Why Mozilla is betting on a decentralized social networking future | TechCrunch
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Consumers are hungry for a new way of social networking, where trust and safety are paramount and power isn't centralized with a Big Tech CEO in charge...

"the company looked at the history of social media over the past decade and didn’t like what it saw… existing companies that are only model motivated by profit and just insane user growth, and are willing to tolerate and amplify really toxic content because it looks like engagement… "

    • @[email protected]English
      9•1 year ago

      You can have as many forks as you want, but that’s a software engineer’s solution to a social problem. Lemmy is the “name brand” now for ActivityPub based federated content aggregation, and it will be orders of magnitudes more difficult to get support for forks, both from a contributor and from a user perspective.

      Just look at last year’s Twitter migration, and the sea of people complaining about Mastodon not having features they felt were a requirement for adoption, while also ignoring every other Mastodon alternative on the Fediverse that had everything they were looking for.

        • @[email protected]English
          3•1 year ago

          As I see it, there are three major ways a fork could gain significant standing among the community:

          • They could get features out faster. Scaled sort would’ve been absolutely pivotal during a migrationary wave, as it would have allowed small communities to gain exposure on the front page in a far more natural and organic way. Currently new communities are largely dependent on the community spotlight subs and there’s not a whole lot of ways to actually gain momentum after that initial posting.
          • They could improve performance and appeal to admins. The current cost of hosting Lemmy is fairly bloated from my understanding.
          • They could invest in moderation. Beehaw would certainly be interested.

          I honestly think any one of these is easily manageable by a handful of people in off time. Other parts of the fediverse of similar size are chock full of forks.

      • @[email protected]English
        1•1 year ago

        Lemmy is the “name brand” now for ActivityPub based federated content aggregation

        Lemmy has an awful reputation even among the rest of the fediverse and particularly among people who have tried to contribute. A fork would probably be a significant improvement as far as brand perception goes.