- Joined
- May 16, 2019
This is insanely optimistic.
He's already spent money and cleared it with the server host.
My understanding of ActivityPub is that it slaughters your database, and that federating requires a network setup that doesn't allow for great defense against attacks. It's why the Kiwifarms instance died after Cloudflare dropped us; the rotating reverse-proxy that keeps the site up doesn't work with federation. Poas.st has only been lightly attacked, relatively to either KF or 4chan.
Beyond the technical issues, I don't know what 4chan (or any anonymous imageboard) gains from federation.
The experiences are completely different. 4chan's catalog is incompatible with fediverse software, which is server and timeline based. If you're on poast, you get a Following view, a Poast-specific view, and an Entire Network view. These are unsorted, chronologically arranged, endless streams. How would 4chan even show up? An endless stream of posts that you have to dig through expanded threads to figure out the full context?
But nobody wants to see EVERY board on 4chan, they hang out in a small number of chosen boards. /pol/ posters don't want to see /lgbt/ posts in their timeline, /a/ doesn't care about /lit/, nobody wants /b/, etc. A fediverse user on Poast doesn't want all those boards in their Network view, even if there's something interesting they'll just wind up muting the entire 4chan server.
The only way to make it bearable is to make each board show up as its own "server" on fedi so you can mute them, but that requires even more hacking, probably to fedi software as well. And it'll start out spamming every federating server and forcing people to mute a whole new batch of "servers" like they did in the old CP flood days. Not a good way to gain popularity.
In reverse, 4chan could start consuming federated posts in a way that a server = a board, but then you get flooded with boards. Plus every single post will be "namefagging" because all posting on the fediverse is under unique accounts, even the posts coming over the Nostr bridge are uniquely identified by wallets. A channer commenting on a fedi post will show up as an anonymous response on the fedi side, which is sure to piss off fedi users even more.
And that's probably the biggest mismatch: the culture. Fedi is pseudonymous, account-based micro-blogging, that stays up forever due to decentralization. 4chan is anonymous shitposting that's supposed to disappear. In today's MATI Null correctly pointed out that the ephemeral design of imageboards meant their users treated them as chat rooms, not forums or blogs. Jump in, chat about something, tomorrow that chat is gone and you start a new one. You never know who you're talking to, and that's part of the appeal; it's also why the boards would go nuts over identifiable posters, because they were rare and unique enough to be noticeable.
The user who wants that doesn't want to transform into a name-fagger whose posts live forever. The friendship-building, follower-oriented, account-signup micro-bloggers don't want the same kind of engagement as a channer. You can mash the two together in one feed, but that culture clash is not going away.
Poast is infamously protective of its own culture, and brags about chasing away mastodon, Gab, Truth Social, Kiwis, Jim fans, TRS/NJP, Gab refugees (again), and multiple waves of Twitter refugees. Throw them together with channers, and they'll just gatekeep them into another separation.
The experiences are completely different. 4chan's catalog is incompatible with fediverse software, which is server and timeline based. If you're on poast, you get a Following view, a Poast-specific view, and an Entire Network view. These are unsorted, chronologically arranged, endless streams. How would 4chan even show up? An endless stream of posts that you have to dig through expanded threads to figure out the full context?
But nobody wants to see EVERY board on 4chan, they hang out in a small number of chosen boards. /pol/ posters don't want to see /lgbt/ posts in their timeline, /a/ doesn't care about /lit/, nobody wants /b/, etc. A fediverse user on Poast doesn't want all those boards in their Network view, even if there's something interesting they'll just wind up muting the entire 4chan server.
The only way to make it bearable is to make each board show up as its own "server" on fedi so you can mute them, but that requires even more hacking, probably to fedi software as well. And it'll start out spamming every federating server and forcing people to mute a whole new batch of "servers" like they did in the old CP flood days. Not a good way to gain popularity.
In reverse, 4chan could start consuming federated posts in a way that a server = a board, but then you get flooded with boards. Plus every single post will be "namefagging" because all posting on the fediverse is under unique accounts, even the posts coming over the Nostr bridge are uniquely identified by wallets. A channer commenting on a fedi post will show up as an anonymous response on the fedi side, which is sure to piss off fedi users even more.
And that's probably the biggest mismatch: the culture. Fedi is pseudonymous, account-based micro-blogging, that stays up forever due to decentralization. 4chan is anonymous shitposting that's supposed to disappear. In today's MATI Null correctly pointed out that the ephemeral design of imageboards meant their users treated them as chat rooms, not forums or blogs. Jump in, chat about something, tomorrow that chat is gone and you start a new one. You never know who you're talking to, and that's part of the appeal; it's also why the boards would go nuts over identifiable posters, because they were rare and unique enough to be noticeable.
The user who wants that doesn't want to transform into a name-fagger whose posts live forever. The friendship-building, follower-oriented, account-signup micro-bloggers don't want the same kind of engagement as a channer. You can mash the two together in one feed, but that culture clash is not going away.
Poast is infamously protective of its own culture, and brags about chasing away mastodon, Gab, Truth Social, Kiwis, Jim fans, TRS/NJP, Gab refugees (again), and multiple waves of Twitter refugees. Throw them together with channers, and they'll just gatekeep them into another separation.
Ultimately, why bother? If you're a 4chan user and you want to view Poast posts, just make an account. Same if you're a Poast user who wants to visit /pol/ or whatever. Merging them might be technically possible, but ultimately pointless. Neither side is gatekeeping a desired experience from the other, and merging the two doesn't make either side happier.
