It’s Fediverser. Yes, it is on github. Yes, I’ve posted about it, quite a bit.
I asked prolific users to join, I offered help to admins to set it up. I even offered the topic-specific instances to the wider community. None of these efforts were well received.
My biggest frustration is that I sincerely believe that I had built like 80% of the tools needed to solve the onboarding issues:
These things are all right there. There was no single admin interested in implementing it. Everyone was just looking at their own few thousand users and never got together to think “how can we get from 50k to 5 million?”
I’m happy to be here regardless of whether we’re growing personally. In spite of Lemmy’s challenges I enjoy it here, and that’s enough for me.
I think this is a fine attitude if you are an user who just wants to enjoy a “slow web” kind of experience, but as someone aware of all the ill effects of Big Tech and Surveillance Capitalism, I wish we were more ambituous and aimed for a bigger slice of user share.
When I say “compromise”, I am not saying “sacrifice them completely”. I am talking about in terms of Big Fedi vs Small Fedi, regardless on where on the scale you want to stay, there are trade-offs to be made.
Me and most others
The “most others” here is a heavily self-selected group of people who don’t want to compromise on any of their values and treat any effort to grow as a threat.
All of this to say, it’s fine if you say “Yes, we are small and I want it that way because if it gets any bigger we will be surrounded by people who do not uphold the same values we do”. The problem is that you’re arguing “We are only small because of $random_reason (network effects/evil capitalists/not enough funding/etc)”, as if “being small” was determined by external factors and not something that you can control.
That’s the point of disagreement. I think we can control this and we can bring more people here, but it’s just that you don’t want to do it if means sacrificing your ideology.
Network effects are incredibly strong
Yet, Bluesky has grown to 35M+ active accounts, even though they started way after us
We have the advantage that we’re not growth focused
This is not an “advantage”. This is an excuse we tell ourselves to cope with our failures.
The inevitable enshittification will do its job eventually,
And when it does, the majority of people will go the next shiny “free as in beer”, VC-funded siloed platform and we are going to be just another “They don’t know” meme.
Yeap, 100%. The extremists and the terminally online are overrepresented here, and that keeps the masses away.
I’d suggest though to not waste your time arguing with the self-righteous idiots and just focus on bringing more normie-friendly content.
Isn’t it a little bit sad to think that the best we can do here is to wait for everyone else to get pissed at Big Tech’s fuckups?
OIDC gives you federated login, but no portable identity…
Yeah, both. It’s flatlining globally and down in the UK.
Unless what you are describing involves some type of Decentralized Identifier, let’s please stay away from any solution that depends on a single point of failure.
They are still separate communities. Users following only A will not see the posts from C. Users following both A and C will everything.
Sorry, but this will be a bit too technical…
The thing is that Lemmy (at least, others probably do the same) don’t treat the Linked Data as the canonical representation, they work by translating every message with an as:Activity to their own internal representation in the database (with separate tables for Posts, Comments and PrivateMessages).
This means that all it takes for a Lemmy instance to treat a post as “new” comment is to produce an “as:Announce” attributed to the “follower” community, and then all instances will process it as a new post/comment/vote.
One of the things that I’m experimenting with is to have “communities that can follow communities”. So, if community A follows community B, then it can re-post anything that has happened on Community B.
If you do it “properly”, it doesn’t even need to be a lot of data duplication because the “follower” community would just be creating Announce activities.
The only thing that is making me hold out on this experiment is because I am 100% sure that some people will see their posts on a community they never interacted on and they will panic on the grounds of “mah privacy” or something silly like that.
The north star goal is to make this app give the user the feel of being officially supported by the platforms it reads from
This is the exact opposite of what I’m working on. My idea is to embrace “Protocols, not platforms” and treat all the different places are sources of content (like RSS) but with the added two-way interactivity that is enabled by ActivityPub and Linked Data.
So of course the UI will need to adapt: threaded discussion forums would be presented in a different way in relation to long form blog feeds. But luckily this is already part of the benefits from Linked Data. A Lemmy post is presented in the Fediverse as https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams#Page, and each response is a https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams#note, while a blog entry from WriteFreely is a https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams#Article and an video from PeerTube is a https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams#Video… this information about the object type should be enough for us to figure out the best way to handle the UI.
what would you want to see on this app?
Believe it or not, I would like to have a read-only view of the Big Tech feeds. Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Reddit, Twitter, Facebook posts from your friends, all of that crap. Like what GrayJay is doing. The idea though would be not to interact with it, but to have a way to people to ease their way out into the open alternatives.
Seeing the instance as infrastructure is what I want to see more of
Yes, exactly! A good manager to me is the one that is just focused on solving the problems that are on the way of the rest of the team.
Host them on your instance, then.
I’m running more than 15 instances for communities. I was running alien.top which at one hosted 600k accounts with more than 2M posts + comments, a lot of them being sent to the topic-specific instances. I’m constantly reminding people that the instances are there, and that I can create communities for anyone that need it.
I just checked the first two pages (…) No Twitter thread, no Mastodon thread.
Cherry-picking data points is not the way to make an argument. That just makes you seem clueless and/or biased.
If you really want to refute my statement, you’ll need to take a look at all submissions in the past two years and compare the number of posts to twitter vs the number of posts to any Mastodon instance.
I didn’t see a “call for more action” in that comment.
We have someone that wants to post more content and who is being told “don’t do that. things here are slow. It’s more than enough to have only 5 posts a day, more than that and you are spamming” and I am saying “No, it’s not enough. We should be encouraging to have people posting more, not less.”
Of course they are, the same way the vast majority of microblog users are still on Twitter compared to Mastodon.
I gave a very specific example to illustrate where Mastodon had become more relevant than Twitter. Again: it’s not about absolute numbers.
I reply when I see absolutes such as “all communities on Lemmy are dead”, "all mods are bad ", “all communities are about politics”
It paints the platform in a bad light
Why would you think that?
The original argument was “Communities don’t need a lot of posting to survive here”, and my response is basically saying “we should strive for more than surviving”.
It seems like that instead of focusing on the part where I am calling for more action, you decided to focus on what you perceive as criticism and you try to attack that as soon as possible.
Stop using absolute statements and I’ll stop replying
It feels like your problem is not with the “absolute statements”, but that you are doing your best to reject reality.
It doesn’t matter if the number is 100% or 99% or 92.376%, what matters is that it has been two years since the Reddit boycott and we still do not have a good example of a thriving community here. We had many attempts (the /r/selfhosted people, the /r/blind), but they are by and large still on Reddit. Can you at least agree to that?
Github’s dominance comes from the network effects. Everyone’s on github, so if you have your project on a different repo, you won’t get as many visibility. If your project is on gitlab only and someone wants to report a bug, they need to:
A Federated forge solves all of that.