Hi Fediverse, I’ve recently been interested in the ActivityPub protocol as well as the programming language Elixir. To better learn both technologies and simultaneously get a product out of it I’ve thought about making (yet another) federated social network.
The main ideas that would set it apart from other federated networks are the following.
It should be easy to use for people who are not tech savy. It should appeal to local communities, like a sports club, as a platform to organize and .
It should be a platform where communities can organise, share discussions and create events. I know many people who use Facebook primarily for this kind of functionality. I hope this could be a gateway for smaller local communities to move over to something more free and open.
Users should be able to categorize their feeds into nested lists, like traditional RSS readers. The idea is that you could subscribe to your favorite PeerTube creators in one feed, and the blogs you follow in another, even with subcategories. You might also make a feed for Lemmy communities you want to follow.
I would love to hear what thoughts you have on this.
What do you think? Do you think the fediverse is the right technology for this? Am I focusing on the right audience? Do you have comments on the attached mockup design?
I would appreciate if you shared this post across the fediverse, such that not just Lemmy users could be a part of the discussion.
For people who are interested in my project Photoview don’t worry, I love to work on that and I will continue to do so.
I love the idea, and am advocating myself for some time to create better abstractions of “Community” in the fediverse than we have now. I call it the “Community has no Boundary” paradigm, where a community goes well-beyond a simple group of members. Instead it can have a rich set of Relationships to other actors (Person, Organization, Group, etc.), some standardized, some app-specific. “Community” as a concept might standardized on the fediverse, where a server exposes one or more Group actors. In the current fediverse the community is implicit and defined by the “instance boundary”. Lemmy is among the first apps that slice things differently and expose many communities with the recent federation update. I wrote more on this in Standardizing on ActivityPub Groups and Standardizing on a common Community domain as AP extension?
The user-friendliness is very important indeed. I see a lot of people comparing to Facebook, and I guess you’d compete with them from functional perspective. But I couldn’t tell as I’ve never used FB. The FB walled garden excludes people that have no account. Maybe your app can shine here, by allowing integrations to the websites that these local communities have. Like GoToSocial the app may be a back-end service, where different UI’s can consume the API.
Thank you so much for your work on this and for sharing it here. Much of the interpretation of the ActivityPub specification has been quite clear to me by reading the W3 spec and looking at implementations.
But I currently only have a vague idea of how groups should work and since it will be an integral part of the platform I want to get it right. I haven’t read the threads you linked yet, but I will make sure to read them carefully.
Maybe your app can shine here, by allowing integrations to the websites that these local communities have. Like GoToSocial the app may be a back-end service, where different UI’s can consume the API.
That’s a great idea, I hadn’t thought of that! Maybe building a small Wordpress plugin aswell since most of smaller communities tend to use that for their websites.
A community dedicated to fediverse news and discussion.
Fediverse is a portmanteau of “federation” and “universe”. It is a common, informal name for a federation of social network servers whose main purpose is microblogging, the sharing of short, public messages.
I love the idea, and am advocating myself for some time to create better abstractions of “Community” in the fediverse than we have now. I call it the “Community has no Boundary” paradigm, where a community goes well-beyond a simple group of members. Instead it can have a rich set of Relationships to other actors (Person, Organization, Group, etc.), some standardized, some app-specific. “Community” as a concept might standardized on the fediverse, where a server exposes one or more Group actors. In the current fediverse the community is implicit and defined by the “instance boundary”. Lemmy is among the first apps that slice things differently and expose many communities with the recent federation update. I wrote more on this in Standardizing on ActivityPub Groups and Standardizing on a common Community domain as AP extension?
The user-friendliness is very important indeed. I see a lot of people comparing to Facebook, and I guess you’d compete with them from functional perspective. But I couldn’t tell as I’ve never used FB. The FB walled garden excludes people that have no account. Maybe your app can shine here, by allowing integrations to the websites that these local communities have. Like GoToSocial the app may be a back-end service, where different UI’s can consume the API.
Thank you so much for your work on this and for sharing it here. Much of the interpretation of the ActivityPub specification has been quite clear to me by reading the W3 spec and looking at implementations.
But I currently only have a vague idea of how groups should work and since it will be an integral part of the platform I want to get it right. I haven’t read the threads you linked yet, but I will make sure to read them carefully.
That’s a great idea, I hadn’t thought of that! Maybe building a small Wordpress plugin aswell since most of smaller communities tend to use that for their websites.