Fediverse

Gateways that ease the pain of entrance to the fediverse are a good thing. A single, centralised gateway that defacto controls all access to the fediverse is exactly what I'm trying to get away from

I kinda like the fediverse as is. We keep slowly growing our services. We don't need to be social media.

We can be social sure but without the need to be ever growing. I would rather us concentrate on the people and giving us power rather than huge orgs that are going to do huge org things.

Then make the "one true frontpage" for Lemmy or whatever (implement ActivityPub, maybe borrowing some code from the Lemmy codebase itself, or kindof making a fork of Lemmy), and if it's good, it'll be used. If not, it won't.

But then, it might well fall victim to this phenomenon:

Lemmy has lots of competing "front pages." How will one more change anything? A more generic domain name or something?

It would give an enormous power to who controls this "front page". This page could restrict any user arbitrarily, lock them out, spy on them, etc. And because this page would be unique, they would have no alternative. This is exactly why federation is a key to freedom.

Hot take? Blue Sky should be worked with to join the Fediverse as the twitter alternative and Mastodon should work to be the Facebook alternative

??? Why should Mastodon become an entirely different kind of site when there's already Facebook alternatives for the fediverse?

As much as I love the fediverse, its control structures can't scale. If it ever became truly popular, bad actors would overwhelm it almost immediately.

You know what's exactly as decentralized as fediverse? Email. Do you know anyone who doesn't use email?

Why on Earth would you want it to take over the social media space? Have you not seen what those places are like?

IMO, it isn't decentralized enough. The federated model is better than centralized corporate services, of course, but it still suffers many of the same pitfalls in microcosm. We need private, encrypted friend-to-friend connections that enable friend-of-a-friend onion routing to those outside one's personal social circle to effectively mimic how real human social networks actually work. The only middlemen we need are the friends we made along the way.

While not being exactly what you are proposing, you could consider mastodon.social and lemmy.world the de facto front page for each service. They are by far the largest and best-known instances in their respective networks. Many new users start at those instances, get their toes wet, and then branch out.

I'm not arguing that's how the network should be structured, though.

Welcome! Thanks for the suggestion, I'm happy with having multiple sites and not one team having absolute say on content over the rest.

But who would control this front page?

Google Chat or whatever uses to be federated via XMPP, but then they slowly started making incompatibility changes. Due to it being such a dominant chatting service, the real federated versions died out.

Basically I'm saying it's not worth it. If you want to support Threads or Blue Sky as a central front page to the Fediverse then go for it, but they don't actually need your support.

You've just described the goals of Mbin. I congratulate you.

I, and a lot of other fedizens, don't want the type of people who use BlueSky and Facebook in my ActivityPub fediverse.

Fedi is cool because it's small, weird, and highly enriched with people I'm actually interested in communicating with. I don't need or want the pool to be diluted with an ocean of piss.