No. The Fediverse is access to syndicated content from a single website. Signing up at some other rando’s website is not going to give you any privileges on mine, and my account on my server doesn’t let me log into any of your computers.

The fediverse isn’t a handful of commercial services for you to demand access to. It’s a shit ton of small websites run by random individuals for niche communities, and a small number of large websites run by people with an impulsive drive toward self-punishment.

“If I eat up a ton of bandwidth and storage, I can make remote content local” is fun until you’re the one paying for the bandwidth and storage.

The thing is, the discoverability issue on the fediverse disappears if we stop treating it like it’s a centealized space. Everything looks the same, and everything uses the visual language of centralized social media. And we encourage people to “join Mastodon” or “join Lemmy”, which is like saying “join WordPress” and “join Joomla”.

We need to be promoting specific websites that people can join, for the reason of wanting to communicate with people on those websites. We need to treat federation as a value-add, not the whole damn value proposition.

Until we do, we’re just going to be navel gazing.

Search on Mastodon is annoyingly restrictive, but you’re never getting “full search across all instances”. Remote search just isn’t a thing.

Even fucking Google is local.

I’m fascinated by this idea that the fediverse is open source by definition, when I don’t think that’s implied anywhere. It’s notpart of the ActivityPub license, is it? I would have assumed thatw as public domain.

This.

The constant refrains of “Why won’t this public content sharing network bend over backwards to keep the things I share private?” shows a persistent misunderstanding of what’s going on here.

And also of how much privacy they actually have while using centralized social media. But that’s a whole other kettle of fish.

No. But it is a social media site, and people have been conflating the two for twenty years now.

Most software developers aren’t interested in being website admins for every Tom, Dick, and Harry. They’re building the software for other people to host websites, not to run a social networking site for you.

It’s not like the phpBB devs are hosting random car enthusiast websites.

I know. But the post is about Mastodon.

As far as I know, Mastodon doesn’t even support assigning a default feed.

Simplify user sign up. No one cares about servers, and I think this is one of the biggest thorns in the side of the fediverse in general.

I cannot stress this enough. This complaint has to die. It’s OK for the fediverse to not be ready for everybody yet. But the idea that we need to hide the fundamental building blocks of it, rather than retrain people for a different technology, has to end.

Servers matter. Servers are the core elements of all of this. The fediverse is a local-first, small social media space, dressed up as a big centralized one. We have to accept it for what it is.

Users need to decide which server they’ll use, in the exact same way they do when using centralized social media. Only now, they’ll be able to talk to people using other services. Whether you use Facebook or Reddit or Twitter matters. You have to choose which server to use between them. THey have different rules, and different cultures between them. This is true here, too.

Masking the server problem behind auto-assignments isn’t going to work, because the developer doesn’t own those servers. They have no formal relationship to those servers. They cannot vouch for those servers. If the closest fedi server to you is startrek.website and you hate nerd shit, you should not be auto-assigned to it.

If you want to simplify the Friendica signup for your friends and family, launch a Friendica-based website. Give them the URL. Now they don’t need to make any decisions. Just like they don’t for your Discord, or whatever else you may use that’s smaller and personal.

A working mobile app. There is only one app I know of that is not even in beta, and I couldn’t get it work at all. Most people will not use a site if it doesn’t have an app.

Get coding.

Clean up of basic functionalities. Default to the most intuitive and user friendly options (no delete box enabled on posts/comments that aren’t yours, infinite feed on by default, prominent option dropdown to turn on darkmode or different styles, etc). I should not be taken to someone’s page when I click the “follow” button. Following should also be a two way street, and require consent. You cannot see someone’s content on facebook unless they approve your friend request. This is how it should be on friendica. Improve groups. I see they exist, but for the life of me I cannot figure out how to browse or search for them. Stop notifying me after I make a post. I know I made the post, I don’t need to be notified. Develop more appealing UI/UX overall that is easy for a layman to understand and use. Allow editing to show updates without needing to refresh the page. Etc, etc, etc.

