Yeah. Discord can create FAQ and “threads” now that I believe work better for this. You can take some question and the answer and discussion and put it in a threat in some channel for issues. Presumably once you have a quality chat server, it is easier to add threads / articles / issues to it than starting from a forum.
A good quality open source “federated discord” would be as important as lemmy or mastadon. But there isn’t much hype around it. Afaik matrix is still far behind discord quality wise and the architecture has limitations for anonymity and encryption.
Discord is just high quality and so easy to use because making a server is so easy.
Maybe the “age of the free internet” has passed and people just expect bad faith and react completely radicalized today.
So if every users would spin up their own instance or “email server” like “me@matcha_addict.com”, could that actually work? Or would that break the activity pub protocol with too many instances?
For example someone liking controversial content
On reddit you basically have to sort by controversial today and lemmy isn’t far behind. There is a hive mind today where people jump on the hive mind and hate wagon. And public voting will increase that, the whole idea that we need to watch out for the dissident malicious actor stalking social media attests to that. That is something that needs to be tackled through a kind of automated or extremely efficient moderative response to detect bots and voting patterns of malicious actors. Of course the question is if anything can be done at all against this shift in zeitgeist.
What is needed would be a way to anonymize voting through some kind of clever algorithm or blockchain or token or something. Or maybe that can’t work or then prevent any protection against bots.
Public voting is much more of an political and self-conscious act. There is a reason voting in democracies is private.
And there is also a difference if I have to deploy special measures to see who votes how, or if it is made very easy to see and use. Ultimately there should be some kind of crypto algorithm that hides how a user voted from activitypub.
Oh yeah absolutely, lemmy definitely needs better cross posting. Currently crossposts are kinda yanky with quote blocks. I’d also love to see reposts that are detected automatically.
Duplicate instances are a problem imho. You can see the network effect synergy working by how many communities flock to the biggest instance lemmy.world.
There also need to be tools to merge two communities on separate instances, or move them.
Two of my niche instances tried to leave reddit, but then there were two versions, one on .ml and one on .world. Confusing. Maybe there need to be reviews for communities or instances.
It’s like the domino theory. If the US falls to fascism, so will the rest of the western world!
Maybe with an advanced lemmy app, but from the website it doesn’t work from my experience. Or is incredibly clumsy.
Or a better “landing page” like an app that can manage multiple instances easily. Or merge multiple communities from different instances. But running in my browser. I’m sure this is in the works with the other lemmy clients or self hosting.
I always used websites to search for ed2k content much like with torrent. The internal search was more like a last resort. It would have been nice to have p2p shared indexes that just use public keys for authentication and you have to choose to trust them. Or something like a trust chain. And you can still fork them. Something I still miss for torrent.
But anyway, I still believe getting more websites “invested” into torrent or tracker hosting ultimately boosted torrents over ed2k. A bit of a paradox. Of course this is just speculation.
When I first tried to check out the exodus this idea totally confused me and nearly made me drop the whole fediverse idea.
All this talk about using mastadon account on lemmy IS BULLSHIT. Sorry but - reading about mastadon account etc made it sound like lemmy is just another mastadon instance. Or another “perspective” on the same underlying data. It kind of works but it’s absolutely confusing and frustrating to try to do this. Just make a new lemmy account - which I was trying to avoid because I thought with federation I should be able to move freely between instances.
It would be nice to merge these kinds of “social media modes”. I believe reddit tried to do something similar with following users etc. But it’s not there yet and only hampers adoption to advertise this.
Interesting points, just one thing I recently thought about: eMule vs Torrents. Torrents requires trackers and websites to host torrent files. eMule was rather fully decentralized from the start and you only needed the hash key. In actual performance there wasn’t a fundamental reason why one or the other would be better. But Torrents won by a large margin, and I believe it’s because it needed websites and trackers and created “hubs” that could fund themselves from ads.
This could similarly apply to the fediverse.
You might also underestimate how much moderation and how many malicious or fascists actors are under way. It could easily become a cesspool.
Encrypted DMs could be added later.
But I definitely think there need to be better tools for migrating your content. Or migrating a complete community including all posts from one instance to another (like a rolling journaling backup that you can do daily, and if your instance just disappears you can just copy it)
I recently thought about what I’m missing, and came up with something rather complicated (sorry, nothing simple haha)
Basically I’m often compiling information in markdown text files. But images are still web hosted. Sometimes I use spreadsheets and wish I could do simple additions in markdown tables. Or I use bookmarks, but know websites will go down and wish I could just “backup” any website in a compact file and organize it without mucking around with files. Zotero does this partly. I also use “SingleFile” to save websites but it would be nice if it was something semi-compatible to web-archive. Or maybe just save a stripped down version of an article like you see in “reader view” on Firefox. And of course usable in both desktop and mobile.
I do think Project Jupyter does something like this and there are also other note taking apps.
Overall the state of computer science in 2025 is still deplorable. The very basics of storing data still don’t have good solutions.