The Fediverse is growing and we have decently successful platforms like Lemmy and Mastodon. What else would you like to see?
Any big tech platform not yet replaced or maybe something new altogether? What are we missing?
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I wish there were an art site you could sign up for that let you follow artists on the fediverse and vice versa, but took its UX cues from DeviantArt and Fur Affinity. Discoverability should probably be local-only but I think that would be OK. The separation between artwork and journal entries in the main feed is something I’ve put into my own single-user server, and it’s had such a good effect on my mental state that I would never use the fediverse without it. AO3-style tag hierarchies would be really cool too.
More interactability between the different fediverse softwares.
I can think of optional integration to other services as being an useful feature while at the same time relatively friction-free.
Some examples that come to mind that could give some integration ideas are Facebook the company with Threads the social media (but is tarnished by the company itself), Bridgy Fed, Wafrn, and Friendica bridging AT Protocol and ActivityPub (the first one seemingly being very popular), NeoDB allowing cross-referencing and importing entries from other databases and platforms, and RSS Parrot sharing posts from RSS feeds as ActivityPub posts (though sadly in this last one, interactions are one way only).
Lobsters and hackernews.
Lemmy and piefed can be deviated into being used as a single sub instance as an alternative but it’s just not the same.
Other than this, we are pretty fine with the basics, it would be nice to have more people working towards letting mods be mods with proper tools without involving CLI.
Also some combo like local first acting as a PDS being able to be written by different softwares. (Basically atproto or solid yes)(yes silverpill and holos are working on this but 2 different people working on 2 different implementation of the hardest thing in the fedi doesn’t seem optimal for a network made of devs lol)
eBay/marketplace/etsy alternative.
I believe Flohmarkt is a fediverse alternative.
Interesting … It looks pretty active. A few dozen instances, mainly in Germany. This has real potential.
Would be even better if these things didn’t use completely stupid names!! They’re not clever, or hip, or even fun. Flohmarkt sounds like I’d be too embarrassed to share what it is.
Is just German for flea market.
Yeah I see that now after looking it up. OK that makes more sense. Still not a great alt for North America yet
You can name your flohmarkt instance whatever you want though.
That’s good to know, I see is avail on Yunohost, too
If it was named something else illogical itd work, like weinerschnitzel selling no schnitzel
Flohmarket is just the name of the software, which as another said, is the German word for flea market. I suspect the creator is German.
Anyone who self-hosts their own flohmarket instance can call their instance whatever they want.
Names are subjective. “Youtube” makes no sense if you discard all the grab that it has now in retrospective. “Craiglist” is even worse.
YouTube always made sense because “tube” is old slang for TV.
Yeah, I guess I’m old enough to remember TVs being referred to a such hah 😅
…this is the first time in the entire Fediverse that I feel not-that-old 👀
Also known as the “boob tube” with “boob” being a synonym for “idiot”. I’m not that old…
I do think that would be neat but wonder how payments might be integrated from a technical perspective. I also wonder if there are any regulations that would get in the way or if it would even apply to something like that.
Edit: also, if people buy something then the instance goes offline. That would be another issue to figure out.
The issue in the US with accepting payments on behalf of sellers is that you have to then collect sales tax which is different for every locality. Then you also have to issue tax forms to the sellers for sales over a certain amount. Which leaves us with sellers collecting payments on their own which means using something like PayPal or Bitcoin. You would just have to have people build trust through reviews and hope for the best. You could base the service in a random other country so that you wouldn’t have a bunch of regulations to deal with and leave all the tax stuff up to the buyers and sellers. You’d probably run into issues with accepting credit cards though.
What about something like wero integration? Isn’t that supposed to be peer-to-peer?
I get that the trust is another issue though. What happens when a person gets stiffed? Who’s guaranteeing the purchase or vetting sellers?
On darknet markets they use an escrow account and admins act as mediators, so as long as you can show that you have a valid tracking number. The issue becomes when people try to scam you by selling you broken electronics or scam buyers pulling fraud returns. Weirdly this is common with VCRs on eBay. There’s large resellers who buy good VCRs and steal parts out of them and return them. Then they resell on Amazon. I guess it comes back to having a karma system.
