But your saying Peertube should have all the forum functionality of Lemmy, and the endless short video scroll of Loops.

rgluilis suggested a generic server idea, where the media and experience differentiating is done at the client app level. That could work well. But that’s an entirely different concept and structure.

And that’s great! Everyone gets what they want. But suggesting Lemmy, Pixelfed, and Peertube, etc. should all try to do it the way Friendica does, is a bad idea.

So like a single ActivityPub instance that hosts all the data, but users can have a Pixelfed app, Lemmy app, etc. all connect to that one server and use it to give the experience they specifically provide.

That’s a cool idea. I can see how that would work.

Why would you follow the same accounts on multiple platforms?
Or do you mean one person who has accounts on multiple platforms?

I think you might be conflating two things. Right now the Fediverse largely looks like you just described. It’s in it’s infancy, trying to copy what it sees around it. Eventually it’ll become a rebellious teen and forge it’s on seperate identity. That’s inevitable. I wouldn’t worry about it.

It’s a very different thing though, saying all the apps need to integrate all the features and experience of every other app, so they’re all largely the same and there’s never a need to use more than one. That sounds like a terrible idea.

Is it?
Because that seems really dumb.

Why would any specific niche service want to duplicate the features and functions of every single other niche service? The whole point is to have different experiences and uses, that might be able to (however works for them) interoperate as they see fit.

It’s a terrible idea that they should all try to eventually do all the same everything.

The current Lemmy version is very customizable. I think it has seven basic types of views, which are further customizable how you like. You can kinda make it look like whatever you want.

It’s not supposed to answer the question. It’s pointing out that the mental model and assumptions behind the question are flawed, and thus the question itself is flawed.

with a single account (isn’t that the point of the fediverse?).

Absolutely not. I’m not sure why people see Lemmy, Mastodon, Pixelfed, Peertube, Loops, etc as all the same thing that should all be one app.

They might communicate with the same protocol, but they have vastly different uses, interfaces, styles, and experience. It’s like saying you want one vehicle that drives like a motorcycle, haules the kids around, gets great mileage, and can tow 20,000lbs.

All your tools fit in the same toolbox, but you use each one separately for the use it’s best suited. Then you put it down and pick up another. Sure you can make a multi-tool but it won’t do any job as well as a proper dedicated tool. It’ll just kinda work if you have no better option.

Sure! People used to use them for journaling all the time.

Everyone used to have a blog, until the big social media “platforms” kinda took over the internet.

You could try substack. They make it easy to monetize your blog.

I never had a problem with the moderation. Just the platform enshittifying to maximize profit.

So you want people to listen to you, while you don’t have to listen to them. That’s called a blog. Try WordPress or something.

Then you switched for the wrong reasons.
You could always go back.
Or start your own server.

Why do we advocate for, and pour hours of development into, ActivityPub rather than building clients which add a social layer to existing content distribution and communication protocols?

If clients built their own social layer, those would be limited to users of that client. If they opened up the social layer with an interoperable protocol, now you just made ActivityPub again.

Yyeess! 🤘

Right now, it looks like the only way users on my instance will get to see content from other instances is if I manually search for just about everything they’ll get to see.

They can do that themselves.

Agreed.
Until people started following hashtags. Then they were trying to be about more than just people, and doing it poorly. Kind of like wanting to subscribe to people on Lemmy. That’s not what it’s for, and just shouldn’t be an option, so people know that.

They really aren’t.
They’re a user created workaround, attempting to fix the structure-less, findability problem. Twitter embraced and officially incorporated them, because they had no better solution that wasn’t completely rebuilding the entire system. They rightly new everybody would hate that.

Yes exactly! It’s just like Twitter or Blusky. It’s 99.3% people just shouting into the void, without form or structure. You’re not confused.