It kind of makes me think of how odd it would have been if many of the old forums named themselves like bookclub.phpbulletin.com, metalheads.vbulletin.net, or something.
There’s nothing wrong with doing that, obviously, but it’s struck me as another interesting quirk of fediverse instances/sites. Generally as soon as you visit them you can tell by the site interface or an icon somewhere what software they’re using.
All creativity leaves your body as you are buying a domain.
can confirm
Also me during character creation in video games.
Yep, default with a cool face scar, or wiafu.
Nah, I can spent ages inside of it if there’s a good editor, but I will equally spent a long ass time sitting in front of the text box for the name. Especially if they require a last name as well.
Can confirm, I have my name and a pretty much random domain name.
Idk, I felt pretty clever when trying to decide my lemmy domain 😐
Because Lemmy is bigger than one domain. If it were just one domain it would be Lemmy.com, but since it’s federated, the names must be different, but you still want people to know it’s a Lemmy instance because they all interoprate.
“Hmm, what’s bajesus.com? Oh, its a Lemmy instance. What’s lemmy.bajesus.com? A Lemmy instance, of course.”
Lemmy is a technology where each instance follows the same rules: a compatible federation API. You want people to know your website is a Lemmy instance.
A bulletin board might one day change to entirely different back-end and migrate all of the posts and users. That’s highly unlikely you’re going to do that with a Lemmy instance. It will always be a Lemmy instance or it will go away. You’re not going to migrate the content and users to some other technology. And even if you did, you can buy a second domain easy peasy!
you still want people to know it’s a Lemmy instance because they all interoprate.
No, no, no. I don’t care that the server on the other side is running Lemmy, kbin, mastodon, wordpress or some dude running his own scripts. The only that should matter is that everyone uses the same protocol. The server should be nothing but a detail.
That’s highly unlikely you’re going to do that with a Lemmy instance.
If this whole threadiverse thingie ever takes off, It’s highly likely that Lemmy will not be a good fit for the majority of users. We will likely have servers working only to validate and relay messages from clients, and data will be fully distributed (instead of replicated to every instance). Any substantial growth will quickly show the limits of the current architecture.
You do care, though. Mastodon is a social network. You want to know if this server is part of that social network. Lenny is the same, even if “social network” doesn’t apply to it in the traditional sense.
Not all the networks on the fediverse interoperate, and that’s not even the goal with activitypub. All servers of the same network should interoperate, but Pixelfed doesn’t and shouldn’t need to integrate with Lemmy, for example.
You want to know if this server is part of that social network.
Hard disagree. There are no separate social networks, and it is not the software that makes the network. That is the whole point of the Fediverse. I shouldn’t care about the identity of the servers, all I should care is about the having a common language and a way to identify the actors.
If a user can not post a picture on Pixelfed and other people can not vote on it, then it’s a shortcoming of the software, not an integral quality of the system. I could switch my Lemmy server to, e.g. Takahe with extensions to support voting and you would be none the wiser.
Idk what to tell you then. Not only is that not how activitypub works, not all fediverse networks even use activitypub. Idk where you’re getting your definition of fediverse, or how you think that’s even possible. You can’t have every app/network support every feature of every other.
Imagine I make a fediverse MMO turn based RPG. How is a Lemmy app support to present that? How am I supposed to consume that from a mastadon server? Mastadon shouldn’t need to support turn based MMORPGs, and MMORPGs shouldn’t need to support streaming video.
There is not only is there no common API for fediverse networks, there isn’t even a common protocol.
How is a Lemmy app support to present that? How am I supposed to consume that from a mastadon server?
You don’t.
There is no place that says that a client needs to process every message that is received on an actor inbox. It doesn’t mean that one client should support only one specific type of activity, or even servers for that matter.
Maybe I don’t understand your position then.
Fediverse doesn’t make any claims for SSO or shared user accounts between server types. And servers aren’t required to interoperate with servers of other types. And clients aren’t required to interoperate with multiple server types.
It’s nice when servers and client do Interop between types (what I’m calling networks for lack of better word), but that’s not really fundamental to the fediverse, and is pretty rare. Afaict the only requirement is that servers of the same type can interoperate with eachother and user accounts from other servers of the same type are addressable.
server types
That is the problem. Assuming that we need different “server types” is a mistake made by Mastodon that benefitted them in the short term but screwed the developers who were looking at activitypub as a simple protocol for bidirectional exchange of data.
What we need is smarter clients and let the servers be completely dumb relays. Instead of thinking of “Mastodon API” or “Pixelfed API” or “Lemmy API”, we could be looking at a single browser extension that could talk Activity Stream directly with the server, let the client be responsible for signing messages and know how to present the context when/how to serve the different activity types.
Uh, OK. I have a Lemmy client on my phone. It doesn’t work with anything else you mentioned. Those are different apps with different features. I need to know if a server is a Lemmy instance, not Mastadon, etc.
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This is for you to connect with your server, not for people who are interacting with you via your server.
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Clients can be made to work with different servers. e.g Soapbox can work with both Pleroma and Mastodon servers.
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My server’s name is communick.news . Can you tell that is a Lemmy instance by looking at its name? You can go look at the API and see that it responds as being a Lemmy server. What if I told you that someone could take another software like GoToSocial and implement Lemmy’s API to make it usable for both microblogging and link sharing? This is perfectly possible, and wouldn’t need to know or care what is behind the API
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Lemmy is a technology where each instance follows the same rules: acompatible federation API. You want people to know your website is a Lemmy instance.
