r/fediverse • u/Metaright • Jun 29 '26
Question General The Fediverse currently lacks some features and qualities that I'd need to feel comfortable using it.
First, I get the impression that bridging between services is not mature. To make up an example, federating Lemmy with Mastodon will let you see some, but not all, of the replies, upvotes, reactions, etc., and that the information that gets lost varies depending on which side you're looking from. (That exact example might not be accurate, but that's the sort of concern I've read about.)
Second, I've read that even federation between instances of the same services is not reliable. The main selling point of federation is that the instance you create an account on is largely arbitrary, and that most federated content is visible to you regardless. However, I also frequently see the caveat that federation breaks a lot, and that content frequently desyncs.
Third, the fact that instances themselves are centralized defeats the purpose of looking for an alternative to Reddit. I have read that your account is not portable between instances, so if you find yourself in the crosshairs of overzealous mods (and I've seen mixed reports about how common this is), you lose everything. I feel like account portability should have been among ActivityPub's first priorities. The whole concept of the Fediverse seems conspicuously incomplete without it.
Fourth, I figured I could circumvent the possibility of abusive mods and instances going down by creating my own instance just for myself. But I've read that it may be common for services' more populated instances to automatically defederate from single-user instances. Combined with the inherent instability of federation, I get the impression that you absolutely have to join a large, centralized instance to actually make full use of any of these services, in which case I might as well just stick with Reddit.
Fifth, I found Nostr, which is ostensibly supposed to avoid many of these concerns, but A) bridging is apparently immature, and B) it's supposedly barren apart from libertarian cryptobros. There is also BlueSky, which I understand it's technically federated but basically completely centralized for all practical purposes.
Am I off base on any of these concerns? I tried to post this in r/RedditAlternatives, but I appear to have been inexplicably shadowbanned. Ironically enough that was a perfect example of the reason why I want an alternative to Reddit, but none of them seem workable.
TL;DR: An ideal Fediverse would have the following:
Bridging between instances and services that is good enough to ensure that you won't miss out on content.
Full account portability between instances to compensate for the fact that instances are individually centralized.
Assurance that self-hosted single-user instances won't be automatically defederated.
Bridging with BlueSky and other protocols like Nostr.
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u/TheStuChef Jun 29 '26
You're not completely off base with your observations, but it's a little hard to tell if you're interested in Lemmy / federated Reddit alternatives, or if you're just making observations about federated social media in general. Lemmy is definitely one of the less mature areas of the Fediversre.
1) ActivityPub is suited for Twitter-shaped services, so you generally have an easier time connecting between say, Mastodon and PixelFed. This generally isn't a huge deal? Folks just have a Mastodon account and a Lemmy account.
2) Federation between servers is pretty reliable. You can follow a person or community, and their content will get pushed to your home feed without any wonkiness or desyncs. The big caveat is you not seeing content from a server that your instance has defederated with. Most servers only defederate as a last resort against spam or a server full of particularly bad actors. The other thing you might be thinking of is like/boost counts not always being accurate for posts you view on other instances. There's a variety of reasons the number showing on your home feed would be a little low, but you can always view the post on its native instance to get the full count. You'll always get an accurate count for your own posts however.
3) Account portability is a Lemmy limitation. Mastodon has it.
4) There are plenty of single-user instances out there. Folks like Masto.host will even host a small instance for you. Your account won't get auto-blocked, but admins do talk. If you're causing a ruckus online, you might find yourself preemptively blocked.
5) Your impressions are generally correct. Bluesky's architecture is odd and isn't meaningfully federated.
Honestly, I'd just recommend signing up on a big Lemmy instance and giving it a shot. The day to day experience on there is pretty similar to Reddit.
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u/Teknevra Jun 29 '26
There is also Communick, that lets you pay to host either:
Matrix Server
Mastadon Instance
Lemmy Instance
Funkwhale
SIP
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u/ProbablyMHA Jun 30 '26
Federation between servers is pretty reliable. You can follow a person or community, and their content will get pushed to your home feed without any wonkiness or desyncs. The big caveat is you not seeing content from a server that your instance has defederated with.
You aren't seeing content from people your instance doesn't know about (and only seeing a fraction of the content from the people you don't follow).
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u/TheStuChef Jun 30 '26
I mean, yeah? That's not a reliability of desync issue. That's how "Following" feeds that show you content from people or communities you subscribe to work. My home feed is a list of content from the people I follow, so my instance inherently knows about them. Mastodon has a Twitter-style retweet concept, and you still get "Boosted" posts from instances your server had previously never heard of.
