@simon_lucy @Gargron @rabble @ricmac

“Need” is a strong word I’d say. Instead, I’m coming from the perspective of what “the fediverse”, an ecosystem of connected (“not isolated”) platforms, promises regarding inter-platform connectivity.

And a simple angle into that, I think, is the embedding of GIFs, videos, polls, emoji etc in social media, which has grown into a de facto standard over time for what were originally text-based platforms (over on BlueSky, they’re still whinging about the lack of such).

That’s an enhancement or enrichment of the UI and the scope of social interaction or conversation that basically expands into the big space of features that the web browser affords. In addition to whatever written language is used in the text of a platform, the additional elements of representation, communication and interaction all contribute to forming its “social language and format”, which then ties in closely with its culture.

The more the fediverse promises connectivity between different platforms, the more there’s an expectation that these “languages and formats” get translated across the protocol between platforms. Thing is, this isn’t just about text, it’s about a platform’s full gamut of visual elements and their formatting or arrangement. That is, it’s about their UIs. The more a platform’s UI gets lost as its translated/interpreted by another platform, the more there isn’t real connectivity at a meaningful social (media) level. Expectations matter here too, where disappointingly “lossy” interactions are simply uncompelling for many.

The web browser and internet is an important backdrop to this IMO. All web pages just work (kinda mostly) as they are intended in everyone’s web browser. There’s no loss. Each link takes you to where and what you’re supposed to. Same with books, or PDFs, or films or music. Fidelity of format is and has always been paramount.

And so, as I claim, the protocol is only the beginning, the foundation.

The actual site of the fediverse is in how UIs get translated across different platforms.

At some threshold of mis-translation, the connection, and the promise of the fediverse, is broken (even if not for everyone, as full or wide-band connectivity is the promise IMO).

Coming back to the web browser and the internet — where it’s important IMO to recall many fediverse advocates describing it as an opportunity to “remake the internet” — an obvious alternative presents itself (I think): Our fediverse clients/interfaces ought to be capable of rendering any form of social media in its intended/designed format just like the browser and the internet.

And of course, this doesn’t preclude user customisation such that some or even many might want to restrict content to a certain format. But, it’s also relevant I think to point out that many have accounts and are active on multiple platforms, both on the fediverse and on big social and interact with overlapping sets of people. Which is to say that using the browser/smartphone-OSs, people are already doing what I’m suggesting

In fact, I’d argue that what we have now is strange. Each piece of social media interaction has to get translated into whatever my current platform decides is the appropriate format and understanding of that interaction. In reality, that’s really not much progress on the screen shots used to share inter-platform content on big (unfederated) social media … and I’d say it’s a policy that clearly germinates from the same design culture (where the fediverse is still in its “lets clone big social” phase).

So, UI-Matching (which requires a good deal of Data-Model-Matching) … that’s the actual fediverse. What we’ve got now is some weird middle ground that mostly breaks its promises.

@Gargron @ricmac @rabble

Pixelfed and Mastodon are not isolated from each other. I have Pixelfed users in my home feed on Mastodon. That’s a very weird definition of isolated.

UI-mismatch is the issue there and as well as with the “promise” of the fediverse. A shared protocol isn’t the same as a shared UI.

Then there’s the whole data-model-mismatch problem, where platforms only implement parts of the protocol such that things get lost or misinterpreted between platforms.

And so, despite being technically “not isolated”, people have multiple accounts all over the place to reroute around these mismatch frictions, which are significant enough to create prohibitive separations.

Whether its a misinterpretation from users or an overzealous advocacy of the power of the protocol and fediverse … I think it’s absolutely fair enough to say that we’ve arrived at a point where the promise of multiple platforms and instances all in a single unifying space is a bad over promise.

The friction involved in trying to reach for that is bad enough that most just bounce off of it, either ditching the fediverse, or giving up on this so called promise and staying on their platform of choice, or just creating multiple accounts and tolerating the chaos.

At the root of it is this lack of mobile identity (as well as, IMO, some other general design decisions). Not least because bridging these gulfs is exactly the sort of thing necessary to make the fediverse realise its killer potential. At the moment to many, probably most, the fediverse is in practice “just” a sea of disparate platforms. Which is a shame TBH, but also shouldn’t be glossed over as a non-issue.