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?
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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!
Less memes. I feel like that is all this site is now…
the bigger it gets, the more the memes will become everything.
agreed though. way too many memes, not enough legit information anymore.
Any city/county/state/federal (or your countrys equivalent) running their own fediverse servers (especially Mastodon) instead of simply having a twitter handle.
The Netherlands has removed many departments form shitter and moved them to Mastodon.
You know how that would end up: massively slow server for 3 million a day hosted at politician X’s friend.
I’m not saying they need to physically host the metal, but the addresses need to be Fediverse addresses. Like how they current do email. I have no idea if my mayors email is outlook or Gmail or whatever, the important part is it’s mayor@city.gov.
I’m just kidding, it would be great :)
I don’t know that at all. Public services where I’m at are pretty well run.
Not so sure I want them to self host, just based on their track record for security, but I would like them to be more visible.
Also news outlets could benefit from doing this instead of us having to rely on repost automation.
I would also love to see peertube become more competitive to YouTube. It would probably need some kind of revenue sharing model or donation integration for that though.
I agree about the self hosted part. That part isn’t important. But an @city.mastodon server is better than an @city on twitter username. The important part is getting them off proprietary platforms.
Like how they all do email and websites now.
Yep. That’s what I meant. I want them to come to the fediverse but I don’t necessarily want the city’s IT admin to manage it between fighting laser printers.
A self-hosted instance has a big advantage: only those working on that admin can have a user. So if you see, p.e., @Emmanuel.macron@gov.fr you know it’s the real account and not a fake one.
Agreed. I don’t think I explained myself clearly enough: I want them to have a presence online. Among the reasons being exactly what you’re pointing out. However, I think at least for smaller cities with very little staff, it’s not realistic to ask them to literally self-host it (as in having a server on-prem running it). I would be fine with them outsourcing it or cloud-hosting it under their own domain. A potential solution for the small ones could be something like a state-level hosted service where municipalities can sign up and get their own accounts, for example. That would work even for something like Rittman, Ohio pop. 6,131.
Probably someone needs to start a service aimed at them, like a mastodon instance called localgov.social or something
They can certainly self-host, it doesn’t mean you have to join those instances. Them making those instances would be good for adoption.
Absolutely. The organizations that have the most to gain and the most capability to manage instances are
- local governments,
- news publishers/journalists, and
- Universities
These are groups that have unique publishing and legal mandates that already have the IT departments and adequate sway to compel users. They already host email and websites, and regularly come into conflict with corporate messaging platforms.
Users, that could help.
*Organic users
I’m ok with genetically modified users.
I’m a talking butterfly if that helps
Sounds like we need to get to cloning.
I would love to see an alternative for google maps where openstreetmap is not enough. So a system where you can post reviews, photos, menus of locations etc.
CoMaps (which uses openstreetmaps) has the option of adding a link to a menu for restaurants, though I don’t think it has reviews.
You can add websites to businesses on OSM too. It’s not that common, unfortunately
There is apparently an incredible amount of manipulation and legal fights happening around these reviews on Google maps, so that is probably a minefield any independent open-source developer should avoid.
OpenStreetMap is frankly about as good as a crowdsourced map can possibly be.
And it’s always improving. Mobile apps like CoMaps let you add business information. There are also apps like Every Door, MapComolete, or SCEE, which particularly emphasize updating OSM on the go.
There are apps for adding photos, such as Mapilary or Panoramax, which are not built into OSM, but built on top of it.
There have been a few attempts at FOSS review projects, like lib.reviews or mangrove.reviews, although it is tricky to reach critical mass.
Each of these are huge organizational challenges and data management challenges separately. Without selling ads or mining data, it’s hard for me to imagine a single project that does evey part and does it well.
There are apps for adding photos, such as Mapilary
just in case you don’t know, mapillary is a facebook project
There have been a few attempts at FOSS review projects, like lib.reviews or mangrove.reviews, although it is tricky to reach critical mass.
I think it’s even impossible if not accessible in a popular OSM map app
Thanks, I did not realize. I just did a quick search because I remembered an app but couldn’t remember the name. Must be something else.
Edit: Maybe it was mapillary after all. They were acquired by Meta in 2020. A better option looks to be KartaView.
kartaview is not better either. they are hypocrite liars: https://github.com/osmandapp/OsmAnd/issues/4942
panoramax thought, that is promising.
I couldn’t quite follow all that. TLDR?
they started out as openstreetcam. they turned out to be not open, in source code and licensing of uploaded content. their app couldn’t even be open source, as it used closed source components (including facebook data mining components), that they did not want to remove. they have got renamed to kartaview and belong to a crappy company. they also don’t value user privacy, shown partly by using facebook (among other) tracking code both on the website and in the app.
at first, they turned out they don’t value privacy of its users, but with an openstreetmap adjacent project that is essential. most OSM editors and users are here partly for the privacy properties of the services and accompanying apps, and like that we can’t honestly recommend something to others that we ourselves wouldn’t use.
openstreetcam privacy policy said they share user data with third parties for analysis of the users. that alone shows how they treat their users, but their website contained facebook tracking technology among others, which is significantly worse for reasons I will not detail here.
in the openstreetmap ecosystem another thing that is important is openness and free software. because that’s how you can know how is your data handled, or how you can continue development if the original devs abandoned the project. all significant android osm apps are available on the F-droid store. F-droid vets all apps it accepts, including all updates to them, and closed source components are not allowed in any of them, because what they do can not be audited.
openstreetcam (at some point renamed to kartaview) was not willing to remove the unauditable components for f-droid inclusion. it was more important for them to collect enormous amounts of user data for facebook and other data brokers.then the open source app completely stopped being open source. they did not officially stopped development, they just started to forget uploading the source code changes. they even tried to argue other points with “but our app is open source!” when it could not be built from source for several years already. that shows they only used open as a marketing term.
later it turned out the app was owned by a crappy company, and that they take all rights, irrevocable, for all images uploaded.
probably other things also happened I don’t remember now.
