I believe that the Fediverse can and should be more than a niche thing for those that reject Big Tech.
I also believe that to get there we will need businesses, service providers and professional developers who work on it because they are motivated by more than just “community values” and goodwill. For example, I have quite a bit experience with distributed systems and I know I could work to make Lemmy federation more efficient, but I can only do that if I can secure a stable income.
Please follow the linked Mastodon thread and vote on the polls. The idea is to find out if there are enough people willing to pay for services that can ease their pains with Mastodon/Lemmy/Matrix.
One of the biggest things I like about Lemmy is the lack of any business. The whole point is you can run your own instance. Social media shouldn’t be a commodity in the first place, as we can see from the death rattles of web 2 social media giants they really aren’t that profitable anymore. And most nations have a lot of laws they have to adhere to, and public opinion is turning against data farming which is one of their primary sources of revenue.
Personally I’d much prefer Lemmy continue its grass roots and democratized growth. But I cant stop you or anyone else from trying, I will just avoid supporting any attempts to create a business out of the fediverse. The last thing we need here is more capitalists lol
I agree. If we want to stand against the giants, we will have to be able to do business here, and accept those that do.
There’s a difference between working with a smaller business and helping it grow vs working with a tech giant.
- Would you be able to share the results of the survey here once it’s complete?
I don’t run my own instance, at least not publicly, but I’m very curious in the answers to some of those questions and I don’t want to skew your results by voting.
- Primarily I’m curious what feedback you get on search.
As I’m already working on on search engine, that’s already public for Lemmy but I hope to add Mastodon in the future. So far many Mastodon users seem to be very anti-search, so I’m curious of your results.
Will make a follow-up post next week when the poll ends.
Re: search in Mastodon. The anti-search crowd is a minority, and as the fediverse grows they will become less relevant. Anyway I think we can build a search engine that can respect their wishes and keep them out of the index.
Anyway I think we can build a search engine that can respect their wishes and keep them out of the index.
I’d love to hear your ideas on this. At least initially I don’t see a way to build a crawler that can ignore select individuals. But I haven’t really dug into the Mastodon APIs just yet.
There were some ideas of adding tags like
noindexornosearchto their profiles as a way to indicate they don’t want to be listed in public search results. We can, e.g, de-boost any post from a profile with those tags.Another compelling proposal from an admin/dev of blahaj.zone: https://blahaj.zone/notes/9ev0kge0aj
From what I understand, as they run their own platfrom software that’s a small fork of Calckey, and which has search built in, their aim is to implement their proposal on their own instance and hope that it spreads (where spreading to other clackey servers, which encompass around ~10k monthly active users at the moment, would likely happen quickly)
Thank for sharing the results.
I can say one of the most requested features I keep getting requests for is a global search as well. I’m just blocked by a bug in Lemmy at the moment.
A tool to see better recommendations on who to follow could be interesting as well. I’ve recently added a new feature that allows for users to search communities (on Lemmy and Kbin) about what posts are actually talking about. I wonder if something similar could be built for users…
But again thanks for sharing.
