As excited as I am about the Fediverse and its diversity, an all-in-one application is the real dream. I’m afraid efforts are splintering into too many redundant apps (15 at this point across both platforms) when they could be focused on the one app to rule them all with clean, working interfaces for as many federated applications as possible. With Fedilab already supporting Friendica, Mastodon, Pleroma, Pixelfed, Peertube, and even GNU Social (with plans to support CalcKey), adding Lemmy / Kbin would be a game changer for me and many others. Add Funkwhale and maybe WordPress and it’s game over you never need to download any other apps.
@fedilab
Fair competition is great. Letting things develop naturally is the way to go.
How would I use Fedilab on desktop?
I think it’s great that there are so many apps. Some will win some will lose and new ones will come along. Just like the federated servers. If an app or server gets out of touch with the community it will get replaced or move.
I would love the move towards federated, p2p, all in one apps! Supporting the back ends on ActivityPub, peertube, IPFS, RSS, email, matrix, and sms, and then you can have tons of different UIs depending on what you are the user’s preferred user experience.
Imagine sending someone a direct message via Matrix, email, or sms. Scheduling a break-out session from a peertube comment block to talk over matrix. Pinning a comment on Matrix and turning it into a fediverse post and sharing it via hashtags and to communities. Sharing files over IPFS and peertube reducing hosting costs so more people can host! With things like thirdroom you could really give more options for UIs, but the greatest thing is that if the backend standards are kept normalized a VR chat, could be seen as a text on my phone, as an email or on a desktop chat application.
So for me, it’s more acknowledging these different mediums and making sure the backends of major fediverse platforms support them, and then the UIs can splinnter as much as needed to cover all the different ways people want to use these apps. Maybe even support a UI addon system and UI layout/theme sharing, so that you can further reduce the amount of duplicate work out there.
Basically KDE Plasma Desktop style configurability but for the Fediverse
As a dev, another really cool development to me is the introduction of ActivityPub to things like Gitea, and forgejo, again this is really where the concept of federation just kicks ass to me. Like imagine commenting on code issue, on lemmy/mastdon/discourse? No need to setup webhooks, bots, webscrapers. Just native support for cross-platform discussions.
Want to follow latest releases of your favorite FLOSS projects? Just follow their repo! You can crosspost it or boost too if you want to.
