Scott M. Stolz

Currently Mastodon does not support moving your content to a new server, but it does allow you to move your identity and followers to a new server (instance).

Or even change protocols. Mastodon used to use OStatus before it changed to ActivityPub. And some platforms are multi-protocol, like Hubzilla and Friendica. Whether they are compatible depends on which protocols they have turned on.

Or a Hubzilla, Friendica, or NodeBB perspective, because all of those support discussion groups and forums. And you can participate with them over ActivityPub without using their software or creating an account on their server. I am communicating with your using Hubzilla, not Lemmy right now.

Right now the user’s identity and the content they consume & interact with are too intertwined in many cases.

There are two aspects here:

1. The user’s home base, which is basically which server or app they log into.
2. The communities they belong to, which can be on any server anywhere on the fediverse.

We have to get out of the mindset that the server you sign up on is your community, because with federation, you are not limited to the server you sign up on.

I think that it is inevitable since there are different types of users. Ideally, everyone has their own fediverse server (“instance”) on their own domain name that they control. Or, families and small groups share a fediverse server. But most people are not that technical and just want something simple and something that works. That is where larger fediverse servers come in. They are an easy entry point for most people. Once people join, then they can migrate to a small instance, or preferably, start their own.

I didn’t realize that Neil changed his name. ;)

I guess I missed the drama. But it is to be expected. Many people came from centralized social media, and simply signed up for something their friends told them about. For those people, they learned about federation after the fact. It is a new concept for a lot of people.

I think Hubzilla and Friendica are its only links to the rest of the Fediverse. Both support ActivityPub and Diaspora.

Maybe Diaspora needs to update their logo, similar to how Walmart just updated their logo recently.

I agree that there needs to be some more “killer apps” for the fediverse for it to really take off. Luckily there are some people working on that. Loops and Pixelfed seem to be some recent highlights and are growing fast. And there are other apps that are being worked on that could change things.

One of the problems is that ActivityPub is somewhat limited to what Mastodon has implemented. A lot of other platforms want to implement some cool features, but none of those are supported by Mastodon. This limits the rest of the fediverse since they have to cater to the lowest common denominator.

It is one of the main reasons why Hubzilla still uses Zot6 as its primary protocol, and uses ActivityPub to communicate with everyone else. Hubzilla has features that the rest of the fediverse does not support, such as nomadic identity, privacy, and access control. And related to that, Bluesky also has features that ActivityPub does not support, or if ActivityPub does support it, is not implemented by the larger platforms.

I think this is the primary reason why the fediverse is falling behind. People look at what Mastodon has implemented and think that ActivityPub is weak compared to Zot6 or AT Protocol.

I think the fediverse will continue to grow, and it would mostly be because of projects like Loops and Pixelfed and other new services. But I think that Bluesky has a lead on us and it will continue to grow, mostly because bigger players with money can afford to actually build on the AT Protocol, which has higher hardware requirements.

Eventually, thanks to bridges and multi-protocol platforms, there will be a multi-protocol network, with big players who have money using AT Protocol, and people who want to start a server on a lower budget using ActivityPub.

From what I read, apparently, AT Protocol does support decentralization, but the server requirements are pretty steep.

To put it in terms we can understand, there are servers and services. You can set up a server, but still wind up using a centralized service from Bluesky. But it is possible to set up competing centralized services so that Bluesky is not the only provider.

But, back to the first point, their minimum hardware requirements are so steep that you have to have pretty deep pockets to fully administer everything yourself.

There is a community called Blacksky that is trying to do this, so they are not dependent on Bluesky at all, yet still use AT Protocol.

Compare this with the fediverse, where you can start up a lightweight ActivityPub fediverse server on a small VPS.

In the short term, I think that Bridgy Fed’s multi-protocol bridge has a better chance of decentralizing Bluesky than Bluesky.

@NigelFrobisher There actually are a bunch of competing fediverse platforms that use entirely different codebases. Some are actually older than Mastodon.

For example, I am posting from Hubzilla, not Mastodon. Hubzilla has an entirely different codebase and an entirely different feature set.

#^[1](https://hubzilla.network/page/info/compare)

It is not made up. Read about Stalin. A lot of things happened when he was in power. And a lot of things changed after he was no longer in power.

If your goal is to solve society’s problems, you have to listen to everyone, even people you disagree with, in order to identity the underlying problems.

And sometimes you have to read between the lines because they are not politically and economically literate. And unfortunately, that means people often latch onto ideas that sound good to them, but may or may not be a good idea in real life.

For example, some people may blame immigration for their problems. But that is not the real problem. That is just a scapegoat that the politicians use. The real problem is that they are struggling financially, and don’t know how to fix it, most likely because someone is taking advantage of them and/or they don’t have what they need to be successful.

If you fix their economic problems, and educate them on what the real problems are, they will realize that the immigrants were never the problem. This will reduce the tension and hate, and expose the propaganda for what it is.

But you can’t change anyone’s minds if you label them as enemies and refuse to listen to them. And you can’t solve problems if you can’t identify the underlying issues people are concerned with.

Hubzilla has built-in cloud storage, where you can host anything you want, and you can even determine who can see it. Images, videos, documents, binary files, whatever.

It’s not just that they may not care. They may not know what they’re being asked or know what the consequences are for choosing either option. Then they sit there for 30 minutes searching the internet for what the question means.

@jas0n All instances of Mastodon run the same source code, unless it is one of the many forks, like Hometown. But none of the other fediverse server software out there uses Mastodon code. They are completely different projects with completely different codebases. What they have in common is that they speak ActivityPub.