This is different from a forum in that you’re explicitly working with a select group of others in a small team to complete a concrete task within a given time window.

Or to put it in simpler terms: for the Summer Season we are looking for developers to both vote on and then work towards completing a two-month long project. This could be fixing a bug or adding a feature to an existing Fediverse project or creating something new.

The benefits to the participant are:

• They’re collaborating directly with others who also have an interest in doing whatever is most effective towards growing out the Fediverse. There’s a lot of the people in the community who want to help out and see the Fediverse grow, but don’t know where to begin. This is meant to be a place where people can pool their efforts and ideas.
• Since we’re breaking stuff into two-month sprints, it also is intended to serve as a relatively short-term commitment which can give development experience and give people within the community a chance to know each other.
• Since we’re putting what to work on to a vote, this is also an opportunity to put your ideas and input for what is most needed out there, and if you’re convincing enough, get others to work on it alongside you.

The benefits to the Fediverse (and free-software as a whole) are:

• Developers are no longer working separately on their own stuff, which is an issue which caused fragmentation. Instead, we’re focused on coordinating people’s efforts to fixing stuff where it’s most needed.
• It helps offload work from central developers or non-profits, which could hopefully serve as a “federated” model of software development long-term if it succeeds.

Let me know if you have further questions.

Yeah, this video is meant to answer the absence of the feature on the desktop site and the official client, explaining the history and the fact that the feature is on the way.

Yeah, this video is meant to answer the absence of the feature on the desktop site and the official client, explaining the history and the fact that the feature is on the way.

I think this mentality is far too narrow and can lead to problems down the road. And it’s a dangerously common one among leftists. The bigger threat right now isn’t some sort of shadowy cabal of elites, it’s market-based logic, which can manifest through the little guy just as much as the big guy.

For example, I’m already seeing discussions of “ethical advertising” or “paying influencers” but this only raises more questions. How will we keep funding this model? What happens when we’re outcompeted by other sites like Twitter for ad revenue? After all why wouldn’t an advertiser pick the method which is more effective. Natural selection and administrative costs will slowly chip away at what distinguishes us.

The foundations you lay now play a role in determining your future. By refusing any form of commercialization, it forces us to innovate to cut costs. This could be cutting technological overhead as with PeerTube’s WebTorrent, it could be setting a foundation for promoting/getting content on the Fediverse which isn’t dependent on constantly having to pay people to switch over.

The blockchain-based and "free speech"platforms do exactly this and it’s why they all die so quickly. They may be little guys but they lack the patience/imagination to approach the issue in an organic fashion, end up trying to ape the big players, and never build a foundation strong enough to last. The market doesn’t think in moralistic terms, it doesn’t care how big or little you are, the only way out isn’t to compete on revenue-based grounds.

This is why I think it’s important that in these early discussions we continue to oppose all forms of monetization/strategies reliant on large and continuous spending. It sets up a vicious cycle that’s impossible to escape.

I think this is a good time to remind people: these sort of opportunities will often present themselves due to a combination of factors well beyond any fediverse user’s control. Trying to force them to occur is like trying to build a house out of unpacked sand, it’ll quickly fall apart.

What advocates need to do is to focus on building a solid foundation within the Fediverse so that these opportunities can be capitalized on more effectively each time. We don’t want it where people join then leave when the hype dies down, when they see a lack of content, or get annoyed with platform quirks. Unfortunately, it seems a lot of discourse tries to focus on marketing-first and assumes the rest will sort itself out. It’s the opposite actually.

Relating to the topic at hand though, I agree with Eugen. Direct people to other instances. Do not let mastodon.social’s downtime dissuade people. If anything, this might be a good opportunity to spread traffic across instances.

Definitely. Feedback is appreciated.

There was a lot of buffering reported earlier on because there weren’t peers at the time. It seems to be picking up now.

Sweet. I’d say the steps towards this end would be:

• Scouting out a medium-small sized RSS reader project with active development and putting out a request
• Or forking an existing one, but this requires ability to work with the codebase.

If you’d like to plan or discuss this further, I’d definitely love to on the /c/fedivangelism chatroom. I feel like it’d be easier to plan that way since it’s realtime.

IMO forking/pushing for an existing RSS reader to easily import federated accounts would be a better approach.

