A series of polls asking for feedback about what improvements people want to see in the Fediverse.
mastodon.communick.com
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.
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.
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.
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)
Thread with my comments about the results of polls.
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.
We definitely do not need business or premium services here.
Excuse me, who made you mayor of the Fediverse?
I see you have trouble with people not agreeing with you...
I really don't mind disagreement. What bothered me:
When you write like that, it gives no chance to have a productive conversation.
You do understand that it's an expression, don't you?
It's a fact. Monetisation of any kind is against the mere idea of federated social media. People com here to be away from corporations, advertising and the like. The model of social media that seeks to make social networking into a business model is in crisis, why would anyone want to made the fediverse into that?
Again, opinion-as-fact.
Okay, let's see where you are going with that...
That does not follow from your the first sentence.
Not every business is a "corporation". Not every professional that provides a service for money is a rent-seeker.
The fact that there are "business coming to the fediverse" does not mean that they can only operate on the same (failed) business models from Big Tech.
If you bothered to look into the polls I did in the original submission you'd see that I do not want to apply the Silicon Valley playbook here. If you go take a look at my first blog post about communick, you would see that the last thing I want to have is a "Corporation" in the Fediverse, but instead I want to have it strong and attractive enough for small, independent service providers, so that it can become a mainstream alternative and not just a niche for outsiders.
No. What you want is to make money out of decentralised social media.
People offering their services and talent for money already exist on the fediverse.
Funny. Because in the polls you asked a question about features someone would be interested in pay for. Some of which are characteristical of corporate social media...
By providing a service and building things that can improve the ecosystem, not by rent-seeking.
None of what I am doing or thinking about doing is exclusive. Managed Hosting? Subscriber-only accounts? Add-on features? What is so evil about these business models?
So what is your problem with my polls?
What is "corporate" about that?
You do know you can't make money out of any fediverse software, don't you? You can make money on the fediverse, like artists and professionals do, but you can't make money out of it.
From mastodon main page:
This goes in contradiction with an option on one of your polls:
Other than accounts that suggest you people to follow on the fediverse, there's no algorithm that recommends you accounts to follow or content to see. In fact, this very thing would go against the TOS of Mastodon, Peertube, and other fediverse software
You could make your own software that offers those things and give users the posibility/ability to federate, but you cannot legally add premium features or recommendation algorithms to already existing fediverse software or any fork of it.
You are making things up or you don't understand how the AGPL works. There is no "TOS" for the fediverse software.
Don't believe me? Go ask the Mastodon devs themselves if there is anything irregular/illegal about any of the things I am working on or proposing.
Recommending profiles to follow is already part of the onboarding process, and is not in any way equivalent to "pushing profiles for you to see".
Look, I really tried to keep an open mind about this conversation, but now you are distorting the truth and I can't tell if it's for ignorance or dishonesty. I think it's time to end it. Have a nice one.
So, if its already possible. What would your freemium features add?
Each software has, in fact, its rules/terms. Peertube, for example, is explicitly non-profit.
To me what you are doing trying to monetise something that is completely free of charge, while pretending you are doing it to promote the fediverse, "making it mainstream" (the last thing the hardcore fedizens want), IS dishonest. So I guess we are even.