Fediverse

I absolutely believe the Fediverse needs to remain a space built on transparency, autonomy, and equity for users, instance admins, and developers working on ActivityPub. Look at the current state of social media, power and money concentrated in the hands of a few, stifling innovation and undermining trust. The centralized model isn’t just flawed, I think it’s had a devastating impact on an entire generation.

The Fediverse offers us a chance to rethink how the internet should work. It’s not just about being a space for free expression; it’s also about proving that a values-driven model can support those who keep the lights on. My main question is, can we implement monetization that honors our commitment to fairness, transparency, and equity, while still ensuring that the people supporting the network earn a livable wage?

This isn’t about getting rich, it’s about creating a sustainable ecosystem that empowers us all to build and maintain a trustworthy digital space. The Fediverse is already a success in its own right, but to truly evolve and thrive, I would argue we need a resource model that can drive sustainable innovation and meaningful progress.

TL;DR: I’d quit my day job tomorrow if I could secure a living wage from this work. Many in tech whold do the same. Is a monetization model that fairly compensates those who support and sustain the Fediverse possible?

I'm leveraging Piefed for something incredibly neat.

You might notice that I'm tagging my photography posts with usernames. In fact, those are not usernames -- they are #Piefed communities.

And to get the full effect of what I'm doing, it's important to visit each individual community for the full aesthetic impact. So here's the links:

1. @dustbloom@piefed.social: https://piefed.social/c/dustbloom
2. @blue@piefed.social: https://piefed.social/c/blue
3. @lumoura@piefed.social: https://piefed.social/c/lumoura
4. @sizz@piefed.social: https://piefed.social/c/sizz
5. @recordpics@piefed.social: https://piefed.social/c/piefed

More important is how I'm submitting content to those Piefed communities. From pixelfed.social and atomicpoet.org, I'm uploading photos from those two servers: pixelfed.social is my own artwork; atomicpoet.org is interesting art I stumble upon. After I upload a photo, I give it a description in a post, then tag it with the community "username" I want it to submit it towards.

Once the post is live, the originating server sends the post over to Piefed, and Piefed reposts it to the community I tag.

Voila! I now have submitted my post to an aesthetic and curated community, for which anyone can collaborate with me on.

Within a day, we got lots of activity here -- and several people are already interacting with photos posted there.

@fediverse@lemmy.world

A lot of us know by now that Substack has a Nazi problem. It not only profits from fascist voices, it actively promotes their work and recruits them. And it's funded by Silicon Valley anti-democracy billionaires like Marc Andreesen — the same type of people who are, right now, raiding the US government to basically cut funding for social services and scientific research, and to steal money for themselves.

Still, a lot of talented writers — including some that I subscribe to — publish on Substack. But others have moved to Ghost, an open source and non-shitty-tech-bro newsletter service. These include Casey Newton's publication Platformer, Molly White's newsletter Citation Needed, and plenty of others. From the beginning, 404 Media decided to publish on Ghost because, as I understand it, Substack sucks.

. . .

If you already have a Substack, Ghost has written documentation explaining how to migrate your subscribers (including paid ones) to a new Ghost newsletter. Since both Substack and Ghost use Stripe as a payment processor, your paid subscribers don't have to do anything to continue paying you.

Setting up and running your own Fediverse instance is an incredibly empowering thing. A good analogy for it is: imagine you have been renting apartments your whole life and then purchase a home. Your home, where you make all the rules, customize it to your liking and take great care of it because it's YOUR home. That's precisely what I have been doing for a digital home - on the Fediverse - with my GoToSocial microblogging instance: @elena@aseachange.com.

If the thought of self-hosting makes you immediately tune out, thinking: "oh my, this sounds so complicated and unattainable for a regular, non-technical person" well, I can understand. I had that exact mindset as recently as November 2024. Heck, even December 2024. But then I took the plunge and never looked back. I'm here to tell you about my journey of tech empowerment, made possible by YunoHost and GoToSocial.

Hi folks! I'm here with another idea. Let's make an amazon alternative. I know! I know! That was asked for a couple times already but lets discuss some details.

Amazon is basically glorified dropshipping by now. What if we just made federated (not sure if over activitypub would work) ads and sales, powered by fediseer (the "trust" network of the fediverse).

Example 1: So you buy at toms groceries, you trust them. they have experience with tina's hardware store and they trust them. so you can buy both toms and tinas wares on both sites.

Example 2: So for example, I run a small business that sells computers. You run a small business that sells mice and keyboards. I have worked with you before so I mark you as trusted in my local website, which federates with yours, showing your products in my shop. If a customer buys my computer and buys your keyboard on top, my site sends you a buy order with customer address and payment. I get a small fee for my electricity of say 1%.

