Hi everyone! I’m building Seamantic, a Mastodon client that introduces the "semantic feed" — a way to interact directly with the Semantic Web.

Here’s how it works:

• Ask Questions: Post queries to the semantic feed. Bots like SeBridge (which I introduced in an earlier post) connect to knowledge bases to provide answers by listening on Mastodon hashtags for queries.

• Contribute Data: Insert data into the feed by posting insert-queries, helping bots grow their underlying knowledge bases.

• Sea-Level: Track your balance—querying raises the "sea-level," and contributing lowers it, encouraging collaboration. When the sea-level goes over a certain level, posting queries is blocked until the sea-level is lowered by contribution.

By connecting users and knowledge bases, the semantic feed creates a dynamic flow of high-quality, consensus-driven data.

What do you think of the idea? Feedback is always welcome.

The semantic web, for example through projects like dbpedia.org, tries to make the internet machine-readable. By making it accessible in Mastodon, users could quickly access and share data from the semantic web.

Theory

A new decentralized social media paradigma, in which data of posts is used to gain some addional features (opt-in).

I would additionally differentiate between central and decentralized bots.

Collective posting means posting to a bot (centralized or not), which then determines which posts go out and how, based on data collected by the bot through earlier iterations of this process, determined by some agreed upon guidelines.

Anarachist posting means posting to the Fediverse, while at the same time collecting all of these messages via a bot (centralized or not), which sends the data back to the client, who can use it again for some calculation based on chosen processes. Examples

Let's see what that means if I want to post my cooking plan for the week.

Anarchist Posting

I post my fridge-content and what I want to cook. This information with all the other participants is saved by the bot and later provided to me as suggestions for my next cooking plan based on a process that I picked.

Centralized bot

The bot posts global suggestions what each participant can do better (for example to eat healthier), based on their chosen settings.

Decentralized bot

Its all done in my bot, which displays suggestions individually to me.

Collective Posting

I post my fridge-content and what I would like to cook. The bot takes this message in with what all the others want to cook and have and then decides what I get to cook and post it based on a distribution-algorithm that I have agreed to.

Centralized bot

One centralized bot calculates the perfect meal for everyone; or every participant but the message is posted globally.

Decentralized bot

Perfect meals are calculated decentrally based on the agreed upon guidelines.

In Sidekick

Anarchist posting: When posting through the Dolphin-bot, all posts are collected and then used on the client-side to provide suggestions to Dolphin-users.

Collective posting: With the Buzz Lightsting-bot, all posts done via Buzz are not sent immediatly, but collected at the central Lightsting-bot, shuffled and then sent randomly over the participating profiles at specified times.

(This is just an outlook, its theoretically implemented, but the client currently only supports being used by a single person ... it would also be nice to attach this functionality to hashtags ... its all a bit work in progress ;))

Currently, there are six bots available:

• Larry: Classic text posting: just post text
• Spark: turns all text into uppercase
• Ennui: produces low-effort posts (removes punctuation, makes it lowercase, introduces typos)
• Jea: schedule posts by starting post with a hashtag and the number of minutes to postpone
• Hamlet: adds a random Shakespear quote to the post
• Legion: send out multiple posts by starting the message with a hastag with the number of repeats

You can select three of them and have them then available next to the post-button as a quick-select.

I tried multiple times to win over H.P.-communities to join Lemmy, until now with no success. Usually they either dont reply, threaten to ban me (Reddit) or say they dont have the time.

The latter happened to me just recently. They heard about the Fediverse, think its cool, but are already overwhelmed with keeping the site up.

What do you think here? Are you having similar experiences? Are you even doing it? Whould it be a good idea to propose a minimal solution like RSS-integration rather than full AP-support?