Oliver Lowe

Sure I can ;) I clicked on the link to your post in my RSS reader then replied from a Mastodon application.

@VintageGenious @fediverse

Lots of things! I subscribe to blogs, Lemmy communities, Mastodon accounts, podcasts, YouTube channels, source code repositories (GitHub, Sourcehut, cgit…), Hacker News, subreddits. All in one ad-free, tracker-less, totally local, instantly searchable, open source application. Couldn’t have lived without it for the past 15 - 20 years!

@fediverse @VintageGenious

@VintageGenious For sure you’re absolutely right to ask the question. I have the same question :)

I guess I’m just venting. Popular Fediverse systems are implemented in a way that closely mimics exisiting CRUD social media like Twitter and Reddit. You upload a post, it’s stored in a database, and you’re done. Mastodon and Lemmy are the same, with the afterthought of sending ActivityPub messages to other systems.

And we see the result: how federation works remains an obscurity.

@rglullis RSS is so underrated I feel. Easy to understand, battle-tested, scales up easily, plethora of clients. Many uses of microblogging, especially in the “real world” use by places like governments, police departments, public transport services could be easily replaced by simple RSS/Atom feeds. Governments and TV stations don’t need to set up Mastodon instances since they never actually interact with people. It’s not “social” media to them; just another avenue of broadcast.

@fediverse

Probably! :) https://old.lemmy.world/post/19168403
To rephrase your question: “did my message get sent to Lemmy servers?”
Because in a sense, your comment isn’t “on” anything; you sent a message to your server (thebrainbin.org) which then sent out a copy to many, many other servers.

@sunzu2 @VintageGenious @fediverse

@maegul @VintageGenious Agreed. But it’s tricky. Few thoughts:

1. ActivityPub itself is in a bit of a mess. Spec too large (spread out over many other specifications!), poor documentation, overly generic.

2. Many devs just aren’t that familiar with interoperability

3. To encourage adoption, Mastodon and Lemmy cloned existing services and behaviour

4. Those two fediverse systems added ActivityPub late in their development

@fediverse

@VintageGenious Think about it this way: an email client can do both Gmail and Hotmail (and Fastmail etc.) because it’s all just email. The same goes for the Fediverse; it’s all just ActivityPub. For example this reply is from a Mastodon app :D

I have personal frustrations about how popular servers like Mastodon and Lemmy hide ActivityPub. I feel progress is stifled. Enough that I wrote my own ActivityPub service (https://apubtest2.srcbeat.com/apas.html)

@fediverse

@threelonmusketeers @hendrik This is how many Fediverse microblogging systems currently work; they serve the Mastodon API for client to server (e.g. app to server) interactions. GoToSocial doesn’t even provide any user interface; you use it from some app originally designed for Mastodon. Why? I think because Mastodon’s HTTP API is simpler, better documented and well-tested compared to something like ActivityPub’s Client-To-Server API.

@fediverse

@skullgiver Good Q. Some thoughts… a standard Python, Flask, PostgreSQL app can handle hundreds of requests per second on a single machine. Any bottlenecks - Lemmy or PieFed - would probably not be at the language yet. For example, Lemmy’s poor performance when I looked ~1 year ago came from a bizarre disregard for things like relational DB query optimisation, HTTP caching, and how the stock frontend lemmy-ui fetched data. Yet Lemmy is written in Rust which is known for speed.

@fediverse

@2xsaiko RSS/Atom feeds were developed for this use case. GitHub, GitLab, Codeberg (Forgejo), Sourcehut, even cgit and git’s own gitweb serve feeds. For example here’s my GitHub account: https://github.com/ollytom.atom
my main OSS project: https://git.olowe.co/streaming/atom/

Atom feeds are widely supported (it’s how I found this post!) and there are many libraries/apps/plugins for aggregation. Robust old tech. And no need to limit feeds to Git activity if you don’t want to :) Good luck!

@technology