Yeah, it’s not great. Unfortunately, there’s not a great way to describe this stuff without either leaning into abstract terms, or using oversimplifications.

The short of it is: only half of the ActivityPub protocol really got adopted by most of the Fediverse: the stuff that lets servers talk to each other. The other half would allow for a lot of cool things to be built, with not everything being its own Fediverse server.

Honestly, it would be kind of cool if you just had a simple app to log in with your Fediverse identity, and it rendered your existing profile on the page and allowed you to put additional links.

I don’t think it necessarily needs to federate.

Actually, there’s a pretty decent possibility of this happening! Ben from Bandwagon is currently looking into this for the underlying Emissary platform. If it proves easy enough to integrate, there’s literally no reason not to.

Proving it in one project might see adoption across similar efforts.

Support for other providers is coming. Bandwagon is in a similar situation. The overall goal is to support a multitude of options, so that no one payment solution has a monopoly.

Probably not, but the tradeoff is that you’re limiting audience reach. Occasionally, this can also break context in public conversations, where someone might follow someone else who responds to you, but can’t see your original post.

OwnCast is wonderful. It’s dead simple to set up and use, and works great with OBS.

I tend to prefer streaming through PeerTube, simply because the platform has more features. But for simplicity, OwnCast can’t be beat!

If anyone is interested in seeing the recorded talks, we’re in the process of uploading them all to PeerTube! First day is uploaded, currently working through day two!

https://spectra.video/c/fedicon_videos/videos

I would imagine that this is getting addressed in the update as well.

A significant portion of the code is available, I think it’s just a matter of getting the latest code pushed out to public release status. Judging by the server repo, seems like a lot of development is happening out in the open.

https://github.com/joinloops

I mean, all of the videos are uploaded to PeerTube, and that instance (run by me) federates across a big chunk of the network. Like, yeah, the videos themselves live in an S3 bucket somewhere, but the metadata federation and P2P video capabilities (plus the ability to mirror redundant copies) somewhat mitigates that.

Wanting to get paid for your work, so that you can keep making stuff, is in fact not the same thing as greed. We have this assumption that everything on the Web should be free, or at least helped along by donations, but it’s not sustainable.

Channel is basically a white label instance of PatchWork, which is a Mastodon fork with custom feeds and community curation tools.

The main intent behind the project is to help existing communities and organizations get onto the Fediverse, and have some curation capabilities. Ideally, it can be used to get a large amount of people and accounts onto the network with minimal friction.

I always liked the concept of Matrix, and still actively use it, but there’s some serious jank. Synapse is generally bloated and not fun to run an instance, Dendrite is perpetually in Beta, and the clients themselves range from adequate to awful. The default Element client on Android is so broken for me that I’m forced to use Element X, because I can’t even log in with Element.

It’s disappointing, but there’s a ton of issues that aren’t so easy to resolve. New Vector and the Element Foundation are basically two separate entities that have some kind of hard split between them, neither of which seems to have the money necessary to support comprehensive development. The protocol is said to be bloated and overtly complex, and trying to develop a client or a server implementation is something of a nightmare.

I want to see Matrix succeed, I think a lot of people see the potential of what it could be. I’m not sure it’ll ever get there.