For example, for me, here are some things I wish to see (or would implement in my design) :
- design around ease of self-hosting. A non technical user must be able to self host easily and at a very low cost.
- Embrace content sorting and filtering algorithms, but on the client side, with optional control by the user.
- Standardize tags on all content. So many of the different ways different platforms classify or organize content can be implemented as tags, which increases interoperability between them.
- Abandon obsession with real-time-first implementations for use cases that don’t explicitly need it.
- Transferable user identity (between instances)
- User identity and authentication as separate service from social network instance
Would love to hear yours!
Fun and weird ways of using the internet socially. Fediverse has the unique opportunity that you can build anything and automatically reach people. I’d like to see people really push the idea of what a social platform looks and acts like.
Misskey?
I havent found an English misskey instance so I havent been able to really try it out. At a glance it seems similar to mastodon
Most of English instance are using Misskey-fork named Sharkey.
Misskey itself has tons of unique features that Mastodon don’t have, like threaded discussion/reply, Misskey games (only two for now), custom interface, emoji reaction like Discord/Slack.
Can you give examples ? That’s partly why I ask this question.
Ive got ideas in my mind but its hard to put them into realistic ideas of a site.
Embrace content sorting and filtering algorithms, but on the client side, with optional control by the user.
You can only filter and sort what was downloaded by the client. So that runs into resource constraints.
Standardize tags on all content. So many of the different ways different platforms classify or organize content can be implemented as tags, which increases interoperability between them.
I’m so with you. https://xkcd.com/927/
Transferable user identity (between instances)
User identity and authentication as separate service from social network instance
That’s more the ATproto/Bluesky vision.
You can only filter and sort what was downloaded by the client. So that runs into resource constraints.
In the client, you wouldn’t need to be sorting and running extensive calculations on all data. You could, e.g, build the front-page by indexing/scoring posts and comments that have been created since your last visit with a hard cap on some time window (last 48h) or total data points (e.g, keep only the most recent 10k objects in a local hot database, freeze/archive everyhing else.)
I’m so with you. https://xkcd.com/927/
That’s what RDF/JSON-LD gives us for free. There is no need to have us arguing over what each tag means, all that developers need to do is to learn how to use the different vocabularies.
That’s more the ATproto/Bluesky vision.
Doesn’t mean that we can’t adopt it.
In the client, you wouldn’t need to be sorting and running extensive calculations on all data. You could, e.g, build the front-page by indexing/scoring posts and comments that have been created since your last visit with a hard cap on some time window (last 48h) or total data points (e.g, keep only the most recent 10k objects in a local hot database, freeze/archive everyhing else.)
Absolutely. There’s a lot you can do. The “For You” Feed on Bluesky is quite instructive. https://bsky.app/profile/spacecowboy17.bsky.social/post/3mb2r5qei322a
But when you’re talking about sending a lot more data to clients, you really need to consider what that means for the internet bill of instance owners.
User sovereignty first design, where users individually control what instances they wish to block.
I agree with this. I think instance owners retaining ability to block other instances is still unfortunately necessary, if at least for administrative and legal reasons. But putting the onus on granular blocking controls on the user is a big achievement, as I prefer the user to retain that control.
That’s not a universal want. Trans people and other vulnerable, targeted minorities face a real cost in having to play whack a mole with bigots. Sure, you can block them as they appear, but by that point, you’ve already seen their hate. And it means every trans person has to see and block that content. After which, the bigot just comes back with a new account, and does another round.
The blahaj instances offer aggressive, pre-emptive blocking of bigots and transphobes, at the instance level, with the goal of giving our users an experience of social media that isn’t shaped by hate.
Of course, not all trans folk want that, and some absolutely do want the power to choose for themselves who gets blocked and are willing to face the hate in order to retain that ability. But that’s the other power of the fediverse, because there are instances that cater to that approach as well.
tl;dr - Granular user control of blocking/federation is good, but it’s not “better” than instance level blocking and defederation.
Allow people who fund the platform vote on features (that are pre approved ). who contribute more get more in return.
“time well spent”. and maximizing the “average quality of content”. maybe by allowing custom feeds. or feeds that are based only on the votes of trusted users. with governance models supporting how those feeds are managed like how KDE and GNOME nonprofits are managed. maybe vote on best post/comment of the day/week/year/decade with leaderboards for that.
Linus law of trail and error. allow people to easily extend the software .with plugins and ideally a store with reviews for addons like in firefox and chrome. making experimentation easier and safer (without risking adding a bad feature to all users of the software). vote on features implemented rating for example how satisfied you are on a scale of one to ten.
information over speculations . use A/B testing to see what works in practice. maybe use “counted statement” for example “this is useful” or “this is important” beyond lemmy and reddit upvotes and downvotes.
Right now a life changing post from world class expert and a funny cat picture with someone who spend too much time online are treated the same by the software. this should somehow change.
1.- and I’m going to emphasize this a lot.
PAGING
(or at least some concept in the vein of “show only a finite amount of information at a time”)
Lemmy does it well, but Mastodon sorely requires it for example. Anything that induces the pattern of autorefreshing, auto-filling, constantly changing timelines only empahsizes the addictions that antisocial media is working with already.
2.- More and better reactions than simply “upvote” and “downvote”.
A upvote or a downvote can mean things in different categories, from “I don’t like this” to “this is uninformative” to “this is misinformative!” to “enough Musk spam!”. Condensing and factoring such results into how threads are found and sorted artificiates any or all of popularity, consensus and usefulness. So, being able to “react” (add a singular tag to a message without the need for a reply) to a message with more options than “upvote” and “downvote” would be useful. I’d count at least three axis (axeses? switchaxes?) that are useful to gauge: “agree - disagree”, “informational - misinformational” and “verified - debunked”.
3.- Global, or at least shareable and moveable, user identity. Won’t comment on this more because others already cover it enough.
4.- Fucking decouple instance identity from DNS. DNS is the layer that big corpo will rein in next, depending on it to validate who an instance is is playing an eventually loser game.
I’m so far paging, and it’s so annoying this isn’t the default design on the fediverse.
On 4, I also agree, but what’s the best alternative?
On 4, I also agree, but what’s the best alternative?
Fuck if I know, tbh. Whatever i2p and/or IPFS are doing, I guess? While removing a central authority is a good idea, I think the more pressing matter is to remove external authority. DNS registrars are not part of the fediverse in terms of being community or people, and thus are a notorious weak point.
For the threadiverse in particular I’d add transferable user created Communities (between instances).
If Activpub does portable actors (a user is just an actor) communities are just actors so therefore portable users means u get portable communities for free
