When illustrating the Fediverse as a network, what should the nodes be?
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@evan@cosocial.ca @gaditb@icosahedron.website
I see illustrations like this of interconnected Fediverse platforms, kind of often, and from an end users point of view, it just isn't that true. E.g. I need a completely different user account for the "threadiverse" platforms (Lemmy/Kbin/Mbin/Piefed) versus all the blogging ones (Mastodon, Gotosocial, Wafrn, Pleroma, Misskey, etc.) and neither of those accounts get me logged into Mobilizon, etc. And claiming general interconnectedness & interoperability is way misleading to potential new users.
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Being a literal-minded person, I chose Instances (/servers) because that's what handles the data.
But an alternate graph might be best described with hashtags.
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@evan I think this is a sneaky good question actually. It reminds me of a blog post @laurenshof wrote a few months back about how communities form. I voted software which I interpreted as the type of platform (Mastodon, PeerTube, Pixelfed etc) but I think it could just as easily be any of the choices
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E) All of the above.
You can do the one diagram, but different copies with the different words, then stack them all on-top of each other to make the Fediverse
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@evan pretty sure it is mostly cats and elephants.
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@stefan @andypiper Servers would have been better. Can we live with instances?
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@evan I reckon people, but have them clustered in supernodes which represent the instances they're connecting through.
But then I'm assuming you want to show the data flow, how the connections work between people and how those connections can fail or be blocked.
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@evan Cute kittens?
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@evan Cats.
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I think you have to start with instances, but I don't think you call them that. An instance is a technical term that is completely meaningless to almost everyone.
Call it a Community.
That's the core of the hierarchy.
- A Community decides to host a Social Platform
- That Community selects the types of content they want to share and then runs the appropriate software (Mastodon, PeerTube, PixelFed, Friendica, etc)
- That Community enables its members to join via the software they've set up
- That Community can then communicate with other Communities via the protocols available (ActivityPub)
The software is really secondary here. A community could run multiple pieces of software for their own purposes. In fact they probably should. The CBC Community should run both Mastodon and PeerTube.
It's not "one instance", It's a community running instances of all of the software they need.
I know you have an option for "people", but I don't think that is specific enough. It's "Communities of People".
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@andypiper @evan @stefan I'm curious why you prefer "server" over "instance". For me, the term "server" is more ambiguous since it could be a hardware host, VPS/VM, container, software, etc. I think of an "instance" as a web origin of an ActivityPub node. Although most AP implementations host one instance on a server, it's possible to host many instances on a server (multi tenancy). Takahē and FIRM are two AP implementations that support multi-tenancy.
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@evan when I got started with the fediverse this question represented all of my apprehensions about what this thing was. While I understand everything can be viewed from multiple viewpoints, I really find that the Instance as Node (or Instance as Community as Node) graph is the most intuitive for both new and veteran fedizens.
This is especially apparent when a community may operate multiple software, such as offering both Mastodon and Pixelfed, for their members.
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I didn't answer this one. I usually do people as nodes, with some kind of boundary to indicate instances. Thanks all!
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I didn't answer this one. I usually do people as nodes, with some kind of boundary to indicate instances. Thanks all!
@evan I'm with you on this one.
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I didn't answer this one. I usually do people as nodes, with some kind of boundary to indicate instances. Thanks all!
I get the good intentions of the encyclopedia diagrams showing the different software packages, but I do not think it works at all.
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@evan
What instance/server/software someone might be using is irrelevant, we all follow *people*.@alisonw correct
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@evan I think Topics could just as well have the same rational, and it's interesting to me that it has scored so low so far.
@aeva at some point I want to use the tags.pub data to make a network diagram where nodes are hashtags and connections exist if they occur in the same content; connection strength is number of items they've been in together.
