@rysiek yeah, that’s the sort of distinction I was looking for. thanks!

@alma @anders this also presents the opportunity to allow users to consent to being listed, as ryziek has been arguing for elsewhere in this thread.

@rysiek I was not talking precisely about scraping toots, I was asking whether you consider Google, Bing, etc uses of opt-out web spiders to be unethical, but fair enough. (Also, not interested in defending OP given the clarification that he is talking about searching the fediverse.)

@rysiek (though if you’d like to argue that search/spidering requires opt-in consent in all cases, I’m happy to hear that argument)

@rysiek I don’t think Anders is asking about a search engine for the fediverse, this sounds more like a federated or P2P Google/DuckDuckGo replacement.

@anders There would need to be a way for that search engine to collect data that is both possible to contribute to as an individual, and doesn’t unintentionally DDoS sites it indexes, and that’s the challenge I think. Spiders collect a LOT of data. Right now the closest thing we have to decentralized search, is metasearch engines like Searx, which query and cache results from all the major search providers that run their own spiders.

@eshep @serenity @rom That’s not always because of a speed issue though. I usually see that on messages that were boosted or searched recently, in which case it’s no different from other AP servers.

@rom @serenity eh, it’s not blazing fast but it’s quite usable and definitely beats Misskey/Calckey in that department

@OptimusPrime It’s likely that this news article is using a different data source (e.g. instances.social) but you can go to [software].fediverse.observer/stats to see the data that @fediverseobserver has collected about this (their numbers are usually lower than the popular data from instances.social due to excluding dead instances, but they include Diaspora). For example, lemmy.fediverse.observer/stats shows 1422 monthly active users for Lemmy.

@sovietsnake @poVoq I dunno, are people so excited about federation that they’ll flock to Forgejo over it? I think ease of contribution is the critical thing here.

Codeberg does already have a large userbase though, and increasingly Gitea and Forgejo are looking like way more compelling platforms than even GitLab. More community-focused compared to GitLab’s enterprise focus (their website is incomprehensible to anyone who isn’t super well versed in big tech lingo) and slowly gaining the upper hand in the features department. I’ll definitely use it for my next project that needs a git host.

@OptimusPrime kind.social for Mastodon, though I keep thinking of moving everything to Friendica here on libranet.de.

I also have a PeerTube account on tube.tchncs.de.

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@lemmyreader kind.social/@f00fc7c8/10940798…

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@nutomic Looks similar to my thread about the history of the fediverse, but more well-sourced and acting as a more comprehensive list of platforms. Neat!

Though, was that first use of “fediverse” about the federated social web?

@jonny @anova I like the idea of user-configurable algorithms, and I think a key point is to ensure that the algorithm is open-source and not an AI black box. Good point about echo chambers, though; I’m not sure where the balance is between freedom of attention and exposing people to a diversity of ideas.

@anova I don’t think it is inevitable for algorithms to be implemented, but it’s true that algorithms prioritizing “important”, relevant, and less spammy content can be useful. I think if we’re going to do that we need to consider what metrics are going in to the algorithm - how we can avoid encouraging exploitation of this algorithm, and how we can ensure that the algorithm represents what users want to see rather than what makes the company the most ad money. Twitter’s algorithm was exploitative and hurt its users massively, compounded by the fact that it stopped remembering preferences for a chronological timeline; it’s a primary reason I stopped being regularly involved in the platform, the timeline stopped making any logical sense and was filled with messages I didn’t care about.

@serenity Friendica is an even closer comparison - it lets you follow RSS/Atom feeds and add their entries as attachments. There is also an extension to use it as a frontend for your Twitter account.

Since Lemmy and Pleroma both support the ActivityPub standard, they can federate, and the servers will pass requests between each other. However, I expect it to be a similar experience to following Lemmy communities from Mastodon - you can follow and comment, but not much else, and it may be impractical. Pleroma does seem to have a “subject” field for messages, but I’m not sure it’s compatible with Lemmy (in fact, it seems equivalent to the content warnings on Mastodon.)