I proposed a features a while back to both lemmy and kbin that never really got any traction. Unfortunately, on the lemmy issue, people kept discussing similar but unrelated ideas and the discussion got pretty muddled until a mod closed it for being a duplicate of an unrelated issue.
Honk is one of the older AP projects and has worked reliably that whole time. I've never had an account on honk but I've never had any federation issues with others on honk.
mastodon wasn't stable or performant in the beginning either. It attracted users because there weren't other well known alternatives and those users were excited to build a new place where they felt comfortable. Gargron rode that excitement and enthusiasm until it didn't serve him anymore, then he shut those ppl out
This was a goal of ActivityPub but it'll take a lot of work to get there. I'd love to see the fediverse evolve in the way you're talking about but I don't think it will while mastodon remains the dominant platform. The masto team did a partial EEE (they did the embrace/extend part) years before Thread was around and they've dominated the fediverse ever since and most people refer to this place as mastodon. The masto dev team has said multiple times they're not interested in adding support for other content and they want to remain a microblogging service.
Other service have to remain compatible with mastodon to gain any traction which makes getting a new project off the ground more difficult. Lemmy was around for a couple years before the reddit migration and you'll notice kbin is just about as big as lemmy despite the head start. Outside of some new huge event, the fediverse will probably continue on as it is for a while. I'm really hoping lemmy/kbin can gain a large enough userbase to throw some weight around and influence other projects development so we can see some evolution.
I don't know anything about the market, but I was really in to Overwatch for a while. It went downhill when they basically abandoned the first game and then came out with a second to flip the business model to battle pass bs.
I'd be down for something new to fill its spot and this looks like it could be it
There's also the point about upgrades and storage growing exponentially, which is one of the most recurring complaints about running a fediverse server. Even the ones that are can lighter than mastodon have to contend with huge databases that never stop growing.
The fediverse is notorious for overmoderation and mobbing. A lot of ppl have come here looking for a safer space and as a result they are incredibly (over?)zealous about protecting it.
Sidenote: I incredibly disagree with the author's conclusion that calckey should be avoided because of their experience. On mastodon, they likely would not have had their account reactivated because the majority of those overzealous ppl are on mastodon
I wish ppl would realize the solution to Mastodon problems is to stop focusing on Mastodon. It's not the fediverse. Fediverse services need to focus on interoperability so that the entire network is the platform instead of depending on Mastodon to fix its built-in shortcomings. These are the same issues that mastodon has had since the beginning and are working as designed. Instead of fighting upstream against mastodon, we could improve the fediverse as a whole.
Kbin and Lemmy bring a huge discoverability boost to the fediverse and microblogging services. Non threadiverse services could better emphasize Group posts to lead users to finding groups that match their interests. Right now they show up as normal boosts on other platforms and there's no indication that it's a Group instead of a single user. Real search features could be built in; the lack of it is a philosophical decision by mastodon that doesn't have to apply to the rest of the fediverse. To fix the CW arguments, services could build in better user based filtering. If you can auto CW other users posts, there's no need to yell at ppl about CWs.
There's plenty of other ways the rest of the fediverse could improve without mastodon; Mastodon is intent on just being a better twitter but the rest of the fediverse could be a platform that's more cohesive and feature rich than any other solical network. And if the non-masto fediverse gains enough traction, mastodon can keep holding back the fediverse and masto users can't keep bullying users into trying to fit into their various disparate rules.
I have argued for a while that the Fediverse is way behind in this area; part of this lack of tooling and reliance on user reports, but part is architectural. CSAM-scanning systems work one of two ways: hosted like PhotoDNA, or privately distributed hash databases. The former is a problem because all servers hitting PhotoDNA at once for the same images doesn't scale. The latter is a problem because widely distributed hash databases allow for crafting evasions or collisions.
This is from the study's author (here's the full thread). It shows how pernicious centralization is in technology. The author is claiming the fediverse is "behind" instead of the tools behind behind in supporting decentralized services. They were developed with only centralized Silicon Valley silos in mind and now they can't keep up with a decentralized infrastructure and the authors solution is for decentralized services to centralize around these tools.
I've explained elsewhere why I don't think that's an actual issue for the fediverse, but my comment wasn't about Meta. It was just pointing out that the top comment in this chain from @Dee is not accurate because the fediverse doesn't have a single, cohesive view of Meta joining the fediverse.
There is no main community. Different instances see different posts so some users may not even be aware of some communities. Or they may be subscribed to the largest community for a topic but because of federation wonkiness they don't see all the posts in a community.
The fediverse is not fragile. It's been around for a decade and a half during which time large corporate networks have taken over the world and then faded away. It's always been small and likely always will be, but that isn't a failure when your objective is to have a nice, communal network instead of a corporate, ad network that makes you $$$.
I don't think we're arguing different points. Even the largest instances were started by individuals not large companies. These are hobbyists doing something they think is fun or a useful/beneficial service. Their reasons for starting an instance (kbin, pleroma, lemmy, friendica, etc) are likely directly opposed to falling in line with policies from Meta.
Running a fediverse server is notoriously taxing. I don't see people deciding to start up a node just so they can spend their time enforcing policies they don't believe in that were handed down from Meta. The large majority of people who decide to start their own instance are probably doing it to gain some level of freedom over their social interactions online and falling in line with a large corporate overlord is antithetical to that
I proposed a features a while back to both lemmy and kbin that never really got any traction. Unfortunately, on the lemmy issue, people kept discussing similar but unrelated ideas and the discussion got pretty muddled until a mod closed it for being a duplicate of an unrelated issue.
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3071https://codeberg.org/Kbin/kbin-core/issues/149