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
this post was submitted on 20 May 2025
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Just to be clear each site, Lemmy, Mastodon.... Would have it's own front page under this idea.
Most platforms have their "join lemmy" or "join Mastodon" equivalents already
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.
I just like that it's smaller. Like, you can actually have conversations (or slapfights :sigh:) and can actually recognize people. Kind of like something bigger than a small town but smaller than a huge city.
I'm not opposed to growth, and it would definitely be a good thing in the long run, but I like that it's not just shouting into the void here.
Thanks totally agree. And appreciate the comment.
I feel like this is still a community and less people trying to influence. Or less so at least.
Lol slapfight.
Growth is a long way away, we already lost 30% of the people that first came on board (couldn't stand having to create their own content smh)
Hey,
Hope you're doing well!
As well as can be expected, all things considered. Hope the same to you.
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.
Why on Earth would you want it to take over the social media space? Have you not seen what those places are like?
Because social media is controlled by big corporations and thats why they are such shit. Once Reddit, Twitter and Facebook falls and if it falls to the fediverse it will be controlled by the average joe not political money motivated operatives
Ah yes. The 'average joe'. :|
Why in Earth would you want it to take over the social media space?
So that the rest can be free with us.
But I don't like them and don't want them in my feed.
Mass-market slop troughs exist for a reason.
I feel like the current Lemmy, if it grew to be as big as Reddit, would immediately defederate from a large section of Lemmy itself, creating many separate communes rather than the one (or two) we have right now
There is that advantage.
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.
From my perspective, that's not something I'd use, or at least, it wouldn't have been much use to me when I was a young closeted queer person in small town Australia. It wouln't have been much help finding my peers
It could have been, there's nothing preventing such a network from providing a degree of anonymity by leaving your signature out of a post and adding a few increments to the distance on its onion route to obfuscate the source.
And in any case, you'd only need to make one remote friend to reach an entirely different segment of the network.
If you can stomach bitcoin bros, check out Nostr, it works more like this.
I cannot, and they can't stand me either because I've deleted more bitcoin than most of them will ever see and I've personally killed about $5million in crypto scams before they could pull out the rug. XD
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?
Lemmy.com Mastodon.com ... If those were the front pages that curated the top 25 posts and top 25 sub groups in the last 24 hours and it was a space where you could search for the groups you fit into or are interested in. No more confusing mess.
But who would control this front page?
A group of people who would all need to agree before action, a mini government of sorts, maybe elected idk but its the only way to gain a real foothold. The people running it are only supposed to act if illegal activity is going on and they are contacted by authorities in the appropriate jurisdiction.
The people running it are only supposed to act if illegal activity is going on and they are contacted by authorities in the appropriate jurisdiction.
which is the "appropriate" jurisdiction?
what if it's legal in my country, but it is illegal in the country where the server is? I have no other choice of server, you're taking away our ability to join servers in our own countries
Ideally it would be hosted in the EU and thus only things illegal there would be enforced.
Which EU country? Who's to say that's the ideal? That sounds biased. Also the "ideal" (if there is such a thing) could change over time with global politics.
any country in the EU
Including Germany, which has draconian laws against criticizing Israel's genocidal actions and fascist regime, as demonstrated by the recent drama over feddit.org?
Laws aren't identical across the EU. If you are aggregating content from a bunch of instances, there will be content aggregated that's illegal in one place and not another.
Welcome! Thanks for the suggestion, I'm happy with having multiple sites and not one team having absolute say on content over the rest.
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.
For mastadon, it's like 85% mastadon.social, Lemmy has it better with only 50%
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?
What's the Facebook alternative? Also blue sky is by far the closest to replacing Twitter with millions of users
Friendica is designed to be a facebook alternative. Not too familiar with it though.
You've just described the goals of Mbin. I congratulate you.
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.
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.