Hey 👋 if you don’t know us already, we’re building Frontpage; an AT Procol based federated link aggregator. We shipped an initial MVP in closed beta recently and have since been thinking about the road to general availability.
This post is an RFC (Request for Comments) targeted at technically minded folks who are interested in seeing the progression of atproto for non-Bluesky/microblogging use cases. All that’s to say the language that follows assumes some knowledge about how Bluesky and atproto work! I’ve tried to include links to explain what all of the jargon means though, so hopefully it’s not entirely nonsense for folks a little less familiar!
When you post on Frontpage, we propose that a mirror post will also be created in your Bluesky account. When you comment on Frontpage, we propose that a mirror reply will be created in your Bluesky account.
Conversely, when you reply to one of these mirrored posts in Bluesky - we will show it as a reply in Frontpage.
Additionally, Bluesky likes will be translated to Frontpage votes and vice versa.
Some people think that because Mastodon and Lemmy are both using ActivityPub, Lemmy could gain some users if Mastodon users could interact with Lemmy.
But this seems to overlook that microblogging and link aggregation are two very different ways to interact with content.
Reddit probably has the highest reserve for potential Lemmy users, just because they are more used to link aggregators.
I mean, I’m not opposed to more users from larger platforms, but right now it’s a shitty experience for Mastodon users trying to follow a Lemmy community, and it’s a shitty experience for Lemmy users when a Mastodon user posts into a community too.
You need BOTH sides to make concessions and fixes and changes to make the experience not shit, and like, that will is just plain not there.
I also agree that the use cases of the platforms are wildly different and that leads to some added friction, but if the software actually interoperated well you could probably fix that with just polite social pressure.
But, well, neither side of this “interoperability” is… useful, and Mastodon doesn’t seem interested to fix it.
I also think recruiting new users might be a more useful use of time than trying to just rely on poaching them from somewhere else, but uh, I couldn’t tell you really how that should or could be done.
Agreed with most of your points
/r/RedditAlternatives is basically the one place we have now. We mention Lemmy there regularly, so hopefully over time it will work.
That’s kind of my comment: pulling from Reddit is probably pointless. If you’re still on reddit at this point, there’s nothing short of Spez showing up and killing your cat that’s going to make you leave.
The Fediverse in general needs to think about being more than just a ‘we copied twitter’, and a ‘we copied youtube’, and a ‘we copied instagram’ and of course a ‘we copied reddit’ collection of things, because you can’t pull people from the thing you’re copying unless you’re better in some way that a normal person will care about.
And I use all these fedi-things to the (mostly) exclusion of the commercial versions, but if we’re being very honest, they’re all carrying a lot of rough edges still.
The Fediverse needs to be able to define and sell itself to people without having to say ‘we’re like x’. If you can’t explain what you’re doing and why someone should care in a way that makes them care, nobody will.
(This is what I get for spending time with people who do marketing stuff, I guess, lol.)
There are a few reasons why people on Reddit prefer to stay there rather than move elsewhere
We are kind of working on the first one (and anyway, the only way to get content is to get more and more users)
For the second one, that’s something even harder to tackle. [email protected] tries to fill that gap, but same as above, it needs more users.
The third one is the most interesting. At some point in the future, Reddit is going to kill old.reddit. By that time, people will look for an alternative, and if they know about Lemmy, they’ll give it a try.
Lemmy is better than Reddit on the following points:
It’s just not enough at the moment, as stated above.
If I were a dev, I’d probably prioritize that awful ‘THIS HAS FAILED!’ error when you search for a new community that your server doesn’t know about because well, new users who don’t know that doesn’t mean what it says are going to walk away thinking something either doesn’t exist or is broken.
I also kinda think that community lists and activity stats should somehow be federated between all the servers that know each other.
Like, lemmy.world knows uncomfortable.business exists, so both servers should know the full list of non-private communities that COULD in theory be federated and be pre-populated in the search results.
And then feddit.org is federated with lemmy.world, so all 3 of the servers should be fully aware of each other’s communities so that a user that lands on ANY instance immediately has a working searchable list of all communities that exist.
Some overhead, sure, but the amount of data here is probably just a one-time big sync and then a small number of updates which is certainly not going to break anything given how chatty lemmy already is.