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?
You must log in or # to comment.
I wish there were an art site you could sign up for that let you follow artists on the fediverse and vice versa, but took its UX cues from DeviantArt and Fur Affinity. Discoverability should probably be local-only but I think that would be OK. The separation between artwork and journal entries in the main feed is something I’ve put into my own single-user server, and it’s had such a good effect on my mental state that I would never use the fediverse without it. AO3-style tag hierarchies would be really cool too.
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.
eBay/marketplace/etsy alternative.
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 whole thing needs legal, insurance and escrow. Nobody in their right mind would want to host it for free if it actually handled the money. Could go anonymous and crypto but really that’s just asking for it.
Hooking up buyers and sellers and having them sort out prices, taxes and shipping would prob be the only viable way.
At some point, someone is going to do enough business to get a good rep and make a large sale and screw someone out of money.
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
There is flohmarkt.
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.
For some, lighter moderation is the special sauce though. Like, I want my mods to understand the difference between frustrated venting and actual, actionable threats and/or malicious content.
It would really help if the rules were clearly stated, and then those exact rules, not some other hidden set entirely, were enforced.
ML comes to.mind, censoring anything negative about China, Russia, or North Korea (how much longer until it adds the USA to that list?), without explicitly stating that anywhere.
It’s the “surprise” aspects that most often turn people away.
Another one is how Hexbears have historically been allowed to troll people all across the Threadiverse. They were explicitly asked not to do that by their own admin team, but there too the follow-up actions did not match the talk.
More interactability between the different fediverse softwares.
I’d love for bands, venues and event promoters to list 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 go to 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.
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.
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.
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, MapComplete, 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 on their own. 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
Yeah, an Imgur replacement would be awesome. That place is full of triggerinas now-a-days
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.
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.
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.
Probably someone needs to start a service aimed at them, like a mastodon instance called localgov.social or something
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.
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.
You know how that would end up: massively slow server for 3 million a day hosted at politician X’s friend.
I don’t know that at all. Public services where I’m at are pretty well run.
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 :)
Forums for long, linear discussion, like phpBB or Discourse, with good discoverability.
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.
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.
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.
How do you discover Lemmy communities? Federated categories in Discourse work in the same way, so a tool capable of discovering Lemmy communities should also be capable of discovering Discourse forums.
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
I can think of optional integration to other services as being an useful feature while at the same time relatively friction-free.
Some examples that come to mind that could give some integration ideas are Facebook the company with Threads the social media (but is tarnished by the company itself), Bridgy Fed, Wafrn, and Friendica bridging AT Protocol and ActivityPub (the first one seemingly being very popular), NeoDB allowing cross-referencing and importing entries from other databases and platforms, and RSS Parrot sharing posts from RSS feeds as ActivityPub posts (though sadly in this last one, interactions are one way only).
More adoption by the public
Government agencies and businesses from my area. Information about local events. Everything is on Facebook 😔
There’s a few trickling in to mastodon
An eBay replacement. Now that they heavily track everything and anything about users-be it sellers and buyers and visitors, I no longer use it after about 25 years… 😢
I don’t do social media, and Letgo/offerup is no better. Might as well go back to Craigslist lol
Agree this would be amazing, but also difficult, since money features as security concerns.
There is Flohmarkt, which is still in early stages, but looks promising. https://codeberg.org/flohmarkt/flohmarkt
