Google Translate:
First of all, the ActivityPub system is not suited to something like Misskey, which flows at lightning speed.
It was originally designed to connect blogs, small-scale SNSs, and wikis.
How can it handle the TL hell where tens of thousands of requests fly in per second?
It’s based on the idea that it would be nice if various small services could send each other updates, so it’s quite costly.
I’m disappointed by their decision. However there is lot fork compatible with the fediverse. I know some dev team that are interested federation of missked with lemmy and piefed. Mainly because of jlai.lu :)
You can follow this project there : https://iceshrimp.dev/iceshrimp/Iceshrimp.NET
The discussion about lemmy support is there : https://chat.iceshrimp.dev/#narrow/channel/6-support/topic/.E2.9C.94.20lemmy-support
And @tournesol@feddit.fr is the admin of feddit.fr. So i hope we will have the first microblogging software that support well the threadiverse. :)
I just sent them a request for piefed and mbin support. :)
i hope we will have the first microblogging software that support well the threadiverse. :)
That’s Friendica. It has great threadiverse support already
That sounds good. You can tell the developers to open an issue in the Lemmy repo or use our Matrix chats if they have any trouble to get the federation working.
Edit: The main thing they need to understand is FEP-1b12.
okay, i will add lemmy repo and matrix room. :)
Better support of the Threadiverse would be big, groups are just better than hashtags
Yep, afaik, they will suggested to change their unused “magazine” section into “threadiverse” timeline. :)
How can it handle the TL hell where tens of thousands of requests fly in per second?
I sorry, but I find this hard to believe. Either they’re counting all requests their service gets (not just the APub ones), or Misskey is doing something really weird. Lemmy is notoriously busy compared to most Activity Pub stuff (PixelFed had to rewrite their activity handling as Lemmy overwhelmed the queue) and feddit.uk gets about 10-20K APub requests an hour.
yea, the Threadiverse probably gets a relatively high number of requests since the upvotes/downvotes are also requests
but everything seems to be working fine over here
I took it as a translation issue and misskey was the one that was designed for less traffic. The next sentence kind of clarifies. “it was designed…” for slower things like wiki updates means misskey.
I was confused at first too but that’s the only way it makes sense. I don’t know the history of misskey though so I could be wrong.
Thanks for posting the translation though! Super helpful
I don’t know if I would say it’s working fine. If you don’t clear your cache regularly the main page takes like a full minute to load.
Hopefully it’s fixable but this is a level of performance most internet users would not tolerate.
if a client side action (clearing cache) affects the issue, then it’s not related to the ActivityPub protocol
Maybe not. I just don’t think saying threadiverse works fine is completely true. We have lots of issues here and there.
Misskey has 3,535 monthly active users according to https://misskey.fediverse.observer/dailystats
edit: actually fediverse observer seems to be unable to get active user counts from Misskey instances, many show 0 active users but with thousands of registered users https://misskey.fediverse.observer/list
Also as long as all the forks keep using ActivityPub, shouldn’t it be okay?
yea but Misskey seems popular, even just misskey.io is huge, this would be a big loss for the Fediverse
https://fedidb.com/software/misskey?stats=1
I think the active user counts are being misreported too
misskey.io has 142 million statues/posts, way more than lemmy.world with 577k posts, it’s natural to have more microblog posts than threadiverse posts but 246x as many is a lot, idk if the lemmy.world number includes comments
Misskey has been around for a very long time. Also a lot of comments here would probably be their own posts on a microblog platform.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s not a good news by any mean, but it’s still not so bad if users who want to stay on the Fediverse switch to a fork.
Comments are counted separately, 5.67M for lemmy.world.
Might be a privacy feature, I checked out the NodeInfo of one of the 0 active users instances (which I checked and did have active users) and it had “null” in the relevant fields. Only the total users were given.
So the data just doesn’t seem to be there for those instances. Considering it works for some and not for others, I assume it’s opt-out for some reason.
That said, FediDB gives 11.3K MAU for Misskey.
So what is Miss Key? Is it like Tumblr? What’s the culture like?
It is a microblogging plateform of the fediverse. They are as of today two major microblogging software on the fediverse : mastodon and misskey along with its many fork (forkkey or *key) : firefish(previously calkey) iceshrimp, foundkey.
There is of course other microblogging software but mastodon and the *key family seem to me to be the most active.
Thanks! Is it similar to tumblr or mastodon or is it not like either of them in terms of format?
I’ve used Calkey and Sharkey and they quite similar to Mastodon but with a prettier UI. I don’t know Tumblr so I can’t say.
Here’s a collection of words I might use to describe their culture: Japanese, anime, quirky, open-minded, fun, goofball, Absturztaube.
Amazing! Thank you that is actually very helpful!
Not sure what this is about. ActivityPub is not a complex protocol. At the end of the day, it is just a REST API. Servers send activities to inboxes, which then gets processed.
Do they want to centralize Misskey?
If it was originally written to sync blogs or wikis, I can understand not wanting to continue running or developing it.
I think they are just saying “I was writing misskey for a different purpose, and it (nor I?) can handle the speed of ActivityPub and its development.”