Yeah I’ve thought about the question there of like is it acceptable then for those managing the instance to collect a percentage of transactions in the case where they provide payment management, arbitration, etc. Because if someone is a bad actor on Lemmy or mastadon you just ban them or the instance, but in the case of money changing hands that’s more difficult to administer
The whole thing needs legal, insurance and escrow. Nobody in their right mind would want to host it for free if it actually handled the money. Could go anonymous and crypto but really that’s just asking for it.
Hooking up buyers and sellers and having them sort out prices, taxes and shipping would prob be the only viable way.
At some point, someone is going to do enough business to get a good rep and make a large sale and screw someone out of money.
There is flohmarkt.
My friends and neighbors and loved ones.
more outreach to, and adoption by, communities that are not specifically tech- or FOSS-focused, like crafting, parenting, fashion, home repair, or brewing, for example. gotta keep chipping away at those network effects. onboarding and ux will need to be top tier.
and moderation is crucial: toxicity pushes people away, so we should maybe try to not push our content creators (actual and potential) away.
For some, lighter moderation is the special sauce though. Like, I want my mods to understand the difference between frustrated venting and actual, actionable threats and/or malicious content.
It would really help if the rules were clearly stated, and then those exact rules, not some other hidden set entirely, were enforced.
ML comes to.mind, censoring anything negative about China, Russia, or North Korea (how much longer until it adds the USA to that list?), without explicitly stating that anywhere.
It’s the “surprise” aspects that most often turn people away.
Another one is how Hexbears have historically been allowed to troll people all across the Threadiverse. They were explicitly asked not to do that by their own admin team, but there too the follow-up actions did not match the talk.
Any city/county/state/federal (or your countrys equivalent) running their own fediverse servers (especially Mastodon) instead of simply having a twitter handle.
Not so sure I want them to self host, just based on their track record for security, but I would like them to be more visible.
Also news outlets could benefit from doing this instead of us having to rely on repost automation.
I would also love to see peertube become more competitive to YouTube. It would probably need some kind of revenue sharing model or donation integration for that though.
I agree about the self hosted part. That part isn’t important. But an @city.mastodon server is better than an @city on twitter username. The important part is getting them off proprietary platforms.
Like how they all do email and websites now.
Probably someone needs to start a service aimed at them, like a mastodon instance called localgov.social or something
Yep. That’s what I meant. I want them to come to the fediverse but I don’t necessarily want the city’s IT admin to manage it between fighting laser printers.
A self-hosted instance has a big advantage: only those working on that admin can have a user. So if you see, p.e., @Emmanuel.macron@gov.fr you know it’s the real account and not a fake one.
Agreed. I don’t think I explained myself clearly enough: I want them to have a presence online. Among the reasons being exactly what you’re pointing out. However, I think at least for smaller cities with very little staff, it’s not realistic to ask them to literally self-host it (as in having a server on-prem running it). I would be fine with them outsourcing it or cloud-hosting it under their own domain. A potential solution for the small ones could be something like a state-level hosted service where municipalities can sign up and get their own accounts, for example. That would work even for something like Rittman, Ohio pop. 6,131.
They can certainly self-host, it doesn’t mean you have to join those instances. Them making those instances would be good for adoption.
Absolutely. The organizations that have the most to gain and the most capability to manage instances are
- local governments,
- news publishers/journalists, and
- Universities
These are groups that have unique publishing and legal mandates that already have the IT departments and adequate sway to compel users. They already host email and websites, and regularly come into conflict with corporate messaging platforms.
You know how that would end up: massively slow server for 3 million a day hosted at politician X’s friend.
I don’t know that at all. Public services where I’m at are pretty well run.
I’m not saying they need to physically host the metal, but the addresses need to be Fediverse addresses. Like how they current do email. I have no idea if my mayors email is outlook or Gmail or whatever, the important part is it’s mayor@city.gov.
I’m just kidding, it would be great :)
The Netherlands has removed many departments form shitter and moved them to Mastodon.
I would love to see an alternative for google maps where openstreetmap is not enough. So a system where you can post reviews, photos, menus of locations etc.
CoMaps (which uses openstreetmaps) has the option of adding a link to a menu for restaurants, though I don’t think it has reviews.
