Read the ActivityPub protocol and a book on webdevelopment… Also have a look at existing projects and their codebase.

https://sepiasearch.org/search?search=autism&resultType=videos

Mmhm, I’m not sure if I’m entirely on the same page. Admins have complained. Users would like to run their own instances, but they can’t as the media cache is quite demanding and requires a bigger and costly virtual server. And we’re at the brink of DDoSing ourselves with the way ActivityPub syncs (popular) new posts throughout the network. We still have some room to grow, but it’s limited due to the protocol design choices. And it’s chatty as pointed out. Additionally we’ve already had legal concerns, due to media caching…

Up until now everything turned out mostly alright in the end. But I’m not sure if it’s good as is. We could just have been lucky. And we’re forced to implement some minimum standards of handling harassment, online law, copyright and illegal content. Just saying we’re amateurs doesn’t really help. And it shifts burden towards instance admins. Same for protocol inefficiencies.

I agree - however - with the general promise. We’re not a big company. And that’s a good thing. We’re not doing business and not doing economy of scale here. And it’s our garden which we foster and have fun at.

Yeah, sorry. You need an (android) app that does this, or PieFed…

It’s a great feature, though. I’m not one of the people who get offended/annoyed easily… But I also prefer to consume some content and skip some other things…

Use the keyword filter. First of all add the last names of the candidates. And also “voting”, “election”. I’m happy with the amount of posts that remain after that.

Maybe competition will make the Fediverse better? With or without Bluesky in the loop, we could take inspiration from their unique features and what people like about their platform. I certainly didn’t know they take onboarding seriously and offer shared blocklists and useful stuff like that…

Sure, no need to explain. I think it’s been appropriate to point it out.

And wow, quite some comments you got. I’m not sure if I agree with the negative ones. We’ve been requesting better moderation tools for a long time now. I wouldn’t immeadiately do away with your effort. I share some concern about privacy and introducing “algorithms” and bots into the platform instead of making it more human… But nonetheless -we need good moderation. A lot of the issues are just technical in nature and can be solved. And you seem pretty aware of them. And there’s always a balance and a potential of abuse that comes with power…

I think we should experiment and try a few things. A bot is a very good idea, since we won’t get that into the Lemmy core software. I think mostly due to personal reasons. And that relates to the lemmy.ml situation. I’ll have a look at the code. But I’m using PieFed instead of Lemmy. Which already attributes reputation scores to users. So this might be aligned with PieFed’s project goals, maybe we can take some inspiration from your ideas.

Hehe, good roast on lemmy.ml

You’re probably fine?! We all make mistakes and/or do silly things. It’s part of the journey. And for example being a bigot isn’t something to be proud of. But having the personal strength to get out of a situation like that, certainly is something to be proud of.

Join lemm.ee and ignore lemmy.ml

Since you’re asking for feedback:

Very good intro and analogy to email.

I’d delete the sentence with “focusing on Lemmy”, since you’re going ahead and talking about the Fediverse in general in the next sentence, and then Mastodon. And the article is more broad and not really focusing on Lemmy, one paragraph aside.

There are quite some good paragraphs. Explaining the concepts very well, and without the need for prior knowledge. You also mention protocols, give examples. I think it’s written very well and good to understand.

I’d add a bit more info on how federation works and the consequences. Earlier on in the text to clarify the terminology. That instances are the interconnected nodes that make up the network. In the background the information gets forwarded between them. Every instance can have it’s own rules and perspective on the network. Cater to specific interests or have a unique design.

The paragraph on “Openness and Choice” isn’t entirely correct. Users can miss out on posts. Not all posts are visible from all instances.

I’d add a paragraph that it’s made by the people, for the people. And not for some corporate interests.

I like you also mention the downsides. I think you should rename “Monitization” into “Funding”. And especially the “slow innovation” is some downside that might not be very obvious. It’s nice to mention that.

You could also mention the “network effect” because that’s also something we regularly struggle with.

And that this happens to be powered by Free Software. And we can choose which server software to use and everyone is invited to participate or change things to their liking.

I think it’ll be hard to be successful with that. Lemmy’s userbase is small and not growing. Projects like KBin died. And we already have several frontends. Now someone introduces yet another one, just that it’s not open source, not actively developed unless they pay a developer to fix something. It doesn’t have a community yet. And I don’t see any significant features that’d attract 100k new users or something. They don’t seem to be invested for the same reasons the existing Lemmy community mingles here. And they’re not eating their own dogfood but rather discussing it on Reddit… So maybe they’re good at marketing? I think that’d be the only reason why something like this would take off and be successful.

I don’t get that from the article. And I mean it’s not a “web” if it’s not interconnected, is it?

Things have shifted a bit in the last many years. Now almost no one reads blogs anymore. They want doom-scrolling and interaction. And even the old school nerds moved away from RSS, Mail and IRC. I also liked some Linux forums, but I feel it got more quiet there during the last years. Mostly to the benefit of proprietary platforms like Discord and such. But I don’t thing they’re very social, as in open and giving freedom to the people…

What’s a better protocol for a social web?

6.84€ per month. And that’s 6.84€ per user. But I also run a dozen of other services on that VPS.

I don’t see any technical limitations preventing that. And I think it’s a desirable feature. Imagine a world where you don’t have to come up with lots of passwords and sign up on dozens of websites, but instead have one identity that’s saved in your device and you can access any free software service without signing up and it’ll already tell you if your friends are there. It could interconnect content and features…

It’s a bit difficult to get it right, though. The identities need to be secure and reliable. Servers can’t vanish (or data needs to be distributed) or people will lose everything at once. We need pseudonymous handles, sock puppets and access control. And there is a lot of trust involved. We need to mitigate for spam and trolls…

And agree on one standard that gets everything right for any arbitrary use-case.

Create a nice atmosphere.

Make it simple and remove any technical barriers. They should be able to google “Fediverse” click on the first link. Choose a username and be on their way. Find the app with the same name and install it in 2 minutes.

The network effect is a thing. They need to already find lots of their friends, interesting people and their favorite stars there.

And it has to be easy to discover them, if we don’t have an “algorithm” that suggests content.

I agree. I must admit my title was a bit clickbaity. Growth - meaning growing in user count - wasn’t my intention. I think it’ll be a result, sure. But I agree with you (and the Lemmy developers) in that growing (above all) isn’t what Lemmy is about. And it’s not healty anyways. And I think I didn’t include any reasoning or suggestions in my text that’d propose doing it.

What we’d need is the communities be at a healty (and useful) engagement level to allow having a conversation in the first place. Well, and I occasionally keep an eye at such metrics, because for example seeing something stagnate or decline could mean there is an issue, somewhere. I think I mentioned that in the post. But it doesn’t necessarily mean we have to push that metric. It’s tackling the underlying issue (if there’s any) that’s the important thing to do (in my opinion).

I’ve always wanted to ask such a person what their deal is. I mean they could be miserable, or one of the people who always complain about everything. Or it’s supposed to be some form of trolling that no one gets… Maybe I shouldn’t ask because it’s not gonna be a healthy discussion… And I don’t care if that happens in an argument. But I really wonder why someone downvotes something like an innocent computer question. Or some comment with correct and uncontroversial advise. Or other people during a healty conversation. It doesn’t happen often to me, but I had all of that happen. And maybe thoughts like this lead to the current situation. And some people think about exposing such people and some think it should be protected.

And i think weighing the votes is a realistic idea. We could also not count votes of people with bad attitude at all.

Thanks for inviting me. I’ll see if I have something meaningful to contribute. As of now I’m not really involved in growing communities. Well, at least not as a moderator. Maybe I should try it.