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Don’t call the fediverse threadiverse…
I was specifically talking about the subsection of the Fediverse that structures itself similarly to reddit (e.g. Lemmy, piefed, mbim, etc).
But that isn’t really Threadiverse now, is it?
Given Thread itself is more akin to Twitter, so Threadiverse would rather be thr Mastodon style microblogging rather than the community-oriented approach of Lemmy/Piefed/mbin/kbin.
It literally is called the Threadiverse. The terminology predates Threads as a platform.
People have been using Threadiverse to refer to the link-aggregating community based Fediverse platforms with threaded discussion topics for way longer than Threads has existed as a website.
If you can come up with a catchier alternative then go for it. Link-aggregator-verse doesn’t really roll off the tongue.
its also reductionist. its not like we are just hoarding links here for hoarding’s sake. discussions. and many non-link posts too.
Feddiverse?
The Threadiverse is not named after Threads by Meta Platforms, Inc. The term “Threadiverse” is older than Threads by Meta Platforms, Inc.
It is named after Lemmy’s and /kbin’s and Mbin’s and PieFed’s “killer feature” of enclosed threaded conversations, with exactly one post followed any number of comments, where everyone always receives all of the comments. Something that was (and often still is) considered exclusive to these four applications.
In stark contrast to the de-facto Fediverse default, Mastodon. Where everything in a thread is a post. Where the concept of comments doesn’t exist. Where conversations are a filthy hack because it’s social media, and replies to replies aren’t part of the concept.
Where timelines always only consist of single posts with seemingly no context, and only a small variation in a small icon tells you that there is a context in the first place. Where seeing even only the branch of a conversation that any given post is in takes some effort, and seeing the whole conversation with all branches takes even more effort, not to mention the knowledge that this can be done in the first place, much less how it can be done.
Where you have to be mentioned to know that someone has replied to you. Like, where I would have to mention everyone in this branch of this conversation (@fonix232@fedia.io @speedythefirst@lemmy.zip @OpenStars@discuss.online @ceiphas@feddit.org) so that even only they receive my reply (everyone else in the conversation doesn’t). Where whoever will reply to me will automatically mention these four participants plus me.
The “Thread” in “Threadiverse” doesn’t stand for Meta Threads. It stands for “we can do proper threads, as in enclosed threaded conversations, something that Mastodon can’t, something that most Mastodon users believe the whole Fediverse can’t!”
Well said.
I think nodeBB also is included as part of the Threadiverse, although it seems not a full-fledged member, and I am not well-versed enough to know why (perhaps connection via the ActivityPub Protocol is still being rolled out to all the instances?).
Meta’s Threads is indeed entirely irrelevant to any of this, except that they wanted to horn in on our fun, but they killed themselves before they could begin, though not before we had already preemptively blocked it all! 🤣
Oh, and also they stole our name. Or rather tried to, but fuck that noise - we took it right back!!
Technically speaking, Friendica, Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte ought to be parts of the Threadiverse, too. They’ve always had enclosed threaded conversations and even discussion groups built in. Except for Friendica, they support FEP-171b “Conversation Containers”.
But look at how few people on Lemmy have even only heard of Mastodon. Friendica is much more unknown there. Those who know Hubzilla are a subset of those who know Friendica. And (streams) and Forte are next to completely unknown beyond Hubzilla’s actual users.
Tbf if you are interested in topics rather than people, then Mastodon is simply inferior to the Threadiverse - as you gave the best description I’ve ever seen on that point.
Friendica is inferior as well, but more on the technical side. It is struggling and instances shutting down due to lack of stability and efficiency, with costs rising far too high along with number of users. They’ve put out calls for programming aid to help fix those issues. As a non-user, I thought their main focus was on people rather than topics of conversation though?
The Threadiverse has quite the reputation for having such solid products - whether written in Rust with custom front-end or in Python with flask front-end (and Postgresql back-end), or Mbin is in PHP, and nodeBB uses Node.js.
My guess is that Friendica’s issues lie in its various federation connectors. They seem like leftovers from Friendica’s early days or derived from such.