Can someone try and poke holes in this idea? It feels like this could work!

Have a nice weekend.

Obviously excluding videos whose authors explicitly do not want to, or copyrighted content that could create problems for individual instances.

By doing this PeerTube could become a kind of youtube database of quality content, excluding shorts and toxic/futile videos. What do you think of this approach? Could it make PT more attractive, or would it create problems for the platform?

I'm sure many creators would do it themselves but don't have time, or many would do it but don't even know about the existence of the Fediverse. Perhaps you could start by making “fan channels,” with all the most important and significant videos on a youtube channel (so without having to stay up-to-date on recent releases).

Hey there!

Last year, I fell into the Fediverse-rabbithole and I really like it so far. We already have alternatives for Twitter/X, Facebook, Instagram, Reddit and so on.

But today I realized, there actually isn't an alternative for tinder. But I think there could be a huge demand for it. This could also motivate people to change platforms, since no one wants to buy tinder premium for a lot of money.

But I think I'm maybe not the first one coming up with this idea. What do you think about this?

~ sp3ctre

Ibis is a federated encyclopedia which uses the ActivityPub protocol, just like Mastodon or Lemmy. If you want to start a wiki for a TV series, a videogame, or an open source project then Ibis is for you! You can register on an existing instance or install it on your own server. Then you can start editing on the topic of your choice, and connect to other Ibis instances for different topics. Federation ensures that articles get mirrored across many servers, and can be read even if the original instance goes down. Ibis is written in Rust and Webassembly, fully open source to make future enshittification impossible.

This release features a redesigned explore page to browse instances and recently edited articles. Articles now have federated nested comments, as well as more subscription options to get notified about new edits and comments. There are also lots of minor changes and improvements.

Changelog

• New explore page with list of instances which shows the topic, update time and list of recently edited articles
• Implement nested comments for articles
• Users can subscribe to articles, in order to get notified about new edits and comments
• Settings for instance name and topic
• Much better error handling
• Add HTML title tag for all pages
• Icons
• Make diff view readable in dark mode (thanks @Earthgames)
• Basic about page
• Show pending edits which have not federated yet
• Various bug fixes

The next major version 0.3.0 will include federation with Lemmy, Mastodon and other compatible Fediverse platforms. The plan is to treat each Ibis instance as a community, with articles as posts. This way users on Lemmy and compatible platforms can directly browse, read and comment on wiki articles.

To follow Ibis development subscribe to !ibis@lemmy.ml or join the Matrix chat. Contributions to the source code are more than welcome.

Maybe you've spent some time on a #Fediverse community server and enjoyed it, but really wanted to start your own. What do you need? How do you do it? We wrote a guide just for you.

Around two years ago, I created @fediversenews@venera.social -- which proved to be one of the most popular Friendica groups ever. Unfortunately, I had difficulty moderating that group and so I decreased my posting there. However, I saw that Piefed has a much more advanced moderation toolkit, so I'm migrating that community over there.

If you still follow @fediversenews@venera.social, be sure to follow !fediversenews@piefed.social -- since that Friendica group will be shut down soon.

Dear Fediversalists,

I am new here. I moderate a 50 000 members Finnish language Facebook group on no-fly travelling since 2015. I want to reduce our dependence on billionaire owned media, so we are trying to start an expansion here on the free side. I learned about Feddit.org and founded the community https://feddit.org/c/maatapitkinmatkustus.

Do you think this was the best move to make? Maybe we should move to another instance before our community grows too big here?

There are some issues I am unsure about. First, I have realised after having created the Finnish language community, that feddit.org is listed as a local instance of German speaking countries and so I could not choose Finnish as the community language, I had to “officially” choose English and German instead, though we are discussing in Finnish in the community.

Second, I do not know how big our community could grow on this server. Maybe the server will decide some day that there is no room for us anymore?

Third, I am concerned about how Feddit.org is going. I just installed Voyager, but I cannot connect to Feddit.org. I could connect to any other instance with it. What if the server has to close – would our community disappear with all the data?

On the other hand, I am happy using Lemmy. The user interface is easy and intuitive (maybe because I happen to belong to the net forums and blogs reader generation). So what would you recommend to a Finnish language group with a potential to grow to (tens of) thousands?

Please, put the pitchforks and torches down. Hear me out.

You (yes, you!) are a front-runner. You are a first-mover. You came to the fediverse while most people don't even know it's a thing.

In the last couple of weeks/months, there's been an increasing sentiment to boycott the established social media (Facebook, Xitter, Reddit, etc.), due to their rollback of fact-checking and hate speech protection. This has resulted in a lot of new users for a lot of instances lately.

