this post was submitted on 08 May 2024
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Fediverse

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A community dedicated to fediverse news and discussion.

Fediverse is a portmanteau of "federation" and "universe".

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The Trouble with Forking Mastodon (wedistribute.org)
submitted 6 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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A lot of people have talked about the possibility of forking Mastodon to get the many improvements their communities need. Making such an effort successful is another discussion entirely.

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[–] [email protected] 28 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Akkoma and Pleroma are two popular "Mastodon style" Fediverse apps, I think born out of exactly this type of complaint about Mastodon, which you could get involved with if you wanted to be involved with better software without it being a one-man show.

I think it's made needlessly difficult by how sloppy a protocol ActivityPub is, such that different Fediverse apps can't really interoperate with each other except at a pretty rudimentary level, so you kind of have to pick one of the leading ones and imitate it, in order to be a citizen in its community and not have to build your own little community from scratch. But that's a problem without a real easy solution, I think.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 6 months ago (2 children)

This is a situation that I think will get better in time. There's some really promising efforts involving Fediverse Enhancement Proposals, where multiple projects collaborate on shared ways of doing things. Some of these behaviors are getting studied and standardized by the larger SocialCG entity, as well.

There's also a lot of promising development behind a Fediverse Testing Suite. If we can develop a platform-agnostic testing system for people to build against, it will potentially become the new development standard, rather than optimizing for Mastodon and nothing else.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 months ago

If we can develop a platform-agnostic testing system for people to build against, it will potentially become the new development standard, rather than optimizing for Mastodon and nothing else

Well, unless interoperating exclusively/mostly with mastodon is still substantially incentivised because of its size. Hopefully mastodon comply with the testing suite’s standard, but I can see that being a slow process, and I can also see grey areas persisting.

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

Yeah agreed. In particular I really like that feditest exists even if I haven't done anything to check it out / learn about it for myself yet.