Something amusing: looking at the profiles of the people who are voting your comment up, it’s mostly people who have a history of very progressive comments and posts. They are voring you up because they think you are arguing that being religious is incompatible with being LGBTQ.

So, in a perfect illustration of horseshoe theory, you are getting the support from people who think that Christianity is wrong,

You haven’t even seen what the community is about and yet you are ready to pass judgement on it.

That does not answer the question.

Do you think a “divorced Christians” community would be a contradiction?

So, what is the contradiction here?

We are all sinners, aren’t we?

Thank you for the encouragement. In principle I agree with you 100%, but we also need to keep in mind that this corner of the internet is extremely averse to having their presence exposed outside of their original context.

They are still separate communities. Users following only A will not see the posts from C. Users following both A and C will everything.

Sorry, but this will be a bit too technical…

The thing is that Lemmy (at least, others probably do the same) don’t treat the Linked Data as the canonical representation, they work by translating every message with an as:Activity to their own internal representation in the database (with separate tables for Posts, Comments and PrivateMessages).

This means that all it takes for a Lemmy instance to treat a post as “new” comment is to produce an “as:Announce” attributed to the “follower” community, and then all instances will process it as a new post/comment/vote.

One of the things that I’m experimenting with is to have “communities that can follow communities”. So, if community A follows community B, then it can re-post anything that has happened on Community B.

If you do it “properly”, it doesn’t even need to be a lot of data duplication because the “follower” community would just be creating Announce activities.

The only thing that is making me hold out on this experiment is because I am 100% sure that some people will see their posts on a community they never interacted on and they will panic on the grounds of “mah privacy” or something silly like that.

TCL as in Terraform Configuration Language.

like rename a file or push JSON somewhere.

Both of these can be done in a declarative fashion.

Yeah, yaml sucks. But we don’t need to throw the baby with the bathwater. You can have tools based in declarative systems that use saner languages, e.g, nix or TCL, and never have to deal with yaml issues.

Declarative systems are so much better to work in the domain, why would you force yourself into “pipeline logic”?

This feels like yet-another attempt at making water not wet, but at least it stops from having servers putting out data on the rest of the federation without any accountability.

The north star goal is to make this app give the user the feel of being officially supported by the platforms it reads from

This is the exact opposite of what I’m working on. My idea is to embrace “Protocols, not platforms” and treat all the different places are sources of content (like RSS) but with the added two-way interactivity that is enabled by ActivityPub and Linked Data.

So of course the UI will need to adapt: threaded discussion forums would be presented in a different way in relation to long form blog feeds. But luckily this is already part of the benefits from Linked Data. A Lemmy post is presented in the Fediverse as https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams#Page, and each response is a https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams#note, while a blog entry from WriteFreely is a https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams#Article and an video from PeerTube is a https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams#Video… this information about the object type should be enough for us to figure out the best way to handle the UI.

what would you want to see on this app?

Believe it or not, I would like to have a read-only view of the Big Tech feeds. Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Reddit, Twitter, Facebook posts from your friends, all of that crap. Like what GrayJay is doing. The idea though would be not to interact with it, but to have a way to people to ease their way out into the open alternatives.

Number of subscribers is not that relevant as a metric. It’s more interesting to see overall activity.

Isn’t it really expensive (in time or in money) to have all these instances?

These instances are cheap to operate because they don’t have any users. They are all free to use and are not related to Communick, which provides accounts to the instances that accept accounts only for paying subscribers.

Is it worth it?

If you are asking if I am making lots of money with this, the answer is no. I am doing it now because I think it’s the only way to make it fair and sustainable.

Yes, they are still running. alien.top has been blocked by some, but the topic-specific instances have no reason to be a source of issues.

Just think of it this way: as slow as the existing community is, the community you want to build is even further behind. If we join forces, we can go a lot further than by trying to keep things separate.

!localllama@poweruser.forum is already going on for some time. If you want, I can make you a mod there and help you.

Seeing the instance as infrastructure is what I want to see more of

Yes, exactly! A good manager to me is the one that is just focused on solving the problems that are on the way of the rest of the team.

Host them on your instance, then.

Hummm, gladly?

I’m running more than 15 instances for communities. I was running alien.top which at one point hosted 600k accounts with more than 2M posts + comments, a lot of them being sent to the topic-specific instances. I’m constantly reminding people that the instances are there, and that I can create communities for anyone that need it.

I just checked the first two pages (…) No Twitter thread, no Mastodon thread.

Cherry-picking data points is not the way to make an argument. That just makes you seem clueless and/or biased.

If you really want to refute my statement, you’ll need to take a look at all submissions in the past two years and compare the number of posts to twitter vs the number of posts to any Mastodon instance.

I didn’t see a “call for more action” in that comment.

We have someone that wants to post more content and who is being told “don’t do that. things here are slow. It’s more than enough to have only 5 posts a day, more than that and you are spamming” and I am saying “No, it’s not enough. We should be encouraging to have people posting more, not less.”

Of course they are, the same way the vast majority of microblog users are still on Twitter compared to Mastodon.

I gave a very specific example to illustrate where Mastodon had become more relevant than Twitter. Again: it’s not about absolute numbers.