Unifying the Fediverse
Why are there so many separate platforms in the Fediverse like Mastodon, Lemmy, PixelFed, and PeerTube? It feels like they could all be part of one unified platform.
Posts
Text, images, and videos could just be treated as posts, all with comments enabled.
- Servers that don’t want to host videos could just have a setting to turn off video uploads.
- That would let PeerTube function like Mastodon when video support isn’t needed.
Lemmy + Mastodon + PixelFed
They all do basically the same thing — let people post stuff. So why split them up?
Forums can still work like Lemmy. If you want your post in a forum, cool. If not, that’s fine too.
Matrix + Posts
- As for messaging, I think Matrix could benefit from Signal-style encryption. Each message should be encrypted with a unique key, just like Signal does.
- Add a button like “See recent posts by this user” on profiles.
- This would make it easier for people to switch over from Instagram or Facebook.
plugin-based development
I also think the Fediverse could grow faster if it were plugin-based, kind of like how Obsidian handles plugins. Development would be more modular and flexible.
- Servers could choose which plugins to enable.
- Devs could collaborate instead of reinventing the wheel across platforms like Mastodon, Lemmy, PixelFed, PeerTube, etc.
- This would create a richer, more customizable ecosystem that evolves together.
Questions
Also, just a question from someone who’s not a coder:
Why not just copy Signal’s encryption model?
Summarize
Each user can create posts (with or without a forum), follow forums, follow other users, have private chats, and join encrypted rooms.
This is just some personal rambling, so feel free to ignore it. But if any of it sounds useful, please share it with other people, especially the developers.
Why are there so many separate platforms in the Fediverse like Mastodon, Lemmy, PixelFed, and PeerTube? It feels like they could all be part of one unified platform.
Simple answer: Because people have different visions, different priorities. Expertise in different programming languages and tooling.
Why do we have three Reddit alternatives in Lemmy, Piefed, and Mbin? Why don’t all their devs work on the same project?
- The Lemmy devs are highly controversial. The other projects don’t have such issues.
- Lemmy is written in Rust, Mbin in PHP, and Piefed in Python.
- The scope is different between them. Lemmy only cares about communities. Mbin targets wider compatibility with the microblogging side of the fediverse. Piefed plans to one day add microblog support iirc, but their priorities lie elsewhere.
Some platforms care about interoperability more than others, trying to push for FEPs (basically standardization proposals for the fediverse), while others don’t. Some care about privacy even if it degrades interoperability, some believe the latter outweighs the former. Some disagree on how to implement a specific feature.
Mbin adopted Reddit’s karma system, Lemmy didn’t. Sure you could combine both of those and give the user the choice, but this reflects a difference in design philosophies. Lemmy users don’t just lack a karma system, they outright don’t want one. It’s a system which promotes karma farming, so it’s associated with the worst of Reddit. But ironically, it also encourages contributing, which is probably why kbin (Mbin’s predecessor) originally added it. The fediverse is in need of contributors over lurkers, so whether a karma system is bad or good for it depends on your perspective. And that perspective differs between the developers of these two projects.
Ultimately, sometimes projects are just born out of a dev wanting to challenge themselves by recreating something themselves. Iirc that’s how Minecraft was born, with its creator originally wanting to test his skills at an Infiniminer clone and that spiralled into the most successful game ever.
So why a separate project is started isn’t always logical even. Sometimes the dev just felt like it.I for one like Mbin but dislike Piefed and Lemmy both. But most people seem to think differently, as Mbin is the least popular of the three. There’s a lot who have sworn off Lemmy in favor of Piefed, but there’s also a lot of people who prefer sticking with Lemmy. If there was just a single option, there’s a possibility I or others might not be here today, because we don’t like the choices that single option went with.
Finally, there’s also the danger of a company acquiring the project and enshittifying it. They can’t really acquire an entire federation protocol and every software implementing it.
In the first place, the fediverse is about interoperability between different social networks. If you have just one social network, you have no use for the fediverse anymore. So your question is really more like “why do we need the fediverse?”. There’s no such thing as “unifying the fediverse”, as that’s the antithesis of the fediverse. Unifying it would undo it. The fediverse is nothing without its nature of connecting different projects together.
Facebook. You are describing facebook.
Not everyone wants to use or host everything.
Facebook. You are describing facebook.
Forgive me, I don’t understand.
Facebook attempts to be an all-in-one everything platform for messaging, photos, video, events, marketplace, news, etc. It is a bloated, incoherent mess.
Most people actually prefer dedicated apps for different activities, with each app being better suited to the individual task.
Just like the UNIX philosophy of old - Write programs that do one thing and do it well.
Yes! but still I think fediverse could benefit from plugin-based development. So it would be “Write plugin that do one thing and do it well”
It feels like they could all be part of one unified platform.
They are. It’s called the fediverse.
There’s no reason why any of these software options couldn’t support all the same stuff, as you say. But so far they have chosen not to.
Maybe another option will come along one day that supports more of it at once.
There’s no reason why any of these software options couldn’t support all the same stuff, as you say. But so far they have chosen not to.
I can’t post a video using a Matrix account in a way that makes it publicly searchable, and they’re unlikely to support that in the future. In this case, I would have to create a separate account on PeerTube.
My thought is that plugin-based development could solve this issue. Even if they choose not to support a certain feature, people could simply use a plugin instead.
Matrix is not part of the fediverse, so that’s kind of a special case and doesn’t work the same at all as the rest.
What you describe sounds very simplified, but let me assure you that there is nothing simple about this problem (I say that as a software engineer that has studied ActivityPub, the protocol underlying the fediverse).
Matrix is not part of the fediverse, so that’s kind of a special case and doesn’t work the same at all as the rest.
Didn’t know about that. Is there a fediverse messager people could use?
What you describe sounds very simplified, but let me assure you that there is nothing simple about this problem (I say that as a software engineer that has studied ActivityPub, the protocol underlying the fediverse).
I’m sure the development is difficult, and I don’t mean to downplay the complexity involved. Still, I wonder if a modular or plugin-based architecture could help bridge that gap.
Xmpp is The activitypub of chatting
