this post was submitted on 28 Mar 2025
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Fediverse

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A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).

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What do you think about this graphic?

It should give an easy overview of the architecture of the Fediverse and what it differentiates from old social media.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (1 children)

This doesn’t explain things well. Lemmy is like a bunch of Reddits communicating with each other. The graphic makes it seem like there is just one Lemmy. Also, are Lemmy posts on Mastodon? Mastodon was largely empty last I checked.

Edit: I just now noticed the second Lemmy

[–] [email protected] 6 points 6 days ago (2 children)

Mastodon users can subscribe to Lemmy communities I think, but it doesn't really work very well. The Mastodon feed isn't really made to support threaded content so all the Lemmy comments will fill and mess up your feed.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 days ago

I think the ATProtocol is better when it comes to connecting between different social media types. But I think ActivityPub makes better use of different servers.

Though I think something like Lemmy is difficult for both because of how different it is from most other social media types.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 days ago

Also, I really like your username. I learned about that fish from Animal Crossing lol.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

Needs more chains and walls between groups in the top picture. And maybe some ransom notes.

(This is more to try to make you laugh, than useful feedback, sorry. I don't have a very good idea how to actually include these concepts in a simple diagram.)

[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 days ago (1 children)

I just got here but I've noticed this platform is much nicer compared to things like reddit. No bots, no ai softcore porn ads. I'll take the fediverse any day.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Nice to hear. :)

What convinced you to join?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Some people in a left leaning subreddit told me it would be a good backup. Then just yesterday I got perma banned and the admins wouldn't tell me why. So now I'm here

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 days ago
[–] [email protected] 102 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Maybe remove the fediverse in the middle, if I knew nothing about the fediverse it will seem like it is centralized?

[–] [email protected] 76 points 1 week ago (2 children)

John Fediverse is in the middle, holding all the fediverse conmections together.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 week ago

Is his first name John or Join?

[–] [email protected] 68 points 1 week ago (3 children)

I'd say these fall into the same trap that most fediverse explainers fall into — too focused on implementation details, not the experience. The average FB user thinks they're connecting to friends directly, not really considering the system architecture that powers it.

I'd like a graphic that shows how centralised media blocks connections to others outside thier walled garden.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Interesting. How would you put this into a picture?

My friend (the average social media user) also didn't seem too interested in it. I can imagine something interesting for the average user in a video but not in an image.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

The implementation details matter tho, your instance admin actively makes federation decisions that affect the content you see. I like to explain joining an instance as pledging yourself to a warlord in medieval Japan

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago

But surely the average Zuckerbook user is not so dumb as to miss what this graphic is describing - a crazy utopia where they could talk to people on TikTok and Xitter as well as Zuckerbook?

[–] [email protected] 29 points 1 week ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 week ago (1 children)

That's cool but I think that's too technical for the average social media user

[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 week ago (2 children)

That's cool too, but way too much text for it to be quickly consumed on a small display. This is more for the second stage when people are already curious and want to learn more, in my opinion.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 week ago

I agree, yours is simpler and to the point. It gets the general idea across quicker. The links for blaze would be follow up things people would look into.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 week ago

Yea, too much yapping

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago

So good 👌

[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 week ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 week ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 week ago
[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Here is the file link. Let's create multiple versions :D

https://www.canva.com/design/DAGjBaOKTmM/mVzeYlpGz2MwWMdMhFqQIg/edit

(Sorry for the proprietary service!)

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 week ago (1 children)

(Sorry for the proprietary service!)

Ouch, brace yourselves, FOSS ninjas incoming 😄

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 week ago

I'm not much of a designer 😅

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

My criticism is that it largely ignores the primary advantage of Fediverse services (Decentralizing services that are designed to operate Centrally), while mostly explaining what I've always considered to be the most pointless feature (Cross Service posting).

It's a mildly neat feature if you want to centralize your entire social profile under one account (which is my security nightmare but you do you), but its not really fundamental to using federated services and its implementation can be inconsistent and confusing.

Maybe have a bunch of "Lemmy" (or whatever) nodes arranged in a circle, the same color, with the same icon, and connected to each other through the middle of the circle (not connecting to the "fediverse", although I guess you could have a transparent "Lemmy" super imposed over it) Then have the users connected to each node. Or something...I'm on a bench and just broadly visualizing it.

The next trick is explaining the fault of centralized services in a graph.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 week ago (1 children)

For the top services, I’d make each of the blue background circles a different color to better denote that they’re proprietary and incompatible.

For the Fediverse section, you could add Tumblr, and other services who also federate via activity pub to show our interoperability and expansive reach.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 week ago

Tumblr

Is it already working?

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 week ago (1 children)

There's no central authority here. But if it doesn't matter which instance you are on, then all the users on Lemmy are still just part of Lemmy.

On the graph I see other icons than Lemmy.

Are we able to see content from other social media? Or what is meant with that

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 week ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

Certain other content crosses boarders. Mastadon especially. Whenever you see people replying to messages and it starts with some sort of @[email protected] tagging, you're probably eavesdropping on a Mastadon thread and you don't even know it.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 week ago

GLOBALISTS ARE TAKING OVER

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

Maybe you can show that, we don't alway federate with every instance, with several drawing of this cloud network.

That's also part of our freedom :)

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Okay maybe I don't get it but how can I access mastodon from my lemmy account?

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Mastodon and Lemmy have only limited interoperability. You can't follow individual users on Lemmy, so most of it is one-way. Mastodon users can post to Lemmy communities by @-ing a specific community, and Lemmy users can then reply as normal and their replies will show up in the Mastodon users feed.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 week ago

That's why I'm always a bit reluctant to have an infographic with Mastodon and Lemmy fully connected. Sure, it's possible to interact, but it's not ideal.

Having another one with Lemmy, Mbin and Piefed servers could be better

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Subscribing to user posts on Lemmy would be a fantastic feature

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 week ago

Mbin has microblogging

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (6 children)

Yeah i do agree but sadjy, there is a reason some of us call it lemmyverse. We can see mastodon's content.

Since Lemmy doesn't really support hashtag, the core of mastodon discoverability, I think switching to a new software is better.

PieFed plan to support Mastodon this year. They already do it somewhat : you can follow PieFed user and a.gup.pe work well. You can also follow comment or post by setting up an alert.

Currently, only mbin can do that.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Simply put your Mastodon profile URL into the search.

Eg. https://europe.pub/u/[email protected]

But it works better the other way around

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

It needs a lot more people and lines connecting to the centralize services, like 6+. You have 14 dudes in the fediverse, you should have a similar number of dudes in the traditional centralized social media things. You need to make it clear that every connection between two people goes through that central server. With only 3 or 4 it looks like it's some kind of small community there, like you're just saying "communities exist on Facebook" rather than "on Facebook everybody connects to one central Facebook service". It would also be good to draw a black line around the edge of the bubble to indicate it's a walled garden rather than an open system.

For the Fediverse example, it would be good to have a slightly darker shaded bubble with people around their local fediverse instance. That would indicate that there are local communities, but that they can still communicate with all the other communities. And, maybe show that people can be part of different communities, show one person connected both to a mastodon instance and a Lemmy instance.

Edit: I just thought of something else to make it clearer. On the centralized networks you could also make a darker group of people who are a community on say Facebook, but show that that community has to connect to each-other through the central server.

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