The Fediverse is growing and we have decently successful platforms like Lemmy and Mastodon. What else would you like to see?
Any big tech platform not yet replaced or maybe something new altogether? What are we missing?
More non-English communities.
The Fediverse it’s pretty English-centric and there are very few communities of non-English speakers, even huge languages like Spanish with hundreds of millions of people.
Forums for long, linear discussion, like phpBB or Discourse, with good discoverability.
Discourse has an ActivityPub plugin: https://discourse.org/plugins/activitypub
This plugin, for example, is enabled on SocialHub https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/ap/about (it’s a forum for fediverse developers)
I do miss a good forum. That used to be my favorite thing about the internet.
So Lemmy and Mastodon are mirrors of two popular forms of social media; what I think might be the next real step is innovation.
No, not a fediverse AI, something more human and “old web”. A federated forum system paired with a solid fedi-search engine could do slot of good - especially with the walled gardens and AI slopfest that the surface net is becoming.
More adoption by the public
Monetization broker for a video service. Let’s give Youtube a run for the money.
Hosted gaming system, card games, board games, tabletop simulator style. Maybe Minecraft java, built around self hostable servers.
E2E Encryption Communication, maybe a tightly integrated reticulum host.
Dedicated news system focused on free journalism (hard with AI and propaganda I know)
Shore up Pixelfed and Loops or Competition for them.
Some form of integrated system that ties all this stuff together, like a dashboard with all your different things. Maybe something like the homeassistant dashboard but for all your fedi services.
That would be great!
I’d love to see that wonderful interoperability we were all promised. It should be possible to have one identity/account that’s connected to multiple services. I should be able to log in once, post some thoughts on Mastodon, share a photo on Pixelfed, and comment on a PeerTube video. Some services have tried to combine various formats with a little success, but it has been very limited, and generally broken.
More users.
Less memes. I feel like that is all this site is now…
Something like a Mastodon+ where besides hosting just our microblog posts, each account would also have a modest amount of storage (maybe just 1 GB or even less) for a personal mini-website as part of our profile, where we could have other content in a more stable place for people to access-- for example essays, tutorials, reference info, fiction/poetry, pdfs for download, whatever someone might want to make available that isn’t just a temporary toot that quickly scrolls away into the sunset.
The account profile would have a link that opens to a personal “home page” which is just a list of links to the various files (with room for description text for each link).
For the user there could be a settings page with a template to enter “Description: link” lines for each piece of content, and buttons to upload/manage the content files. Preferably the content pages would be in markdown format and would be rendered for the browser like the way github does with readme files. That way users wouldn’t have to know how to do HTML.
This idea is because getting a domain, learning html, and creating a website is just not something most people can or want to deal with, but would still like to be able to have a place to put some of their stuff online. Another possible option might be ability to specify whether the personal mini-website is available to public, instance members, followers only, or mutuals only.
neocities?
MMORPG!
Bitcraft claims to have open sourced its code.
But is it federated via activitypub?
Its a starting point
eBay/marketplace/etsy alternative.
There is flohmarkt.
I believe Flohmarkt is a fediverse alternative.
Interesting … It looks pretty active. A few dozen instances, mainly in Germany. This has real potential.
Would be even better if these things didn’t use completely stupid names!! They’re not clever, or hip, or even fun. Flohmarkt sounds like I’d be too embarrassed to share what it is.
Is just German for flea market.
Yeah I see that now after looking it up. OK that makes more sense. Still not a great alt for North America yet
You can name your flohmarkt instance whatever you want though.
That’s good to know, I see is avail on Yunohost, too
If it was named something else illogical itd work, like weinerschnitzel selling no schnitzel
Flohmarket is just the name of the software, which as another said, is the German word for flea market. I suspect the creator is German.
Anyone who self-hosts their own flohmarket instance can call their instance whatever they want.
Names are subjective. “Youtube” makes no sense if you discard all the grab that it has now in retrospective. “Craiglist” is even worse.
YouTube always made sense because “tube” is old slang for TV.
Yeah, I guess I’m old enough to remember TVs being referred to a such hah 😅
…this is the first time in the entire Fediverse that I feel not-that-old 👀
Also known as the “boob tube” with “boob” being a synonym for “idiot”. I’m not that old…
I do think that would be neat but wonder how payments might be integrated from a technical perspective. I also wonder if there are any regulations that would get in the way or if it would even apply to something like that.
