I was just reading this post https://old.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1gmv76n/is_reddit_going_to_remain_the_primary_space_for/ and many barely see the fediverse as an alternative and they seem to have a negative bias towards it. Super ironic when it comes to the self-hosting community. Yes, some instances are problematic, yes, some devs might have had problematic views. But it doesn’t really matter when it’s federated and FOSS. I think it’s clear-cut that the selfhosting community on Lemmy is a perfect alternative to reddit. Why is there such a negative bias?
One line of thinking that intrigues me, which you might be interested in as it relates even more to Mbin: at what point do we differentiate between where the content is located, vs. how we access it?
So like PieFed exists - I am talk to you from it right now - but if I were to make a post, let’s say to !tenforward@lemmy.world, then am I posting on “Lemmy”? There is next to no content that is exclusively located “on” an instance running PieFed itself, so PieFed is my vehicle to access Lemmy content, in a way?
Then again, a better way would be to say that it was PieFed content, shared “with” the Lemmy instance where the community is moderated (via the ActivityPub protocol), and from there shared around the world, to whatever people are running to receive it - Mbin, Kbin, Sublinks, Tesseract, etc.
And all of that is still just within the Threadiverse, but how to say what Mbin does? Does Mbin access “Mastodon content” as well as “Lemmy content”, or rather “microblog content on the Fediverse” as well as “threaded content on the Fediverse”?
I am not even sure what name the “microblog content on the Fediverse” goes by, b/c people usually say just “Fediverse”, but also things like PixelFed (Instagram replacement) and Friendica (Facebook replacement) are part of the Fediverse too, so if “threaded content on the Fediverse” becomes “Threadiverse”, then “microblog content on the Fediverse” is going to have to be renamed to something other than Fediverse too?
Since in the last six months Mbin doubled the number of comments made monthly, the distinction is becoming more noticeable - yet it is still 10k posts and 75k comments, vs. 9.4 million posts and 16.7 million comments from something running the software “Lemmy” (https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/stats).
Then too, if Lemmy.World switched over to use Sublinks (as they hinted at several months ago…), would most of this content (especially since ~80% of the Lemmy userbase is located on that server) switch from being “Lemmy” to now “Sublinks”? Setting aside the question of “what even is Lemmy, anyway?”, my question to you is: what even is Mbin, anyway? Does it cross-browse “Mastodon and Lemmy content”, or is it like a new, hybrid thing, b/c it doesn’t just browse e.g. Mastodon content, but also can host its own microblog-formatted content too, shared with servers that run Mastodon as its software, as well as its own forum-based content shared with servers that run Lemmy (which can replace themselves with Sublinks) and PieFed.
Whew, this is getting complex!? No wonder people just say “Fediverse” and leave it at that!:-P
i used to call the micrblog stuff the ‘twitterverse’… and i kind of still want to. I may edit my mbin instance to use that term, and i also hate ‘magazine’ in favor of ‘Subs’ or ‘Community’
to me all of these server products are federating media servers with varying access to those 2 pieces. the underlying software should be nearly irrelevant except for them.
the ‘community/magazine’ is the source of the data and ‘remote’ servers cache that data. when i post to tenforward im posting to the source@itshomeinstance and my server receives a copy… a locally cached version.
my server still has a ton of kbin.social content for example despite that server being doa.
i refer to my instance, at the moment, as primarily an ‘onramp’ server. my users utilize it to access remote content almost exclusively as you point out piefed does. But, my server also caches a huge amount of fediverse data… both from all the lemmys and major microblog platforms mastodon, threads, and universodeon among others.
the specific platform lemmy.world utilizes should have no impact on me or my users if they do things correctly.
Twitterverse - oh that’s interesting!:-)
Irrelevant software - especially if forum-based (Threadiverse), user-based (Twitterverse), and other content (PixelFed/Insta, Loops underneath that, and whatever Friendica is about) were all to end up conjoined into a single “Feed” of whatever mixture proportions the user wants, that would indeed become a true “Fediverse”:-).
But until that time… some of them do still seem somewhat separate, though perhaps artificially so.
federation - I made a post yesterday, but due to federation issues it now sits solely on PieFed (viewable from https://piefed.social/c/fediverse@lemmy.world?sort=new&layout=list), and presumably is not available from any other instances as well (e.g. looking at https://discuss.online/c/fediverse@lemmy.world?dataType=Post&sort=New, I do not see it). That’s perhaps a fine example of how the various vehicles that we use to access the Fediverse are distinct from the sources of content - although tbh that type of occurrence is nowhere close to being unique wrt PieFed, as I’ve had similar things happen with StarTrek.website and heard of many such occurrences with the likes of Aussie.Zone and Programming.Dev, etc.
Some instances COULD theoretically hold content - e.g. PieFed has a Local filter where people discuss the specific issues relating to PieFed software, as well as a trollyproblems community, etc. - but in practice, the vast majority of content derives from Lemmy.World, or wherever the particular community (or magazine) is based in. And this too is not unique to PieFed - e.g. my previous instance Discuss Online likewise has a couple of communities (e.g. !linus_tech_tips@discuss.online), but the vast majority of that instance is as a “general purpose” one that mainly pulls in content from elsewhere rather than holding it on its own.
So such “onramp” servers are common across the Fediverse - whether running Mbin, Kbin, Lemmy, PieFed, or one day Sublinks, that’s just a property of how the instance admin chooses to do things, and the people who want (or don’t want) to make communities there.
And yeah, if Lemmy.World switched from Lemmy to Sublinks, or to PieFed, or even Mbin, then it would cease to be called “Lemmy” (although other servers would still be that, like Discuss Online), though would still fall under the heading “Fediverse”, and whatever mid-range term used like “Threadiverse” as well. Although people seem to hate that term and argue whenever it is brought up.
I totally agree though - such software details shouldn’t matter, and rather it’s the “content” that we want to aim at, however we end up getting there:-).