Put another way, what are some examples of software built with federation in mind from the start, rather than on top of a more centralized design?
I think that we need to talk about the history of software and social software here, because the current status is kind of crazy:
- Most of the big platforms didn’t invent what they are currently doing. Reddit is basically a forum. They had a great innovation with their voting idea, but functionally there is little difference between the many webforums we had before and Reddit
- Twitter is a microblog, which already tells you about its origins. There were blogs before twitter, on their own servers, talking to each other with pingbacks and RSS
- YouTube, well, basically just shows you videos, which of course was done before by people on their own servers
So basically most fediverse is not emulating existing platforms, but trying to go back to an internet we had before the big platforms took everything over. And with ActivityPub we have the protocol to ease some of the pains that the decentralized internet before the web 2.0 era had. F.e. you had to create an account for each individual webforum, which really sucked if you just wanted to ask a question or share something. Reddit with its one login totally took over, because you could participate in many subforums. It was easier to just hop into /r/cooking to ask a question about your lasagna then to find the relevant lasagna forum and register there.
Misskey. It’s second most used software in fediverse. Used in misskey.io, which has 10 thousands daily active user (possibly 100K-200K MAU).
Developed since 2014. Originally function as self-hosted microblogging, now turns into unique social media. For example:
- Misskey-flavoured Markdown, example
- social games (only two so far: Reversi and Bubble Game)
- emoji reaction like Discord (they’re the first one to implement it on fediverse)
- Antennas (tracking post with any keyword)
- Pages
- Channels (groups)
- Clips (bookmark with multiple groups, kinda like Facebook bookmarks)
- Achievement
- optional ads banner (just in case the server admin wants to do community ads, usually used for indie games, comics, vtuber, or IRL art event)
Their community is mainly Japanese, they desperately need English contributor and community to help them grow.
The Misskey forks are in English, the only bad thing is that they are a little resource intensive
If it was soft-fork, than its fine. Almost all previous forks are hard-forking, splitting English community into another one.
A lot of FOSS project from non-English community often having hard time to broaden their community unless English community embrace them first. Helping non-English community also broaden FOSS community diversity and perspective, allowing them to collaborate and do cultural exchange.