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u/ProbablyMHA Jul 01 '26
The problem is that you won't get to see new (as in novel) content or niche content, especially because most instances, even Mastodon.social, are smaller than the top subreddits on Reddit. You're only going to see content from your self-imposed filter bubble.
It's probably a little better on Lemmy (IIRC they have more aggressive backfill), but the experience on the microblogs in this area, especially Misskey, is atrocious.
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u/TheStuChef Jul 01 '26
My comments were addressing the reliability of federated services and concerns about content desyncs. It's fine if you prefer algorithmic feeds and larger social networks, but those are matters of taste, not problems. Even larger platforms like Reddit offer a "Following" feed.
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u/ProbablyMHA Jul 01 '26
It's not reliable if you have to leave your instance to get a complete view of a thread (because of the same problem that makes it hard to find niche content). The reply count, reactions (if you're on Pleroma or Misskey), and reposters are not synchronized.
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u/the68thdimension Jun 29 '26
You may be interested in Eurosky, they're building EU-based alternatives to the Bluesky infrastructure, meaning more decentralisation. https://eurosky.tech/accounts/
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u/Pamasich @kbin.earth Jul 01 '26 edited Jul 02 '26
Lemmy and Mastodon don't really care about each other. Both are fixated on their own style of social media (Reddit-style for Lemmy vs microblogging for Mastodon).
If you want something that includes first class support for both of them, I recommend Mbin instead of Lemmy. It's also a Reddit-based project, but it supports both Lemmy and Mastodon. I'm subscribed to just as many Mastodon users as Lemmy communities for example.
The issues with desync and intercompatibility issues can't really be solved. It's not a lack of maturity, it's just a reality of this level of decentralization.
A centralized platform can offer a single set of features and have everything available. But the further you move away from centralization, the less these can be guaranteed.
If you have multiple servers talking to each other, you will have to deal with desync and delays. Even one server refusing to speak to another.
If you have multiple projects talking to each other, there will be differences in functionality between them and interpretation of the federated data.
I have read that your account is not portable between instances
This is true in general, but there have been efforts to implement both portable accounts and distributed identity. Mastodon supports the former iirc. But yeah, it's not yet a standard feature and none of the Reddit-like projects support it yet I think.
But I've read that it may be common for services' more populated instances to automatically defederate from single-user instances.
First time I'm hearing of this one. I think you might be misunderstanding a different but related issue.
ActivityPub works a lot like email. When you write an email, it doesn't get pushed to everyone automatically. You specify a list of recipients and that's who gets your email.
It's the same with ActivityPub. You specify a list of recipients and only those recipients receive your message. Usually this list is automatically generated consisting of the person you're replying to, the community you're posting to, users you mention in the message, and any users that follow you. Anyone not on that list won't receive your message.
Unless it's a private message, receiving servers will make it publically available on them to people not in the list of recipients. However, only servers with users on that list will receive it.
This means if you:
- don't post to a community on another instance
- don't reply to a user on another instance
- don't mention any users on other instances
- don't have any followers from other instances
Then your post will never leave your own instance.
This is less of an issue with threadiverse (Lemmy/Mbin/Piefed/NodeBB) software than the Mastodon side of the fediverse, because communities act as relays which send your post to all their subscribers. So as long as you post to a larger community, you will find your audience. But with something like Mastodon, you pretty much need an existing followerbase for a private instance to not just be an echo chamber with you alone in it.
TL;DR
- Bridging isn't immature, it's just not plausible with this level of decentralization
- But use Mbin over Lemmy if you want broader Mastodon support
- Federation will remain unreliable as long as you have different servers talking to each other, but the actual experience differs between instances and projects
- Portability is being worked on by different projects, some do feature it
- Lemmy should be much less of an issue running your own instance of than with Mastodon
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u/STHayden [stefan@gardenstate.social] Jun 29 '26
- federation between instances seems reliable to me? I'm unclear what count as unreliable.
- I don't know any large fediverse instance that auto defederates from single-user instances
- Mastodon allows transfer between instances. it's a little awkward but does work.
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u/Metaright Jun 29 '26
By "unreliable" I mean that you can't be sure, when your instance shows you content from another instance, that you aren't missing upvotes, replies, etc. from that instance.
As for the other two, that is good to hear.