I assume there’s a Google translation issue that caused the post to be confusing.
It wasn’t. Even the very first appearance of ActivityPub in W3C mentioned it being a social networking protocol:
The ActivityPub protocol is a social networking protocol based upon the ActivityStreams 2.0 data format. It is based upon experience gained from implementing and working with the OStatus and Pump.io protocols.
OStatus and Pump.io are both social networking protocols as well.
I wouldn’t say that “social networking” is just syncing blogs and wikis.
The vocabulary is also not that small and the flexibility is also there. It is clearly not meant for just blogs and wikis.
This doesn’t really apply to why misskey was originally created though, which is what this post implies.
What misskey was used for and why it was created can be two things.
I feel disappointed.
And do they have some alternative? I mean without anything to replace it with, that probably means switching off the networking and either split up or all agree on one large service?!
I think the main alternative to Misskey is its fork, Sharkey? I’m not personally familiar with them though
I think misskey.io is the flagship instance for Misskey so they would not switch since it’s their own software? other instances might
There are several, this is an overview and it’s probably outdated: https://pancakes.gay/misskey-comparison/
Uh sorry, I was a bit unclear. I meant their alternative to leveraging ActivityPub for what they do.
They’re working on their own federation system which they’ll only switch over to when it’s ready. They expect things to be fine for the next few years still.
Is there any background information on this? Wikipedia mentions this but they only link to the very same post.
I saw a separate post linked in the Reddit thread on this, where it was said.
https://misskey.io/notes/af5udbqosfca05lo
Via machine translation:
I won’t be leaving the federation immediately, but I will be migrating to the low-overhead federation system MisskeyHQ is developing. Servers incompatible with that system may eventually lose connectivity.
The full transition will likely take several years, so it should be fine until then.
Source for the full quote of link + translation (Reddit alert)
Don’t know more information than this. But the wording there suggests to me that what they’re switching to isn’t fundamentally incompatible with the fediverse. They seem to be treating loss of compatibility as an allowed risk, not a guarantee. So they’re probably still using ActivityPub as a foundation for what they’re building.
It sounds a bit like they drank too much ATproto coolaid, which is designed for “firehose” like feeds, but does so at the expense of horizontal scalability, making Bluesky a near natural monopoly on the protocol.
May the best team win.
I’m not sure if trading in these things is very helpful, it probably doesn’t get us all the way. But I can empathize. I feel some nostalgia for the times when I ran mostly text based communication on a potato. And that’s not how any of the more modern tech works. But there’s an entire complicated story behind it.
How can the best team win when ATproto is structurally giving Bluesky an advantage over any possible other team? The best solution is not to play such a rigged game.
ATproto and ActivityPub are not in a competition, despite many people having this wrong impression. ATproto ultimatly tries to solve a different problem than ActivityPub.
ATproto tries to make the influencer type social media (many follow a few) more robust by giving those influencers better data ownership and outsourcing moderation to community operated filters. At least in theory, as most of it didn’t work out with Bluesky dominating everything and few others interested in becoming part of it.
ActivityPub ultimatly tries to solve the social network problem where network effects lead to large centralized walled gardens like Facebook or Reddit locking in users. The overall design is thus modeled on that problem and it isn’t particularly suited to cater to social media influencers with large amounts of followers.
Sure. I was coming from a different perspective. We have all these competing protocols, I’ve used Matrix, XMPP, eMail, several dialects of AP and there’s a bunch more out there (Nostr, …), and a plethora of different and/or overlapping use-cases. My definition of a “win” would be to connect people. In a meaningful way and to contribute to their lives. Make it easy to participate and all these things. I don’t really care that much about the exact protocol, that’s just a tool to achieve some goal.
I think it’s way more important what we build with these things. My ideal platform would do away with the unhealthy social media dynamics we’ve inherited. It’d be full of people discussing hobby projects, share their travel stories and what’s important to them. Have answers to weird computer problems… Politics would be more than a shouting match. It’d empower people to be constructive while talking to each other. I think the protocol is crucial to lay out the groundworks for that, but ultimately it is not in itself the standard by which we measure our success.
ActivityPub ultimatly tries to solve the social network problem where network effects lead to large centralized walled gardens like Facebook locking in users. The overall design is thus modeled on that problem and it isn’t particularly suited to cater to social media influencers with large amounts of followers.
I never thought about it this way. Probably that’s why Mastodon was always struggling with discovery, while on the other hand federation on the Threadiverse works quite well
Mastdon’s discoverability issues are as political as they are technical. It fundamentally requires some aggregating and process of people’s data, something Mastodon users are infamously opposed to. Not for entirely illegitimate reasons, but the extent some go to oppose it is troubling.
Ah, that makes sense. I assume than that discoverability is better on Sharkey and other key forks?
Maybe? You’d have to ask someone who’s used them.
I’ve actually never used anything beyond my basic mastodon.social account.
I’m hoping to finally be able to move of it if FEP-1580 goes anywhere: https://neuromatch.social/@jonny/115376513498494866
