Bluesky already implemented that
Oh really? Awesome. I’m still not going to use a generalist social network, but they’re doing it right. :)
although most users will just stick to the default one
Yeah, indeed. My taste for tinkering may be showing, I should acknowledge it’s not something widespread. 😅
I would one up that suggestion : what could be awesome would be to allow users to choose which sorting algorithm they use, and possibly tweak it. This would allow people to share the sorting logic they like, and there would be no trust issue, since you can verify the logic is respected by changing it.
Not sure how realistic this proposal is, though, because this could lead to performance issues if users submit too complicated sorting logic, which could be exploited to DoS an instance. On the other hand, it could be solved with a timeout mechanism : “if your query takes more than 100 ms to load, we kill it”. And also, you can’t just let users run arbitrary SQL, obviously, so this would require to implement some sort of meta-language safely transpiled, this would be the real challenge.
In such a widespread usage, there would probably not be “the fediverse” anymore, but a galaxy of clusters of interconnected instances. Spam would be a serious problem, so instances would switch to whitelisting instances they want to federate with instead of just occasionally “defederating” from them. It would not only happen because of spam, by the way, but also because of political/cultural/ideological divergences. Maybe even because of laws.
There would be a boom of innovations, made possible because of the data openly accessible and the fact that we would finally have a standard on which to build upon to create third party applications (which, from a developer perspective, was the promise of the web-2.0 and its APIs, but never truly materialized). You would see alternative frontends for everything, and applications that allow to get new insights or use your data in new and smart ways.
The big businesses would still be around, by the way. They would open their own instances, publish lot of ads and add cool features found nowhere else so that most people join their instances, which would quickly become the go to instances for everyone, dwarving all other instances. We would spend a lot of time evangelizing so that people join smaller instances instead, but our folks would answer that it’s less convenient, they would have less easy to use features and their account is already at BigCo anyway. Plus, to fight spam, terrorism, child pornography, nazis or whatever is the scarecrow then, they would severely limit the possibility for small instances to interop with them, adding arbitrary technical barriers that most implementers won’t succeed in hoping. But we won’t care that much, because we will have our own alternative networks with more content on them than ever.
GitHub is a great platform, which has championed open-source for decades, now. I don’t think anybody has anything to blame them for (except people not liking the idea that AI is trained on their code, like sibling mentioned), it’s more about fears it may go bad. Because basically, it’s where most of the code of the world is hosted, it’s a single point of failure. People also have questioned the pertinence of having all open-source code hosted on a proprietary platform. And the acquisition by Microsoft also had a chilling effect on those of us who remember Internet Explorer 6’s Microsoft more than VSCode’s Microsoft.
For those reasons, it is desirable for those who love the idea of decentralization to look up for alternatives. But even there, it’s perfectly fine to stay on GitHub, “decentralizing” doesn’t require everybody to leave. :) Plus, even when using an other forge, it’s still good to keep publishing mirrors on GitHub for visibility and discoverability, currently.
Thanks for raising the issue.
Most probably, people who made that decision are not aware of the implications and made that choice in good faith, so it’s worth giving reasons why you want them to avoid proprietary software, rather than just frowning at them.
To the admins of lemmy.world and anyone who feels confuse about why this is an issue : it is about freedom. You all know how Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc are turning ugly, and you can’t do anything about it. With FOSS (Free and Open Source Software), when it turns ugly, you can do something about it. You (or any technical person who agrees with you) can take the code and go your own way with it (we call that “forking”). No decision of the authors can be forced upon you. Similarly, if you think something is not working right, you can fix it yourself, and send the changes to the maintainers of the code, who usually are happy to get some help. So it’s also about freedom of fixing your own problems, instead of waiting and praying the authors do something about it.
And this is the whole spirit of the Fediverse : taking matters in our own hands instead of being betrayed once more by a company which decides that their bottom line requires to be user hostile. One day, this will happen to Discord to, it always ends up there. That’s why people using Lemmy who are aware of those problems are not happy with seeing lemmy.world use Discord.
