They all take several minutes work to fill out the form, and then another few minutes waiting. Then they hang with no error message. It's tedious and I've given up trying to sign up for any of these new fedi-reddits.
EDIT: ok, after reading some more of this thread I decided to have one more try. Sign up on squabbles.io took 2 minutes. Yay!
Either way Fediverse has its problems but it's the best "old internet" i've seen in a long time. Lemmy and Kbin are just the start. I'm excited to see where it goes. Developing for the Fediverse is fun, frankly.
I was hoping to have the beta already but I am now hoping to have it out this weekend. For those curious, I am the developer of HACK, one of the top rated hacker news apps for iOS and Android.
Looking forward to LimeReader!
Can you give us more details? How can you do this without creating double posts from multiple accounts?
Sorry for the barrage of questions. I knew that accounts already have private keys associated with them, but I didn't know it's possible to use them at the same times across multiple instances without any negative impact.
I am using ECDSA P-384 for the keys and signing. Browsers come with the CryptoSubtle library which does this natively, so I am able to build it all with pure vanilla javascript without frameworks:
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/SubtleCrypt...
The client (browser) creates the public private key pair. The private key pair never leaves the client device. The client uses the private key to sign the records (data such as user metadata, comments, posts, votes etc). These signed records get sent along with the public key and signature to multiple servers hosted by multiple people and then fetched by multiple other clients from these servers. The servers (if they want but highly encouraged) verify the signature of the records using the public key. If verified, then it stores that record as “belonging” to that public key. The public key is basically the user’s identity. It’s also unique. So one public key is one account only. When other clients fetch these signed records, they also verify the signature.
Behind the scenes, there are no “real” accounts on servers. There are only records which have been sent by the public key and been verified. Using these records, the clients create the metadata of accounts, communities etc.
The API will be only 2 endpoints - /search and /create.
The /create accepts the signed records of various types. These are the types of records which can be created for my site which I also think should cover most similar sites: user, community, text, reaction, hide, bookmark, pin, award, view, delete, follow, report, collapse, media
The /search accepts the filters which are enough to build the feed of a link aggregator like website.
The signature of each record is unique due to the benefit of ECDSA signatures. So, the signature also becomes the “id” of your record. The replies to your comment all reference this “id” i.e. the “signature” of the comment they are replying to. These replies get sent to multiple servers (whichever ones the client has configured). Unlike the Fediverse, in my way, the servers don’t talk to each other. The client talks to multiple servers and sends its signed records to them.
I will have a more detailed write up in the coming days. I am having to have all this work as seamlessly as possible so that to a non-techy person, they shouldn’t have to understand such complexity. On the front end, it will look like a simply link aggregation site.
I want a centralized megaforum. I don't care about federation or what technology it uses. I just want easy access to everything
After you sign up you don't have to care much about servers or instances, just tap "all".
I don't think it will be long before someone comes into this space with a good UI and the community that reddit just marooned and turns it into gold.
It’s a pretty good replacement for Reddit, and the community that’s forming seems good so far.
You're going to have to stick with reddit and give replacements a dew years for the dust to settle before asking that question.
Heh as if it ever stopped...
The magic of the internet, once upon a time, was discovering content in your own time. You stumbled into that cool niche forum, found someone’s personal blog, a flash game page. It didn’t need big centralised services to be fun.
Internet users have become consumers and want to be fed content. I do not understand this sentiment at all. It feels like we are all addicted to the easy dopamine kicks of scrolling Reddit/Facebook/Twitter now.
There is no way to discover content anymore, long gone are the days where some expert's blog would appear prominently when searching a topic. Now all the results are people trying to sell you something. Reddit has replaced google (more or less) for a lot of people.
The only functional search engine nowadays is marginalia.
5 years ago even the internet as a whole at least felt functional. Today everything feels like a giant scam.
* What we want is high signal/noise ratio.
* In the magic old internet, the bar for signal was relatively low, because it competed with books, and TV.
* The competition over attention has raised the bar over what "good content" looks like.
* Content like that don't materialize out of thin air, but needs an audience to keep it alive, and to grow, and select, and feedback
* The re-fragmentation of internet communities risks loss of economies of scale for the content creators to create or maintain high-quality gems.
Let's take something specific, say furry artists. Their content loop for reddit was: post cute pics on r/furry, if it hits quality bar, gets upvoted, and seen by ~1000s of people; 0.1% of those will commission a new drawing, draw the thing, get paid, post it on reddit, close the loop.
In a re-fragmented Internet: 1, a lot less people will be able to find those "gem forums" focused around a topic, and they won't browse it daily; and 2, the artist needs to spam their stuff to all the communities to get the fraction of traffic they have on reddit.
The outcome from this re-fragmentation _in our present time_ will be the "hallowing of the middle", the "hobbyists scaling towards professional", and people who are just really into the thing, and make some money on the side. In a re-fragmented Internet, you are either a fully professional -with competent marketing team- or you're doing it for the ~20 people sharing the same forum.
I understand that many people are expressing explicit preferences for there to be only that 20 people they chat with, or only the hobbyist / geeks to participate and _I'm happy for them_. What I'm claiming above, is that this will kick the professional ladder out for upcoming people to build - show - get attention for their stuff. And that creates a less magical Internet.
Ofc you exploit it anyway, but Reddit was never truly good for professionals unless they were eternally on reddit to begin with.
Also, don't know why no one remembers RSS feeds if they want an aggregator anyway. Even Reddit and YouTube have RSS protocols (for now). I never used them but it's nifty for the best of both worlds.
I’d also not exactly how fediverse works except for direct links. You read posts/comments from your instance.
Mastodon should figure out an extension to simply redirect links to your instance. It would remove a lot of confusion.
Lemmy/kbin still have some rough edges in their UI but given enough time I think they'll get there. If any of the big ex-reddit apps turn to the fediverse I think it'll give these communities a big boost.
You have that backwards. Not enough people are there because it is inadequate in all kinds of ways.
Pick whatever you want - kbin, lemmy, mastodon. Go there, find your community (it will probably look very sad compared to Reddit). And contribute something positive - comment, post, whatever. If everybody just did that, we would kickstart something durable that couldn't be destroyed and take back the internet that everybody is pining for.