That would be neat. It would also be really nice to have some kind of community notes section where you can info on parking, best times to go, etc. Especially for tourist destinations.
I’d love to see bands, venues and event promoters listing their upcoming shows on Mastodon. But I can’t really see it happening in the immediate future, since they have to cast the broadest possible net to lure people in. I tend to see a lot of punk / garage shows (it’s an emotional outlet, I guess) and they’re allllll advertised exclusively on Instagram, often with AI-gen flyers. To add insult to injury.
Having more localized communities would change that.
A lot of small punk shows need to build a following locally before they can get traction nationally/internationally.
Amateur porn. Sadly I still have to use twitter for that.
I think it’d be fun to have a kalshi/polymarket clone, but with internet points instead of money.
This may be self serving but if someone could maybe contact Mojang and get the Minecraft instance to be an officially recognized Social Media outlet like r/Minecraft is on Reddit, that would be peachy.
Oh and a syncable mobile app
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.
outside of the ask
More outside of the question.
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.
Thank you so much for taking the time to lay that all out for me. I’m sure you’ve had to do it once or twice already, lol. I’ll absolutely start curating the stuff I’d rather see. Maybe part of the friction I’m feeling is a procedural rub with marxists/leninists, and it would make sense/be hilarious if I’ve wandered into the middle of their space.
Do you have any less political servers you’d recommend? Besides the servers/services you recommended? Or is it largely an issue with the server i’m on?
Glad I can help! 😊
So, hard question in server selection. If .ml server isn’t for you then there are hundreds of other options. Lemmy Verse is definitely going to be your friend here. Instance is substituted for server, and is a more appropriate name.*
This highlight button in the image shows you what to select on Lemmy Verse to get a large list of networked Instances. It likely won’t be all the Instances, and may have some dormant and/or private Instances not open to the public to join. Most of the Instances with some size will be open and no problem to join though.
^*I only like to refer to Instances as servers because it reminds me that they also have a physical presence somewhere in this world, and the location selected has some importance.^
So thats a quick general guide for Instance selection.
Specifically ‘non-political’ Instances that I know is hard because I don’t know how political is too political for you.
Take my ‘Local’ Instance, its for Australians and people interested in upside down land. Theres plenty not political, but each day we are posting and discussing the daily political news. You know, things like, which bum scratchin politician has been caught pickin their nose again, etc…
Theres other location specifics for France, New Zealand, Netherlands, Midwest US (midwest.social), UK, etc…
If you’re looking to get away from politics as much as possible then maybe location specific areas won’t work for you.
With that said technology servers might be the go, db0 or programming.dev are examples.
You could join solarpunk and help them imagine a positive futuristic world rather than a dystopian one.
Or mander.xyz is more science based.
Book lovers might like literature.cafe
These are just some of the larger (in fediverse terms) options you could look into.
I hope that helps you and anyone else reading.
If you do decide to change I’d love to know where you’ve gone off to and why that Instance was chosen. Theres so many Instances I still have no idea about 😆
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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.
I agree with this. Outside of German, I’ve found it very difficult to find communities in other languages. I couldn’t tell whether those communities didn’t exist at all or whether they were simply not discoverable.
I’d love to get some BAME make up skincare etc in !Womensstuff@piefed.blahaj.zone but I’ve had zero luck
I think that’s largely due to the lack of variety in our clientele.
It seems to be hard to get anyone from the non-geek community over here. My wife isn’t interested at all if it doesn’t have an algorithm. She wants the tech to spoon-feed her things she’ll like instead of finding communities. Threads, Bluesky, Tiktok, Instagram just have all the people because it’s what the masses crave.
I dunno I have zero tech skills… I am a bit of a nerd though if that counts
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)
No discoverablity. There is no directory that lets me find interesting forums the way I can find lemmy communities.
I do miss a good forum. That used to be my favorite thing about the internet.
I really miss those days, when you had a good one you were like a family.
nodeBB literally is forum software in the Fediverse. I don’t know if it can do strictly linear like phpBB, though.
Or you create a channel on Hubzilla. You can configure it for your stream to be strictly linear as opposed to be tree-style. And then you can join Lemmy communities, /kbin or Mbin magazines, PieFed communities, nodeBB subforums, Friendica groups, Hubzilla forums, (streams) groups, Forte groups, you name them, and they’re all strictly linear from your POV. It’s just that you, on Hubzilla, will always only directly reply to the start post (as opposed to the most recent comment) when the thread itself at its source is actually tree-style.
Lots if nice users posting original content.
More Lemmy, PieFed, & Mbin communities/magazines with more content, especially niche ones!
Speaking of which, I’m gonna go ahead and shamelessly plug !micromobility@lemmy.world for anyone interested in bikes, e-bikes, skateboards, scooters, motorcycles, heelies, etc.
AmITheAsshole was always fun…
Oh, and hamsters! There’s not a fediverse hamster community that compares to the hamster subreddits yet
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.
I am a bit disappointed by all the federated social media kinda being boring clones of existing things instead of branching out more. More customizability would be nice. Just got Marvis for apple music and I really like the idea of setting smart rules for my social media feeds. (Creating your own algorithm) Cyberspace.online is a pretty interesting looking alt take on social media, not open source tho I don’t think.
Something that lets us create our own profiles like myspace would be nice, using threejs or some sht to allow for interactive experiences
