Is there any real or serious conversation or work around the idea of a feature-full social media browser?
Basically something like a web browser but for “all the social media” along with useful organisation features too.
For locked down big social APIs, this makes less sense nowadays, but for open alt-social systems, *it is likely the most valuable promise of such systems* that they can become like the web, reachable through an awesome all-in-one app.
Hmmm … seems my response from mastodon didn’t federate (sighs) …
copy-pasted (sorry, for whoever federation did work, this is likely making things worse):
Personally, I’m there with you I think. I only use default web-UIs on all fediverse platforms I’ve used, and advocate for that.
But should multi-protocol systems and multi-platform clients become normalised, I think this goes beyond “to app or not to app”. What I’m talking about could likely just be a web-app.
The issue is more around aggregation and creating something “greater than the sum of its parts” out of open alt-social.
A useful lens I find is whether a social media system is good at creating, facilitating and hosting genuine communities.
Alt-social right now is struggling with this I think and, IMO, has plenty of room to grow in this regard.
The difficulty though is that it requires more features in our platforms, some likely non-trivial. That’s a big ask for an open non-profit ecosystem.
An effective means of aggregating multiple parts into a unified view could alleviate this.
To go on about it … I don’t think the browser does much at all. Unified feeds and notifications, with helpful filtering, sorting and organisation? Helpful account management? Making it easy to cross-post or copy across platforms or protocols?
Why have an RSS Feed reader if you could just visit each of the web pages individually? Obviously one can, but the feed reader is still useful.
While I think I understand where you’re coming from, I fear it’s coming from a position of habit and app fatigue rather than from a general consideration of what could work well on alt-social (where my position is that it isn’t really working well enough (yet)).
The browser solves the problem of not having any open API. Each platform wants to handle things in its own way, and the browser is the perfect way to do that. Each service, including both the open and the proprietary ones, can present the feed in the way that they decide is right. The browser already does handle rudimentary account management via form auto fill, as well as a unified notification system.
But as for a unified feed… I think the best example is the issues with that come from Lemmy/Mastodon integration. Mastodon posts have a different mentality than Lemmy posts do, not to mention with structure of responses. I just don’t think it does us any favors to have them share the same feed. Now we have replies that have a clear structure of who they are responding to, but Mastodon users come in adding the user tag into the comment, which is messy at best, and bordering obnoxious at worst.
But I get it, I’m not the audience you’re looking to cater to. I don’t particularly understand the value of RSS readers at all, because I just go directly to the services I want to see the feeds from. Hell, I don’t even use bookmarks. I type in the web address for my services every time
Yea, I hear you (I don’t use bookmarks either) … but I don’t think this is the average user.
This sounds to me like a design issue. In fact, this is kinda my point … better interaction here, which is the “promise” of the fediverse, may be best addressed with good aggregating clients rather than relying on too platforms to work out their historical differences over the protocol.
Notifications are the value for me. I don’t have to regularly check infrequently-updated sites if my RSS reader pings me whenever there’s a new post. Largely a different use-case to social media though.