If only lemmyverse.net drew from more than once instance. If only.
It’s a good idea and exists at https://lemmyverse.net/instance/lemmy.world
99.36% uptime overall, other stats could be added
IDK what benefit there would be to having downdetector that was specifically for Lemmy sites, there is downdetector after all, but in general there are a couple of sites that do this. Fedidb is another one that tracks some fedi metrics also, although to me they seem a little unreliable / inconsistent from instance to instance and month to month sometimes.
Hm… I think telling people to invest a bunch of time and effort in reading the guide before they’ve even figured out if it’s something that’s worth investing themselves into is maybe not the way to go. Most of the people who are up for reading a bunch already have stuff they can read.
I think if I were trying to make it more friendly for people, I would go the opposite direction: Open up an instance, and provide access to all the nifty stuff, but reduce the front part of the learning curve. The site is called Apples. The app on your phone is called Apples. The icon is an apple. The domain is Apples. The software you interact with says “About Apples” instead of “About Lemmy.” Once people see for themselves that, on Apples, they can interact with people @beehaw.org and @fedia.io in addition to @apples.social, they’ll be primed to decide that yes, this is worth learning more about. They’ll probably think that it’s cool that Apples is plugged into this whole little world. It’s not complicated to understand, after all, it’s like email. But as a UX thing, the attention you make people invest before you’re earned their trust or demonstrated that it’s worth their time to do so, the more they’re going to tune out.
You can do basically all of this with Lemmy communities and @bot@rss.ponder.cat.
You can create a community for “Alex’s Linux Feed,” and add any stuff you want to read to it, and it’ll all automatically get posted there from the linked RSS feeds. Then, if you want to create your own feed to organize those posts better, you can create a separate community for that, and hand people out the RSS link for that community, and post stuff to it by crossposting.
The only issue is that I think it’s possible that Lemmy hands out feeds that link to the Lemmy discussion, instead of to the underlying article, but I can probably make you an alternate RSS link that will instead link to the underlying article, so you can have that as an alternate feed if you want.
How’s that sound?
?
Wordpress the software has one of the best extension frameworks of anything I’m aware of. It’s old, but it’s also well-structured, mature, and has a ton of support. There’s a reason it got ActivityPub support so early (in comparison to other similar outside-the-Fediverse platforms).
The leader of the company behind it seems to have lost his mind, but that’s not anything against the software. Maybe don’t get hosting through Automattic. The software as far as I know is still pretty good.