It’s on the internet. Public. Got it. It’s almost as if, and hold on to your hats here, the whole point of posting on something like Mastodon or Lemmy or so is to have a public discourse, as you cannot know who will be replying anyways. It’s almost as if, and this is getting wild, I know, read-access being public is intentional and explicitly part of the design.

This is true for Mastodon and Lemmy and I generally agree with this sentiment.

That said, ActivityPub is more than just Lemmy and Mastodon. ActivityPub is more general than that. Lemmy and Mastodon are designed in a way where public discourse is the default and everything you write is expected to be public. But ActivityPub on its own has no such assumptions. There’s nothing about ActivityPub that says that you cannot build a more private social media with it. But actually you can’t really, because of the problems that the blog post points out. But the vision I think for some people is that this should be possible.

I’m personally not 100% convinced that that vision is even possible though tbh.

I love me some calzone with spaghetti bolognese inside of it. It’s very indulgent but so good.

Sure. But lemmy would still not show Mastodon posts outside communities even if they supported that extension. Both parties need to move towards each other.

ActivityPub is an extensible protocol. It is not just one thing. Lemmy only supports posts that follow that extension I linked above. That extension has a definition and Lemmy follows it so in that way it is “standard”. But it is an extension, not part of the core protocol.

Mastodon and most other fediverse services do not support this extension.

Its not that anyone is “doing it wrong” and Mastodon doesn’t really support Lemmys communities either. So Lemmy works in a bit of a funky way that doesn’t match most other fediverse services.

Its just a bit strange that Lemmy does not support the more common posts outside communities since that is how most of the fediverse works, so we’re kinda missing out on a lot of content that we can’t see on Lemmy.

This is the FEP Lemmy uses but most other fediverse services do not use it and Lemmy does not support anything that doesn’t use this FEP. So again, it’s not that Lemmy is doing something wrong, but Lemmy is not supporting how most of the rest of the fediverse functions.

I think Mastodon is very far from standard

I think it’s much closer to standard than Lemmy and I’ve looked into it quite a bit recently. ActivityPub is unfortunately quite focused on microblogging. Honestly lemmys way of doing it is a little hacky.

As for the posts outside communities? That makes sense lemmy-wise I think. Where would those posts be?

I actually think it’s quite straightforward, they’d just be on a users page. This is actually how Reddit has also done it ever since they introduced the feature (much before they enshittified everything else).

You can think of it like every users profile being a community of its own but only the user itself can post to it. Just conceptually speaking.

That would also let you follow users just as you can follow communities.

I mean you could equally ask why does Lemmy not support posts outside communities? It’s on both parties to interoperate I think. Lemmy also uses a specific extension to ActivityPub while Discourse’s posts and Mastodon’s posts and such are pretty standard, but still not picked up by Lemmy.

It has ActivityPub support so it is connected to the fediverse in some ways. Lemmy doesn’t work with it though AFAIK because Lemmy doesn’t support posts made outside communities.

If there was a Reddit/Lemmy style website (where people create communities for various subjects but it’s all available from the same website using the same credentials) with forum style discussions

Isn’t this just Discourse?

Do you think that the conversation around, e.g, python programming or wood turning techniques will vary so much that it warrants many specific flavors?

I don’t see why not. Human culture is like a fractal after all :P. At least I don’t think we should discourage creating different places for the same topics, because different approaches is part of decentralization.

for the cases where the culture is more-or-less universal

When is this ever true? The idea of a “universal culture” is exactly what I mean with this encouraging centralization. Even a specific community (subreddit) on a centralized service like Reddit will have a specific culture that is not in line with any “universal culture” (it’s likely to be skewed towards whatever culture exists in western english-speaking countries, just to mention an example).

I personally am not a huge fan of this idea. Instances are at the end of the day communities of their own in a way. One community may want to discuss a topic in one way and another community may want to discuss it in another way. This seems to be a way to centralize all discussion around a topic in one community, but we should rather go for decentralized communities.

But hey that’s just my opinion, if others like it, go for it.

They have a page on “supporting long form text in the fediverse” - but this is already supported? I think it’s only Mastodon and other microblogging places that put restrictions on how long posts can be.

Zoxide, dust, fd, rg, btm, tokei. So many newer Rust tools that are way better than the old stuff.

Interstellar is the first one that comes to mind.

But how do you know that the human brain is not just a super sophisticated next-thing predictor that by being super sophisticated manages to incorporate nuance and all that stuff to actually be intelligent? Not saying it is but still.

I mean… you can already kinda do that right? Raise your children to have similar values to you and they’ll vote like you when they grow up. That happens constantly. There’s just an 18 year latency to it. Obviously you lose the vote once they grow up to vote by themselves. I feel like you’re making a bit of a strawman out of what I’m saying here. We clearly just disagree and that’s okay.

The idea is that the parent represents the child. We don’t trust children to make an informed vote, but we trust parents to make all kinds of choices for their children, including extremely personal choices. The current alternative is to not give children a vote at all. I think letting parents choose the vote for their child is better, and fits pretty well with all the rest that parents currently choose for their child. I also think it’s better than simply letting children of all ages vote, since again, they probably won’t be able to make an informed vote.

In that regard, they already have representation by their parents’ votes.

But that vote only counts as much as one person, so it doesn’t give any more representation to the child if you ask me. My whole point is that a parent should have outsized voting power because they represent two persons, not one (okay actually each parent would get 1.5 votes as the child’s vote would be split on each parent but my point is the same).

Until they reach that point, it’s essentially their parents or guardians getting an extra vote.

Honestly I’ve sometimes thought that parents ought to be able to vote for their kids. At least that gives some form of representation to children.