Sure. But lemmy would still not show Mastodon posts outside communities even if they supported that extension. Both parties need to move towards each other.

ActivityPub is an extensible protocol. It is not just one thing. Lemmy only supports posts that follow that extension I linked above. That extension has a definition and Lemmy follows it so in that way it is “standard”. But it is an extension, not part of the core protocol.

Mastodon and most other fediverse services do not support this extension.

Its not that anyone is “doing it wrong” and Mastodon doesn’t really support Lemmys communities either. So Lemmy works in a bit of a funky way that doesn’t match most other fediverse services.

Its just a bit strange that Lemmy does not support the more common posts outside communities since that is how most of the fediverse works, so we’re kinda missing out on a lot of content that we can’t see on Lemmy.

This is the FEP Lemmy uses but most other fediverse services do not use it and Lemmy does not support anything that doesn’t use this FEP. So again, it’s not that Lemmy is doing something wrong, but Lemmy is not supporting how most of the rest of the fediverse functions.

I think Mastodon is very far from standard

I think it’s much closer to standard than Lemmy and I’ve looked into it quite a bit recently. ActivityPub is unfortunately quite focused on microblogging. Honestly lemmys way of doing it is a little hacky.

As for the posts outside communities? That makes sense lemmy-wise I think. Where would those posts be?

I actually think it’s quite straightforward, they’d just be on a users page. This is actually how Reddit has also done it ever since they introduced the feature (much before they enshittified everything else).

You can think of it like every users profile being a community of its own but only the user itself can post to it. Just conceptually speaking.

That would also let you follow users just as you can follow communities.

I mean you could equally ask why does Lemmy not support posts outside communities? It’s on both parties to interoperate I think. Lemmy also uses a specific extension to ActivityPub while Discourse’s posts and Mastodon’s posts and such are pretty standard, but still not picked up by Lemmy.

It has ActivityPub support so it is connected to the fediverse in some ways. Lemmy doesn’t work with it though AFAIK because Lemmy doesn’t support posts made outside communities.

If there was a Reddit/Lemmy style website (where people create communities for various subjects but it’s all available from the same website using the same credentials) with forum style discussions

Isn’t this just Discourse?

I’ve seen some mods power tripping just like good old Reddit.

The difference is that when that happens on Reddit, you can’t go anywhere else. On Lemmy, you can go to any other instance and do it better if you feel the mods elsewhere are bad.

I need to perform a magic trick to make my feed “better”. At least it’s not that addicting

Lemmy’s feed is intentionally (or I think it is intentional at least) worse in this aspect than Reddit’s feed, in order to not be as addictive. Take that how you will.

Do you think that the conversation around, e.g, python programming or wood turning techniques will vary so much that it warrants many specific flavors?

I don’t see why not. Human culture is like a fractal after all :P. At least I don’t think we should discourage creating different places for the same topics, because different approaches is part of decentralization.

for the cases where the culture is more-or-less universal

When is this ever true? The idea of a “universal culture” is exactly what I mean with this encouraging centralization. Even a specific community (subreddit) on a centralized service like Reddit will have a specific culture that is not in line with any “universal culture” (it’s likely to be skewed towards whatever culture exists in western english-speaking countries, just to mention an example).

I personally am not a huge fan of this idea. Instances are at the end of the day communities of their own in a way. One community may want to discuss a topic in one way and another community may want to discuss it in another way. This seems to be a way to centralize all discussion around a topic in one community, but we should rather go for decentralized communities.

But hey that’s just my opinion, if others like it, go for it.

They have a page on “supporting long form text in the fediverse” - but this is already supported? I think it’s only Mastodon and other microblogging places that put restrictions on how long posts can be.

a bit of text you can send to them by whatever secure side channel you want down to handing them a flash drive

Normal non-technical people are never going to do this. It needs to be easy as clicking a button, otherwise it will never happen for them. Again, this is a neat technical solution but it completely forgets the human.

Yea in theory you wouldn’t need the password if you have the private key but here the key is only used for signing, maybe not for login. If it also needs to be backwards compatible. In any case, I don’t think user-held private keys is viable.

Sharing with trusted parties… I dunno, I think again it’s too technical and complicated to do it. And you’d need people on the platform you trust to already be there.

Seems very technically oriented haha. But sounds like a cool project.

How does Hubzilla work? I haven’t really heard much about it, just heard the name.

New fetch just dropped

Because anyone can grab the same name, on a different platform.

That’s always the case, even for centralized platforms. Usernames are just usernames. Same thing with email. This is a fundamental problem with the internet and the solution is that celebrities and such host their own ActivityPub server (just like their own email server) or make it clear on their personal website what their own official account is somewhere else.

I don’t know why it wasn’t the solution people jumped on when Reddit admins started fucking up instead of leaving to go on Lemmy where admins are still a thing…

One reason is that Nostr is filled with crypto-bros who think cryptocurrencies is the future. The whole Nostr space is filled with bitcoin news and deranged people yelling “HODL”. Not surprising coming from a social media that makes it harder to ban you and encourages more absolute free speech.

I think the UX on Nostr is also just worse. You need to keep a private key for yourself I believe and that’s just a technical hurdle and annoyance that most people don’t want to deal with.

Another reason is that people like having admins. People want moderated places. People don’t want to bother moderating stuff themselves. People don’t want douchebags calling them stuff all the time and having to block stuff. Admins and moderators provide that service and users like that.

I get that you’re frustrated that the admins at Reddit were mistreating you. The answer to that is not “abolish all admins” but rather “choose better admins”, if you ask me at least. The good thing on the fediverse is that you can go to another place if you feel the current place isn’t run by reasonable people.