Pretty much in the title. Maybe you wouldn’t even use it, but would like to simply see it exist for the sake of having a federated alternative.
For me, it’d be the following:
- Meetup
- Tiktok
I am on the first two, but would prefer a federated alternative. I’m not on Tiktok, but would like to see a federated alternative.
I’ll admit these might not be a good idea. But as a thought experiment, I’d be curious about the community weigh in on what you all think this might look like.
Well, I’d for one like to see something new. Not just another clone of an existing platform, since I don’t really love any of the social media platforms. I’d like something that simultaneously connects me with friends and people all around the world. With communities like here, just more focused on positive and constructive engagement regarding different topics. Less picking on the news and less just replying if there’s something wrong with what somebody said. I’d like to explore some means of democratic engagement. For example electing moderators. Maybe vote on rules instead of transferring power just by choosing instances wisely. And I’d like to do away with the current way of upvoting. It sometimes encourages herd mentality instead of good answers. I’d also like to incorporate blogging longer and well reasoned texts, microblogging and sharing pictures. Both silly memes but also vacation pictures with my friends. I think the concept of friend circles is good, You could choose who gets to see what aspect from your life. And I want different pseudonyms so not everyone knows all the stuff I’m into. And something that’s entirely missing is selling used stuff in the neighborhood. Something like NextDoor/Craigslist/Facebook marketplace… You could also combine that with local news and connecting the neighborhood, not just discuss world politics all the time.
I think there is much potential for an enticing platform if we think big and use the concept of federation to our advantage, apply it to use-cases and concepts that haven’t yet been explored by the big commercial platforms. We have to do away with the urge of re-creating something to make it possible. And it’d be hard to come up with good concepts to foster good behaviour and solve the technical aspects. But at the same time it’d allow us break free from the constraints of what’s already there and just be a smaller alternative to XY. The way it currently often is: We let the major players come up with the new ideas. They have different motivations, mainly growing and making money. We re-create what they came up with and add a bit to it, but the concept stays the same. I think we can do more. But it is difficult. There have been crazy ideas, really new distributed platforms being implemented, lots of it with some crypto tech and in the end it didn’t take off or wasn’t aligned with what the users want and need or are comfortable with. Or people tried combining every feature into one platform (like I just proposed,) and it fails due to complexity.
I’ve had this idea where instead of a moderator having dominion over a community, their removals only work for people subscribed to that moderator specifically. We can make moderator actions work the way block lists do in ublock origin!
Of course admin action would still be necessary for curbing high volume spammers and illegal stuff.
I’d just like to see how things are when the conversation isn’t one way ruled by moderators who want their own ideals to seem like the norm. I’m not interested in tone policing and the like.
We seem to share similar ideas. I think we don’t necessarily have to be constrained by how stuff works in the real world. There, it is impossible to listen to everyone, you need to transfer power to a small amount of representatives. And one or few people at the top or it gets messy and nothing gets done. Also you need to come up with a single solution that applies to everyone.
I don’t think it has to be that way in the realm of online services. Technically, we can ask an arbitrary number of people for their opinion. Vote with less effort since networks are fast, databases quite capable and everything interconnected anyways. Have people just represent themselves or just 5 family members or transfer their democratic power to whomever they deem appropriate. It doesn’t even have to be a vote by majority. There are better weighted voting systems out there that are just impossible to implement in real-world countries. It doesn’t have to be one solution for everything, it could individually apply to communities of the platform or work differently for different topics. And big platforms already provide different content and algorithms for their individual users. We could also just everyone be provided with a unique perspective on the same data. Someone can be faced with something while another person has it buried at the bottom or not displayed at all. And we’d just choose things for ourselves, not vote on how other people are treated at all. (I mean that somehow emerges on it’s own… Once everyone chooses to not listen to trolls and annoying people, they’d just lose their audience and become meaningless.)
I see many technical challenges and negative consequences. We’d need to keep the crypto and blockchain people away from it. Everything I’ve seen that uses blockchain technology to achieve this has failed in the meantime. And was mainly intended to make money by some means. But things like ActivityPub are also not made for this. I’d really like to do away with the current voting mechanisms. I’d rather say I trust what this person says and my interests align with those people and this would replace global up- and downvoting. It’s certainly possible from a technical viewpoint. But would it really encourage good behaviour and foster a nice place? People sometimes like to engage especially with the things they oppose and comment on them. It would also be a massive filter-bubble. Algorithms confine people into small and similar-minded bubbles, not a diverse and realistic and stimulating world. I think it’s really difficult to find a delicate balance here, design choices that automatically push towards good behaviour and interesting engagement per default.
I completely agree on the admin stuff. Someone has to provide the computing power and take responsibility for what’s stored on their servers. And sometimes mistakes happen, things turn out bad or break. There are malicious people out there. Someone needs to have the power to fix things. I think that’s perfectly possible. Lots of platforms have succeded at that, there are people available, perfectly able to handle that responsibility. And ultimately, the whole internet is quite resilient and was designed with the idea of being a level playing-field and connect things and people.
I’ve actually put a lot of thought into how this would be implemented, and you’re right about the technical challenges this would impose. There’s gonna be like a dozen different ways the data can be sorted and that would be up to user preference. It would have to be single host rather than federated unfortunately, but that doesn’t necessarily mean evil. PM me if you wanna hear about it.
commune is a semi unique fedderated social media
Love the illustration on their home page. Looks like a very new project.
Looks very neat! Thanks for the link, Something to keep an eye on !
Nice. Looks a bit like Revolt, Rocketchat, other standard Matrix clients, maybe even inspired by Discord or whatever people use. I’m curious to find out how they applied the Matrix protocol to power this.
Friendica provides blogging, microblogging, pictures, friend circles (but they work only for Friendica users), and multiple identities managed by single login.
And there is a fediverse marketplace software - Flohmarkt - instances
AWESOME! Thanks for linking the Flohmarkt project. I’ve been looking for something like this for quite some time and all I found was abandoned projects, and things that didn’t make it. I’m going to have a closer look at it and install an instance if it proves to be what I was looking for.