Scott M. Stolz

This sounds interesting. I would love to hear about how it could integrate with other platforms.

The biggest issue is economies of scale. Browser engines generally require a lot more coding and maintenance than social media software does (unless you are engineering to be the next Twitter will millions of users). This means more people involved and more organization is required than your typical ActivityPub-related project.

There actually have been many alternate browsers proposed and built, but they usually wind up being abandoned because of the lack of adoption and the amount of work it takes.

And, depending on the type of changes you are making, sometimes it is better to just use what someone else has built and modify it. That is why we have Waterfox, Opera, Brave, and numerous other browsers that use Chromium or Firefox as the base. Why build an entire car, when you can repaint it, change out the seats, add a quality sound system, and swap out the wheels for something nicer?

I do think that there needs to be more choices for browser engines, but I am not sure decentralization is the right word. What we need is more competition, or put another way, more players. The standards are open, so anyone with resources can build a browser. It is a matter of whether people will use the new browsers.

The third logo is Gravatar, which allows you to set an avatar associated with your email. It is mostly used by blog platforms such as WordPress to associate an avatar with your comments. Many other platforms, such as Hubzilla and many forums, support Gravatar.

I didn’t realize that Neil changed his name. ;)

I guess I missed the drama. But it is to be expected. Many people came from centralized social media, and simply signed up for something their friends told them about. For those people, they learned about federation after the fact. It is a new concept for a lot of people.

I think Hubzilla and Friendica are its only links to the rest of the Fediverse. Both support ActivityPub and Diaspora.

Maybe Diaspora needs to update their logo, similar to how Walmart just updated their logo recently.

I agree that there needs to be some more “killer apps” for the fediverse for it to really take off. Luckily there are some people working on that. Loops and Pixelfed seem to be some recent highlights and are growing fast. And there are other apps that are being worked on that could change things.

One of the problems is that ActivityPub is somewhat limited to what Mastodon has implemented. A lot of other platforms want to implement some cool features, but none of those are supported by Mastodon. This limits the rest of the fediverse since they have to cater to the lowest common denominator.

It is one of the main reasons why Hubzilla still uses Zot6 as its primary protocol, and uses ActivityPub to communicate with everyone else. Hubzilla has features that the rest of the fediverse does not support, such as nomadic identity, privacy, and access control. And related to that, Bluesky also has features that ActivityPub does not support, or if ActivityPub does support it, is not implemented by the larger platforms.

I think this is the primary reason why the fediverse is falling behind. People look at what Mastodon has implemented and think that ActivityPub is weak compared to Zot6 or AT Protocol.

I think the fediverse will continue to grow, and it would mostly be because of projects like Loops and Pixelfed and other new services. But I think that Bluesky has a lead on us and it will continue to grow, mostly because bigger players with money can afford to actually build on the AT Protocol, which has higher hardware requirements.

Eventually, thanks to bridges and multi-protocol platforms, there will be a multi-protocol network, with big players who have money using AT Protocol, and people who want to start a server on a lower budget using ActivityPub.

In the short term, I think that Bridgy Fed’s multi-protocol bridge has a better chance of decentralizing Bluesky than Bluesky.