It shouldn't be like this. If we keep treating the Fediverse as just a scrappy, amateur effort, it will never reach its full potential and it will be forever just a niche thing.

This may be possible with a basic web stack

"basic web tech stack" is quite a bit hand-wavy, don't you think?

Yeah, indieweb sites could do a lot of things: authn and authz, content syndication, backlinking, Social Graph, etc. But none of them had been standardized and put into one single protocol. ActivityPub is precisely this protocol.

Saying that "we can do that with a basic web stack" is not that different from saying "we can have a protocol to publish XML content without styling using a basic web stack, why do we need RSS or Atom?"

I ran curl "https://mbin.grits.dev/u/mozz/outbox?page=1" -H 'accept: application/activity+json' and I could see your outbox. Apparently mbin does not put Like/Dislike activities in there, only your comments/posts/notes.

In a world where ActivityPub is only used in server-to-server, this would be fine. If we ever get to a (IMNSHO, better) scenario where we have more clients talking AP directly, then this will not work, and mbin will have to add those as well.

All of this to say:

• the debate about "what Lemmy devs are doing" vs "what mbin is doing" vs "what PieFed is doing" should be seen as tremendous conflict with the idea that "The good thing about the Fediverse is that we can all talk with each other, regardless of where we are".
• There is no sane way to square this peg into a round hole. Privacy and "Social Media" are inherently incompatible. The advice about not putting anything online that you are not willing to ever be made public is evergreen, and anyone that does not follow it will eventually have to learn it the hard way.

That, and to let people get auto subscribed to all the communities that are corresponding to the redditor subscribed subreddits. It solves the onboarding problem completely.

To be quite honest, I wouldn't mind sponsored posts as a way to support a community or instance, as long as they were completely disclosed as so and if the sponsor had no control over the moderation.

Why does it need monetisation?

Because the number of people who are willing to put in the work and create quality content without any potential reward is too low to be relevant. Without a credible model for monetisation, content creators will always prefer to stay in the closed platforms. If we want the open web to be a real alternative for everyone and not just a fringe thing, we need to be able to attract everyone.

data vacuumed to sell to advertisers?

Maybe I am getting old, but I do remember the time where "ads" did not automatically imply "Surveillance Capitalism". The problem is not the former, but the latter.

I have no issues with sponsorship in videos or creators plugging their stores/Pateron/Kofi in content.

Easy for you to say, but how many creators do you know that can make a living exclusively off their Patreon? And of those that do, how many managed to get known without putting their content on a closed platform?

Do you mean exclusive/tiered access to certain rooms only for subscribers?

If you are telling me that such a thing doesn't exist for Matrix already, you just gave me a perfect thing to offer on communick

missing piece is the replies, which Lemmy devs have no interest

If you look in one of the duplicate issues, nutomic says "no one has implemented it yet. Would definitely accept a PR to add it though.", so it's not a matter of "no interest", it is a matter of lacking manpower for it.

Not that I hold the Lemmy devs in particular high regard, but unless OP is cutting them a check every month enough to pay their full time salaries, I really don't think that he should be expecting anything just because he faced an issue that was difficult, but (a) not specific to the developers but the admins of the instance and (b) ultimately solvable.

I also think that this is not a reason to justify a whole fork or even a fully adversarial position. Yeah, tooling for moderation and instance management is lacking, but these can be built on top of the existing codebase. If my fediverser tool does that for user authentication and account management, it could also be extended for content moderation and provide granular access for staff.

Exactly! The only way that we can make sure that the Internet is not controlled by anyone is to make it available for everyone. If we are fighting for an open internet, we need to understand that this type of thing will be part of the package.

Somewhat related: do we have a more up-to-date mapping between reddit <-> lemmy ?

sub.rehab is not accepting new links, redditmigration is recommending some instances that have been abandoned or closed, etc. I have now over 4000 subreddits at https://portal.alien.top and only mapped ~150 of them. If none of these mapping projects are going to be maintained, perhaps I should a similar functionality to fediverser itself?

There was no "Extinguish". XMPP still continues on.

By the way, Facebook also did the same. The original Facebook Messenger was based on XMPP as well.