Edit: also, if people buy something then the instance goes offline. That would be another issue to figure out.
The issue in the US with accepting payments on behalf of sellers is that you have to then collect sales tax which is different for every locality. Then you also have to issue tax forms to the sellers for sales over a certain amount. Which leaves us with sellers collecting payments on their own which means using something like PayPal or Bitcoin. You would just have to have people build trust through reviews and hope for the best. You could base the service in a random other country so that you wouldn’t have a bunch of regulations to deal with and leave all the tax stuff up to the buyers and sellers. You’d probably run into issues with accepting credit cards though.
What about something like wero integration? Isn’t that supposed to be peer-to-peer?
I get that the trust is another issue though. What happens when a person gets stiffed? Who’s guaranteeing the purchase or vetting sellers?
On darknet markets they use an escrow account and admins act as mediators, so as long as you can show that you have a valid tracking number. The issue becomes when people try to scam you by selling you broken electronics or scam buyers pulling fraud returns. Weirdly this is common with VCRs on eBay. There’s large resellers who buy good VCRs and steal parts out of them and return them. Then they resell on Amazon. I guess it comes back to having a karma system.
Yeah I’ve thought about the question there of like is it acceptable then for those managing the instance to collect a percentage of transactions in the case where they provide payment management, arbitration, etc. Because if someone is a bad actor on Lemmy or mastadon you just ban them or the instance, but in the case of money changing hands that’s more difficult to administer
more people embracing/publishing original content on peertube. righ now I just can’t find anything decent to sub too other than Veronica Explains. I wish more linux youtubers would also put content on peertube or just decent original content in general
My friends and neighbors and loved ones.
more outreach to, and adoption by, communities that are not specifically tech- or FOSS-focused, like crafting, parenting, fashion, home repair, or brewing, for example. gotta keep chipping away at those network effects. onboarding and ux will need to be top tier.
and moderation is crucial: toxicity pushes people away, so we should maybe try to not push our content creators (actual and potential) away.
I think this is a little bit outside of the ask, but I’d like to find a place that is both positive and relatively politically neutral.
Part of what drive me here was that the tip of the iceberg (facebook, instagram, tiktok) feel so deeply infused with ads/ai/influencers that even the content I like is likely deceitful. This bums me out and makes me not want to use social media.
Places like reddit and any of the #chans have less of this, but the baked-in politics in both make of them bum me out.
I like that Lemmy feels like it’s actual people, but the politics and negativity can get to be a little much for me. I don’t like to think about things I don’t like, and while I can the value in being informed of things that I may need to act on, I don’t think that constantly bringing up things we take for granted is helpful.
What I want to be doing is getting to build and be a part of something positive and purposeful, something people do because they’re passionate, something that is so cool that the shitty stuff outside kind of pales in comparison. I’ve met lots of cool people on here that are that way, and I’ve been able to filter some of the negativity out by ignoring posts that I know will bring that out in people, but still, it would be cool to see something like that.
I hope it’s as simple as finding the right instance for me.
Agreed - can’t say for sure if this is my instance / communities or not but Lemmy seems to have a very particular political bent and it’s pretty narrow. On top of this there are some dominant narratives that I wouldn’t count as “politics” but which are inescapable - and heaven help you if you say something interesting that doesn’t affirm one of these narratives.
So I have some advice that you might already be thinking/implementing.
For Lemmy use your three buckets well.
You have,
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All
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Local
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Subscribed
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Use ‘all’ feed for keeping an eye out on that bigger social media and taking the value of being ‘informed’ on the current narratives and events.
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Pick an area of relatively specific interest, i see your currently on our premier Marxist/Leninist server, if thats anything like Aussie Zone its a completely different bucket of topics thar you will hopefully be able to relate to in a very different way to the ‘All’ feed. If your local server is fairly sleepy or not that different from ‘all’ considwr moving server fedidb or Lemmy Verse might help with server selection.
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Use subscribed to drill down and keep a tight list of the niche communities rhat will really keep you happy, don’t subscribe if you only think its important to keep abreast of, keep that list as your happy place. 😊
I’ve recently joined Mastodon. For individual to individual connection it is better. So to my surprise, I’ve found Lemmy and Mastodon work well used as a pair. Even though if I want to, I can see the agonisingly embarrassing comments I make on lemmy very easily from my Masto account.
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outside of the ask
More outside of the question.

















