First of all, how is called this category of programs, instance engine?
Second, why there are 3 different, basically inter-compatible projects out there, what are the benefits of each one over the others? and why does Lemmy prevail all of them.
*i will be using feddit as a umbrella term for all the reddit-like fediverse.
I don’t have much of a technical Background to know how this things work under the hood, but I’m quite curious of where all of this is heading.
I see a lot of awesome features locked away in these other projects that would be just nice if it was standard to have them, like piefed’s hashtag-like system that allows people to seek things by topic instead of going to a specific community hosted in a specific instance, it would instantly fix the fragmentation problem across feddit, lol.
How the future of feddit will be? will be all be using Lemmy or other specific project, or instances will use whatever project they like and they will be cross compatible enough that it won’t be much of a deal what project is running underneath?
The whole point of federation and open protocols is that you aren’t tied to any specific piece of software, or any single provider, or any single set of features. People can experiment and innovate and collaborate and expand to build new things on top without losing access or interfering with people who prefer the old methods. People or software that abuses the system on the other hand, can be blocked or defederated.
A healthy software ecosystem should have many different pieces of software all written by different people with different goals, but all implementing most of the same things. Some will be more popular than others, and the popular ones might not agree with your own personal tastes, but that’s just life. The point is that we (and software developers) all have the freedom to choose how we interact with this system without any formal rules or maintainer group deciding what is allowed and what isn’t (except within their own software and/or instance).
They are already cross-compatible enough, they are as cross-compatible as they need to be. It’s not clear what more you could ask for. If you want them to all look and work exactly the same then what’s the point of having different software at all? You’re acting like the different features and choices are a downside when it is in fact a benefit. Pick the one you like the most and use it. If you like Piefed’s hashtags, then use Piefed, it’s great! There’s nothing “locked away” in Piefed, everything in it is available to everybody, as it should be!