The need for a Fedi Union.
The need for a Fedi Union.
tl;dr I propose a Fedi Union consisting of the developers of Phanpy, Pixelfed, Peertube, Lemmy, and PieFed. That will work as a way to fund all of the services collectively (with the option to still go to their individual patreons and fund them seperately) and as a way for them to communicate to help all the services be more compatible.
The only way to stop Meta taking over the Fedi is by making better apps than them. Defederating from threads as the sole defense mechanism is a fools errand. They are migrating their Billion+ users from instagram to Threads, the couple million mastodon users defederating from them won't hurt them. Yes we might think who cares if they have billions of users on Threads we will stay on mastodon servers that defederate with them but realistically there will be times we need to check stuff posted there if the biggest content creators, journalists, gamedevs, artists, youtubers, are posting their work there which they will do because they want to reach large audiences and because Threads will provide a way to monetize their work.
Threads is also being designed to take over Reddit\Lemmy next. Something no one has talked about is the fact that only one # is allowed in a post on Threads. This seems small but its actually huge because once launch their Reddit\Lemmy view every post on Threads with a # will be shown as a post on the subreddit/community with the name of that # and every like will be an upvote. Once this happens there will be times when specific niche communities and useful information will be stuck on their platforms. (like sometimes we still have to google for something with the word reddit to find useful information for something specific)
The only actual way to compete with them is to, well, compete and do a better job. Compare the official Mastodon app with Threads or any other mastodon app. The official app STILL doesn't have grouped notifications, threaded replies, or quote posts. It is barely compatible with any other ActivityPub service (Mastodon basically EEE activitypub but thats a thread for another day). The Mastodon devs are very hostile to the broad activitypub community. They don't work with devs of other services, they don't accept PRs, and they're deadset on sticking to Ruby and being nothing more than a Twitter clone. Mastodon is by far the biggest activitypub app which makes them essentially lead the rest of the space.
We need a Fedi Union where the developers of the different services work together so the services are fully compatible and so the community can fund the Fedi Union so devs outside the official team have the money to focus on development. The Mastodon team is getting around $30,000 a month and they haven't added a new feature in months (years?) meanwhile:
The sole developer of Phanpy (a mastodon app) has launched everything mastodon has and more (instant translation on home feed, boost carousel, threaded replies, Catch Up ui, new media focused view)
The sole developer of Pixelfed (an instagram competitor) has also developed Loops (a tiktok competitor), Sup (a WIP whatsapp competitor), and PubKit a toolkit for activitypub developers.
the two (main) develops of Lemmy have made the second largest ActivityPub service that is already a fleshed out competitor to reddit and has a huge community of developers making frontends and apps and now a WIP wiki as well.
I propose a Fedi Union consisting of the developers of Phanpy, Pixelfed, Peertube, Lemmy, and PieFed. That will work as a way to fund all of the services collectively (with the option to still go to their individual patreons and fund them seperately) and as a way for them to communicate to help all the services be more compatible.
Phanpy, a mastodon frontend is somehow going to co-lead a battle against Meta? I'm not at all against unionising, but it sounds like you're cherry picking whatever you personally happen to use as representative of the fediverse.
Defederate Threads. There is no way the Fediverse communities survive a 100 million users platform joining.
Lemmy is 50k monthly active users
They already survived it lol, nobody even noticed it happening. Probably because to post here a threads user has to format a post in a specific way for it to even render here
Did you read the OP? Defederating won’t solve anything theres barely 1 million monthly active users on the fediverse. We have to make better apps than facebook so people want to leave from threads to the open alternatives
Defederating won’t solve anything
[citation needed]
We have to make better apps than facebook so people want to leave from threads to the open alternatives
[citation needed]
The apps are fine, it's content quality and quantity which can only happen organically. You can't force an increase in quantity and keep quality high. Plus the fediverse is a fairly new concept with new issues that arise as it scales up. By it's very nature the fediverse cannot react and change quickly so a slow growth allows for communities to try their own solutions and eventually settle on a more universal fix.
Permanently Deleted
3 hour mandatory meetings 3 times a week
Good idea, but It would hard to cooperate efficiently when there is money involved. And I don't think that Mastodon devs would join this union.
On the other hand, I believe that separate organisation focused on interoperability, long-term goals, defending from Meta, etc. would be great.
Interesting to see your comment about Mastodon EEE ActivityPub. I would love to know more about your thoughts. It’s funny to see people worried about Threads making breaking changes yet Mastodon has done it from the beginning. Look at recently with the quote post situation, Misskey has had them forever, Threads used Misskey implementation and an FEP, Mastodon announced yesterday they got a grant for quote posts. They are doing their own thing yet again
Meta is taking over the fediverse now, uh huh. Thought we all blocked it?
No, Mastodon Social, the flag-ship has not blocked Facebook's Threads. And Gargron is very happy with that. Imagine being the main developer letting your flagship instance turn into a huge "silo" and then happy that a corporate privacy invading giant federates with your instance :/
Or they might just be quite into the open and federated concept, above all else.
It's not your instance, so what do you care? Again, half the point is that you can run your instance however you want, and talk to whoever you want or do not want. Federated. Mastodon or Lemmy aren't distributed systems, they're federated systems.
Like i said in the OP that doesnt mean anything. Theres barely a million monthly users on the fediverse as a whole currently. They have a billion users just on instagram. They will dictate how the space runs if we try to rely on just blocking them
Thought we all blocked it?
Everybody who cares did — everybody who counts.
Pixelfed developer deserves a raise. Dude is the developer that every ADHD developer wishes to be. I could never focus on more than one project at once.
As for Phanpy, it's one of the rare apps that has 10/10 user interface and 10/10 user experience. Very rare these days where people focus lots on just user interface but have no clue about user experience.
+mbin?
Interesting ideas
A thread about a Lemmy instance going off line and how to back it up got me wondering if tools could be built to automatically back up Lemmy instances to Arweave.
Limitless Peace
I doubt it would work, the piefed dev seems pretty hostile to the Lemmy Devs (who run .ml, iirc) https://mander.xyz/post/12037820
I didn't read that thread as indicating hostility, more like he noticed a pattern of users being banned from a community on .ml and being confused as to why, so stuck a warning on it. One community on .ml has a warning, in the same way communities on beehaw have a warning that the instance has higher standards.
It's not like they refuse to co-operate (e.g. PieFed already has a place to put image alt texts, but will move it when Lemmy releases support for them; and it uses the 'audience' field that was originally proposed by Lemmy Devs)
Which is kinda the point of the federated stuff: run your own instance.
If we just all pool shit together again, we might as well launch a company and hey, in a few years do an IPO and cahs out. 😛
From being on Lemmy for quite a while, I can say quite some people share that view. We don't enjoy moderation on the basis of a political agenda.
