Help me out here. Like a lot of ex-redditors, I made my way to the fediverse to find a whole new world of social media. Is it confusing at first? Yes. It takes a moment to adjust and learn the difference between an instance and a server and all that. But the one thing that confuses all hell out of me is @name@server. Not because it doesn’t make sense. I get that on the most basic level if I wanna find user @[email protected] that’s what I need to search for. But mainly because it doesn’t work in the way it’s proposed to work across all instances/servers/services. Which is if I search for @[email protected] on Mastodon or Calckey or any fediverse server I should be able to see what they posted. Most of the time, that’s not what happens.

First we need to look at Lemmy because they’ve kinda thrown a wrench at this cog. What is this: [email protected]? More importantly what is [!] doing there? Well that’s the NFL community on lemmy.world. But to be super distinct, its a place. Not a person. What happens if I search for that on Mastodon? It returns nothing? What if I change that to @[email protected]. I get a user on Mastodon with 16 posts that don’t populate on Mastodon. Same thing on Calckey but 0 posts instead of 16. Why does this happen? That user (to my knowledge) doesn’t exist. On Lemmy, it’s a place. A place where a collection of users congregated to make a collection of posts about the NFL. You could argue it’s the same thing on Mastodon but instead of a dedicated place it’s a subject and it’s out in the open.

A noun is a person, place, or thing. So far in the fediverse we’ve concentrated on a person @ and a thing #. Mainly because the groundwork is there thanks to twitter. The fediverse’s implementation of interactivity only focuses on the user. It has only looked at the @ of human interaction and not the whole noun. If this idea of connecting across servers want’s to fully work then each service needs to come to an agreement on how they want to implement places !. We’ve got the user part down. We’ve got the thing part down. Only using an @ and a # leads to small talk. Need proof. See Twitter. If you want deep thoughtful discussion, you need the !. And in my analogy that is the place. And like in real life when it’s all working together it leads to a community.

So I guess what I’m proposing, is as much as we hate reddit right now, Mastodon, Calckey, Lemmy, Kbin, and so on need to find a way to incorporate places together to get the whole idea of the fediverse walking.

I shouldn’t have to enter a full URL to get Mastodon to populate the contents of a user or place. That’s not the way we’ve been told this works. We’re being sold on the model of @name@server. Well @name@server wants to see what !nfl@server is saying about #nfl over on !different@server. Until we standardize that, the fediverse will only ever be a half baked idea.

#Mastodon #Fediverse #kbin #lemmy #reddit #federation #socialmedia #opinions #ideas