A little bit of computing and a little bit of neuroscience.
he/him/they
Yea. The basic idea feels like something that’s kinda been forgotten in the wake of big-social’s long dominance and vanilla-ification of online activity.
I even once asked the dev of a popular mastodon app who was expressing interesting in making a lemmy app too … “why not just add lemmy compatibility to the mastodon app”.
Their response was that they couldn’t see what that would look like or how it would work.
It’s all just text messages … I don’t think this is hard!
A useful lens I find is whether a social media system is good at creating, facilitating and hosting genuine communities.
Alt-social right now is struggling with this I think and, IMO, has plenty of room to grow in this regard.
The difficulty though is that it requires more features in our platforms, some likely non-trivial. That’s a big ask for an open non-profit ecosystem.
An effective means of aggregating multiple parts into a unified view could alleviate this.
Personally, I’m there with you I think. I only use default web-UIs on all fediverse platforms I’ve used, and advocate for that.
But should multi-protocol systems and multi-platform clients become normalised, I think this goes beyond “to app or not to app”. What I’m talking about could likely just be a web-app.
The issue is more around aggregation and creating something “greater than the sum of its parts” out of open alt-social.
@fediverse
Probably not original at all. But I suspect there’s something to framing it around “improving the quality of internet discourse” through the emergent dynamics of a federation … especially in comparison to monolithic big-social.
It also repositions the internet as a broader resource to be used effectively.
And instills independent and contentiously incompatible instances along with widely connected federation as desirable positives for social media and the internet in general.
2/2
A tricky part here is that the community still needs to be followed at least once on your instance for the content to come through. *I think*
So if a community isn’t coming through, I’d recommend these steps:
* Search for the community and follow it like any other user.
* Add it to a specific/bespoke list, then remove that list from home (a setting available on each list). This removes “the firehose” from your home feed.
* Follow the corresponding tag as you would any other
2/2
@mick_collins @Subversivo @fediverse @fediversenews
I’m not familiar enough (or at all) with C#, but AFAICT, it could make an instance more stable, as firefish and misskey have struggled with handling a decent amount of users and C# could be a faster system for the server.
Also, a re-write sometimes is a good thing. And, developers have different preferences for languages, so having a C# project around enables C# devs to more easily contribute to the fedi.
And to really get it you have to have been a vulnerable commuter (cyclist etc) in an encounter with a car where they’ve clearly just not seen you and will kill you if you’re not constantly on the look out for such things.
Despite being well informed about such things I was still shocked my “first time” as I watched a car just turn into me like I wasn’t there while the driver was looking elsewhere.
cars were already a problem. Weaponising them with tech hype is toxic.
Lemmy federates pretty well with mastodon. From mastodon you can follow a community as you would any person/user.
There are two major problems though.
Also, you can just follow lemmy users on mastodon.
That search/SEO is broken seems to be part of the game plan here.
It’s probably like Russia burning Moscow against Napoleon and a hell of a privilege Google enjoy with their monopoly.
I’ve seen people opt for chatGPT/AI precisely because it’s clean, simple and spam free, because it isn’t Google Search.
And as @caseynewton said … the web is now in managed decline.
For those of us who like it, it’s up to us to build what we need for ourselves. Big tech has moved on
Some, maybe many, hope for the decentralised model of the fediverse to “take back the internet”. Each time a commercial platform “enshitifies“, there are then calls for the fediverse to replace it with a federated alternative, in part to take advantage of the moment of user agitation.
But, IMO, resources and financial support are a touchy topic in the fediverse. If such has lead to a mismatch between ambition and opportunity, and, capability, that may be worth addressing.
@weirdwriter @ajsadauskas @lemmyreader
Yes, forum platforms too (incl #nodebb of course).
I do get the (very vague) impression discourse is focusing on integrating well with masto to a good extent and so might not integrate too well with the other Reddit/forum platforms. If true, that might be a good enough reason to start with another base. OTOH, it’s a familiar platform to many devs so adapting it for stackoverflow like use could go well right?
Yep! It seems a good Threadiverse ecosystem could be on its way with lemmy etc, nodebb and discourse. Hooking a stack overflow alternative into that could make a lot of sense of kick starting it.
Though at some point UI differences could prove problematic(?)
Yep, yep and … yep!
Ha
AFAIU, two platforms other than mastodon (lemmy and discourse) have issues federating because at least one of them is trying federate well with mastodon (for obvious reasons). The mastodon quirk causing issues is, AFAIU, the way it kinda mangles articles and pages (long form formats in ActivityPub), which are appropriate for forums and link-aggregators like lemmy and discourse. So someone hints been done to work well with mastodon’s mangling, which hurts lemmy-discourse interop
Agreed (and said the same myself)!
As I’ve said it … alternative social has run its course in this post-musk-twitter moment. Everyone’s settled down where they ended up.
And yea, either more major disruption or some new killer features (rather than clones of big social) will be needed to shake things up. Neither seem particularly likely in the short term … your EU-meta smackdown is probably the best bet??
Comparatively, it’s definitely a lot more into shitposting vibes, for sure.
I think their biggest problem right now is they don’t have good community self-organising features (nor masto, but the boost culture corrects for that IMO), so those who want more serious sub-cultures aren’t getting much footing (and may never).
Feeds are interesting but not very fruitful IMO and hashtags are new, so it’s a bit flat community-wise there, and many users are “wait & see” I suspect.
Fair (kinda the simple explanation why I’m anti-threads-federation).
While I’m no BlueSky-stan, the idea/promise of the system is a hybrid, which I think is generally worthwhile (especially while things like twitter and threads *dominate*) but also interesting.
How hybridised it becomes (and can become) is the question though with *big* outstanding questions.
LOL … yea plenty right.
The point though is that not all platforms had the problem, which means platform diversity would have lessened the significance.
@simpleguy @fediverse
I don’t believe so. I’m pretty sure I’ve checked it, but I could be wrong.
It makes sense though as hashtags are a different mechanism from follows and boosts.
You could do a quick test with the test community and the test hashtag.