Mastodon has a ton of apps and Lemmy app development is going crazy right now. Are there any apps that can use both Lemmy and Mastodon accounts (and preferably Kbin accounts too)? I know the interfaces may need to be different, but the protocols are the same as far as I understand it, so it seems technically possible.
It really is a little embarrassing for the fediverse I think. Many of the people that went back to Twitter essentially did so because of a lack of features. Some of those were controversial like QTs, but all around it’s a rather spartan platform that sometimes feels like it doesn’t want you to socialise too much.
That being said, it’s also the most stable and snappy. Calckey, I think, has some problematic performance issues. And Lemmy has its issues too, though I’m fairly hopeful they’ll get fixed over time. Mastodon, once you get used to it, kinda just works. For competing platform devs it’s a quality probably worth noticing.
I think the biggest problem with that is all the people complaining about “meta” trying to get into the fediverse (don’t get me wrong, I am not a meta user).
Because the protocol is open, it is impossible to stop it. If meta does make a product with better UI, even if they don’t change the underlying protocol, guess what the majority of people will be using?
Yep. Meta have even announced that they will allow people to migrate from mastodon to meta’s platform.
Meanwhile mastodon have no such feature for migrating from anywhere else to mastodon. And you can bet it won’t be easy to perform the migration away from meta.
More deeply, it seems to me that the fediverse hasn’t really appreciated that it needed to find ways to work together and not reinvent the wheel for every new platform or UI. As a result, its killer feature should have emerged by now but hasn’t, arguably at all … namely the whole fediverse and all its various platforms becoming one giant “actually meta” platform. This requires good interoperstion and good standards etc. But once you’ve got it, any new feature or idea anywhere can contribute to the whole and stay behind the reach of any big corp’s abilities. Instead, the fediverse is a bunch of separate and small independent hackers trying to clone big social platforms without much help and now in a race to stay ahead of big corporations.
If the fediverse dies, failing to create modular and composable software will probably be the ultimate killer.
Exactly. I’ve even seen a fair amount of Mastodon essentialism when alternates are brought up, but in order to prevent a takeover we need a healthier ecosystem than anything they can offer. I think the threadiverse is in a healthier place with two major alternatives that have slightly different overall ideas about which direction things should go. All that said I love Mastodon. In my mind the killer feature for any of these apps is still a smart, private take on an intelligent content algorithm designed around human growth and personalization rather than doom scrolling and ad views.