Explaining the fediverse is a hard problem.

eeeee

I accept your challenge to explain the utility in 20 words. Ironic challenge as your posts are lengthy literary masterpieces

So under 20 words with practical example

I already use Mastodon as apposed to Twitter so Im onboard. @[email protected]

eeeee

@julian I wanted to message mastodon account and reply from there, as part of Omegas 20 word challenge.
I didnt get the message to my Mathstodon.xyz account, why might that be?

julian

@eeeee where's the response you're looking for?

eeeee

I want this message to show up in my Mastodon
@[email protected]

evehiclefan

@eeeee
Ah worked this time!

eeeee

@julian it worked second time.

I think it was maybe because first time tag was added in an edit of post

EDIT: Second test, adding in edit of post
@[email protected]

EDIT2; yes ^this tag didnt work!

julian

@eeeee thanks! Will record for fixing

caesar

Honestly I think that if interoperability between different types of federated platforms Just Worked people would "understand" it more intuitively, because they'd see it in action instead of it having to be explained to them as an abstract concept.

I'm a fairly tech-savvy user, and I perfectly understand what federation is and how it works on a technical level, but even I find the UI aspects often confusing or downright impossible to figure out.
For example, I saw this thread from my Mastodon client because I followed the ActivityPub topic on this forum from my Mastodon account. In my Mastodon client the posts appear as boosts, but mostly with broken HTML formatting. I clicked through to this forum to read the thread properly. I then wanted to "like" / +1 a post, so I copied the permalink into my Mastodon client like I would for a post on a different Mastodon instance, but it couldn't find anything. In the end I had to log into my local account on this forum instead.

Don't get me wrong, the UI problems are very difficult to get right. But I think they're more important than documentation. When it Just Works, people will grok it and documentation/explanation won't be needed.

julian

@caesar that's concerning, can you link me to the posts with broken html in your Mastodon account?

caesar

@julian Here's the one I saw today: https://indieweb.social/@[email protected]/113101718634936122

However, I now see that the broken HTML appears in the original post on this forum, so it's not a federation problem. Apologies for the 'false alarm' on that aspect. I've definitely seen broken formatting before, but haven't clicked through to check where the issue was. I'll keep an eye out for it again.

That said, my point was mainly about the difficulty of actually working out how to interact with posts from a different instance (especially one running different software), rather than about the actual content of the federated messages.

omega

@caesar Yep that's it in a nutshell, nailed it, when it hits the "it just works" moment, this affords intuitive mass adoption

Getting to that point is filled with blood sweat and tears.

eeeee

Good points, and want to add, as credit to @julian , what he's building is complex.
Not many developers could do it.

julian

@caesar okay, how about the permalink issue? Can you show me the link you tried to paste into Mastodon? That definitely should work. That's a fairly standard flow (which is already janky, and can be improved)

caesar

@julian it was this one: https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/explaining-the-fediverse-is-a-hard-problem/4462/7
It's a Discourse post (and thus problem) rather than a NodeBB one, but it illustrates the point of the general jankiness of inter-platform interaction on the fediverse: if I copy the permalink of your post above into my Mastodon instance, it finds it and I can reply, but if I copy the permalink of a Discourse post from the same thread, it doesn't work.

caesar

@eeeee Absolutely, and @julian has my deepest respect for that. Like I mentioned, the UI for inter-platform interactions is definitely a really tricky problem to solve in an intuitive way, and I don't think any Fediverse platform has managed it yet. (I'm very interested in this because I'm starting to consider similar issues as they relate to the Fediverse implementation in Forgejo.)

caesar

@julian sorry to multi-post but I forgot to say: although I can find your post from my Mastodon account and reply to it, I still haven't worked out how I would do the reverse from here. In fact I'm not sure if I can follow a Mastodon account (or perhaps more usefully, a Discourse or Lemmy topic or even a topic or account on a different NodeBB instance) from a NodeBB account at all, is that possible yet?

eeeee

@caesar the Discourse link you posted raises another issue.
Its a similar thread to this one, but it has additional posters, and any edits made in my posts arent reflected.
So these conversations arent fully federated when there are some posts in that thread missing from this one.
Out of interest @Omega, did you start your post on Discourse or on this site?

eeeee

As an example as the disconnect between the thread on Nodebb and Discourse, @[email protected] 's post is missing from nodebb sites thread.

And conversley some of Ceasars posts are in this thread but not that one.
Isnt the goal to duplicate all posts in all places so they stay in sync?

Caesar

@eeeee The lack of complete federation is another very good (and very hard to solve) point that makes federation less-than-intuitive. From my Mastodon instance the situation is worse, none of @bumblefudge 's posts nor any others from SocialHub appear in the thread. (See https://indieweb.social/@julian@community.nodebb.org/112972609579702339)

Caesar

I suspect most of the federation problems mentioned in the last few posts are the "fault" of Discourse – BrowserPub fails to find anything at https://browser.pub/https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/explaining-the-fediverse-is-a-hard-problem/4462/4 – but in the end the user doesn't care whose fault it is when something doesn't work, they just think federation is confusing and broken.