Oh yea I hear you.

Just recently read your 2017 article on the different parts of the “Free Network”, where it was new to me just how much the Star Trek federation was used and invoked. So definitely interesting to see that here too!

Aesthetically, the fedigram is clearly the most appealing out of all of these. For me at least.

It seems though that using the pentagram may have been a misstep given how controversial it seems to be (easy to forget if you’re not in those sort of spaces). I liked the less pentagram styled versions at the bottom. I wonder if a different geometry could be used?

I know, but Unicode is big. I’m saying that there may very well be something better.

I appreciate the argument, but I feel like there’s too much of a chance that we can do better with something in unicode. Or, that this isn’t really good enough. Three asterisks is just too meh, IMO, to catch on.

⁂ … to me right now just looks like a splodge on the screen.

Somewhat unfortunately, the pentagram in the older icon probably can’t really be used without some cartoon-ification, because reasons.

I suppose pointing out MS also owns linkedin isn’t the talk down you’re looking for?

If you’re a dev, this along with GitHub, and your employer using teams, is a pretty severe panopticon.

I was under the impression that friendica supported groups or communities and should be able to follow lemmy communities more natively (without using the microblog interface)??

If it helps, I’ve posted about how to bridge microblogs and lemmy before:

https://hachyderm.io/@maegul/110483509521476095

And on taking advantage of the new automatic hastagging: https://hachyderm.io/@maegul/112720255264101773

… which is more relevant on the mastodon end but also rather helpful IMO and a major improvement if people take advantage of it.

In the end I’d say this is likely a nice demonstration of decentralisation and a plurality of instances is inherently valuable. Every online place will have its inclinations and slants, in many ways, which can always combine to create shitty interactions between otherwise defensible or understandable actors/motives.

Ensuring that there are multiple such “places”, which we can each connect to as we wish, means that many/most issues or people can have a place to “breath” without handling the shitty noise and friction the internet is so liable to create.

Hell, I don’t even use bookmarks. I type in the web address for my services every time

Yea, I hear you (I don’t use bookmarks either) … but I don’t think this is the average user.

I think the best example is the issues with that come from Lemmy/Mastodon integration. Mastodon posts have a different mentality than Lemmy posts do, not to mention with structure of responses.

This sounds to me like a design issue. In fact, this is kinda my point … better interaction here, which is the “promise” of the fediverse, may be best addressed with good aggregating clients rather than relying on too platforms to work out their historical differences over the protocol.

Hmmm … seems my response from mastodon didn’t federate (sighs) …

copy-pasted (sorry, for whoever federation did work, this is likely making things worse):

Personally, I’m there with you I think. I only use default web-UIs on all fediverse platforms I’ve used, and advocate for that.

But should multi-protocol systems and multi-platform clients become normalised, I think this goes beyond “to app or not to app”. What I’m talking about could likely just be a web-app.

The issue is more around aggregation and creating something “greater than the sum of its parts” out of open alt-social.

A useful lens I find is whether a social media system is good at creating, facilitating and hosting genuine communities.

Alt-social right now is struggling with this I think and, IMO, has plenty of room to grow in this regard.

The difficulty though is that it requires more features in our platforms, some likely non-trivial. That’s a big ask for an open non-profit ecosystem.

An effective means of aggregating multiple parts into a unified view could alleviate this.

To go on about it … I don’t think the browser does much at all. Unified feeds and notifications, with helpful filtering, sorting and organisation? Helpful account management? Making it easy to cross-post or copy across platforms or protocols?

Why have an RSS Feed reader if you could just visit each of the web pages individually? Obviously one can, but the feed reader is still useful.

While I think I understand where you’re coming from, I fear it’s coming from a position of habit and app fatigue rather than from a general consideration of what could work well on alt-social (where my position is that it isn’t really working well enough (yet)).

Do you happen to know what platform compatibility they’re aiming for (I haven’t picked up on that) … a “plain” mastodon & user-actor or anything involving more that could be compatible with groups / threadiverse?

Yea anything big and mainstream just seems super shallow.

I’m not on top of things to compare accurately, but it was always kinda like that (and is like that here sometimes too). But whenever I’ve gone back, I’ve definitely felt like it has gotten somewhat worse. Some of that could easily be a shifting standard from spending more time on other less “mainstream” platforms though.

Eh. AP isn’t magic. Platforms can be pretty incompatible because of their differing use or implementation of AP. I feel like at some point there’s a blurry line between a bridge being something different and just an extension of 2 protocols.

It’s one of my main concerns with the fediverse, that tech people’s (and people generally) inclination to not work together and instead do their own thing will be detrimental on the whole.

ActivityPub (the protocol used by the fediverse) has recently had a proposal to expand it incorporate marketplace exchanges of information. See the proposal, and a discussion thread