I’m happy to announce that the a.gup.pe Mastodon groups now federate into Lemmy. Previously they were just empty communities, but now they’re being filled with content. Fantastic news.
You can see the federation working properly at !bookstodon@a.gup.pe
If this has been the case for ages and I’m just the last person to notice, I’m sorry.
Oh I’ve heard.
But it’s not surprising. Mastodon mainly sees the fediverse as a mastoverse with “other things attached” and gargron mainly sees mastodon as his personal project with “other people attached”. It’s a bit harsh, but there’s enough truth to it, especially for an ecosystem/platform that has as its core ideology cooperative diversity and connectivity.
All of that being said, I think a good amount of blame falls to the protocol. With a good enough protocol and set of guarantees around what compliance with it entails, it shouldn’t matter whether someone like gargron behaves in this way (where to be fair, he’s built by far the biggest platform over many years now), as compliance with the “standard” protocol should preclude his ability to arbitrarily push things around like this.
But the protocol is very soft. And I think a time is coming, if it isn’t here already, where the creators of the protocol are going to rue how much they’ve left up to developers like gargron who will suck the “standard” out of AcitivityPub. I say this may already have happened already because there are calls (which are very reasonable IMO) to take the mastodon API and basically make it a standard, not least because other platforms are adopting as a de facto standard already. And of course the biggest, sometimes desperate/emotional push back against this I’ve seen has been from one of the authors of the ActivityPub (evan, if you know them), because there’s apparently something in ActivityPub that should be used instead but no body as really heard of and which I’ve heard is kinda crappy and vague (not unlike the rest of the standard perhaps?).
Bottom line is that ActivityPub needed gargron and mastodon to prove that something good could be made with it and they may regret the bed they’ve made. What ActivityPub should have done from the start is dedicate efforts to the creation of standardised software, at least for testing purposes, so that there was some sort of standard at the functioning software level for developers to work against. THere are efforts along those lines now, but it may turn out to be too late and one of those things every fediverse developer is “supposed” to use and contribute to but don’t bother because they’re too busy getting their platform/app to work with mastodon.
EDIT:
And on that note, an interesting project in the fediverse is
vocata(https://codeberg.org/Vocata/vocata), because it tries to make the server as generic as possible and instead require the client (ie browser or mobile app) to make all the decisions.What can we do to improve this situation?
Great question!
I honestly don’t know.
My best bet is that there needs to be another platform that’s roughly as big and successful as mastodon so that there’s some balance. Preferably, that second platform should be more mindful of the importance of standards and inter operation.
Lemmy/kbin and other threadiverse alternatives have potential here, especially if they can themselves work well together and get as much synergy as possible from each others efforts.
Otherwise, all the people making alternative microblogging platforms should take the job more seriously and consider banding together into an organisation that really aims to provide a stable alternative. Currently Bonfire seems to have the most promise in this regard, and with out knowing too much about them, I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re a big deal in a year’s time, as there’s so much potential to show mastodon users that hats really possible on the fediverse outside of gargron’s influence.
At an even broader level, I hope BlueSky does well and shakes up the fediverse by showing what else can be done with a different approach. However centralised and corporatised BlueSky is relative to the fediverse, if BlueSky kinda eat the fediverse’s lunch, I think it will be mostly deserved for the simple reason that BlueSky appear to be putting UX as the first priority and decentralisation as the second. For social media, this seems like the correct approach if you want users that aren’t running Linux BTWTM.
Even more broadly, users having conversations about the general values they want from their platforms and speaking up about them with a willingness to use their feet when the time comes is probably a net good.