The fediverse is the network of federated decentralized social media using activitypub to connect. Lemmy (the software on which chapo.chat is based) will be in some months part of this network.
What do you think about fediverse ? Are some of you using Mastodon as a twitter replacement ?
I can definitely see how there may be other instances which have a different focus but are not otherwise incompatible with chapo.chat. Letting members of those instances participate in discussions here is probably a good thing.
You see this kind of thing happen on the existing fediverse already. There are mastodon and pleroma instances set up for specific groups or interests, but they all communicate more or less freely with each other.
This way, the larger network does not live or die by one central point of failure.
See but if federation only just provides portability of usernames so you can carry your clout across lemmy instances, honestly WHO CARES ABOUT THAT
I didn't need an account to shitpost on 4chan and bunkerchan, and need everyone to know who I was.
Shitposting on an anonymous board is a different use case. Being identifiable across servers is useful in its own way that goes beyond clout chasing.
See, but again who cares about this. What is it meant to provide? Trolls aren't going to care if their handles are federated across instances, and the only reason anyone that is acting in good faith would care is for clout. Same thing with federating topics and comments and posts. If I wanted to know what one community thought about a topic, I'd go there. Seeing what some moron on another lemmy instance is thinking, and having that show up in this lemmy instance is just not interesting to me.
Anonymous conversations have their place certainly, but in other cases it's useful to know that you're talking to the same person you were yesterday. If you see posts from bilb@chapo.chat posting on teawareenthusiasts.club, you know it's the same account posting here. That's not about clout, it's about being able to have coherent conversations over a period of time across a network. That said, if you're unconvinced of the benefits of being in a decentralized network rather than a monolithic siloed service that's another discussion.
See but we already are decentralized, just by the very fact that chapo.chat is its own DNS name, running on its own infrastructure, as opposed to being a community run on someone else's infrastructure (like it was on Reddit).
Federation is not decentralization. You are conflating terms.
Federation, in super simple terms, is like interconnecting different platforms doing similar things, like crossplay does for games, right?
Everyone keeps saying it's like e-mail, which makes sense to me.
In some ways, yes, in other ways, no.
SMTP is a protocol laid out by the IETF in RFCs. Everyone got together and hammered out the protocol, and everyone agreed to abide by the RFCs so that data could be interchanged between all the independent systems. That's why you can send an e-mail to a Gmail account from an MSN account and it will transit the network and end up on the other end, still able to be processed and displayed.
So, to me, that means that there is interoperability. That's what the IETF strives for.
Lemmy is talking about using ActivePub, which is is being developed by the W3C. It's sort of like the IETF, but at a higher OSI layer. So, that's why they talk about "federation" - so that different lemmy instances can exchange data via ActivityPub. Since I work at a lower layer in the OSI model, that's why I am focusing on the identity federation part of Lemmy, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federated_identity - and why I don't think it's all that useful to have identities persist across lemmy instances.
Yes crossplay is a good example of federation, when it comes to identity management. Each network (xbox live, PSN, PC) has their own identity providers (steam, xbox, psn) and crossplay allows people from different networks to play on the same game session.
This is seperate from the discussion around interoperability, meaning the sharing of gamestate between different versions of the same game, running on these different platforms. It's an important distinction, that I think sometimes people take the interoperability concept and roll it up into the term federation.
Maybe I played a bit fast and loose with those words, but federation enables decentralization while allowing these services to talk to each other. I know you find the latter part pointless, but yeah.
Federation does not enable decentralization. Federation enables the sharing of resources across different independent systems. This is used to remove duplication of resources. Identities, for example.
Why would I care that it's the same user. I only care about the content of their post. Why would I care to know that bilb on chapo has great posts on chapo.chat but has absolutely the worst taste in teaware patterns? It's not worth the technical infrastructure and code to implement
If you don't care to socialize beyond reactions to content, then yes, identity doesn't matter. I like the idea of creating and fostering relationships between people though.
because my identity is metadata I'd rather control. federation allows me to set up my own lemmy instance (for myself, close comrades, etc) and choose what gets shared with other instances.
fully separated identities fragments that data instead and splits control over a bunch of parties.