Lemmy

I believe this is a shortcoming of the fediverse and applications being built as (moderately siloed) web applications.

There's content out there, but reading it requires being on that web application. The interoperability between the servers outside of their domain (e.g. Lemmy - Mastodon) gets clunky.

This goes back to the "how I'd like to see the fediverse". A content generic front end that federates with other systems.

Look at email for an example - you don't need to use gmail's web app to use email and once there was a rich selection of email clients. Now its Apple Mail or Exchange/Outlook for the most part.

There was a link the other day to https://github.com/BentonEdmondson/servitor // https://programming.dev/post/577464 which is closer to that ideal of a fediverse reader. It consumes data via ActivityPub rather than having the person use the front end of the website.

The only problem with that application is that while it is likely quite good for consuming content, it doesn't have anything for pushing content to something on the fediverse. Furthermore, because much of the fediverse activity happens either in the subscribed content sources or in local it returns to the problem of "discovery of someone is hard".

What I think I want is a myspace / geo cities old school thing where someone could just push activity pub content to it, have content pushed to it (permissioning the pushing of content is a very hard problem) that other people could also consume (another hard permissions problem) and just have it be there.

Push a post "Hey, I did this thing" and other people could comment on it (pushes the comment back to your node for others to be able to consume also from your node - yes, I said permissioning was hard). And then also have aggregators of content. An aggregator of question type content from everywhere that people could browse and push comments back to the aggregator that would then push the response back to the original node.

... but that's all with a 1970s ideal of the net with a bit of early web and NNTP mixed together. The problems that they didn't solve are difficult ones that aren't entirely technically solvable. Spam is still a problem on NNTP and is also an issue on email. The quality of questions on Yahoo Answers where anyone could post were laughably poor (Stack Exchange does it better... at the cost of its a centralized system that manages what you see and people complain about their questions being closed or deleted or banned from one of the sites).

And this touches on the core problem of the fediverse that I'm not sure anyone has sat down and tackled. It's the "how do you make social software" (if you haven't read the pdf about the group by Shirky - I strongly suggest that). Lemmy is a a clone of Reddit, that will have Reddit's social problems some day (if they aren't here already). Mastodon has Twitter's problems - though it fights them with a much more active moderation team that shunts off the undesirables to their own instances that no one else talks to (see also Lemmygrad and exploding-heads for Lemmy equivalent sites).

All this boils down to a "I really don't have a solution." I mostly "live" in the cosy web of https://maggieappleton.com/cozy-web - moderated / restricted slack and discord sites. I'd like to see more digital gardens, and I have hope that ActivityPub will enable that, though that hasn't been the case yet. There aren't enough tools to make Lemmy or Mastodon part of the Cozy Web (small Mastodon instances that are largely single topic focused may show up here) and I worry that its just time before adtech and trolls are able to make inroads into Lemmy. Lemmy instances with the most local communities that are only loosely affiliated with the reason for the instance are likely (crystal ball gazing here) most susceptible to it as they also have the highest costs of hosting and moderation commitment time.