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A geologist and archaeologist by training, a nerd by inclination - books, films, fossils, comics, rocks, games, folklore, and, generally, the rum and uncanny… Let’s have it!
Elsewhere:
- Yrtree.me - it’s still early days for me in the Fediverse, so bear with me
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I started a post along these lines on !ibis@lemmy.ml. I, personally, think this will be the killer application for Ibis.
I don’t know if you read the entire transcript, but I bolded what I think you might want to see:
Thanks for flagging that up, there is a lot there beyond just RSS readers and I have been merrily noting down bits that touch on my broader concerns. They mention it early on: “the deterioration of the open web” of which the sidelining of RSS readers is a symptom (after Google Reader died, I migrated to Feedly and have tries some FOSS alternatives but it isn’t the same, partly because the Web isn’t the same but also I am wary about going all in on a service that could be bought up and/or die at someone else’s whims. Why I am looking for Fediverse solutions). With the rise of Big Tech and their social media companies, it felt like all the utopian dreams and energy were funneled into walled gardens and, at the time, that seemed an acceptable compromise to help get the waves of new users online with free and convenient platforms available to help ease them into web life. It’s only with the enshittification of social media that it has become clear that it wasn’t worth it.
That’s why I am enthusiastic about the Fediverse as it feels like the more natural evolution of the web - as if some clever soul had come along and looked at all the forums and blogs then asked “what if they could talk to each other?” And it’s good but it could do better and the things they discuss on their are key - curation and allowing people with niche interests to discover each other. I’ve been kicking around a few ideas like this for a while on here (most recently a federated Delicious, Fedilicious, which would integrate well with a Fediverse as the latter pumps content in and the former shares and categorises the various links that get discovered) and am now putting in a bit more focus to take notes as I go. So, in that respect, that article was very useful for thinking more broadly on the issue, and raising RSS readers as a good option (newsletters might have to wait).
I agree with you on most levels, but I think the author is leaving it more up to developers to develop a site that brings back RSS feeds and newsletters to the masses.
I’ve been mulling over the idea of a Fediverse RSS reader (Feediverse?) that would run alongside other services. Lemmy is a link aggregator and having an RSS reader plug-in on the same instance would make sharing links across pretty seamless.
It would also help address issues like not being able to follow people on Lemmy as you could have a “follow” link that punts the individual’s RSS feed over to the reader.
I like it.
Tags solve a few problems:
- they add context to posts and we all want a semantic web
- they would allow people to find posts and content across the Fediverse where, despite ActivityPub) it can be difficult finding material between different services. One click of a tag and we can see posts on, cfir example, Stonehenge on Lemmy, Mastodon, Pixelfed, PeerTube, BookWyrm, etc or multi-tag to see only selfies taken there or news or scientific articled, etc.
Most people would just do this anyway if available (I always run fine-grained categorisation where available) but gamify it you get a lot better coverage, especially if people can tag other people’s posts, and the coverage would be a lot more comprehensive.
Fediseer would seem like a good hub for this but there’s nothing stopping a FediTag or FediHub springing up or you could federate it, so there’d be lots of instances - lemmy.world could run tag.lemmy.world and all the tags on l.w would point to it. It may even be possible for various services to bundle this in, so all tags are “local” and your, for example, l.w account gives you an account on the l.w FediTag instance so you can follow them, get notifications of new posts, etc.
Sorry, just thinking outloud but I like it even more.
I want these to be two separate posts sometimes.
They are two separate posts, it’s just cross-posting won’t flood your instances “all” feed. They would still appear as a post in /c/London and one in /c/NewYork with separate comment threads
Is that a grouping the user makes?
In the Reddit apps that had multi-sub functionality then I believe they were user created but this is a brave new world and we don’t have to do it that way. People or instances or communities could create multi-communities and people could subscribe to them so only a central file would be updated. If it stopped being updated or was too broad or too specific, it could be forked. I wonder if that could even be rolled into a possible future wiki system as it need only be a text-based file listing the communities.
I think multi-communities will solve a lot of this - you can group, for example, all the movie communities together or the meme ones and get a coherent feed, so it wouldn’t really matter which you posted to.
The UI could detect sibling cross-posts and suppress multiple mentions of the same post if you’re subscribed to multiple sibling communities, maybe with a “cross-sibling post” designation. That way it only shows up once in your feed.
Doesn’t this already happen? At least within an instance, my experience is that, if you cross-post, the second post doesn’t appear in your all feeds.
I went with Feddit.uk as I am in the UK and it also helps give a more local spin to things because, increasingly, the English-language web seems to default to an American take on things and so going local helps counter that.
Plus uptime is good and the admin has said they will wield the defederation hammer sparingly.
If the server doesn’t process payments it should not cause admin a headache in most (?) jurisdictions.
It depends on how it works - if you just want a small ads type thing where you are allowing someone to say they have a thing and another person to contact them to say they want that thing, then they sort it out between themselves, that should be fine (NAL). You could, presumably, advertise services as well as goods. There were subs that kinda worked like this and there may be communities on here doing the same.
It would work nicely as a Fediverse service - you could post an ad and reply through an account on another service (the quality of your account could act like your reputation), boost it elsewhere (like Mastodon) to presumably like-minded people, etc.
Adding bidding might be a pain as the service would be locking in an individual’s commitment to pay (as opposed to letting them sort that out between them).
There’s a bit of discussion at the old place but it is defying my attempts to link to it (try Googling “Fediverse eBay” and you get a thread on r/Monero.
There’s bitejo and there was OpenBazaar. It may be possible to take the code from the latter and bolt on ActivityPub. Or look at Bonfire’s Value Flows.
It should be technically possible but it’s everything else that would be a headache - how you’d operate without huge overheads or breaking all sorts of consumer laws, for starters.
It’s still relatively early days yet. A lot of Fediverse services mimic commercial ones because it makes it an easier pitch to people “it’s like that but open and privacy-respecting”. Hopefully, as they mature they’ll evolve away from this. In addition, now more people are comfortable with the Fediverse they’ll start to create new and unique platforms.