Show HN: A Gentle Introduction to the Fediverse

by ftfish • 3 years ago

27 9 3 years ago

There's a lot of great explainer sites and articles about the fediverse, but I wanted to make something that serves as a quick introduction for a more casual audience, and lets you dig deeper from there.

exabyte• 3 years ago

I'm curious, how would something like Nostr (https://nostr.com/) fit in with the Fediverse? Does it generally enhance federation or would it compete?

My understanding is that many federated services use ActivityPub protocol.

ftfish2• 3 years ago

Great question, and I'll let someone with deeper technical understanding answer this, but using Wikipedia as a reference (1), it looks like "fediverse" is a bit loosely defined, with parts of it not being fully compatible with all of the other networks (2).

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fediverse 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_software_and_pro...

scooke• 3 years ago

It is similiar to Mastodon in that most users (from my impression) still sign up at a main host, or instance, trusting that their sign-up data is secure (the important thing are keys which are generated upon sign-up). Once that initial account is created though, one can start using any number of other hosts which can also act as clients. This would be one difference - with Mastodon, your account made at ABC instance stays with that instance. Another similarity though is that anyone can make their own instance, generate their own users keys, and then start using any host/client they want, including obviously their own. So, federation (but federation within the nostr world only) happens mostly through the freedom of users to move about, and by users being able to make their own instances (which then have to have "relaying" turned on to help federate). Nostr though also has a way for users who've made their own instance to also turn it into a node which can receive sats as payment for being a node, and this aspect is often promoted in whatever article you find about Nostr, which has, in my opinion, the unintended side effect of scaring people away - partly because it is quite technical, and partly because it's scary crypto.

Xeoncross2• 3 years ago

As a dev, I'm still waiting for the basic, single-binary, self-contained Rust/Go/Nim app that has been audited and is fairly locked down. Something I can passively run without a lot of drama.

Like hacker news, I don't need one-thousand-and-one cool ui tricks. Just a simple way to share text and photos with people. There should be a pretty easy way to ensure something like that could be audited to avoid every known injection issue (XSS, CSFR, SQL injection, heartbleed, CRIME, etc..)

Currently, when I look at OwnCloud and Mastodon I just picture Wordpress nightmares.

As an aside, I'm still beyond disappointed that the Activity Streams spec did not even mention the word 'encryption' one time.

rsolva• 3 years ago

I self-host GoToSocial, which is a Go implementation that is lightweight and minimalist. It might not meet all your demands, but it is good enough for me. I set it an forget it and it works. I guess it'll hit 1.0 this year.

Xeoncross2• 3 years ago

I'm really happy to see learn about GoToSocial, thanks for sharing I'll be investigating this evening.

iancmceachern• 3 years ago

How does this differ from wuphf from Ryan's character on The Office?

shaburu• 3 years ago

The main reason the mainstream social media apps are mainstream is because of the user base if fediverse runs on alternatives - it doesn't even matter if the alternatives are better. Without the user base Fediverse seems to miss the mark

ftfish2• 3 years ago

We're getting there! https://fediverse.observer/stats

Show HN: A Gentle Introduction to the Fediverse

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