Unifying the Fediverse
Why are there so many separate platforms in the Fediverse like Mastodon, Lemmy, PixelFed, and PeerTube? It feels like they could all be part of one unified platform.
Posts
Text, images, and videos could just be treated as posts, all with comments enabled.
- Servers that don’t want to host videos could just have a setting to turn off video uploads.
- That would let PeerTube function like Mastodon when video support isn’t needed.
Lemmy + Mastodon + PixelFed
They all do basically the same thing — let people post stuff. So why split them up?
Forums can still work like Lemmy. If you want your post in a forum, cool. If not, that’s fine too.
Matrix + Posts
- As for messaging, I think Matrix could benefit from Signal-style encryption. Each message should be encrypted with a unique key, just like Signal does.
- Add a button like “See recent posts by this user” on profiles.
- This would make it easier for people to switch over from Instagram or Facebook.
plugin-based development
I also think the Fediverse could grow faster if it were plugin-based, kind of like how Obsidian handles plugins. Development would be more modular and flexible.
- Servers could choose which plugins to enable.
- Devs could collaborate instead of reinventing the wheel across platforms like Mastodon, Lemmy, PixelFed, PeerTube, etc.
- This would create a richer, more customizable ecosystem that evolves together.
Questions
Also, just a question from someone who’s not a coder:
Why not just copy Signal’s encryption model?
Summarize
Each user can create posts (with or without a forum), follow forums, follow other users, have private chats, and join encrypted rooms.
This is just some personal rambling, so feel free to ignore it. But if any of it sounds useful, please share it with other people, especially the developers.
They are. It’s called the fediverse.
There’s no reason why any of these software options couldn’t support all the same stuff, as you say. But so far they have chosen not to.
Maybe another option will come along one day that supports more of it at once.
Yes please don’t try to shoehorn everything into every soft, like Spotify now have shorts and other “social media” bullshit.
I can’t post a video using a Matrix account in a way that makes it publicly searchable, and they’re unlikely to support that in the future. In this case, I would have to create a separate account on PeerTube.
My thought is that plugin-based development could solve this issue. Even if they choose not to support a certain feature, people could simply use a plugin instead.
Matrix is not part of the fediverse, so that’s kind of a special case and doesn’t work the same at all as the rest.
What you describe sounds very simplified, but let me assure you that there is nothing simple about this problem (I say that as a software engineer that has studied ActivityPub, the protocol underlying the fediverse).
Didn’t know about that. Is there a fediverse messager people could use?
I’m sure the development is difficult, and I don’t mean to downplay the complexity involved. Still, I wonder if a modular or plugin-based architecture could help bridge that gap.
Xmpp is The activitypub of chatting
It sounds like that would require unifying the architecture of all fediverse platforms, which nobody is interested in and very much goes against the point (decentralization). Right now all of these platforms are written independently, with unique architectures and different programming languages.
Suffice to say that, while it’s a nice thought, what you’re proposing is not really realistic, nor is it actually desired.
I see now, thanks
There is one in active development. But it doesn’t seem to be federating YET according to the description. That’s an item in the planned list, and federating with other instances of itself is marked as wip. But work is being done on that front, the latest commit on the main branch is from 4 days ago.
thanks!