IDK, I’m here on Lemmy basically as a refugee from Reddit, but the federation angle doesn’t seem to help much from what I can tell. Look at how fast Bluesky overtook Mastodon. Anyway, anyone putting up new fanfic servers without understanding the politics and drama behind the existing ones is probably in for some pain. There used to be a saying “you’re looking for a Star Trek solution to a Babylon 5 problem”.
Yes I use lemmy.ml sometimes, but stay mostly on .world by inertia. It doesn’t make much difference. It does matter where the communities are. c/vegan is big and active and it’s on .world. The catfood incident there didn’t affect me directly (I’m not a subscriber) but it affected all the participants, many of whom are on other servers. So it’s not enough for users to move from .world. Communities would have to move or split as well. The federation model is that .world exports its censorship to every server that federates with it.
In fact, community fragmentation is already a huge fediverse fail even without censorship causing even more fragmentation.
This false equivalency pains me to my core. I don’t really have anything to say about the rest of your comment, but ffs can people stop with this nonsense take? You’re implying that the difference between centralized corporate authoritarianism and decentralized grassroots democracy is negligible.
It might very well be that the corporate censors are worse human beings than the Lemmy censors. That is completely independent of which platform experiences more censorship. It’s literally against the Lemmy World terms of service to discuss unsanctioned brands of cat food without supplying scientific sources. That nailed Lemmy’s coffin shut for me. There is nothing like that on Reddit. It’s ok, I’m not trapped in here with you. You’re trapped in here with me.
If you really think this and don’t think Lemmy will get better then you should be using Reddit instead of Lemmy.
I explained that Reddit is better for most people, though there is a fringe minority that chooses Lemmy for various idiosyncratic reasons. I’m part of that minority and so are you, ok? That doesn’t make the rest of the world likely to migrate here.
Lemmy is a failure at being like centralized social media
It’s also a failure at being like Usenet, which was far less centralized than Lemmy. I’m unfamiliar with Beehaw.
@Teknevra, you’ve posted a number of ideas like this which seem based on the premise that all it would take to make them happen is writing the software and keeping the servers running. In fact those are really the easy parts.
Any above-ground platform involving user to user payments (Patreon, Paypal etc.) has to devote a ton of energy into anti-fraud, anti-money-laundering, trade in illegal goods, etc. AO3 isn’t just file hosting for fanfiction, it’s explicitly political in that it aims to give a safe space for works that would be banned on other platforms due to subject matter that draws disapproval. That takes a lot of ideological commitment and some level of moderation, legal backing, etc. Pulling non-fediverse sites into the fediverse when they desire to run their own walled gardens for whatever reasons is another set of battles to fight. So in each case, the obstacles to your idea involve conflicts between humans, not just lack of the right software.
Why do you find the fediverse so great anyway? Lemmy is basically a failure IMHO. Instead of having one giant jerk censoring things like on Reddit, there are instead dozens of little petty ones wanting to defederate from other instances. Reddit is mostly a superior experience for users, with just a few of us fringe types staying on Lemmy because of priorities that almost nobody else cares about. Mastodon gained some popularity when Twitter became an intolerable hellhole, but Bluesky ended up recapturing a lot of those departing users.
I appreciate your good intentions and willingness to help out with various annoying situations, but I think it’s important to stay clear-headed about exactly what you are trying to do.
Why would you want that? What is the attraction? “Federate all the things” isn’t really an answer. Why would authors or readers prefer it over AO3?
It’s not about the code, it’s about control of the servers and feeds. Decentralization doesn’t just mean multiple servers. It means no single entity has special authority over the user community. That isn’t the case with bluesky from what I can tell.
By that logic we should also connect up with facebook and 4chan, not to mention twitter itself. bsky is just another one of those platforms from what I can tell. It is fairly new so not yet blatantly evil, but give it time. We here are supposed to know better.
There is already a fediverse twitalike called mastodon. I don’t understand why anyone here cares about bluesky.
Sorry, that makes no sense.