Hi, thanks a lot for your detailed message!

I totally understand the lack of faith - I mean I’ve shown nothing to earn any faith so that’s completely fair. I also share your frustration with existing apps that have shown to not improve or be good enough. That’s part of the reason why I wanted to try my hand at it myself. I feel that the status quo is not good enough and I believe in the mantra that “if someone else is doing something that you think you can do better, you should do it”.

forumverse (or threadverse) projects like Lemmy have received the main damage precisely from the incompatibility wanted by Mastodon against them;

Not sure what you mean with “damage” here, but my plan is to support all kinds of ActivityPub content, both the microblog stuff that Mastodon is known for, the forum stuff that Lemmy does and anything else from other apps. I don’t want my app to feel limited like Mastodon or Lemmy. Mastodon is very microblog-focused, Lemmy is very forum-focused. I want something that can do both and more. In some ways, this makes it harder, in other ways it makes it simpler. For instance, Lemmy makes a difference between “posts” and “comments”; they are not the same thing in the database. But in my app, comments are just another post, much like how posts work in Mastodon.

new very interesting projects like Bonfire (the only software together with Friendica and Hubzilla to manage the “circles”) are being developed with difficulty and are made up of many modules and above all do not have a decent app.

I’ve heard of these projects, but haven’t studied them in detail. I find bonfire especially confusing. I can’t seem to grok what it is - is it a server, or a framework for a server, or an app? For instance there’s this app but the code link goes nowhere. There’s also this repo with commits that look super weird. Honestly just confused about it. Anyway.

I agree that having good mobile support (including an app with great UX) is super important.

Finally, the impression I had is that even among the most famous developers of the Fediverse there is a bit of ignorance about Activitypub, about other platforms and about how other developers have solved the same problems; also it seems that the “Masters of the Fediverse” are always in a bad mood and have less and less desire to learn new things (a praiseworthy exception is Matthias Pfefferle).

I’ve tried to learn a lot about ActivityPub and I understand it fairly well at this point I would say. I’ve participated a bit at https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/ where ActivityPub is discussed at length. I’m not sure what “Masters of the Fediverse” refers to but I definitely am a curious soul and I think continuous learning is super important :)

Creating a federated software is therefore not a very simple thing neither technically nor psychologically, but if you feel capable of doing it, perhaps it could be advisable to test yourself a bit:

• developing some web utilities, some plugins or less ambitious projects
• actively contributing to other existing projects (Friendica? Bonfire?)
• getting familiar with both the Mastodon API (which is an industry standard) and with the development and definition of APIs in general: when someone wants to write an app for your software, they will look at your code and in two minutes they will decide if it is worth doing!

I appreciate your concern, but I am a professional software engineer so I’m not so worried about the scale of the project. Rest assured, I have worked on very large projects professionally and built plenty of things in side projects, most of them related to the web. I also administrate Feddit.dk so I have experience with hosting a Lemmy instance and all the complexity that brings.

I particularly enjoy Rust, and I did actually look into contributing to Lemmy (since that uses Rust in the backend) at first before I started my own project. Unfortunately, Lemmy’s code is… not where I would like it to be (both of Lemmy’s main devs learnt Rust while working on Lemmy, and it unfortunately shows in the code quality), and the direction of Lemmy is not the direction I want to take my project, as stated above. I want something more general than a Reddit clone, though it will be inspired by Reddit/Lemmy in some ways (I plan to use up/down votes to sort content, for instance).

I have no interest in contributing to Friendica, as the direction seems bad, as noted in the post above. Besides, it’s PHP and I really don’t want to touch that. Hubzilla is also PHP and seems much to technical for general users, so once again not viable. Bonfire seems to be Elixir which I don’t know either, but again I am super confused about what Bonfire even is. All these reasons and other reasons are why I wanted to do my own project.

