lemmy/kbin will outgrow it soon.

EDIT: To address OPs callout:

no one has done an especially good job explaining why the fediverse is better than centralized solutions

This feels like the author is ignoring a lot of writing about this. The main argument is its better because you’re not beholden to someone else’s interests, especially corporate interests that will never be aligned with the average user. (See reddit debacle)

It’s not as common to push users to apps on desktop, but its a tried-and-true practice on mobile. I’m sure companies would do it if they could, but app stores and app lockin aren’t as strong on desktop as on mobile

Users can block those with extensions so the data isn’t as reliable

A lot of kbin users are coming from reddit and don’t care about its additional (microblogging) features. Using a Lemmy-API powered app would give them exactly the experience they’re looking for. And there’s nothing stopping these Lemmy-API apps from adding support for the kbin extended api.

Fedilab is an app that was originally built for Mastodon and uses the mastoapi but also supports some Pleroma specific features. Apps don’t need to be directly one-to-one tied to services.

The lead dev of kbin has said he’s evaluating implementing the API.

kbin has a totally different backend and also additional functionality that is not available in Lemmy apps.

This doesn’t make it less likely. They can implement the lemmy api for compatible features and add their own api (or more likely use the masto-api) for the other features.

there is an initiative for federated git “forges” called ForgeFed. I’m on mobile but will find some links when I’m on desktop

ah you’re right. I misread the section that mentioned that and thought there wouldn’t be any public post pages. Thanks for the clarification.

And mastodon has consistently used platform-centric thinking over interoperability since its start. You can notice how whenever gargron talks about groups, he doesn’t mention any of the current implementations and the masto team is rarely involved in FEP or interoperability conversations (other than to defend their own stance)

Here’s hoping that the mastodon team actually pays attention to this when they start their group implemenation

Not only is it exciting that they’re adding ActivityPub support, but its great that they’re basing their implementation off of Lemmy. Up til now, most implementations have been from scratch and implement federation after the project has gotten up and running and then do federation testing. That leads to different assumptions about models/flows and inconsistencies and hacks to get it working. Working off of another implementation’s federation guide will mean less hacks but still leave room for impl-specific features and workflows.

While I agree with the EFF that the fediverse could become “the fabric of the social web”, I think this article is slightly off. Their argument is about the fediverse and how it’s based on ActivityPub and so could be used for many different types of interactions. But they were arguing against the idea that mastodon is a failed twitter clone. I think the article they’re replying to is right; mastodon is a twitter clone that misses what hardcore twitter users like about it. Everything the EFF wrote about the fediverse is right, but that has nothing to do with whether mastodon is a decent twitter alternative or not becuase mastodon is not the fediverse.

I don’t know much about open source licensing. What’s wrong with the SSPL and what does that have to do with mongo?

Complaining that you’ve been banned for a seemingly innocuous post isn’t proof that you deserved to be banned. If the author is telling the full story, the admin(s) of their instance were in the wrong.

And this is a legitimate issue. If new fedi users try out an instance and get banned without warning, they’re unlikely to try another instance. I want the fediverse to have a wider array of people and conversations happening, but that can’t happen if admins are quick to ban instead of engaging their users.

just because the (corporate) internet works this way now, doesn’t mean it should

The web worked this way before there was a large corporate presence. Scraping was common during the blogosphere period and robots.txt was the solution everyone at the time agreed on and that’s been the standard ever since.

I’m happy that you’re comfortable with this model, but I don’t want people who operate like this to intrude on the spaces we’re building to get away from it

We’re not intruding on this space. We’ve been in the fediverse for just as long or longer; the fediverse has been scrapable since 2008.

cool bot. thanks to whoever wrote this