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Fediverse

fediverse.party

71–80 of 143 posts

Re: Fediverse

#71
post #31

It seems to me that the main reason for unpopularity, in addition to the lack of advertising, is monetization. How can I recoup my production of content that can be expensive? It seems to me that a competent symbiosis of fediverse and cryptocurrency is the real web3.

The Fediverse is not for your target market. We hate Internet advertising: it serves to use and abuse us, and is a security risk to our devices. It exists in opposition of monetising people and what they do and say, because we're sick of being retreated like we're worth a ton of beans. We don't live to be a part of profit.

Re: Fediverse

#72
Ratio of active vs created accounts is very low, it feels like most of them ware abandon by users after the initial boom. That one that’s stands out is Mastodon which isn’t a surprise.

For whole fediverse to succeed it will have to jump out from niche groups and fight for ordinary users that are used to Facebook or Twitter. Which will not happen until some big brands/interesting people start to use them as PR/commentary tools. And, yes, that’s the single point of all social networks, and not connecting with friends.

Re: Fediverse

#73
post #3

Which are the platforms that let you own your data cryptographically and let you move your account around seamlessly for yourself and your followers? Basically the network should be in the data and the servers should be replaceable. I think those are very obvious bottlenecks that affect most of these alternative networks. On the other side, censorship is also very important, nobody wants to have to dwell into spam an…

Permissionless decentralized platforms.

This includes Radicle, IPFS, Skynet, SSB, Arweave, Ethererum, and many more.

Re: Fediverse

#74
post #72

Ratio of active vs created accounts is very low, it feels like most of them ware abandon by users after the initial boom. That one that’s stands out is Mastodon which isn’t a surprise. For whole fediverse to succeed it will have to jump out from niche groups and fight for ordinary users that are used to Facebook or Twitter. Which will not happen until some big brands/interesting people start to use them as PR/comment…

No post body was provided.

Re: Fediverse

#75
The hacker in me loves the idea of the Fediverse. All of these services seem fun and, different, and I would love to participate. I am even willing to (and have in the past) set them up for myself. The issue comes when I think about my community:

I can count on one hand the number of people I know that fit (what I think is) the criteria for the Fediverse:

    A. Possesses the technical ability to set up their own instance or configure the clients

    B. Understands the value of decentralized platforms and holds those values themselves

    C. Knows more than 1-2 people who ALSO meet the qualifications of A and B (aside from me)
I think this leaves two possibilities:

    1. There can be a small number of large instances, which removes the issues caused by A and B but has the effect of reducing most of the benefits found in B (focus, privacy, catered speech, etc).

    2. There will need to be a million tiny silo'd instances (
I'd love to see Fediverse “platforms” succeed, but I'm not sure how they can since the network effect is what is needed.

Re: Fediverse

#76
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that a typo? This post doesn't make sense to me. The latter isn't true, because individual instances can ban you and instances that allow bad behavior will be defederated. Elon has indicated a desire to unban users, not ban them.

Yup, it was a typo (edited now). I meant that if they want everyone they don't like to be banned, the fediverse doesn't seem like the place for that. Getting banned from a fediverse instance isn't as impactful as being banned from twitter, and I think those people would want it to work like twitter. Not too sure about instances being defederated though, that's the first I've heard of that.

The biggest defederation example I know of (with the caveat that I haven't actually used Mastodon in years) is that when Pixiv launched their own instance it quickly grew to be something like the 1st or 2nd biggest instance in the network and was eventually defederated by many other instances because people were REALLY antsy about the fact that a lot of Japanese art on Pixiv is illegal in other countries.

Re: Fediverse

#77

General purpose social media will be considered the greatest mistake of the early 21st century. Go back to topic-oriented discussion boards. When you have no common topic around which to organize, then people have to search each other's personalities for commonality. And in doing so, they stratify along political lines. This isn't enough, so then they micro-stratify into various, rabid subgroups within those politica…

In my opinion, social media like Facebook and Twitter were (mostly) fine before commercial interests killed them.

There are plenty of reasons to connect with a group of people and have asynchronous communication. In many ways, current messaging groups are a poor replacement of early facebook and twitter.

Where it went wrong was, in the case of facebook, the lack of control over the visibility of updates, and for both facebook and twitter, the lack of control on how to filter and sort updates.

Over time, the initial concept of people who have something to say, watered down to liking or forwarding other people's updates.

Topic-oriented discussion is great. But there is also a need to connect to a small group of people that just want to talk about random subjects that come up in everyday life.

Re: Fediverse

#78

The hacker in me loves the idea of the Fediverse. All of these services seem fun and, different, and I would love to participate. I am even willing to (and have in the past) set them up for myself. The issue comes when I think about my community: I can count on one hand the number of people I know that fit (what I think is) the criteria for the Fediverse: A. Possesses the technical ability to set up their own instanc…

I completely agree, there's such a barrier for entry that's incredibly difficult for not-tech people to emphasize with.

I think there's an interesting case to be looked at with Discord. Not that discord itself is decentralized, but the surprising amount of vibrant and active communities in the form of Discord servers. If the client-side barrier can be sufficiently lowered, I'm sure many communities like that have at least one or two people knowledgeable enough to set up an instance or two

Re: Fediverse

#79

The hacker in me loves the idea of the Fediverse. All of these services seem fun and, different, and I would love to participate. I am even willing to (and have in the past) set them up for myself. The issue comes when I think about my community: I can count on one hand the number of people I know that fit (what I think is) the criteria for the Fediverse: A. Possesses the technical ability to set up their own instanc…

> Possesses the technical ability to set up their own instance or configure the clients

Yep. Self-hosting something like Plex (please consider Jellyfin instead) or a social Fediverse server shouldn't be any more difficult or less secure than installing an app on your phone. I think projects like Sandstorm, yunohost, Cloudron, etc have the right idea, but they're still way too complicated for the average person to get up and running. I've been chewing on this problem for about a year, and I believe it's solvable with technologies that are currently available. This is the focus of my current main side project.

Re: Fediverse

#80

The hacker in me loves the idea of the Fediverse. All of these services seem fun and, different, and I would love to participate. I am even willing to (and have in the past) set them up for myself. The issue comes when I think about my community: I can count on one hand the number of people I know that fit (what I think is) the criteria for the Fediverse: A. Possesses the technical ability to set up their own instanc…

> technical ability to set up their own instance or configure the clients

This will be largely alleviated with managed or hosted services. For example, a lot of corporations used to run mail services on-prem but no longer need to do this, they've moved on to purchasing it directly from a provider like Microsoft or Google Workspace.

Also, this largely reflects the idea behind Discord and Slack - hosted services will be the dominant players once the ecosystem evolves.

also, I'll repeat my new business model Twitter should adopt -- take the underlying protocol (ActivityPub), white-label their services and sell them to orgs who want Twitter on their own domain (also allowing for control over the username namespace like email / @anyusername@domain.tld). I've been pitching this idea for years and no one's ever given a serious critique of the idea. A global unified namespace like the one Twitter uses is problematic (squatting/trademark disputes, etc) and awful.

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