I’m amazed by the fact that it remains such high quality even when you go so far back to the early videos. It’s crazy. Dude is a genius.

Kind of weird but suit themselves I guess

How come?

I feel like it is just a matter of time before either:

1. The fragmented communities develop more and become distinct, so that they are more unique and shouldn’t merge.
2. One of the communities becomes the more popular “default” option, and the other becomes less active as people gather in the more popular one.

Even if that doesn’t happen, redundancy isn’t bad. We’ve seen how hard it is to migrate when there’s only 1 real option and that option disappears or goes bad for some reason (i.e. reddit). If there was another fairly active community with the same focus, that would make it easier to keep going. That’s part of why decentralization is good.

This is a non issue. Different communities and instances have different rules, norms, cultures etc. There’s no need to smash everyone together in a monoculture.

Exactly. This is a non issue and actually a feature.

I mean, just set the limit to a ridiculously high number then? I’m not aware that Lemmy has any in-built limits, but I could be wrong.

I believe that Mastodon instances with limits only link to external posts that exceed the limit, they don’t display the whole post.

Of course you can always run into network limits if you get huge posts, but that applies to everything and doesn’t have anything in particular to do with Mastodon.

Isn’t character limits an instance setting?

This kinda erodes cultural differences between different communities though. Different communities may have very different approaches on how to talk about a post. I feel like this approach just leads to monoculturism.

Finally someone who gets it. This “problem” is in fact a total non-issue. Different groups talk about the same thing all the time. This is good, not bad.

the conversations should be combined

Disagree. As OP points out, there is value in separating the discussions as well.

As much as “instance drama” can be a bit tiring, I think it might be an inevitable outcome and shouldn’t necessarily be seen as completely bad. My thinking is that instance drama would not occur if all the instances were similar, and that would be bad. As it is, there are actually differences among the instances and that’s good - some disagreements due to those differences is inevitable.

Now, it would be good if we could agree to disagree and still be friends… but that also moves into the paradox of tolerance. But I would say most instances have nothing strongly against each other, despite any differences in moderation or rules or approach. The Pareto principle applies too… probably 20% of the instances are responsible for 80% of the drama. If you don’t like the drama, try avoiding those 20% of instances 😅.

It sounds like that would require unifying the architecture of all fediverse platforms, which nobody is interested in and very much goes against the point (decentralization). Right now all of these platforms are written independently, with unique architectures and different programming languages.

Suffice to say that, while it’s a nice thought, what you’re proposing is not really realistic, nor is it actually desired.

Matrix is not part of the fediverse, so that’s kind of a special case and doesn’t work the same at all as the rest.

What you describe sounds very simplified, but let me assure you that there is nothing simple about this problem (I say that as a software engineer that has studied ActivityPub, the protocol underlying the fediverse).

It feels like they could all be part of one unified platform.

They are. It’s called the fediverse.

There’s no reason why any of these software options couldn’t support all the same stuff, as you say. But so far they have chosen not to.

Maybe another option will come along one day that supports more of it at once.

It looks like the default one to me, but I guess it could be a bundled one. But I tried downloading another camera app and it showed the same 30 second exposure limit so I’m guessing it’s a hardware limitation.

Hmm I have something called “nightscape” but I think it can only do 30 second exposures

What phones have this option? How would I find it?

you can squeeze a bit more faint detail out of them

What exactly did you do here? Up the contrast or something?

This is like requiring people to read a specific text book before they vote in real life elections. I hope you can see the problem with that.