Decentralization is obviously the big thing about the Fediverse but is it TOO decentralized to gain traction?
There is no reason why they have to be fully separate domains in the same branch. You can set up a system of fully independent moderation and extreme levels of customization while having them all on one site with a front page that allows everyone to see whats popular.
A front page wouldn’t prevent individual subgroups from requiring approval to join, it wouldn’t prevent subgroups from banning those it doesn’t want. It doesn’t prevent users from blocking subgroups that it doesn’t want to see on the front page.
What would be most useful is that now someone could create an account on the Reddit, Twitter, Facebook(?) alternatives and give them access to every community, and then allow each community to set its own rules, and customize its own to be unique while having a unified product to “sell” and get people to move.
Hot take? Blue Sky should be worked with to join the Fediverse as the twitter alternative and Mastodon should work to be the Facebook alternative
TLDR: One front page and general site for Lemmy, Mastodon…and to sign up and see whats popular and then have fully independent subgroups.
It would give an enormous power to who controls this “front page”. This page could restrict any user arbitrarily, lock them out, spy on them, etc. And because this page would be unique, they would have no alternative. This is exactly why federation is a key to freedom.
That can be worked out, have power shared by say 10 people who have to agree to any changes they make to it. or use AI (I know not ideal).
Then make the “one true frontpage” for Lemmy or whatever (implement ActivityPub, maybe borrowing some code from the Lemmy codebase itself, or kindof making a fork of Lemmy), and if it’s good, it’ll be used. If not, it won’t.
But then, it might well fall victim to this phenomenon:
Lemmy has lots of competing “front pages.” How will one more change anything? A more generic domain name or something?
Lemmy.com Mastodon.com … If those were the front pages that curated the top 25 posts and top 25 sub groups in the last 24 hours and it was a space where you could search for the groups you fit into or are interested in. No more confusing mess.
PieFed can group communities (including Lemmy’s federated communities) by interest, it’s just not mature enough replacement but I’d wage on it being a lot more convenient for people less knowledgeable about tech to use it than Lemmy, when it gets mature enough
While not being exactly what you are proposing, you could consider mastodon.social and lemmy.world the de facto front page for each service. They are by far the largest and best-known instances in their respective networks. Many new users start at those instances, get their toes wet, and then branch out.
I’m not arguing that’s how the network should be structured, though.
Google Chat or whatever uses to be federated via XMPP, but then they slowly started making incompatibility changes. Due to it being such a dominant chatting service, the real federated versions died out.
Basically I’m saying it’s not worth it. If you want to support Threads or Blue Sky as a central front page to the Fediverse then go for it, but they don’t actually need your support.
Welcome! Thanks for the suggestion, I’m happy with having multiple sites and not one team having absolute say on content over the rest.
As much as I love the fediverse, its control structures can’t scale. If it ever became truly popular, bad actors would overwhelm it almost immediately.
I never understand people comparing Mastodon to Facebook, it feels more like a proper modern evolution of what Twitter used to be than of Facebook, you can’t have communities on Mastodon which is a key thing Facebook has that Orkut also had which when it closed down there was a huge exodus to Facebook, not to say it’s like wow so important but they both also had integrated games be that Flash games or Unity Web (no longer a thing either of the two but Flash games can be played safely through emulation with Ruffle (which is open-source) and not enough games yet but there’s ongoing QoL development for web game export with Godot) again games are not that important and communities feature is a huge thing, people using fediverse thinking who wants communities will join forumverse platforms like Lemmy is not being realistic with your target audience if you want to keep talking about exodus of all kind of people to fediverse platforms, there are a lot of people who barely understand what domains or directories are
