Alexia

Fedi, in the past few years, has gained quite a bit of traction; In just a few years it has grown from what seems like nothing to spanning over 13 million users, many of which call this their home

However, all of these projects in the field generally have stuck to one goal, which I feel is short-sighted – even as someone that helps with a tumblr copycat – everyone just kinda goes for “Open-Source/Federated alternative to [Social Media Site]”

That in of itself is great! I can applaud an effort at making more ethical approaches to e.g microblogging or video streaming viable, or even possible to begin with. I also understand where it comes from: It is much easier to take an existing concept and adapt a new one – like Federation – on-top of it. But in the grand scheme of things I feel this has limited us quite a lot on the Fediverse as a whole, in terms of new ideas for us to try out.

For instance, even when we just limit ourselves to microblogging, the fact that we are trying to neatly fit into certain boxes already limits us; Especially in the context of federating with Mastodon, we routinely have to make design decisions we otherwise would not have made, had Mastodon taken a different approach to their software.

One such example is what you are reading right now. Writefreely, the software this blog uses, has activityPub integration, meaning these articles are not just stuck on paper.wf, but can also be viewed from many other pieces of software that support ActivityPub. Of course, AP is a little (very...) messy, and what “supporting ActivityPub” means is very vague, but generally speaking you can hit up a Mastodon instance, a Misskey instance, an instance running one of the many misskey forks, or different software altogether like Wafrn.

But even just then, Mastodon has weird behavior around how it handles Articles (so, usually long-form posts like this one)

Instead of showing the actual post and, idk, truncating it with a “read more” button, it instead takes the URL of a post and it's title and displays that!

You can see this in action by visiting this very blog on Mastodon and Wafrn respectively: – @[email protected]">https://mastodon.social/@[email protected] (this might redirect you...sorry!) – @[email protected]">https://app.wafrn.net/blog/@[email protected]

Constraining ourselves to these neat, tidy boxes of what Social Media can be, and what we can do with our standards means that we end up in situations where our supposedly agnostic way of sharing and displaying data suddenly gets handled in very different ways. Another good example is Misskey's Markdown language, MFM

MFM allows you to do more complex formatting for your text, including operations like scaling or translating an element, overlapping things, animations and more. All of these only being supported by Misskey and co., completely unsupported on anything else; It has become standard practice to outline the fact you're using MFM in a content warning

The point I am trying to make here is that despite our supposedly agnostic nature, and our chance on building features that can be compatible with one another whilst at the same time not being limited to one website or 'instance', we rarely actually make use of that and instead – for one reason or another – try and stick to tidy boxes of what “microblogging” is, or what “video streaming” is, or what “blogging” is and so forth.

I really think Fedi could benefit from just...getting a bit more quirky with it, trying out an entirely new idea on-top of ActivityPub and the infrastructure we've built over the years, without being constrained into what one or two pieces of software decided 'The Fediverse' should be. Especially in the realm of microblogging.

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