It's one of the nice things about AP is that whatever interface you like best Twitter/Reddit/RSS can get you access to the same content.
Is Lemmy named after Lemmy?
I ended up starting at programming.dev because someone on HN mentioned it and it at least seemed to have a focus and also wasn't a ghost town. And that was pretty good but I've also joined beehaw (takes some time) because I like its size and decorum and generically would choose to get on their side of a defederation. And after I'm starting to understand how this whole activity pub and defederation and federation works, I really am optimistic about it.
I think somebody needs to build something that's a crossover between GitHub pages and activitypub that sort of behaves like discus and integrates with Lemmy/kbin/mastodon. So that blog writers can have comments at their own sites again and they can integrate together to grow organically. I haven't quite pieced it all together, but I sort of see that could grow as a replacement for what we lost with Google Reader and the loss of blog commenting communities.
Of course, this goes for any major interest category but it just hit me the hardest so far to realize this.
Another cool development would be a science-oriented Lemmy instance with lots of special purpose sciency stuff.
Viewed like this, the sky is the limit for Lemmy and it could have potential to grow a lot!
Something like this?
https://mander.xyz/communities
> An instance dedicated to nature and science. > The main focus of this instance is the natural sciences, and the scope encompasses all of the STEM fields.
Agreed. I think the barrier would be lower if I knew I could migrate my identity to another instance if the first one became sketchy or shut down or de-federated.
Instead AFAICT I have to choose not just what community to join and where the content will initially live, but also which of these random groups to trust with my identity indefinitely going forward.
Like SSH keys, where you manage your own identity and then share a public key to each instance that identifies you to that instance.
Like an identity client you could self manage if you wanted to. Make it optional, portable, and transferable. So you can choose to let a server host manage your identity, or migrate to a self managed identity.
If I had more time on my hands….
Conceptually a planned migrations should have a period of concurrent access to both the old and new accounts and it should be easy to publish a handshake to confirm the migration to followers to update contact info. That's my thought anyway. Something like keybase (does that still exist?) could also be used for similar sorts of proofs.
The way people used to handle this on Reddit is people would send a message from their old account saying "hey XYZ is my new account" and that seems sufficient.
First Twitter API, then Reddit API, so today Apollo and many more Reddit clients shut down, and now Nitter. :-(
I'm happy Lemmy is kind of taking off. I think it's helped more than Mastodon because it's less realtime/feed focused and slower paced. It also doesn't require you to form a friend circle to benefit. Instead, the community is waiting for you already. You just sign up on an instance and add your communities. Done. This helped me a lot, together with sites like https://sub.rehab