Most of these are admin settings. Launch your own Friendica-based website and have at it.

Add expected functionalities. Tagging users, live videos, gifs, reaction emojis, marketplace, public events, unshare, reshare with commentary, recommend friends from contacts, etc.

Tagging works. Gifs work. Marketplace isn’t going to happen, because it’s a whole different product. A bunch of these need someone to support them.

So, start coding.

Friendica is not a social networking site. Lemmy is not a social networking site. Mastodon is not a social networking site. These are web servers that let you run your own social networking sites. Social networking sites that can connect with other small, independent social networking sites, creating an open social web.

But you should not be getting people to sign up to “Friendica”. That’s not a place on the internet.

It’s a technology that drives places.

People really do be needing to look at the Local and Global timelines. There’s a lot of chatter about regular, non-linuxy things there.

Honestly, I think I’m completely sold on the idea that the Local timeline should be the default.

The solution there is to have them pick the instance rather than the underlying technology. To want to join, I don’t know, tenforward.social and chat with other Trekies (and connect to other communities as a bonus) rather than to join “Mastodon”.

But everyone’s all focused on big social now, caysing usball to approach this backwards. Once you do that, things get more confusing and frustrating.

Well, stop expressing that people shouldn’t have to make choices about what they use, and maybe I’d give a shit what you say or do.

They’re websites. You’re arguing that people shouldn’t use different websites. On the Internet. Which is kind of how the Internet’s been going the last 15 years, and has turned out to be a total disaster.

The idea that the largest game in town should adopt the features of smaller players, rather than users exploring other options because there’s a slight inconvenience to the user just seems, I don’t know, incredibly entitled. It’s also how smaller projects stay invisible and die, leading to a monoculture.

So no, you’re not arguing that “we should have a monoculture!”, you’re just saying “people shouldn’t have to make choices!” which… leads to monoculture. And overwhelmingly supports the status quo.

they would have to do the whole “which instance to join” dance, again.

Oh, this again.

Seriously, you’re now arguing for a monoculture and centralization.

At that point, just go back to Reddit.

We can not just tell someone “what you want is on kbin, use that instead”, because there will be different use-cases that kbin does not fulfill.

So instead, it’s “let’s beg Lemmy to fulfill these use cases that it currently does not”. Got it. Makes total sense, and is not internally incoherent at all.

Definitely not just arguing for a monoculture.

No, they’re not. Forums and content aggregators are significantly different in terms of user experience and, frankly, project goals.

One of the biggest differences between Reddit and forums is focus. A web forum is focused on a topic, and has sub-topics. Content aggregators are flat, and focused on, well, content aggregation. They’re a mix between link aggregators and blogs. The modern version of them also involves user created and maintained discussion groups, where forums have set sub-topics and generally have site-wide moderation.

And modern forums, FWIW, have threaded comment chains.

Reddit and Reddit-like services are really quite shit at being forums. There’s very little about the user experience that they have in common.

Remember when forums would be super active with, like, 500 users?

“Millions of users” is a vanity stat. The critical mass needed to keep a discussion group alive is actually quite small – assuming you’re interested in, you know, discussing things. So, how active “Lemmy” is is entirely dependent on which topics you’re interested in.

Forums seem like the most natural use case for ActivityPub. I’m over the Reddit style UX, and absolutely ready to take a step back and try to pick an older jumping off point.

The thing is, mbin is right there if you want that kimd of functionality. There isn’t really a reason why everything needs to evolve into omni-applications. It’s better to have a broad ecosystem that has something for everyone, rather than a monopoly that’s servibg everyone a compromise.

Just look at the Twitter mugrations in 2022, and the clammor for quote posts. Misskey was right there, giving them exactly what they wanted, but you couldn’t speak the name of anything that wasn’t “mastodon” because everyone is brand focused and context blind.

What OP wants exists. It’s right there. It’s just not named Lemmy.