Mobilizon – A free, federated tool for events and groups

I really enjoy what Framasoft is trying to do, making the internet decentralized again. I truly hope they're successful in their endeavours!

This is a great endeavor and I hope it succeeds.

I only have one question - does it allow for private events?

I feel like this misses the point.

People dislike Facebook and other centralized platforms not because they're centralized per-se, but because the user experience is terrible (due to mismatched incentives - these platforms make money off ads, so their only objective is to make you engage with the ads as much as possible).

The solution is a platform that doesn't have these mismatched incentives (either paid for, ran by donations, etc) but that otherwise has the user experience of the mainsteam platforms.

This reads like a tech demo where the tech and decentralization is the selling point, but the truth is, the masses don't know/care about that and rightfully so. The same applies to Mastodon and similar projects.

Yes, if I understand their FAQ correctly

https://joinmobilizon.org/en/faq/

Wow that's pretty ambitious, and pretty relevant for me right now. I build models, and so used to frequent forums to post to build threads detailing what I'd done with photos, sometimes a Word doc, video, and always some plain text.

Problem with the forums is that they're dated. It's easy enough to find old content because search is usually pretty ok. Who owns content is still not a solved thing though. A forum in Germany insists you upload your IP to their servers so that your photos don't disappear over time. Other forums let me host my hosts on my own web site with a link.

Facebook of course is godawful. Everybody is there, so everybody posts there. Unforunately you cannot find old stuff you know is there. Photos aren't annotated, comments aren't searcheable, stuff just disappears into a rabbit hole. Here today, gone tomorrow. Facebook's content is ephemeral, so it's groups are the worst possible forum replacement.

And from what I can tell (I can't start my own group to assess features) Mobilizon doesn't add anything to improve on what Facebook already does.

What's needed is an organic heirarchical taxonomy where you're persented with a top-level list of options. Say for instance manufacturers. You pick one, and are given a list of models. Pick one of those and you see all models in the repository for that make/model. Lastly (in my contrived example) you might choose your favourite model maker to further narrow that list, or a date, country or whatever.

This is not hard to build (modellers are pretty hardcore about what they build, and so would not hesitate to add the meta data needed to drive this), and I've been toying with a usable UI for it for some time. Maybe I should post up a proof of concept somewhere...