I don’t agree with you that the Mastodon API is an “industry standard” - it may be widely used, but Mastodon is continually forcing its own ideas of the Fediverse on the rest of the ecosystem, which I don’t like and is something that is often bemoaned on https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/. But rest assured that I am very familiar and comfortable with APIs (again, professional software engineer 🙂). I care about documentation a lot and from the start, my prototype backend has exposed its API via an OpenAPI specification so that clients can be easily generated. I’m actually about to use this OpenAPI spec to generate a client myself as I start work on the frontend 🙂.

Again, thanks a lot for your thoughts and attention! If you have any concrete feedback on the UI and/or UX of Lemmy, Mastodon, Friendica or other apps, I’d love to hear it, as I’m starting work on the UI for my own frontend these days. For instance, any favourite UI of a fediverse app, any preferred features or any common mistakes or pitfalls that should be avoided, if you have any thoughts along that direction.

I think “hundreds of thousands and even millions” is a bit of a stretch. Wikimedia’s annual report mentions donors at a level of “$50,000+”, and I’m guessing most of those are probably closer to 50,000 than to 100,000. Tbf I suppose that’s over just one year, so perhaps your statement isn’t entirely inaccurate.

I suppose this community is as good as any. But it’s difficult to talk in general about this as each fediverse app has different performance needs/characteristics, so I’m not sure if you can extrapolate anything in general. But perhaps?

Why shouldn’t the donation model keep working? Wikipedia works on donations, why can’t the fediverse?

Feddit.dk is not a huge Lemmy instance but I’ve managed to not have to pay anything so far due to generous user donations. It works quite well I think. I think Mastodon is just not quite as effective in gathering people like this to donate, that’s my guess at least.

It’s very early. I have a prototype backend server and I’m currently starting work on the frontend. If you have any inputs on features, UX, UI, or anything else that you maybe are missing from existing fediverse apps, I’d love to hear from you, as some preliminary feedback. But again, it’s early so there is not much to track yet. But thank you for the interest :)

But you’re not saying it’s just “precursors” - it sounded like you were saying the fediverse will never become mainstream. Never is a long time, I would say.

Propaganda is definitely not on the list of planned features, haha :)

Appreciate the sentiment, I hope it will one day be worthy of donations :)

Don’t want to shout too much about this yet as it’s still super early but I am actually working on a new fediverse app that I plan should be covering the same sort of use cases as Lemmy, Mastodon and Friendica, all in one application. With a big focus on user friendliness, easy onboarding and such.

It’s still super early but drop me a private message if you’re interested in helping or just hearing more.

I don’t think that’s true. That’s just defeatism talking.

That is, in theory. In practice, it can make a big difference. Source: Worked professionally with large services built in Python and Rust.

You might want to seek professional help in that case.

I meant more like trust in communities and admins. If you can trust that the admins and moderators will do their task well, you shouldn’t have to worry about keeping track of these users yourself.

Karma in the style of reddit is not and has never been a great proxy for whether a user is “good” or “bad”. It mostly just says something about how active a user is and for how long they have been active, and how much they agree with the hivemind. Agreeing with the hivemind is not necessarily the criteria you want, as that just leads to more echo chamber situations.

I don’t know, I’ve never done meditation. I don’t think you have to overdo or overthink this. It’s more about letting your brain have some moments of rest from stimulation. We’re currently stimulated all the time. It’s not healthy.

Sorry, Shaun who? 😅

Tip for anyone dealing with this: it’s not just a sleep hygiene thing. You’re thinking about all those things because you didn’t give yourself space to think about any of it during the day. Try to just sit without looking at your phone all the time. Try to have silence when you’d normally listen to music or a podcast.

Basically, try being bored again. You’ll find your mind will fill in with these thoughts and you’ll have an easier time processing them when you don’t have the pressure of needing to sleep.

Trust built up over a long time through well moderated communities is my bet.

Not sure I like this though. That kinda stuff can just as easily be used to enforce echo chambers and censorship.

This depends on the settings of the other instance. Some instances copy images, others don’t.

actually starting a new instance on the same domain name would be… very weird, potentially extremely problematic. The system would not be able to tell apart users from the old site and the new site.