I can definitely see name-collisions being an issue, where communities on different instances have the same community “ID”, but aren’t actually about the same thing. I’m still overall in favor of the basic idea though.
I can definitely see name-collisions being an issue, where communities on different instances have the same community “ID”, but aren’t actually about the same thing. I’m still overall in favor of the basic idea though.
That’s what I’ve been trying to do myself. I’m really not an interactive kind of person on these online communities. I’m almost always a lurker, but I’m really trying to push myself to be more active, because I want an open-source and federated Reddit alternative (and ActivityPub in general) to succeed!
I’m really interested in the idea of these different kinds of websites being interoperable because of ActivityPub. Like the different websites are basically different frontends for people who prefer link aggregators or micro-blogs or other kinds of websites. It’s a really cool idea!
For anyone who’s interested in an alternative, check out https://codidact.com . It’s much smaller right now, but it’s open-source and the community is nice.
I have an account, but I don’t really use it much. Not because I don’t like it, but because I don’t have much to say really. I’m more of the lurker type.
The important thing about Matrix is to think of it like email. Homeservers are like your email provider, like Hotmail or Gmail or Protonmail. You look for a homeserver, then you just make an account on that homeserver. The “main” homeserver is matrix.org, but it’s recommended not to make an account on there if you can avoid it. Remember that making accounts on these homeservers is free, so there’s no reason not to make accounts on a few of them to try out.
The other thing to think about is your matrix client. This is similar to an IRC client or an email app. Luckily, this matter even less than the homeservers since you can freely switch between these anytime with basically no issues. If none catch your eye, Element is the sort of “reference implementation” so you can just try that one if you want. It has a web version too: https://app.element.io
There’s some cool more advanced features like spaces and threads, but you don’t have to worry about those much at first.
Federation definitely feels like the next major stepping stone of the internet’s evolution. Protocols like ActivityPub and Matrix feel like a bit of a “new beginning” for communities on the internet.
But with the way the Reddit admins are handling the website, you wouldn’t have had that sub for much longer anyway. That’s the whole point of the blackout in the first place. Don’t blame the protesters. Blame the admins. They’re the ones with the power to change things.