There are a large number of unanswered questions about the Fediverse. I don’t just mean questions that users may have, but questions for which no suitable answer exists yet. Some are extremely abstract and existential like “will the Fediverse survive the next decade?” Other questions are very concrete like, “What is the copyright status of a federated post?” or “What are the moral implications of federating content that may be harmful or recording a crime?”
I wonder, for those of you who stay up nights thinking about the Fediverse, which question is the most important to you?
A big one is “How does an instance change their underlying implementation?”. Like how could a lemmy instance decide to migrate to become a Mastodon instance?
Currently that’s just not possible, but it seems important for the long term survival of an instance. It seems naive to think that an instance will stay the same implementation forever. But ActivityPub basically makes this impossible.
it’s useful to be able to change implementation, but I’m not sure if changing also the platform type is a good idea. that’s a different instance then, with the former one being shut down. mastodon and lemmy are quite different.
lemmy has multiple implementations already. when switching between them only the database and the structure of the attachment storage should need to be converted, and ideally that should be done by the implementation you are switching to.
No it doesn’t? There is only one Lemmy implementation. There are some similar alternatives like PieFed and Mbin but those are separate implementations and are not in any way related to Lemmy, aside from using the same ActivityPub extensions.
There is really no such thing as a “platform type” - it’s all ActvityPub under the hood.
openlemmy?
Beehaw is not very happy with the Lemmy project, and was looking for alternative implementations a few months ago. I remember to have read that they have found something written in Java, and maybe another one, that was basically a separate implementation of Lemmy.
Try to view a Peertube stream on Lemmy, then. Or subscribe to a Mastodon user. There are platform types, and there will be at least until the platform has to implement its own way to interpret and render the content of an other platform that hosts content of a different kind. Even when a platform type implements full AP compatibility, there will often be things a specific platform won’t be able to display.