Thanks to the admins of lemmy.world for all the work they provide to the Fediverse.
Anyone heard of them being DDOS’d? This certainly sounds like ongoing DDOS and protections kicking in (assuming that by “verify my account” you mean “having to solve a captcha”).
You can think of it like that, a scrapbook that updates everyday with new things about your chosen subjects. Or you can think of it as a newspaper in which there are only news about things you like. It’s quite close to a Facebook/Twitter feed where you would follow companies/projects/artists you like, with the notable difference that there is not a centralized authority (the owners of Faceook or Twitter) who can decide to change your experience (by altering what you see, removing some content, adding some ads or whatever). Oh, and also, you can’t comment. :) (but the articles you’re reading in your aggregator have links to their original web page, which often contain a comment section).
I’m sorry, I’m not taking your word for it, that’s not how it works. :) Do you have reliable sources on that?
requested info : I don’t use Facebook. I’ve had an account I opened in 2018 due to peer pressure, and I closed it in 2018.
I’m not familiar with that story, so correct me if I’m wrong, but this looks like a classic case of shooting the messenger. Facebook is a communication tool. The fact that horrible people used it to do horrible things doesn’t sound like a problem with the tool, except of course if people from Facebook were aware of it while it was happening (I doubt so, for the simple reason that they would have nothing to gain from that, and much to lose ; but again, correct me if I’m wrong). Genocides have probably been organized using phone and paper mail systems, but nobody would say “stop using phones, it’s bloodstained”. At least, with Facebook, there’s a possibility of moderation that never existed with previous means of communication.
… but fuck Facebook anyway. :P
This made me laugh as well, especially given how that concept is prevalent in the US. 😂 OP is probably not a native speaker.
It’s a feed protocol for websites. Each time you see that icon, it’s a RSS feed :
You have a RSS client, a program you use to display your news. In it, you paste the url of the RSS feed of the various websites you want to follow, and just like that, you have an app in which you can go every morning to see what’s new in your favorite websites, all at once.
Now, the problem of course is that not every website, by far, is offering RSS feeds, so you have to look for those who provide one. RSS is popular among techies and journalists, so press and tech blogs are where they are the most common. On top of that, there are many websites having RSS feed without even knowing it, because they use Wordpress or other engines that automatically provide RSS feeds. Those are a bit more tricky to get your hand on, because there is no link anywhere on their page, you have to look in the source code of the page (using Control + u) to find an “alternate rss” or “atom” link. It used to be automatically detected by browsers, showing an icon in the url bar when a RSS feed was detected, but it’s not the case anymore. You can still install a browser extension to make them appear, like this (chrome) or this (firefox).
For the record, youtube has RSS feeds for all publishers, reddit has RSS feeds for all subs, most major news websites have RSS site, so it’s quite useful, provided you can find the feed urls.
Then, to actually aggregate the news, you need a RSS client in which to paste those feed urls. There are tons of them. Name your favorite platform, there probably are a dozen RSS clients for it. Mobile, web, desktop, it’s everywhere. So pick the one you like best. :) You just have to search for "RSS client for ". A couple popular exemples : The Old Reader on the web and Thunderbird (which is also a mai client) on desktop.
I don’t think it’s a Mastodon problem. It’s a generalist social network problem. Facebook, Twitter, Mastodon, why are we using those? For some, it’s “to keep in touch” with friends and family, and they’re happy seeing any activity, preferably things that makes them smile (that’s more Facebook). For others, it’s a mean to build street cred in their industry by publicly saying on topic things that sound smart (that was Twitter). But if you look for interesting discussions on things you like, in order to learn something, they’re terrible at that. It’s where specialized communities, discussing only one topic, shine. It used to be forums, then reddit, now lemmy. RSS is also a very good way to get that kick.
He’s clearly laying the groundwork to sell it to Alphabet (Google’s parent company). /s
2033 is maybe a bit too far for me. :P Here one for 2027 : “Y (previously known as Reddit) finally shuts down after failing its pivot to b2b AGI support board. CEO says the world doesn’t deserve Y anyway.”