Sean Tilley
Former Diaspora core team member, I work on various fediverse projects, and also spend my time making music and indie adventure games!
- 89 Posts
- 161 Comments
Basically, this. In layman’s terms: finding the good stuff on a decentralized network is hard, because not everybody or everything is all in one place. Some tools can help make the experience suck less, but it’s a really hard problem that has lingered on for years.
This proposal is basically a team-up to develop the necessary plumbing so that services, such as search providers or distribution networks, can be easily used by anybody on the network, regardless of whether they’re on Mastodon, Lemmy, or something else.
There’s a few interesting applications here that go beyond just finding people, showing trending stuff, or providing an index of stuff. Some of this could be used for moderation tooling for admins, or custom feeds for users, or a directory of things to review. If the existing projects trying to solve all these problems came together, it might make a lot of things way easier.
Dude, listen. I am one person running a volunteer news project for free. I try my best to stay on top of researching the space, but there’s no reasonable way for me to catch everything. I’ve written 200+ articles at this point, but due to a combination of factors, I struggle to get more than one article out per week at times. I regularly juggle a backlog of 40+ drafts at any given moment. Add a dash of burnout and fatigue, and you’ll start to get a clearer picture: it’s hard to keep up, and only getting harder.
There’s no way for me to reasonably catch everything. Mitra’s a cool project and all, but it’s tiny enough that I’ve heard relatively little about it. There are dozens of projects out there at this point, and new ones everyday. If you’re not advertising the thing you’re building and what it does, there’s a high chance I might miss it.
I keep an eye on the FEP developments from time to time, and I applaud all you’ve accomplished with that. However, the existence of a spec does not necessarily mean that platforms out there are necessarily implementing each and every one of them.
Probably because, to my knowledge:
- I didn’t know that Mitra did that.
- Even though it does have that functionality, I have no idea whether it would work with the rest of the network.
- This article was about sub.club
I’m not trying to slight Mitra in any way, shape, or form, but my focus for this article was scoped to one thing in particular.
Most of the backlash pertains to the board members appointed to the new nonprofit. One of the members is a lawyer that has defended crypto and AI companies, another is ex-Twitter angel investor Biz Stone.
Mastodon’s community usually has some kind of vague beef about one thing or another when it comes to Eugen and the decisions he makes for the project, whether it’s a new feature or a design change or that he didn’t do something that other projects wanted to do.
Yeah, if you read the article, Hometown and Glitch actually get mentioned. The criticism is not about making a fork to do your own thing… but, instead, about trying to compete with Mastodon directly.
Doing that kind of fork (which is what people are calling for) requires a tremendous amount of coordination, effort, and commitment that cannot be done casually.
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.
I think there’s a balance to be struck between “good defaults” and “customize to your heart’s content.”
Emissary is very much in line with some of my own pipe dreams regarding Fediverse / IndieWeb platforms, but it’s still very young as a project. I think the best thing they could probably do is ship bundles of templates as different experiences, that are easy to install right out the gate.
Want a bog-standard microblogging system? Go for it. Want something more like Lemmy? No problem. Want to just build something yourself from scratch? Here’s the docs.
I think what excites me about this is that it could be a tremendous development tool for people looking to mock up new ideas for apps and platforms, while sitting in top of ActivityPub and offering actual functionality. The Music project the lead dev is working on already looks great in less than two weeks of development, and aims to be compatible with Funkwhale.
To my knowledge, the project isn’t dead…but, it has been moving at a horribly slow pace for a very long time.
Funkwhale is a pretty cool project, but it’s one of those things where the ActivityPub implementation really was bolted on well after the core experience was defined and developed. It was meant to be a Grooveshark clone, while a lot of people were hoping to use it in a more social way, like SoundCloud.