Part of Friendica’s concept is to be able to connect to just about everything and then some. Friendica itself is based on a combination of its own DFRN protocol and ActivityPub. It connects via ActivityPub. It connects via the diaspora* protocol. It can crosspost to WordPress, any other XML-RPC-based blog, LiveJournal, Libertree and Dreamwidth. It can integrate accounts from Twitter, Tumblr and Bluesky. It can subscribe to RSS and Atom feeds. It can “federate” via e-mail.
Sound fine and dandy. The actual issue is two-fold: Friendica’s federation code is terribly inefficient. As I’ve said, it seems to be Mike Macgirvin’s first shot at building such stuff, either untouched since ca. 2010/2011 or derived from similarly old code. Besides, if I remember Friendica right, none of this is really optional. If the server admin activates it, it’s permanently on for all accounts, regardless of whether they actually use it or not.
Sure, it worked well under lab conditions when there were only few connectors. And it worked well while Friendica was just a few very early adopters playing and tinkering around with it. But when these became a few thousand people actually daily-driving it, and the number of connectors gradually grew, shit got real.
I remember Friendica nodes closing their registration at not even 150 users back in the day because they were full. Granted, these were mostly nodes that had the Facebook connector on (which worked like the Bluesky connector nowadays), and people would mirror their entire Facebook timelines with hundreds of “friends” into Friendica. Still, nodes without the Facebook connector didn’t fare that much better.
And yes, there were public Friendica nodes disappearing spontaneously all the time. That’s why Mike invented nomadic identity and created Hubzilla in the long run.
One of the first steps on the way was in 2012 when he took Red, the fork of a fork of Friendica that would eventually become Hubzilla, and re-wrote the entire backend against his new Zot protocol. In the course of doing that, he must have redone all the federation stuff. In addition, he made all protocols that aren’t Zot, RSS and Atom optional and turned them off by default on each newly created channel.
I have no other explanation as to why hub.netzgemeinde.eu is working that well with 3.5K channels (only a bit over 220 of which have recently been active, but the inactive ones cause their share of load, too), including cloned channels as well as clones, with a whole lot of add-ons activated, on an ARM-based server, operated by a guy who pays for the server himself and refuses to accept donations.
That is neat to hear that back-story, thanks for sharing! 🤯
Having attempted to use Lemmy communities via NodeBB, it’s a pain. No surprise we rarely see posts or comments from NodeBB users.
Ah, thank you for sharing your experience there. So it’s possible but difficult, like Mastodon (where behavior is also inconsistent) - good to know! I should probably stop listing nodeBB as a major player in the Threadiverse then.
The inverse (using Lemmy to follow NodeBB boards) seems to work fine, but I haven’t been able to find any that interest me
Oh neat! Or… I guess not, as you said 🤣 - either way it’s good to know! 😉
I know it isn’t named after Threads, but your average person won’t. Especially when you capitalise it so it’s Threadiverse instead of threadiverse.
Didn’t realize you made the rules
Here is an interesting post on the topic. The TLDR is that the term Threadiverse predated the shitty attempt by Threads to do whatever, and some of the biggest names in the Threadiverse including the software developers underpinning it decided not to allow Meta to steal it from us.
Besides, Threads is more or less fully dead now, isn’t it? And anyway it’s preemptively defederated by pretty much literally every instance out there, including those that famously defederate from virtually
anything(edit: nothing) else - including even CSAM spammers.Regardless, long live the Threadiverse! Other terms like Forumverse or just Verse may have worked better but… meh, people got used to calling it the Threadiverse and it just kinda stuck, or rather they did not want to change it. Feel free to advocate for something better, but the matter feels kinda settled now, so you would be going against what everyone else does routinely now.
In that post I included links to older comments proving usage of that term prior to Meta announcing its naming of Threads. We truly had it first, so using the term now is not in homage to them, but rather in spite of them.
Also, at this point I usually add an obligatory fuck spez… except I realize that I haven’t done so for months now, because at some point it’s okay to simply move on and forget him. That’s the real way to dispose of trolls: just forget they ever existed in the first place! :-P