#caturday

@thisismissem @rakoo I'm using AP to mean ActivityPub. I was agreeing with your point that in many spaces, AP doesn't necessarily line up with community boundaries - but also pointing out that sometimes it does, and this happens much more naturally with AP than atproto

@rakoo @thisismissem

I think it's nuts that Masto doesn't have local-only posts, it would be the easiest thing in the world to do, it's entirely natural to the underlying data model. Good on blacksky for building it first.

Re: @thisismissem 's point AP not directly matching how communities form, this is the kind of thing I had in mind when I said that neither AP nor activitypub is directly modeling human interaction. But AP is closer because there are large chunks of the fediverse where it does actually fit community. The instance I'm on is one such example, the local feed is heavily slanted towards people who have interests related to me, we moderate based on our own community standards, and all that. Many of the people I interact with are on similarly-sized instances that have their own noticeable community.

@rakoo @baralheia @thisismissem @mastodonmigration @cwebber

Yeah great question! It's that everything past the local level is flat from a network/protocol level - all communities are 'equidistant' at the network layer, which isn't how it works for human communication and society.

So I'm agreeing with your point about circles of trust, but down a layer at the protocol - and I don't think it's an accident that Mastodon and other fedi software have not really gone very far in implementing such things given that - while it's certainly possible - it's not inherent in AP.

But yeah I think AP is far *closer* to how humans actually communicate than atproto

@thisismissem @mastodonmigration @baralheia @cwebber

I would argue that neither the AP nor atproto are built directly for patterns of human communication that exist in the real world.

The "everyone messages everyone else and must have access to any message from anyone at any time" pattern embodied by the present Bluesky is not a real human way of communicating and forming communities, it is a figment of tech companies' imaginations and represents a massive amount of over-indexing that relies on, and therefore tends towards, centralized platforms.

The "everyone preferentially messages people in their nearby vicinity but sometimes people further away" view embodied by most present Fediverse software assumes a flat social network in which "non-local" is functionally the same in all cases and does not model human social networks very well.

AP assumes you are building bunch of villages with a flat road network between them. atproto assumes you are building Saudi Arabia's The Line.

@taylorlorenz On the old centralized platforms, everyone's in the same building with the same landlord, if the landlord is shitty (of course they are) everyone suffers. On decentralized media, there are tons of buildings with different landlords, and you can even build your own house. If your landlord sucks, you move.

@joncounts It would be interesting and technically possible to add these kinds of limited calculations but I'm not sure how to do it without making a real mess of the UI. Of course, you can already use the tool to scale the whole thing to NZ, in which case mastodon.social is Auckland and mastodon.nz is Brooklyn, Wellington Region

@jadp I did add a bunch of individual building sizes down at the lower end

Hachyderm is the El Paso of the Fediverse

It can be kind of hard to understand how big a server (instance) on the Fediverse really is. I know mastodon.social is much bigger than the server I'm on, but how much bigger, really?

So what if we compare the populations of servers to cities?

I built a tool for that! https://arewedecentralizedyet.online/fedicities/

Let's compare mastodon.social, the biggest server on the Fediverse, to the biggest city in the world, Shanghai (pop 24.9M). In comparison, pixelfed.social is like Ahmedabad, India (pop 6.4M). hachyderm.io is like El Paso, Texas (pop 679K). The server I'm on, discuss.systems, is like Eisenhüttenstadt, Germany (pop 32.1K).

Cool but maybe I'm not so familiar with some of those cities. What if we compare to cities in Mexico? (mastodon.social is Mexico City, Hachyderm is Tepic) Or Ontario? (mastodon.social is Toronto, Hachyderm is Caledon).

Play around with this tool, select an area of the world you're familiar with, and get a better sense for how big all these servers really are! Check out what your own server is comparable to!

@brittanytrang Oops, looks like I failed to link the post I meant to

It was standard messing-around-with-an-LLM type stuff:

https://discuss.systems/@ricci/115867057793995406

And do see this important context: https://discuss.systems/@ricci/115867714944436598

@STAT @brittanytrang this does not surprise me at all, given the set of things that I got their main product to "refill" for me

@aeischeid our kid is a bit older, so they do get more news

Kids all across our city, including mine, organized their own walk out in protest of ICE on Friday

We are leaning from the bravery of people in Minneapolis and Minnesota more broadly

https://www.sltrib.com/news/education/2026/01/30/national-shutdown-utah-students/

@jdp23 @noracodes fuck it, I'll help fund it if there's a way to

@jdp23 @noracodes the good moving UIs over there are all third party so they haven't even spent any money on it, they're using volunteer labor

(but part of it is, really, that the protocol makes it quite easy)