Decentralization is obviously the big thing about the Fediverse but is it TOO decentralized to gain traction?
There is no reason why they have to be fully separate domains in the same branch. You can set up a system of fully independent moderation and extreme levels of customization while having them all on one site with a front page that allows everyone to see whats popular.
A front page wouldn’t prevent individual subgroups from requiring approval to join, it wouldn’t prevent subgroups from banning those it doesn’t want. It doesn’t prevent users from blocking subgroups that it doesn’t want to see on the front page.
What would be most useful is that now someone could create an account on the Reddit, Twitter, Facebook(?) alternatives and give them access to every community, and then allow each community to set its own rules, and customize its own to be unique while having a unified product to “sell” and get people to move.
Hot take? Blue Sky should be worked with to join the Fediverse as the twitter alternative and Mastodon should work to be the Facebook alternative
TLDR: One front page and general site for Lemmy, Mastodon…and to sign up and see whats popular and then have fully independent subgroups.
Gateways that ease the pain of entrance to the fediverse are a good thing. A single, centralised gateway that defacto controls all access to the fediverse is exactly what I’m trying to get away from
Just to be clear each site, Lemmy, Mastodon… Would have it’s own front page under this idea.
Most platforms have their “join lemmy” or “join Mastodon” equivalents already
I know but having a reddit style front page or trending like Twitter would look more engagefull.
Peertube and pixelfed have that built in to the individual instances. It is something I’d like to see more widespread
It would give an enormous power to who controls this “front page”. This page could restrict any user arbitrarily, lock them out, spy on them, etc. And because this page would be unique, they would have no alternative. This is exactly why federation is a key to freedom.
That can be worked out, have power shared by say 10 people who have to agree to any changes they make to it. or use AI (I know not ideal).
I kinda like the fediverse as is. We keep slowly growing our services. We don’t need to be social media.
We can be social sure but without the need to be ever growing. I would rather us concentrate on the people and giving us power rather than huge orgs that are going to do huge org things.
I just like that it’s smaller. Like, you can actually have conversations (or slapfights :sigh:) and can actually recognize people. Kind of like something bigger than a small town but smaller than a huge city.
I’m not opposed to growth, and it would definitely be a good thing in the long run, but I like that it’s not just shouting into the void here.
Thanks totally agree. And appreciate the comment.
I feel like this is still a community and less people trying to influence. Or less so at least.
Lol slapfight.
Growth is a long way away, we already lost 30% of the people that first came on board (couldn’t stand having to create their own content smh)
IMO, it isn’t decentralized enough. The federated model is better than centralized corporate services, of course, but it still suffers many of the same pitfalls in microcosm. We need private, encrypted friend-to-friend connections that enable friend-of-a-friend onion routing to those outside one’s personal social circle to effectively mimic how real human social networks actually work. The only middlemen we need are the friends we made along the way.
From my perspective, that’s not something I’d use, or at least, it wouldn’t have been much use to me when I was a young closeted queer person in small town Australia. It wouln’t have been much help finding my peers
It could have been, there’s nothing preventing such a network from providing a degree of anonymity by leaving your signature out of a post and adding a few increments to the distance on its onion route to obfuscate the source.
And in any case, you’d only need to make one remote friend to reach an entirely different segment of the network.
You know what’s exactly as decentralized as fediverse? Email. Do you know anyone who doesn’t use email?
Email is a utility 💀 not a social platform
It was before chat services arrived.
Remember when we had mailing lists that basically acted like forums and group chats with your various friend groups that consisted of these long email chains?
Not really, i grew up in the AOL era, so for me it was chat rooms, and sometimes (but not often) actual forums. Then it was myspace after that.
Why on Earth would you want it to take over the social media space? Have you not seen what those places are like?
Because social media is controlled by big corporations and thats why they are such shit. Once Reddit, Twitter and Facebook falls and if it falls to the fediverse it will be controlled by the average joe not political money motivated operatives
Why in Earth would you want it to take over the social media space?
So that the rest can be free with us.
I feel like the current Lemmy, if it grew to be as big as Reddit, would immediately defederate from a large section of Lemmy itself, creating many separate communes rather than the one (or two) we have right now
Welcome! Thanks for the suggestion, I’m happy with having multiple sites and not one team having absolute say on content over the rest.
But who would control this front page?
A group of people who would all need to agree before action, a mini government of sorts, maybe elected idk but its the only way to gain a real foothold. The people running it are only supposed to act if illegal activity is going on and they are contacted by authorities in the appropriate jurisdiction.
The people running it are only supposed to act if illegal activity is going on and they are contacted by authorities in the appropriate jurisdiction.
which is the “appropriate” jurisdiction?
what if it’s not illegal in my country, but it is illegal in the country where the server is? I have no other choice of server, you’re taking away our ability to join servers in our own countries
Google Chat or whatever uses to be federated via XMPP, but then they slowly started making incompatibility changes. Due to it being such a dominant chatting service, the real federated versions died out.
Basically I’m saying it’s not worth it. If you want to support Threads or Blue Sky as a central front page to the Fediverse then go for it, but they don’t actually need your support.
While not being exactly what you are proposing, you could consider mastodon.social and lemmy.world the de facto front page for each service. They are by far the largest and best-known instances in their respective networks. Many new users start at those instances, get their toes wet, and then branch out.
I’m not arguing that’s how the network should be structured, though.
For mastadon, it’s like 85% mastadon.social, Lemmy has it better with only 50%
You’ve just described the goals of Mbin. I congratulate you.
Then make the “one true frontpage” for Lemmy or whatever (implement ActivityPub, maybe borrowing some code from the Lemmy codebase itself, or kindof making a fork of Lemmy), and if it’s good, it’ll be used. If not, it won’t.
But then, it might well fall victim to this phenomenon:
Lemmy has lots of competing “front pages.” How will one more change anything? A more generic domain name or something?
Lemmy.com Mastodon.com … If those were the front pages that curated the top 25 posts and top 25 sub groups in the last 24 hours and it was a space where you could search for the groups you fit into or are interested in. No more confusing mess.
The top 25 posts in the least 24 hours would probably mostly show politics, news and tech memes, which aren’t the most attractive content for potential new joiners.
I personally block this type of content, and I’m probably not alone.
