this post was submitted on 31 Aug 2023
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There's only so many ways you can arrange a group of people, what they post and their audience. The fediverse is exploring most variations right now and it came up with things like decentralization and activity pub which are unlike any of the big platforms of yore.
It resembles the internet of the 90s only superficially. The underlying infrastructure and technology is completely different today. Most of the lean towards the 90s is caused by taking inspiration from the way they dealt with similar threats.
Where are:
Without wanting to be aggressive or critical of you here ... there's a good chance you, like many of us, are stuck thinking the internet can only be so many things because that's all we've been given for a while (like a long time ... like Twitter and Youtube have been around for longer than half the age of the internet, like we've arguable had real stagnation that might look like the age of Dinosaurs from the future looking back).
Have a look at https://fedidb.org/software, chances are something has popped up there.
Now that's a blast from the past if I ever heard one. Do people really don't understand why MySpace died? The notion of "personalized pages" went out of style several technological and social generations ago. They're not coming back, and not because it can't be done, because it's an antiquated idea in almost every way.
Given the above it's ironic that you perceive me as stuck in my ways. 🙂
Everything you listed can be done nowadays and there's software for it out there, way too much to list here. Thinking in terms of centralized and/or proprietary platforms is the old way. The new way involves offering services based on open source software, using portable infrastructure solutions, and making a privacy pledge to the users.
Everything you listed can be done either by setting it up yourself or by finding a service that offers it. There's a billion options.
I’m sorry, but I think you’re being too aggressive here and dismissive about how much is not easily doable on the fediverse. We’re not living in some open source utopia where there’s an abundance of awesome software waiting to be used.
A few quick thoughts.
But why would you go to a centralized platform for your website?
You can do that too btw, with services like Wix or Squarespace, or specialized services for various niches, like Flickr or 500px if you're a photographer etc.
You can also put together a website in an editor and host it on a generic service where you control your domain and everything.
How would you define and market a service like MySpace nowadays?
A quick and easy landing page for something with the ability to engage and interact socially over all of the platforms of the fediverse built right in.
It doesn't have to be centralised at all ... and I'm talking about what features are offered by platforms/software that are compatible with the fediverse such that connecting across it can be baked in. All of the specialised services are the sorts of things I'm talking about in terms of what's not on or easily possible (right now) on the fediverse, where the advantage of bringing such things to the fediverse is the possibility of easily reaching a wide audience while still owning your content and platform.
I am also going to say that nostr has all these things in some alpha form or another. However, it is very much a mess right now and it is harder IMHO to connect with others or curate my feed with stuff I like.
The advantage of small groups and fedi is starting with a small network and growing it slowly, this is more rewarding than starting with the whole world and trying to pull back.
Nostr might have all the features but its a mess right now
Try Nostr, it is all the Fediverse wants to be but better
I personally think activity pub is overrated. Not that it's bad or anything. But many think of it, IMO, as the beginning and end of a new form of social media and people taking back the internet. In reality, I think it's literally just a protocol and so much more than people recognise depends on what people build on top of it. So far, for example, the limited interoperability between lemmy/kbin and the microblogs/mastodon, which is not a simple bug fix away, at all, is a major friction between these two platforms that essentially forces them to be separate spaces/platforms. This is so despite both using ActivityPub and actually federating with each rather well. Because, it's not (just) about the protocol, it's about platform designs and structures ... IE the software ... and the protocol can only do or guarantee very little on that front.
From what I've gathered, the diaspora people didn't adopt activitypub in large reason because of this, and I think they've always had a point. The pain some users have gone through trying to work out how to use lemmy and mastodon together, having been promised that ActivityPub is a whole new thing that creates a deep and wide fediverse, has been awful to see.