Completely agree. I went into more detail elsewhere in this thread but I think the whole question of democratization is just going to lead to feature creep and is better suited for a separate Fediverse project if done at all.

IMO people are overreacting to the effects of the interview; if there’s any lesson, I think its that putting your all your eggs into the Reddit basket for something like antiwork rather than IRL was a poor idea fundamentally.

IMO any such changes towards democratization would probably be best suited to a different Fediverse project entirely given how much it alters the structure of the genre of site Lemmy falls under.

I think the real lesson from the whole fiasco is that people shouldn’t place more political expectations on a subreddit than its capable of handling. Reddit/Lemmy has specific uses it’s good for, and things it’s not good at. Upvotes, subcommunities, and central moderation all contribute to the problems with Reddit but at the same time they stay because they’ve proven to be the most effective at doing what Reddit is built to do. Yet the unfortunate thing is that a lot of movements have begun using Reddit in ways it wasn’t meant to be used.

When it comes to making a sort of rallying point for things like what /r/antiwork was going after, IMO the whole structure of the site would have to be re-thought. And while I think we should begin with experimenting with platform design more, I don’t think it’s a good idea to burden platforms which were designed to act as direct alternatives to mainstream platforms with unnecessary features which may or may not work out.

So IMO, it’s better to work on theorycrafting an entirely separate ActivityPub project which isn’t constrained by Reddit-like design and can directly address the issues /r/antiwork was inherently facing from even before this interview.

Fantastic idea! I actually never thought about this.

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Jokes aside, I also have UBPorts and it’s quite nice. LTE doesn’t work and its unfortunate how few apps there are (even compared to something like FDroid) but the interface is fantastic.

I’ve been going with the phrase “Open Web”. I think its simple and self-explanatory, while focusing on the essence, which is openness.

That aside, it happens to be the most active instance (since I’m assuming new users mistake it for a flagship rather than a personal instance), which means that the federated feed tends to be dominated by this instance’s slant.

I think it’s a legitimate concern to be raised even if it’s not the admins’ fault. Working towards encouraging those who lean center/right to make their own spaces rather than dismissing the platform as a whole I think would be productive in the long-run.

It’s just the nature of how it was founded and the sort of people who founded it. But yeah, look for other instances if its an issue, possibly look into starting your own if you’re willing to take up that responsibility. I think having spaces for other viewpoints would be great for the platform as a whole.

Would some sort of Bayesian filter help? At least from what I’ve seen on PeerTube, WriteFreely, and the history of email is that certain patterns crop up in the posts.

Is there anything regarding how evenly spread the user count is across nodes? If not, maybe developing some sort of formula or index may be good.

Federation only works if people arent all cramming together on the same instance.

Is ForgeFed dead?

Adding onto this, IndieAuth looks like a good solution in that department.

There first needs to be content before people will want to use the platforms as their main driver.

Help get more content on the platform whether that be by uploading your own, creating an instance for specific niche, or scouting out small creators on social media and convincing them to mirror their content to the Fediverse.

I disagree just due to the aforementioned network effect. Numbers with social media have a snowball effect, where people make their decision on whether or not to participate based on existing levels of activity. What sets Lemmy apart from stuff like Lobste.rs and HackerNews IMO is that it’s integration of federation gives it potential to break out as a serious alternative to the platforms rather than catering a specific niche, so I’d say the snowballing is important also since it has the potential to help bring up the rest of the Fediverse.

Given Lemmy’s reputation as being a platform run by communists, the fact that such a hardcoded filter even existed to begin with, and also per-instance blocking/slur filtering, I’d think that should be enough to keep them away and stop them from polluting the communities associated with the flagship instances, then again I’m not an admin so I can’t say for sure. It’d also help the issue you mentioned regarding ambiguity of what slurs to include, since each community can decide that for themselves.

Isn’t instance-blocking alone sufficient for being able to prevent the environment from being overrun? I understand the hesitancy to platform reactionaries, but as it stands the network effect is easily the biggest hurdle the Fediverse is going to face. Right-libertarians and actual reactionaries might be a net negative on the main instance, but as far as the software itself goes, numbers are numbers, and could end up making a world of difference.

Let them form their own circlejerks away from everyone else and have slur-blocking be on a per-instance basis, after all that’s why the federated design works so well.