ActivityPub is an extensible protocol. It is not just one thing. Lemmy only supports posts that follow that extension I linked above. That extension has a definition and Lemmy follows it so in that way it is “standard”. But it is an extension, not part of the core protocol.

Mastodon and most other fediverse services do not support this extension.

Its not that anyone is “doing it wrong” and Mastodon doesn’t really support Lemmys communities either. So Lemmy works in a bit of a funky way that doesn’t match most other fediverse services.

Its just a bit strange that Lemmy does not support the more common posts outside communities since that is how most of the fediverse works, so we’re kinda missing out on a lot of content that we can’t see on Lemmy.

This is the FEP Lemmy uses but most other fediverse services do not use it and Lemmy does not support anything that doesn’t use this FEP. So again, it’s not that Lemmy is doing something wrong, but Lemmy is not supporting how most of the rest of the fediverse functions.

I think Mastodon is very far from standard

I think it’s much closer to standard than Lemmy and I’ve looked into it quite a bit recently. ActivityPub is unfortunately quite focused on microblogging. Honestly lemmys way of doing it is a little hacky.

As for the posts outside communities? That makes sense lemmy-wise I think. Where would those posts be?

I actually think it’s quite straightforward, they’d just be on a users page. This is actually how Reddit has also done it ever since they introduced the feature (much before they enshittified everything else).

You can think of it like every users profile being a community of its own but only the user itself can post to it. Just conceptually speaking.

That would also let you follow users just as you can follow communities.

I mean you could equally ask why does Lemmy not support posts outside communities? It’s on both parties to interoperate I think. Lemmy also uses a specific extension to ActivityPub while Discourse’s posts and Mastodon’s posts and such are pretty standard, but still not picked up by Lemmy.

It has ActivityPub support so it is connected to the fediverse in some ways. Lemmy doesn’t work with it though AFAIK because Lemmy doesn’t support posts made outside communities.

If there was a Reddit/Lemmy style website (where people create communities for various subjects but it’s all available from the same website using the same credentials) with forum style discussions

Isn’t this just Discourse?

Well there is a phenomenon where your brain will make sound and sight “match up” even when it shouldn’t. Like if you hear and see a basketball bouncing 75 meters away, the sound should have about a 0.25 second delay. But your brain will make you perceive the sound as happening simultaneously with the ball hitting the ground, despite the fact that you could not perceive the visual and auditory sensations simultaneously. If you go further away with the ball, eventually there is a threshold where your start perceiving the delay. The auditory and visual sense would need to be somehow linked for this phenomenon to happen I’d say.

I guess it’s the brains way of matching visual and auditory cues to try to make a better picture of the world. The brain is basically saying “that sound came from the ball” and you don’t even need to think consciously to know that.

I’ve seen some mods power tripping just like good old Reddit.

The difference is that when that happens on Reddit, you can’t go anywhere else. On Lemmy, you can go to any other instance and do it better if you feel the mods elsewhere are bad.

I need to perform a magic trick to make my feed “better”. At least it’s not that addicting

Lemmy’s feed is intentionally (or I think it is intentional at least) worse in this aspect than Reddit’s feed, in order to not be as addictive. Take that how you will.

Maybe what I see as red is actually what I see as blue to someone else.

This is a very common interesting thought, but what I’ve started thinking is even more interesting is this related thought:

Why does red look like it does, to you? I’m not concerned with how other people see red here, I’m just thinking about a single person (me or yourself, for instance). Why does red look like that? Why not differently? Something inside your eyes or your brain must be deciding that.

You could say “oh it’s because red is this and that wavelength” but what decides that exactly that wavelength looks like that (red)? There must be some physical process that at some point makes the qualia that is red - but how does it do that? The qualia that is red seems to be entirely arbitrary and decidedly not a physical thing. It is just a sensation, an experience, a qualia. But your eyes/brain somehow decides that ~650 nm wavelength translates to exactly that qualia. What decides that and how?

So what you meant to say is that you don’t see a difference above 60 Hz. But other people definitely can tell the difference. Don’t generalize on everyone based on your own experiences.

Do you think that the conversation around, e.g, python programming or wood turning techniques will vary so much that it warrants many specific flavors?

I don’t see why not. Human culture is like a fractal after all :P. At least I don’t think we should discourage creating different places for the same topics, because different approaches is part of decentralization.

for the cases where the culture is more-or-less universal

When is this ever true? The idea of a “universal culture” is exactly what I mean with this encouraging centralization. Even a specific community (subreddit) on a centralized service like Reddit will have a specific culture that is not in line with any “universal culture” (it’s likely to be skewed towards whatever culture exists in western english-speaking countries, just to mention an example).

I personally am not a huge fan of this idea. Instances are at the end of the day communities of their own in a way. One community may want to discuss a topic in one way and another community may want to discuss it in another way. This seems to be a way to centralize all discussion around a topic in one community, but we should rather go for decentralized communities.

But hey that’s just my opinion, if others like it, go for it.

They have a page on “supporting long form text in the fediverse” - but this is already supported? I think it’s only Mastodon and other microblogging places that put restrictions on how long posts can be.

Them socks though

I know you’re being sarcastic but if we actually look on the bright side, then tools like this could make indie games easier to produce. More and better indie games could in theory bring more competition to companies like EA and that could actually pressure them to make games cheaper.

Jokes on you, I love the clumps of chocolate in milk with cocoa powder.

a bit of text you can send to them by whatever secure side channel you want down to handing them a flash drive

Normal non-technical people are never going to do this. It needs to be easy as clicking a button, otherwise it will never happen for them. Again, this is a neat technical solution but it completely forgets the human.

Yea in theory you wouldn’t need the password if you have the private key but here the key is only used for signing, maybe not for login. If it also needs to be backwards compatible. In any case, I don’t think user-held private keys is viable.

Sharing with trusted parties… I dunno, I think again it’s too technical and complicated to do it. And you’d need people on the platform you trust to already be there.