Help me out here. Like a lot of ex-redditors, I made my way to the fediverse to find a whole new world of social media. Is it confusing at first? Yes. It takes a moment to adjust and learn the difference between an instance and a server and all that. But the one thing that confuses all hell out of me is @name@server. Not because it doesn’t make sense. I get that on the most basic level if I wanna find user @[email protected] that’s what I need to search for. But mainly because it doesn’t work in the way it’s proposed to work across all instances/servers/services. Which is if I search for @[email protected] on Mastodon or Calckey or any fediverse server I should be able to see what they posted. Most of the time, that’s not what happens.
First we need to look at Lemmy because they’ve kinda thrown a wrench at this cog. What is this: [email protected]? More importantly what is [!] doing there? Well that’s the NFL community on lemmy.world. But to be super distinct, its a place. Not a person. What happens if I search for that on Mastodon? It returns nothing? What if I change that to @[email protected]. I get a user on Mastodon with 16 posts that don’t populate on Mastodon. Same thing on Calckey but 0 posts instead of 16. Why does this happen? That user (to my knowledge) doesn’t exist. On Lemmy, it’s a place. A place where a collection of users congregated to make a collection of posts about the NFL. You could argue it’s the same thing on Mastodon but instead of a dedicated place it’s a subject and it’s out in the open.
A noun is a person, place, or thing. So far in the fediverse we’ve concentrated on a person @ and a thing #. Mainly because the groundwork is there thanks to twitter. The fediverse’s implementation of interactivity only focuses on the user. It has only looked at the @ of human interaction and not the whole noun. If this idea of connecting across servers want’s to fully work then each service needs to come to an agreement on how they want to implement places !. We’ve got the user part down. We’ve got the thing part down. Only using an @ and a # leads to small talk. Need proof. See Twitter. If you want deep thoughtful discussion, you need the !. And in my analogy that is the place. And like in real life when it’s all working together it leads to a community.
So I guess what I’m proposing, is as much as we hate reddit right now, Mastodon, Calckey, Lemmy, Kbin, and so on need to find a way to incorporate places together to get the whole idea of the fediverse walking.
I shouldn’t have to enter a full URL to get Mastodon to populate the contents of a user or place. That’s not the way we’ve been told this works. We’re being sold on the model of @name@server. Well @name@server wants to see what !nfl@server is saying about #nfl over on !different@server. Until we standardize that, the fediverse will only ever be a half baked idea.
#Mastodon #Fediverse #kbin #lemmy #reddit #federation #socialmedia #opinions #ideas
I didn’t even mean to post this here in NFL. This was posted to Calckey because they allow 3000 characters. They automatically posted it to here for some reason. Kinda highlighting my point of the whole thing.
@[email protected] @nfl @[email protected] I think we do need separate notation to separate groups from users, reserving @ for users.
The leading ! can be used for communities/groups, but we need to be consistent across applications because as you said, it’s a mess if we conflate the two concepts and have them use the same syntax
@trebach @[email protected] @nfl Yeah, just the fact that everything we’re posting here on Mastodon is getting posted to nfl.lemmy.world because they think it’s a user is proof of problem at least. Person @, Place !, Thing # It’s so simple IMO.
@[email protected] @nfl @JakoJakoJako13 if you search [email protected] you should see the lemmy community and be able to interact with it (they might have to let you join first?).
@[email protected] @name@server @JakoJakoJako13 @nfl I find it easier to think of @ names as “feeds” instead of “users”. This way, there’s no distinction that needs to be made between “user feeds” and “place feeds” as you’ve described them. My mastodon account is my personal feed of content that I write. The @nfl feed is an aggregator feed that boosts out posts from the lemmy instance
@[email protected] @JakoJakoJako13 @[email protected] I believe the reason Mastodon is showing “16 posts that don’t populate" is because your mastodon instance isn’t downloading the content for you. Did you follow @nfl? My understanding is that your instance won’t fetch those posts until someone on your server is following the account, and even then it will only fetch new posts after someone follows the account, not the old back catalog. That’s why you get the link to “browse more on the original profile.”
@awilbert @nfl I’ve been in a requested to follow state for a couple days. So from Mastodon nothing populates because somebody on their end has to approve the follow. Which is again why we should make a distinction between names and places. A person should be responsible for who follows them but a place should allow it all unless put as restricted or private I guess. The expectation of I want to follow the community vs the user are different.
@JakoJakoJako13 @[email protected] I agree that there are a lot of rough edges, especially when you start crossing boundaries between Activity Pub implementations. It may simply be the case that the @nfl moderators can’t see your request to follow because they’re not paying attention to the way the content is presented on mastodon. It’s very early days in all of this, these hurdles will work their way out over time.
