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this post was submitted on 26 Jan 2024
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Fediverse
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A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).
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Usenet servers had no web UI since the web was not yet invented. They ONLY provided an API and the presentation layer was done completely by the client. There were dozens of client programs people used, maybe 100s. Clients handled all features like subscriptions, tracking read articles, boosting or blocking topics or users, etc. So in that regard it was much more private for users. The servers were computers 1000x slower than a modern mobile phone. So yes, Lemmy seems overbuilt.
Well yea, part of my thinking here is whether all the work of federation, from building the software, debugging and testing it (which AFAICT is a huge pain in the ass) and then actually running it as a job ... is actually worth it ... when users could very well be happy with something much simpler and the mission of creating a more open, safe and "billionaire proof" social web easier to achieve with something more straightforward.
Usenet had a counterpart to federation in that posts got automatically propagated between servers. I haven't read the Wikipedia article about it but that might be a good place to start if you want to learn about it. Being a server admin did require some ongoing effort, just like with Lemmy.