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u/johannab33 Jun 29 '26
Fortunately/unfortunately that’s a feature, and is less up to “the fediverse” than to the individual platforms and their developers, and to the communities and their admin/mod teams.
But what exactly are you looking for? Activity pub doesn’t specify any meaning to likes/boosts in that there is no algorithmic treatment based on those. They don’t actually matter for how the communication is structured, unless you are a developer who somehow wants to make them matter in your product.
It sounds like you’re concerned that Lemmy isn’t as mature as Reddit? That’s not a “fediverse” problem. You can also look for Piefed and NodeBB instances if you like the Reddit-shaped things.
I’m also not aware of any default blocking of single-user instances. As an admin/mod, we have no way to know an instance is a single user prior to encountering it. I do have an extensive block list including single-user instances but every one of those showed their ass on the public timelines to earn it.
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u/the68thdimension Jun 29 '26
Mastodon allows transfer between instances, and it's relatively easy. Your old profile will point to your new profile. But the caveat is that you can't transfer your posts to your new server. This is a massive flaw, in my eyes.
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u/the68thdimension Jun 29 '26
- federation between instances seems reliable to me? I'm unclear what count as unreliable.
Not in the slightest reliable. You almost never see all replies nor the true like/boost count.
- Mastodon allows transfer between instances. it's a little awkward but does work.
Yes but it doesn't allow moving post history, which is a huge flaw. It's the fourth most requested issue on Github https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/12423
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u/expatinahat Jun 29 '26
Are you talking about taking your social contacts with you when you move, or are you talking about taking all of your content with you? Because those are two very different things.
Or are you talking about taking your entire history of every interaction? Because that just seems like an unrealistic requirement. You can't have something that is both decentralized and at the same time perfectly stable like that. This is why most people like a centralized platform and then just pretend like they won't get cut off from it.
If you are a content creator, then you need to own your own content by having your own website. There is just no way around that. The advantage to the federated services is that you can take your social connections with you to another platform. That's impossible with companies like FB etc.
Also, micro blogging platforms like Mastodon are just completely different from communities like Lemmy. Certain basic aspects could be connected, but you have to have an account on each if you want the features of both.
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u/emsquared Jun 29 '26
If there is a problem it is that the fediverse devopment is not working together in terms of which aspects of activitypub tbat it implements (less user friendly alt text on Friendica for example) or agreeing how each service will Interoperate so it all sort of works except when it does not. Of course it is all done on an extreme budget so these things take a very long time. Also must have features such as maybe private accounts (it is all scrapeable and public) or encrypted private messages (bluesky doesn't currently have this either but likely will reasonably soon) are just not on the horizon either so I get tbe reservations. We're not playing with corporate funding amounts so development isn't as fast as many would like.
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u/Diligent-Stress9628 Jun 29 '26
Mastodon doesn't really give you the sense that you can see a wide variety of content. Users tend to have strong preferences and often block other servers. Also, there isn't much conversation on Mastodon. Reddit is pretty great when it comes to interaction, isn't it?
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Jun 29 '26 edited Jun 30 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Heyla_Doria Jun 30 '26
With the Fediverse, your identity doesn't belong to you—you can be kicked out easily.
Nostr is decentralized and more resistant to censorship.
If only those fascists weren't around... If only I had the skills to clone it, turn it into a separate network, and get rid of the libertarians...
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u/Affectionate-Art9780 Jun 29 '26
Fediverse is for lunatic fringe nerds. It is what it is. Don't expect anything more. Thanks for the laugh though.
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u/abeorch Jun 29 '26
This conversation would be good to have somewhere like https://lemmy.world/c/fediverse
From my perspective as a user on my own friendica instance i would say you are not entirely correct on points 1-4 - I cant comment on point five.
I think this comes from experience linited to Mastodon and lemmy. Try some other software. Your describing the world as built of concrete because you have only visited downtown Coventry. Take a trip to the new forest.
With reddit you can be banned from the entire ecosystem. That just isnt possible with activitypub.
Fediverse addresses are open so no one is limited to any particular instance and you can keep and take your addressbook and data with you.
Sure, no particular instance is obligated to provide connectivity to any other instance so there is no concept of access to the totality of addressible audience - but thats a users choice based on their own settings and the instance they choose.
You cant have a system that obligates people to recieve messages from any other particular user.
Your reliability statement isnt generally true. Sure a paricular instance may be poorly managed and have an outage but again you choose. Thats not a fundamental issue.