0x1C3B00DA

If your instance is already aware of that user, you don't need the domain. Mastodon.social is the oldest mastodon instance and probably the biggest, so it is aware of a large majority of the fediverse.

If you know the person's twitter handle, its simple to search for them. People coming from centralized systems, don't realize that you have to include the domain for fediverse searches to work. I couldn't just find you by searching for p03locke, I'd have to search for @[email protected].

Also, if my instance has never interacted with you, your profile probably won't show posts when I find you (though this is a choice and I don't know why implementations won't fix it.)

Again, instance blocks makes this more complicated because my instance could block yours or yours could block mine and that would prevent this search from working but the user wouldn't know that.

I'm not gonna begrudge anybody their use of meat or dairy alternatives, but I don't think I'm in favor of them. Or at least, I hope they're not the main solution we try to use to combat climate change. Again, I have no problem with individuals using them but it feels like at the societal level, they're just an excuse to not change anything. Like the idea is we can keep consuming endlessly as long as we're consuming something slightly less damaging to the environment.

I would also hate to see the agriculture industry replaced by manufacturers of these alternatives. The agriculture industry sucks and is terrible for small farms, but at least small farms are still there. If that industry is replaced, my fear is that small farms won't be able to sustain themselves even with innovative or regenerative practices and our only options for meat/dairy will be large corporations. (I know most people already get their meat/dairy from large corporations, but I'd love to see us move more towards local farms than replace all farms with more corporations)

Most people are pointed to joinmastodon.org first and have to pick an instance. And since they're not familiar with decentralization, they don't understand what that means. It's especially weird that they can't directly join mastodon on the site called "joinmastodon" but have to go to another site.

Then once you get past that to make an account, you have to find people and discovery has always been one of the worst aspects of the fediverse. And the graph of instance blocks means a new user may not even be able to find the people they care about and they won't know why.

If you know all this, its easy to understand. But for people used to a centralized system and unaware of all the intricacies of the network, there's a lot of snags here.

It shouldn’t be this hard to implement a standard structure for social media (groups/channels/sub-reddits) with an allegedly standardised protocol.

Wait til you see mastodon's proposed Group implementation, which they're intentionally making incompatible with existing Group implementations

There's nothing wrong with getting an insulated and reusable thermos. In fact, that's probably a great thing to do and should be encouraged. What people are rejecting is the trend of collecting them as status symbols or buying multiple in different colors to match your outfit. That behavior has real and negative consequences.

Only if you want to force everyone to adopt this behavior

Did you read the proposal? No one is forcing anyone to do anything. The proposal would allow one community to follow another. Communities don't have to send a follow request and the other community doesn't have to follow back. This works just like users following users/communities. It's all optional.

There are tons of people here that are telling you that this is a non-issue to them, why do you think that all clients need that?

There are tons of ppl telling you it is an issue for them. If its not an issue for you, then you lose nothing if this is implemented, but ppl who care have one of their pain points solved.

it absolutely is better to delegate behavior to the nodes as much as possible... Pushing as much functionality to the client is such a good way to follow Postel’s Law that is basically second nature to those developing distributed systems.

The nodes are the servers not the clients. Your argument is the exact opposite of what every fediverse developer says. The reason most of the fediverse uses the MastoAPI (or lemmy api for the threadiverse) instead of the ActivityPub Client to Server API is because the C2S expects a more client focused ecosystem but all the developers find it easier to handle logic on the server.

requires no extensions in the spec

That proposal doesnt require an extension to the spec. It requires a group to follow another group, which is definitively within the ActivityPub spec. The proposal above is written as a FEP (Fediverse Enhancement Proposal) which is the agreed upon way to propose new behavior in an interoperable way.

no changes in the server side

But it takes changes on the client side. One is not inherently better than the other. Also, doing it client side means you have to duplicate the work for every client. Doing it server side means it works for everyone.

easily prototyped/tested

Every fediverse platform already supports following Actors. That's part of the spec. Handling follows for groups is just as easy as for users.

That's exactly what the third proposal in the article would do. See the proposal its based on for more detail.

Lemmy doesn't have to have missing features for someone to want to write their own implementation. And in a decentralized system you want multiple implementations to exist. This is a good thing

Exactly. It's also using Spring Boot, Hibernate, and Lombok. It looks just like projects at work. It might be the first fediverse project I contribute regularly to.

But if you increase the userbase, you'll end up with more ppl who like yugioh and want a community which leads to duplicate communities. But for niche topics, the duplicate communities are likely to end up with userbases too small to sustain enough activity. A way to combine communities makes it more likely that users find other users who want to discuss niche topics with them. That helps to grow the userbase.

There is no point

Yes, there is. If we can keep those 5 users here, its better than them being on reddit. There's no reason not to work on this. We have multiple projects, each with multiple contributors, so we can do multiple things at one time.