I kind of see where you’re coming from, and I think the reason I wasn’t thinking of it in those terms is that I see ActivityPub as the more important underlying tech across the fediverse than say Lemmy/Mastodon/Friendica/etc.
I say that in part as I’ve come into the fediverse from Mastodon, where there’s more than two options in play, e.g. Akkoma/Firefish/Misskey/Pleroma/etc. each of which has some commonalities, but also some pretty distinctive features, particularly from the Misskey side. Hell, Mastodon itself even has Glitchsoc, which is what the original instance I joined on that side of things runs.
On reflection, I don’t know that the microblogging instances mix in the name of the software they’re using as much, which you’d think with more options they might be inclined to, but the more I think of it the more I remember a lot of them use some fun, odd names instead.
Activitypub is the protocol. Mastadon/Lemmy is the API. Just because two applications share a protocol doesn’t mean they can talk to eachother.
The Spotify app uses the HTTP protocol, like your browser does, but that doesn’t mean you can view any webpage from the Spotify app. Idk if activitypub is actually a protocol, but it is at least analogous.
While it makes sense for apps/networks of a similar type to interoperate (like microblogging), apps/networks of different types may not make sense to integrate.
So for servers on the same network/app, it makes sense to include it in the server name, so that people know what app/network it belongs to.
Also the practice of using a subdomain to indicate which program is running is pretty old. That’s what the www subdomain on so many websites is.
Hotmail and Gmail have “mail” in the name, too.
Isn’t that more akin to instances having “social” in their name?
More like “fediverse” instead of “social”. Facebook is also a “social”, but it does not communicate with other fediverse instances. The fact that you are federated and share content is what should be in the name.
And behold: many instances DO use fediverse over lemmy in their name.
But Lemmy is not perfectly compatible with Mastodon and kbin. At the time some of the instances were made, Lemmy could not even federate with Mastodon at all. So it makes sense that instaces explicitly picked a name with Lemmy in it.
Yeah but mail isn’t perfectly defining services either since last I checked FedEx didn’t let you share links.
As someone with senior experience in cloud engineering here is my input, naming things is hard.
And God forbid you decide down the line you need a sub domain the terror of having service-b.service-a.com give me the chills.
But yeah 100% naming thing is difficult so you end up naming it after the software and using the group as the parent domain
Lemmy / Mastodon is the social network. To show that your server is part of that social network, they include it in the name
Yes, it would be very weird for server addresses to have the service name as a subdomain. Like a common prefix of web servers to signify that it’s serving world wide web.
On a more serious note, this used to be fairly common for many protocols to ensure loaf balancing between different protocols - you’d have one server for www, one for ftp, and so on.
Also, from an administrative point of view, it’s more manageable when you can, for example, add an entire (sub)domain to the firewall rules.
I do wish for more loaf balancing in this world.
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It kind of makes me think of how odd it would have been if many of the old forums named themselves like bookclub.phpbulletin.com, metalheads.vbulletin.net, or something.
There were hosting services for forums in which free or cheap tiers were on a subdomain like that. I think what you’re asking is the inverse though, e.g. mastodon.alostinquirer.org. I find that odd too, as it creates a weird situation if the person hosting it wants to use different software for the same purpose, e.g. Pleroma or Firefish for microblogging instead of Mastodon.
I probably should have adjusted the examples as like metalbulletins.org to better describe what I was trying to ask.
It’s not strictly the explicit software as part of the address that I’ve found odd, so much as the blending of the software in the names, but I think generally it comes down to the same basic point being made in the different comments concerning domain registration and management.
Because the nerdy engineers hosting these are not great at naming things.
With mine, it just sounds like let me and I just played with that.
Answer 1:
with an old forum like running phpbb, it doesn’t matter to the user what the site is running. if it works, it works.
with the fediverse, because it is interacting with other instances in a way forums never even conceived of, it is really important to the end user what software is running. the software is center stage.
Answer 2:
The blossoming of the threadiverse in the past 6 months has prompted/necessitated the creation of a lot of “general purpose” domains.
Your examples are
bookclub.phpbulletin.comandmetalheads.vbulletin.net. But most lemmy instances are not themed around literature or music or anything else. More apt example would have beenphpbbtalk.ioorchatvbulletin.xyz. Such sites did start back in the day. But in the absence of federation they were not likely to cohere. So you don’t remember them, if you ever found them in the first place.it feels like this is an artifact of the immaturity of the platforms.
they start out as personal or small collaborations, and those users are likely to utilize the software name. the first wave of 3 parties are likely to mimic the source instance.
i was also curious about this, but really, its just that there hasnt been time for devs to really commoditize fediverse software and non-project related folks to see the apps as a marketable solution.
It’s like the slavish old “www.” nonsense back in the day. It will go away over time.
I just do software/service.ohaa.xyz cause I dont wanna rent more than 1 domain (Iactually have 2, need to move my website to ohaa.xyz)
@ALostInquirer@lemm.ee I think part of it is the “branding” of Mastodon - if everyone someone follows uses a Mastodon server, they might just think of “Mastodon” as the social network they want to join, and never really consider that other people on the network might be using something like Firefish or Pixelfed or microblog.pub. After all, most Mastodon servers’ web UIs look pretty much the same and the default Mastodon name and graphics are often pretty prominent.
I don’t think this is usually an issue, but there are some Mastodon instances out there whose names are `mastodon.[something] and I think that can mislead people into thinking that’s the one they “should” join just because it seems “official”.
Another thing is that ActivityPub uses the hostname as the unique identifier, so I don’t think you can easily switch from Lemmy to KBin or something like that if you’re trying to use the same hostname as before
