The balance I’ve found is

• if it’s important and I have time: read it myself
• if it’s important and I don’t have time: save it for later
• if it’s not important (and I’m fine with reading someone else’s summary of it, knowing that their summary might be wrong), and curious enough, I’ll get a quick AI summary of it. Afterwards I might go back to read it properly if it sounds interesting, or skipping it happy I didn’t waste time on it

That’s actually why I liked having those summary bots in the comments.

• only generated once, so it saves some resources compared to many users generating it for themselves
• people who read the piece or know about the topic can call out issues

Looking forward to the sublinks migration, I know a lot of people were looking into it for when it becomes ready!

Core idea is to create a frontend for simple users who do not want to learn about servers and navigation to use a product. So we are starting with curated feed, once we have traffic, we can add features for advanced users to let users pick any community from any server.

Well rather, how will you pick which communities go in that feed? It’s not a bad plan, but transparency would encourage your users to use that feed

Understood. Not everyone has to or will agree with what others are doing. I am trying something different. I am only asking for not enforcing undocumented rules too hard until we have some minimum traffic like let’s say 100 active users in a month

With how new fediverse tech is, a lot of new rules will be “written” based on what people try. Obfuscating or misleading people on where content is coming from (which is the concern people are expressing here), seems like something people will push back against.

A simple toggle would fix this issue

• show the instances (default)
• simplify my feed (removes the instances)

Again, while others may disagree, but are there rules on what not to do?

Nope, no rules on what not to do. Users and other instances are free to decide which ideas to support.

What I see is that donation approach alone has not generated enough money for any server to be a real competitor. So are others free to try other things?

I don’t think any one instance is trying to be the replacement alone? That seems to be a big misunderstanding on what people want from the threadiverse. Despite network effects that limit growth, these instances continue to grow, self sustain from donations and grants, and prove how easy it can be to break away from the model big tech companies have adopted.

My view is that most people chose to use Lemmy/Mbin/PieFed/Sublinks over the established alternatives (ex. Reddit) because they didn’t like how those alrernatives were being run.

As such, you might find it easier to build a userbase by avoiding what Reddit has done rather than try to emulate it

Yea we picked Google forms for convenience mostly. We want to switch to something better at some point. In my quick look around, there are a few self-hosted options that could work.

Maybe in the future we could collectively make a few templates with the selected questions for that year. That way instances can use whichever method they have the resources to run, but still get the same format of data afterwards

If your team does come across something better, I’d be interested in exploring further

Does it log IP addresses of respondents?

While the survey creator can’t see any of those details, I imagine Google may be tracking things on their end.

If it helps (and if your instance is ok with using Google forms too), we should be able to share the template for others to copy

Also tagging @Dave@lemmy.nz

See here for the comments on the other post, on !main@lemmy.ca

https://lemmy.ca/post/34976449

There is discussion going around right now about if more instances should defederate from this project. If you have any updates on the points you mentioned above, please do share!

I have some feedback, and I hope it doesn’t come across as being too hostile.

we had to prioritize what would be most useful to the broader community

How are you planning to do this in the long run? Hand picking communities will be hard to scale I want to find the communities I like, and I’m not sure I’d like a curated feed like that.

A Lemmy instance doesn’t show content from every other Lemmy instance out there, nor does it pull all communities from federated instances. For example, lemmy.ca doesn’t pull content from every lemmy.world community, only the ones that our users search for and subscribe to. That keeps the server costs low and leaves it up to the users.

If this is a temporary thing for testing, then disregard :)

For federated servers to really compete, complexity needs to be eliminated. One of the goals of ClubsAll is to simplify everything, so we hide servers, instances, multiple logins etc that can be confusing and overwhelming for a new user.

Having helped some non-technical users get started with the fediverse, it’s not actually that bad. Something like this would be more confusing because now you can’t see where that user or post is coming from. I am otter@lemmy.ca, but there are other people with the username otter from other instances. Will we all look like the same user? What about similarly named communities from different places, which don’t actually deal with the same subject matter.

Instead, would you consider keeping the servers and instances but making them smaller in the UI? That way it’s not a distraction, but the information is still there.

Seems to bring us back to the current Reddit situation with extra steps.

That’s a valid concern. However, I’ll open source the project once I get some assistance, which should alleviate some of these fears.

The problem the fediverse is tackling is centralization, not lack of open source. That’s what the comment was referring to. If the goal of this project is to be a one stop shop for all threadiverse content, you’re not going to find much support here.

Reddit was once open source as well. Having the code available is helpful in some ways, such as by being open about the algorithms used, but it doesn’t solve all problems. Similarly, without a way for others to host the software, it’s hard to tell if that is the actual code running on the live server.

That’s exactly right. This is the main reason. Unfortunately, our developer recently left, so we’re at a bit of a feature freeze for now, aside from a couple of things coming soon.

That’s totally ok, the fediverse has many projects like this in various stages of development. The concern expressed in this thread is less about what the project is doing now, and more about clarity on what the future plans are.

For example:

• funding through donations instead of paid accounts, advertising, and user data

• a confirmation on what kind of federation it will have

One option that I’ve heard of in the past

https://archivebox.io/

ArchiveBox is a powerful, self-hosted internet archiving solution to collect, save, and view websites offline.

But I didn’t know Mbin could federate with Lemmy. But I’m sure Lemmy/Mbin probably won’t federate with Pixelfed, or Peertube.

I think all of these are "don’t federate well currently ", but it’s a goal to improve federation over time

For example, Lemmy is federating with Mastodon better than when I first joined. It’s also possible to subscribe to peertube channels from Lemmy, but it’s a bit buggy.