You can add websites to businesses on OSM too. It’s not that common, unfortunately
There is apparently an incredible amount of manipulation and legal fights happening around these reviews on Google maps, so that is probably a minefield any independent open-source developer should avoid.
That would be neat. It would also be really nice to have some kind of community notes section where you can info on parking, best times to go, etc. Especially for tourist destinations.
OpenStreetMap is frankly about as good as a crowdsourced map can possibly be.
And it’s always improving. Mobile apps like CoMaps let you add business information. There are also apps like Every Door, MapComplete, or SCEE, which particularly emphasize updating OSM on the go.
There are apps for adding photos, such as Mapilary or Panoramax, which are not built into OSM, but built on top of it.
There have been a few attempts at FOSS review projects, like lib.reviews or mangrove.reviews, although it is tricky to reach critical mass.
Each of these are huge organizational challenges and data management challenges on their own. Without selling ads or mining data, it’s hard for me to imagine a single project that does evey part and does it well.
There are apps for adding photos, such as Mapilary
just in case you don’t know, mapillary is a facebook project
There have been a few attempts at FOSS review projects, like lib.reviews or mangrove.reviews, although it is tricky to reach critical mass.
I think it’s even impossible if not accessible in a popular OSM map app
Yeah, an Imgur replacement would be awesome. That place is full of triggerinas now-a-days
Thanks, I did not realize. I just did a quick search because I remembered an app but couldn’t remember the name. Must be something else.
Edit: Maybe it was mapillary after all. They were acquired by Meta in 2020. A better option looks to be KartaView.
kartaview is not better either. they are hypocrite liars: https://github.com/osmandapp/OsmAnd/issues/4942
panoramax thought, that is promising.
I couldn’t quite follow all that. TLDR?
they started out as openstreetcam. they turned out to be not open, in source code and licensing of uploaded content. their app couldn’t even be open source, as it used closed source components (including facebook data mining components), that they did not want to remove. they have got renamed to kartaview and belong to a crappy company. they also don’t value user privacy, shown partly by using facebook (among other) tracking code both on the website and in the app.
at first, they turned out they don’t value privacy of its users, but with an openstreetmap adjacent project that is essential. most OSM editors and users are here partly for the privacy properties of the services and accompanying apps, and like that we can’t honestly recommend something to others that we ourselves wouldn’t use.
openstreetcam privacy policy said they share user data with third parties for analysis of the users. that alone shows how they treat their users, but their website contained facebook tracking technology among others, which is significantly worse for reasons I will not detail here.
in the openstreetmap ecosystem another thing that is important is openness and free software. because that’s how you can know how is your data handled, or how you can continue development if the original devs abandoned the project. all significant android osm apps are available on the F-droid store. F-droid vets all apps it accepts, including all updates to them, and closed source components are not allowed in any of them, because what they do can not be audited.
openstreetcam (at some point renamed to kartaview) was not willing to remove the unauditable components for f-droid inclusion. it was more important for them to collect enormous amounts of user data for facebook and other data brokers.then the open source app completely stopped being open source. they did not officially stopped development, they just started to forget uploading the source code changes. they even tried to argue other points with “but our app is open source!” when it could not be built from source for several years already. that shows they only used open as a marketing term.
later it turned out the app was owned by a crappy company, and that they take all rights, irrevocable, for all images uploaded.
probably other things also happened I don’t remember now.
Government agencies and businesses from my area. Information about local events. Everything is on Facebook 😔
There’s a few trickling in to mastodon
An eBay replacement. Now that they heavily track everything and anything about users-be it sellers and buyers and visitors, I no longer use it after about 25 years… 😢
I don’t do social media, and Letgo/offerup is no better. Might as well go back to Craigslist lol
Agree this would be amazing, but also difficult, since money features as security concerns.
There is Flohmarkt, which is still in early stages, but looks promising. https://codeberg.org/flohmarkt/flohmarkt
more people embracing/publishing original content on peertube. righ now I just can’t find anything decent to sub too other than Veronica Explains. I wish more linux youtubers would also put content on peertube or just decent original content in general
Nextdoor but less toxic
That would be neat. Able to get the info you want without the constant ads or emails from Nextdoor.
I think this is a little bit outside of the ask, but I’d like to find a place that is both positive and relatively politically neutral.
