I'm curious - what's the difference between magazines and users when linked to the greater fediverse?
It seems like the link to both would be @name@kbin.social. If somebody creates a user named news, it would therefore be found at @news@kbin.social - which is where the news magazine is found.
Don't these collide? How do we distinguish between the two?
@sab Actually, that's the idea, Lemmy and Matrix use a ! before the URL to name communities/rooms for example https://lemmy.world/c/technology but Mastodon doesn't support it and they are the biggest platform so they don't have any plan to do it, Kbin's solution was to use the same logic for users than for magazines. If you access a magazine from Mastodon you will see that it works as a user. Many people think that Lemmy is the only one who resists Mastodon's bad practices.
The more I use different #fediverse apps, the more I feel that we are on the edge of a different future, in the early stages of something that we haven't seen before.
In the last few months, I've used #Mastodon, #Misskey, #Calckey, #Funkwhale, #lemmy, #Peertube, #Bookwyrm and #Pixelfed. Soon, I'm going to try an install of #kbin. In the not too distant future, we will see #GreatApe bringing more options for video chat to the Fediverse. There are countless more platforms that I haven't had a chance to try.
The network formed by the interconnections between those apps is the Fediverse; a Federated Universe. Federated, because everything out there is connected with everything else, in one giant network. What I am truly beginning to appreciate is just how real that vision is, and just how disruptive to our future it's going to be. More than a truism, these the fediverse platforms really will allow us to see and interact with nearly anything else out there.
The platform we use no longer determines the information we can access; it doesn't build walls around us. Instead, what out choice of platform determines, is how we interact with information, rather than determining what information we are able interact with in the first place. The walls in the walled garden haven't so much been torn down, as simply never built.
I can write a blog post, and someone on Mastodon can reply to it. I can make a group post on lemmy, and someone from Calckey can reply to it. I can see an awesome photo on Pixelfed, bring it in to #Akkoma and boost it for everyone else to see. And then anyone who sees it can interact with it.
The cross platform interactions are still imperfect. Standards are still being developed, code is still being written and features are still being defined, but the future is right here, we are on the cusp of something new and amazing.
Of course, this is all old news to someone who has been part of the fediverse for years now, but it feels different now. The momentum is here, we are seeing a shift and I think once we cross that precipice, once we have normalised the cross channel interactions we are starting to develop, it's going to be very hard to go back.
