So, I was thinking that I joined Lemmy.World because Lemmy had more users than MBin. But today I was looking at https://mbin.cocopoops.com/ and started seeing MY posts. I knew Mbin could have different instances. I knew Lemmy could have different instances. And I knew they all federated together.
But I didn’t know Mbin could federate with Lemmy. But I’m sure Lemmy/Mbin probably won’t federate with Pixelfed, or Peertube.
Mbin, piefed, and Lemmy are essentially reddit replacements. So they should be in a circle. It doesn’t matter how many users Mbin has, or piefed has, or Lemmy has. It matters how many the full circle of federated reddit replacements have. Because thats the true circle of users that you can interact with.
So what we need is a website that you enter an instance, and it tells you how big your circle would be on that platform, and a list of federated, and defederated instances with it.
So Lemmy.World would have a pretty high circle. While hexbear would have only itself, if I understand right.
Generally speaking, all the major instances are federated with all the other major instances.
The differences are the super tiny instances (which are generally effectively zero traffic) and the controversial instances (mostly tankies). Said controversial instances don’t want to advertise that nobody can stand them and the rest of the instances don’t want to deal with the bullshit from bringing it up again.
I think it would be a nice novelty to visualize this. But I don’t think there would be much actionable information coming out of it and , because this is The Internet, it will likely lead to harassment and brigading.
This would be massively exploitable by anyone who wanted to know the personal networks of someone they wanted to harass (and businesses wanting to scrape and make shadow profiles on consumer connections).
All you need is their email, since you’re doing this before you make an account, you can see all their personal connections and start to use that information to aid in your harassment of them.
Good idea in theory, but it needs a lot of work for showtime.
I think you’re kind of misunderstanding what I’m saying.
You wouldn’t see where an individual user is. You would see “If I sign up to lemmy.world, I’ll have 300,000 people combined across these instances. The people signed up at any of these are counted in that 300,000. They’ll see my content, and I’ll see their content. But if I sign up to hexbear, my circle will be much lower, because that instance defederates from the majority of users. So my content will only be seen by 50,000 users.”
Made up numbers for the sake of proof of concept.
But I’m sure Lemmy/Mbin probably won’t federate with Pixelfed, or Peertube.
Technically, they do! It’s not fully-integrated yet so the process is a bit hackish, but because the ActivityPub protocol works mostly the same on the backend, content from any of these platforms can appear on the others without much issue.
The biggest issue just has to do with the way you actually interact with each platform may not translate well on another compatible platform. For example, Pixelfed typically nests replies to comments only one layer deep, whereas Lemmy or Mbin will nest many layers deep. The actual nesting still works just fine when you view Pixelfed comments on Lemmy, and if you join in the conversation and reply in the middle of the thread, your post will nest properly for you and will show inline as normal for Pixelfed users. So in some instances, you may need to know a bit about what platform you’re posting to, on top of the platform you’re posting from.
There’s other quirks like Mastodon replies typically being preceded with @ing the user they’re replying to, which isn’t a thing on the Lemmy side of things. It doesn’t really change the way posting works, and you can choose to not do it and things will still work fine.
But I didn’t know Mbin could federate with Lemmy. But I’m sure Lemmy/Mbin probably won’t federate with Pixelfed, or Peertube.
I think all of these are "don’t federate well currently ", but it’s a goal to improve federation over time
For example, Lemmy is federating with Mastodon better than when I first joined. It’s also possible to subscribe to peertube channels from Lemmy, but it’s a bit buggy.