Part of what drive me here was that the tip of the iceberg (facebook, instagram, tiktok) feel so deeply infused with ads/ai/influencers that even the content I like is likely deceitful. This bums me out and makes me not want to use social media.
Places like reddit and any of the #chans have less of this, but the baked-in politics in both make of them bum me out.
I like that Lemmy feels like it’s actual people, but the politics and negativity can get to be a little much for me. I don’t like to think about things I don’t like, and while I can the value in being informed of things that I may need to act on, I don’t think that constantly bringing up things we take for granted is helpful.
What I want to be doing is getting to build and be a part of something positive and purposeful, something people do because they’re passionate, something that is so cool that the shitty stuff outside kind of pales in comparison. I’ve met lots of cool people on here that are that way, and I’ve been able to filter some of the negativity out by ignoring posts that I know will bring that out in people, but still, it would be cool to see something like that.
I hope it’s as simple as finding the right instance for me.
So I have some advice that you might already be thinking/implementing.
For Lemmy use your three buckets well.
You have,
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All
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Local
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Subscribed
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Use ‘all’ feed for keeping an eye out on that bigger social media and taking the value of being ‘informed’ on the current narratives and events.
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Pick an area of relatively specific interest, i see your currently on our premier Marxist/Leninist server, if thats anything like Aussie Zone its a completely different bucket of topics thar you will hopefully be able to relate to in a very different way to the ‘All’ feed. If your local server is fairly sleepy or not that different from ‘all’ considwr moving server fedidb or Lemmy Verse might help with server selection.
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Use subscribed to drill down and keep a tight list of the niche communities rhat will really keep you happy, don’t subscribe if you only think its important to keep abreast of, keep that list as your happy place. 😊
I’ve recently joined Mastodon. For individual to individual connection it is better. So to my surprise, I’ve found Lemmy and Mastodon work well used as a pair. Even though if I want to, I can see the agonisingly embarrassing comments I make on lemmy very easily from my Masto account.
Thank you so much for taking the time to lay that all out for me. I’m sure you’ve had to do it once or twice already, lol. I’ll absolutely start curating the stuff I’d rather see. Maybe part of the friction I’m feeling is a procedural rub with marxists/leninists, and it would make sense/be hilarious if I’ve wandered into the middle of their space.
Do you have any less political servers you’d recommend? Besides the servers/services you recommended? Or is it largely an issue with the server i’m on?
Glad I can help! 😊
So, hard question in server selection. If .ml server isn’t for you then there are hundreds of other options. Lemmy Verse is definitely going to be your friend here. Instance is substituted for server, and is a more appropriate name.*
This highlight button in the image shows you what to select on Lemmy Verse to get a large list of networked Instances. It likely won’t be all the Instances, and may have some dormant and/or private Instances not open to the public to join. Most of the Instances with some size will be open and no problem to join though.
^*I only like to refer to Instances as servers because it reminds me that they also have a physical presence somewhere in this world, and the location selected has some importance.^
So thats a quick general guide for Instance selection.
Specifically ‘non-political’ Instances that I know is hard because I don’t know how political is too political for you.
Take my ‘Local’ Instance, its for Australians and people interested in upside down land. Theres plenty not political, but each day we are posting and discussing the daily political news. You know, things like, which bum scratchin politician has been caught pickin their nose again, etc…
Theres other location specifics for France, New Zealand, Netherlands, Midwest US (midwest.social), UK, etc…
If you’re looking to get away from politics as much as possible then maybe location specific areas won’t work for you.
With that said technology servers might be the go, db0 or programming.dev are examples.
You could join solarpunk and help them imagine a positive futuristic world rather than a dystopian one.
Or mander.xyz is more science based.
Book lovers might like literature.cafe
These are just some of the larger (in fediverse terms) options you could look into.
I hope that helps you and anyone else reading.
If you do decide to change I’d love to know where you’ve gone off to and why that Instance was chosen. Theres so many Instances I still have no idea about 😆
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Agreed - can’t say for sure if this is my instance / communities or not but Lemmy seems to have a very particular political bent and it’s pretty narrow. On top of this there are some dominant narratives that I wouldn’t count as “politics” but which are inescapable - and heaven help you if you say something interesting that doesn’t affirm one of these narratives.
outside of the ask
More outside of the question.
More adoption by the public
