“Behold, I’m a unicorn!”

fwiw this is poking more fun at the other person that said this in reply to you, which is why I spelled it your(s and another person’s) way

Hey speaking of, while !games@lemmy.world is a great example, if you’re not finding similar communities for your interest, feel free to post over in !general@lemmy.world for what Zombiepirate’s describing.

Hobby without a community around here? Just not really sure if an existing community is open to non-news posts? General’s got ya covered.

Going against the post’s spirit, but…If you’re not finding a community for your interests (or only finding abandoned/inactive ones), and don’t want to create one (or try to get existing ones going), you’re welcome over in !general@lemmy.world. Post about whatever, find likeminded folks, then if ya think there’s enough of ya, you can make a separate community without it being one person posting into a void.

Also there’s !justpost@lemmy.world. Similar vibes.

Their other comment elaborates on this more:

Until the link /c/books shows any user, with only one click, the aggregate of all “books” communities in a single place, without subscribing or even logging in. Then lemmy will stagnate because it is failing to live up to its promise of federated decentralization

They want a link like /c/books to work like multireddits did on reddit to collect together books-related communities for improved browsing and discovery.

It’s Tail Time!

RSS would be an interesting route but like, it would need a feed for every creator wouldn’t it? unless the social media platform allows it built-in like BSky does

If I understand ya right yeah, with BSky/Mastodon you pull the individual feeds for each account if you go that route (or maybe someone has an .opml file of several already grouped by topic to import). To me it’s no worse than having to individually follow them on-platform, but I know I’m atypical in that respect

Once ya have’em it’s all in one feed in your reader so not too different than the following feed

What you describe is basically the flipside of what happened to RSS folks, so I know what you mean. It sucks to stop getting updates the way you’re used to, and more hassle making the transitions to whatever the different method is.

It’s basically the reason Twitter/X still has anyone there, except they have higher switching costs compared to an open following format.

Honestly I take the compromise approach where I can, which is social media that still generates RSS, like Bluesky/Mastodon/etc. and use that to avoid making additional accounts.

Nah, I get that normal people wouldn’t, but I can dream. It’s so much better than making Yet Another Account. Plus I know in set up we’re talkin’ people pulling the feed into a reader, but also for content creators making sites, loads of sitebuilding software already has RSS baked in, so it’s not even that big an ask from them.

If there’s another more convenient no-sign-up method of keeping up with sites and stuff online, I’d love to know, 'cause I know many aren’t about to use RSS.

Hmm, if so, it wasn’t clear in the documentation I read. I was of the impression it was still passing posts through the relay to enable others’ discovery & interaction.

But apparently what they actually meant was, “users of Mastodon instances rarely explore outward”? The instances would auto-federate, but in practice, the “crawlers” (the users) aren’t leaving their bubbles often enough to create a critical mass of interconnectedness across the Fediverse?

It’s more along the lines of, as Mastodon’s been one of the more popular ActivityPub platforms for awhile longer, there’s a longer history of federation faffery, i.e. instance admins/people not getting along leading to defederations leading to a somewhat more fragmented network. Lemmy’s only grown in adoption more recently and hasn’t had as much time for that faffery to crop up as much, and has a different style and audience to it anyway, so it may be less prone to that, time will tell.

Regardless, your conclusion is basically on point for many folks. Federation stuff is no better to them than the erratic moderation/management of larger platforms that’s driving them elsewhere. Of course problem is, moderation/management’s not really something tech can solve (as Bsky’s already run into with its attempts at enabling third-party moderation).

They’re supposed to be able to, true, but I’ve not come across any examples of that in action yet. If you know of any I’d be interested in seeing them, as I’ve been trying to keep up with AuthTransfer’s developments.

It can be, yeah. However, similar may be said of responsible social media setup.

Relay (backend albeit rumored to be expensive)

Not even rumored, so much as explicitly expected.

The federation architecture allows anyone to host a Relay, though it’s a fairly resource-demanding service. In all likelihood, there may be a few large full-network providers, and then a long tail of partial-network providers.

I just assumed Mastodon was like Lemmy, where every instance federates with every other instance basically by default and there’s only some high-profile defed exceptions.

That’s…Not how Lemmy works either. In fact, and someone may correct me if I’m mistaken here, your hell is sort of how it works as I understand it. Instances don’t have any built-in crawlers to seek out others running on ActivityPub with the same software, e.g. Lemmy or Mastodon or the like. That’s genuinely been one of the biggest stumbling blocks with the whole protocol, as discovery is largely a manual affair. The only crawlers we have are the people using the service and following remote people or communities or channels from other instances to let the one we’re on see them.

One of the basic reasons for this that I’ve read is that it’s related to handling scaling, as each instance trying to handle all of the data of all the people on each other instance right away would bog down the servers and probably crash them. It also arguably works out, to a degree, that there’s a good chance not everyone on each instance is of interest to each other anyway, so you may not want or need each server to know about every other server’s people/channels/communities/etc.

But I’m going to stop before I get too much further into the weeds of all this. The irony is that the simplest solution to discovery issues with all of this presently is to invite those you want to have a similar experience to you, or want to connect to with the fewest jumps, to the same instance as you to mitigate any of those issues. Does that tend to undermine many of the benefits of it all? In a lot of ways, yeah, but that’s where many ActivityPub platforms are at currently, at least the more popular ones as I understand them.

I’m still on the fence about that…I think it’d make more sense for many to drop social media and opt for their own site with RSS feeds. A lot of social media for some is little more than a noisier RSS reader. Sometimes even literally with those with auto-playing videos. 😬

Walnut a.k.a. Nutcracker

Great exhibit placement, looks cool in front of the windows!

I’m pretty sure it used to be easier to get people to move to new things like new forums, Xfire, Ventrillo

In some respects it was somewhat easier to get them to be on multiple platforms instead of moving. Think of the original messenger proliferation, where sometimes people would be on IRC, XMPP, AIM, ICQ, MSN Messenger, or etc. so much so that you had software like Pidgin and Trillian to help consolidate server/chat rooms and friends lists to more easily chat with all your contacts.

Even with Ventrilo, I remember being open to also switching to Mumble or vice versa if there was some hiccup with either.