Is it really decentralized and private?
this post was submitted on 19 Nov 2023
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Privacy
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I'm with you. The problem is that this promise is mostly empty, at least at the moment.
ActivityPub, from what I've gleaned, is too vague and open ended and under-developed in terms of software for this to be true. The result is that each platform is implementing a sub-set of the protocol and often adding their own custom twists/additions to it. Which means that just because two platforms use ActivityPub does not mean at all that those two platforms can communicate in anyway. And, even if they can communicate, there's no guarantee at all that this will be usable.
The interaction between lemmy and mastodon is illustrative. Technically they can communicate, and at times this can work well. But the two platforms are hardly mutually enriching each other because the interactions between them are fairly limited in number. And that's because they don't talk to each other well. Some of that is because they've implemented different parts of the protocol. Some of it is also their differences in design and UI/UX that just add too much friction to consuming and meaningfully interacting with content from the other platform.
What's more, this problem is fairly predictable and has been criticised as a false promise in the past. At the moment, I'd say it's fair to say that ActivityPub has not been proven as a way to enable communication between substantially different platforms. That might change over time, though I suspect the load on developers to make that happen will remain high without some major foundational work.
But right now, unless there's something I don't know/understand, I don't see the extra-platform capabilities of ActivityPub playin any role in the success of the fediverse in competition with BlueSky, at least as far as Mastodon is concerned which, as a platform, is relatively happy just doing its own thing.
I quite disagree. Of course interoperability is not going to be a perfect one to one - that's in the nature of these being different services. You don't want threads from a link aggregater taking over your microblogging feed.
Yet it's normal for Mastodon users to join in on the conversation here. From their perspective they never left Mastodon - from my perspective, I never left kbin - and you, for your part, think it's all happening within Lemmy. But it's really not. So these things happen all the time, it's just that you don't necessarily notice unless you check the domain of the person you're responding to. Mastodon users of course often leave in the @-tags, making them a bit easier to identify.
Lemmy is a bit more isolated than Kbin, as it is not integrating microblogs at all. That's a decision on the side of the developers, not a weakness of the ActivityPub protocol.
Well, as neither of us are presenting or citing data on this, we can’t be sure.
Personally I care about this and keep a bit of a lookout for it and have in the past tried to advocate for and create more cross-platform talk. In my experience, and from what I’ve heard from others, the UX friction from the mastodon end makes it mostly a dead end. So while some cross talk certainly happens, I’d estimate it’s quite minor and meaningless in so far as we’re talking about it as a salient strength of ActivityPub compared to its competitor ATProto.
What this misses is whether the protocol makes it easier or harder for developers to ”decide” to allow for more inter-platform cross talk. Part of my critique was that the protocol and its general design isn’t making this easier. Kbin, for instance, doesn’t truly support microblogging. And the lemmy devs have acknowledged that allowing users to be followed like communities would be good but is just too hard right now.
The question then is whether the protocol could have made this easier for platform devs, either through its design or through providing fundamental tooling that enables developers more and removed the need for constant wheel-reinvention. From what I’ve heard from actual developers working with the protocol, they’re real technical critiques to be made around how hard it is to work with. So I believe that it isn’t helping anyone interested in making something new and interesting with it (which has yet to be done IMO, though kbin gets close ).
What do you mean kbin doesn't really support microblogging?
The only real issue I can think of right now is that it does not display videos or polls yet, but for being an early version of a software developed primarily by one guy as a hobby project those are pretty minor omissions.
I could be wrong about this … but as I understand, you can’t see a feed of microblogs/posts from people that you follow. Instead everything is viewed through magazines, which pickup microblogs but combine them with the ordinary threadiverse content posted to those magazines. Following people and viewing their personal posts is, I’d say, the essence of microblogging.
Not a criticism of kbin at all BTW … easily the youngest platform on the fediverse but doing quite well it seems with already a fork that’s doing well too (mbin).
Hi @maegul, actually you can track people you follow in the /sub feed at https://kbin.social/sub/microblog. It might seem a bit chaotic, with what looks like random posts, but in reality, each of them has a response from someone you follow (or an boost post/comment). But you're right, it's not perfect yet, and the presentation will be improved in the coming weeks/months to highlight specific comments from people you follow on front. I'll probably write about it in my devlog soon ;)
Thanks Ernest!! Hope you’re going well and kbin development isn’t too much of a burden!!
I’ve seen that view before, and just checked it now again. It still feels like there’s more in the feed than should be. I’m probably missing some of the boosts etc that you cite, but it feels to me like some posts are coming in without it being clear why they’re there. My guess has always been that my subscriptions are playing a role somehow.
Anyway, hope the new changes go well!! And thanks for the response!
I will also separate this feed with the ability to track only users, excluding communities.
The option to keep followed users and subscribed communities separate in the feed will be great!
Really impressed by the pace of progress lately - it's very much appreciated. You're building something special here. :)
We're building this together, I just add a few extra lines of code to it all ;-)
Could you maybe give users the ability to exclude certain communities/hashtags? Some hashtags associated with communities like #fediverse seem to be overused to the point that following it barely filters content.