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Lemmy enjoys growth as developers pivot from Reddit amid API charging controversy
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this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2023
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@lohrun @snoopa lemmy's federation is buggy af and is causing excessive congestion from failed jobs
Federation in general seems to be pretty buggy, I’m running my own instance and I can see a ton of failed jobs happening in the logs. Seems like some of the issues are short comings of the ActivityPub protocol
@lohrun they are shortcomings in lemmy's flavor of apub. activity pub is more akin to json than it is an actual social networking protocol.
@jeff@federated.fun i don’t know if there is much we can do about that though. I have read through the activity pub spec as I was considering writing a fediverse web app…I won’t disagree, it is glorified json. Unfortunately it’s the “standard” that has been loosely agreed upon. I might have the willpower to write a passion project FOSS fediverse web app but I know I couldn’t remotely begin architecting a new federation protocol as well.
That doesn’t seem impossible… I’m not sure what business logic would be needed to make them easily interoperable. Honestly the biggest complaints I’ve read about the fediverse isn’t the UIs available to view content. The issue is the bugginess of federation and the lack of content recommendation algorithms on the platforms.
I’ve been mulling over the idea of a fediverse content crawler to allow instances to mass federate content to their instance…but then like I said you also need a good recommendation algo as well.
We have a ton of dev work going into making new UIs for Lemmy but personally I think what I said above should get some love too.
Wow I appreciate the lengthy response! So where do we go from here? Do we need to add new features that make content more discoverable? Do we need some great sorting algorithm here? Do we need a 3rd party tool that scrapes the fediverse and tells us what we might like? I’m trying to answer a bunch of questions like this. I’ve been messing with ActivityPub in my spare time to see what my implementation of it would look like. I think I have some ideas that could solve some of the issues we are seeing pop up. Honestly I’d love to have some people help me brainstorm features and architect out a system. At the end of the day… I’m on the fediverse because I don’t like Facebook, twitter, instagram, and (now) Reddit. It’s not just the people and the content on those platforms I didn’t enjoy, it’s also how they wanted you to interact with the content. I’m not looking to build a platform clone, I’m looking to build something that can fully utilize ActivityPub and can provide a feature rich experience to the user. Maybe I have too lofty of goals..idk, let me know!