Monkey With A Shell

It can also be an awesome idea, depending on your perspective. Having an instance without all the cruft is a pristine peaceful thing at times. For a while I ran one of those subscriber bots on Lemmy and pretty quickly found it to be so full of shitposting spam as to be unusable. Just don’t start an instance and expect it to be a raging party and you won’t find it disappointing.

In those two cases I’d think the Friendica/Hubzilla apps and the Lemmy/K-Bin apps would fit those two needs respectively. I’ve also bookmarked this thing called Fire fish that seems to have potential as a sort of all-of-the-above effort that could prove interesting, just don’t want to see something that tries to be too much at once and fails at all of it as a result though.

A big part of the problems in anything on the fediverse as a professional presentation is that very little of the software is really well polished. Mastodon is probably the most ‘pretty’ of any of them right now that I’m familiar with, but there’s always the balancing act with new software between working well and looking good/friendly that takes some time to hammer out, particularly if there isn’t a massive development team backing it.

Given the way this is tagged up with the @ and # throughout the comments I’m venturing it originated on Mastodon, yet here I am commenting on it from a Lemmy instance. Some of the inconsistencies of the federation between different platforms are going to come down to them each having different focuses, and that’s plenty good. Trying to jam every functionality into a single platform is likely to result in it doing none of them well.

For my part having the ability to see one from another is a neat bonus, but not the main driver of use. The format and style of interactions leads me more towards things like Lemmy/K-Bin where some find Mastodon, Pixelfed, or any of the Friendica/Hubzilla style page base ones to be their thing. It’s even possible people like more than one. I host both a Mastodon and Lemmy instance, and have toyed with others but didn’t find them compelling enough to maintain.

So no, the notion of talking across platforms isn’t so much the huge point of the fedi in my mind, but toss that in with the ability to do what you want to do similar to any of the big social platforms (they all pretty much have some kind of fedi counterpart now) without selling your soul to the corporate overlords is pretty fn awesome

Federated ID seems interesting but impractical. Take your home instance ID and use it to auth to another server, nice to have if the home base is down but if the home is down then how does the remote host validate the user in a realtime sense? Storing tokens or creating a local version of the account would be possible but if the user was banned from the home base then you have to trust replication to clear it from the remotes or have a short enough token expiration to know they need to revalidate against the home base after X time.

A ways out of my expertise, I work more on the lower layers of connectivity so maybe I’m overthinking it. What could be helpful would some sort of local app setup that would create an instance with an easy executable. Creating spontaneous servers has playing with fire potential and doesn’t address domain creation or port allocations, but with the certbot/acme systems out there it seems like it wouldn’t be too far out of the realm of reality. Musings of a mad scientist…

I’ll have to check that out if nothing else but for the name. Friend of mine and I have had a running gag for 20+ years around ‘firefish’.

I guess that depends on if the federated users receive content via a push or poll method, and I’m not sure how that’s done in Lemmy. If the subscribing user is just requesting content from the home base and pushing their comments/posts up to it then even the home server wouldn’t nessesarily know the user count, just the number of instances polling it. From what I’ve seen trying to clean out communities ( ran a subscriber bot too long and blew up my DB to obnoxious levels ) though is if the home server thinks there is anyone subscribed though it will still look to push content to the remote end, so based on that I would think the home server should have an accurate-ish count of the total users.

https://fediverse.observer/

Not super consistent but it does place all kinds of services on a map.

*When you reccomend the site that the OP came from to as a solution to a followup post… 🫤 stil it works. Also found out today that when you put the site through cloudflare it takes it off the map which is kind of a +/-

Not sure what you mean by anonymously here. There’s not a ready list of subscribers for a list, though it can be seen in a site’s data. Account migration isn’t there yet but you can subscribe to the same communities from any instance assuming there’s no federation issues at one of them.

You can generally read from a community without subscribing too, but to post of course you need to either subscribe remotely or be logged in on the home server of the community, otherwise we would end up with a bunch of 4chan style ‘anon’ posts.

I don’t think I’ve gotten any kind of screen notice either, or are you talking about after opening rhe app? Is it even a thing to show up like when you get a text/email? There’s also an option in there to send notices to email if that’s the kind of thing you want.

It’s similar to how Reddit looked on most of the 3rd party apps I’ve ever tried, though that was mostly via Relay4Reddit. Makes for a nice collapsible tree to skip threads that might go off the rails, though I haven’t seen too much of that here yet. Also, welcome to fedi-space!