Feddit.dk has gotten over 50 new users in the past few weeks, which is about a +50% increase of the monthly active users, a big deal for a small instance like ours.

This is a great opportunity to teach others about the fediverse and get more people to move to a more democratic, sustainable internet. But all these potential users are still on the corporate social media - we can't reach them unless we are there!

You, the first-mover, is exactly the kind of person we need to stay on Facebook, just for a while, to guide people over to the fediverse. Feddit.dk was actually posted in a Facebook group a few weeks back and we got a few users that way! We've also gotten a lot of users via Reddit recently, as people on /r/Denmark have been mentioning Feddit.dk. Guiding people from corporate social media to the fediverse has been the most successful way to get more users so far.

We can't get second-movers if the first-movers leave everyone behind. So maybe, consider not deleting your Facebook or Reddit account just yet, and if you don't, try to look out for people that are looking for alternatives. You can be their guide.

(and if you want to delete Facebook regardless, I totally respect that choice btw)

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/39411782

After moving in to our new server last month, our next large project is to set up some new Fediverse platforms. One of the most requested of those was Pixelfed, which is an image sharing platform.

You should be able to sign up here: pixelfed.ca

As with any new instance, some issues are to be expected and while we've done some testing already, please bear with us as things get going. For any support related issues with pixelfed.ca, please post in the new !pixelfed@lemmy.ca community

Edit: We have moved from pixeld.ca to pixelfed.ca!

I created !dull_mens_club@lemmy.world a few months ago and then started seeing contraversies around moderation policies and federation that just don't apply to the type of content on dull mens club so I decided to make an instance solely to host that community.

!dullsters@dullsters.net

I'm not sure if this has happened yet, but I like the idea of having a neutral instance that users can still visit regardless of what happens. There's no user signups, only admin/moderator accounts. Users have to use an account from a federated instance.

Flipboard and Surf.Social are hosting the first-ever Fediverse House at SXSW to explore the world of decentralized social media.

The organization behind critical pieces of Trust & Safety infrastructure in the Fediverse is struggling to make ends meet. Here's what's going on, what the road ahead looks like, and how to help.

Please be nice as this is VERY beta. Thought I would share with the rest of the fedi. Looks like a passion project so again please be nice.

Shows decentral AI fungus that can be browsed like a chat bot connected to other chat bots - and it can also be interacted with through Mastodon and its connected knowledge graph. It's basically three views of the same thing, just from different webs!

I found a super simple way to refer people to Lemmy.

One simple message:

Try out the Reddit alternative called Lemmy https://phtn.app/

It also has a mobile app: https://vger.app/settings/install

This way a user can just click, start seeing content and what Lemmy is about, and if they want to comment etc. they will be asked to create an account with lemm.ee selected as a default.

This should fix most of the onboarding UX issues, and eliminate the decision fatigue of trying to figure out which instance is best.

Hi guys just wanted to know if Lemmy has any karma count for people in their profile like Reddit has? If so is it public and How can I access it? Edit: Thanks guys I'm so relieved that this kind of stuff is not prevalent here. I love the Fediverse ❤️

If at some point you want to delete your account and have your posts and comments be gone, you better delete it all manually before you actually delete the account, because that deletion process does not really work as advertised.

For my main account on world (which runs an outdated lemmy version), it seemed like at least the account deletion was federated so that my user page was no longer browsable from other instances, but none of my posts, comments or images had been deleted, not even on the home instance.

The homie @MrKaplan@lemmy.world helped me by manually deleting my stuff, but it seems like that has only worked for the home instance, posts and comments seem to still be readable from other instances (except for some of the images that MrKaplan manually deleted too, but that was only possible up to a date not too far in the past because lemmy used to not associate user uploads with the accounts). So my old posts from the world account can be viewed just fine from other instances:

https://lemm.ee/post/1379925

For other instances that are more up to date the process is even worse imo, while locally things seem to get deleted, federation does not seem to happen at all. For example you can still browse my deleted slrpnk or lemmee accounts from other instances just fine:

https://slrpnk.net/u/achtungdrempels@lemm.ee

https://lemm.ee/u/AchtungDrempels@slrpnk.net

Account deletion in piefed works kinda like the old lemmy system (as on lemmy.world), and nothing gets deleted except the user page (which also seems to get federated), the posts and comments stay up.

Thought this would be interesting to some, if i had known what a mess this would be (obviously expected some federation issues, just not like that), i would have manually deleted everything. I deleted all these accounts in December, maybe this has been addressed somehow in the meantime, personally i'd have trust issues in this process.