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Do you think there's better ways to fediverse? (sh.itjust.works)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Personally I think that if there was like a central link/front end to access everything and then have each user be able to have a recommended list of instances/hosts to access would be a more user friendly solution and a better solution for search engines. I know the fediverse is about decentralization but having a central front end and decentralized back end seems easier for new users. And then for the back ended hosting aspect each host would be able to manually pick which instances or communities to host and mirror. I'd like to hear your ideas since I have no idea what I'm talking about.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Really great ideas. I read up a bit on Fediblock and I think you’re absolutely right.

If I could riff off of your ideas a bit: instance-blocking recommendation lists bundle an entire stack of things together:

statements of fact or intent: this is wrong, this is right, this is insulting and harmful, this is insulting but not harmful if you can laugh at it
value judgements about those statements: I care about this issue but not that issue, this wrong statement is easily disproven, that wrong statement takes paragraphs to disprove, etc.
actions to take based on those value judgements: block, tag with a statement, link to an article, etc.

With things bundled, the whole stack has to be a pretty close match for a user’s own values, or else there’s friction. The user can just tolerate the friction, maybe miss out on some content, or they can decide to switch to a whole new list.

Suppose we could unbundle those from each other. Subscribe to the work of a group of volunteers that recommends safe defaults but lets you customize things when you encounter friction points.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I think that would be useful! I also think that anyone putting that much work in should look into hosting their own server, because they've already done the hardest part of hosting a server in the fediverse. A big part of the issue is that a lot of ActivityPub apps don't really have granular enough customization baked in to support that sort of thing just yet; you can get some apps that do that on the user side, but anything on the server/community side is usually just "block all" or nothing. The admin of my Mastodon instance is always complaining that he can't just hide certain instances from the "all" tab without blocking then entirely, and he just wants to hide them so they don't overwhelm the server, not block them from showing up for people who choose to interact with them.