No more “alternatives” please. That formula has failed over and over again. We want software that can do what proprietary platforms do not pursue because it’s not profitable. Online spaces to build meaningful connections, have interesting conversations with like-minded people, discover new things, be free from trolls and toxicity, possibly without the guilt of polluting the hell out of this planet with hardware and excessive electricity consumption.
Example? I’m skeptical there’s anything that both appeals to a reasonably large audience and isn’t monetisable. I’m very skeptical you can do it with less toxicity and computation somehow.
Edit: I suppose dating sites might count. They’re very much not optimised for actually finding good partners at this point, because gamified swipe dating keeps people hooked. Computation and toxicity are still pretty intractable.
That’s a measure of success that makes sense only in a for-profit, growth-oriented environment. Software just has to be sustainable and “bigger” doesn’t necessarily imply "more sustainable.
That said, what is now possible with social media is extremely restricted and our idea of what a social media is is constrained by profit motives. Social media could be much more, connect humans for collaboration and exchange instead of data extraction. We are so used to the little crumbs of positive experiences on social media that we normalized it.
Bonfire, for example, if we want to stick to the fediverse, is trying to challenge this narrative and push the boundaries of what a social media is supposed to do.
Another space would be non-siloed notion-like tools.
Anothe entire can of worms would be to go beyond the “dictatorship of the app” and start building software and UX around flexibility and customizability for the average user, rather than keeping this a privilege for tools targeting power users. Flexibility in UX means harder trackability and less CTR, so most end-user “apps” avoid that.
Okay, sure, you could make an ultra-niche Fediverse app that has integration with a digital toothbrush or something, I’ll give you that. If three people can productively use it I’m not sure that counts as a form of social media, though. I’d use a descriptor more like “add-on service”. The “social” part means you need a certain number of bodies involved.
What’s the deal with Bonfire? As far as I can tell it’s microblogging with an emphasis on customisability.
Open source endpoints are great. I’m a big fan.
Edit: Oh hey! They have a blog post about that. So basically, it’s another framework on top of ActivityPub. I like the sound of that. From their GitHub they currently integrate microblogging and some weird thing that I can only describe as socially distributed accounting.
they are also doing a whole flavor just for research-oriented social media, geared towards the OpenScience community and the academia in general. It will launch soon.
Then they have a whole set of collaboration tools and groupware, that now kinda incorporates the basic features of Trello and GitHub, but on top of a social media with granular permission systems. There the use cases are many more, but it’s also much more general-purpose than the research flavor. I think the end-game would be to have a platform that acts as a middleware and connect social life, gift-based collaboration, work and consumption in a single open platforms.
I also wrote an article envisioning a federated notion-like tool built on top of Bonfire, that clearly would allow to structure knowledge and implement no-code software on top of Bonfire, but clearly this would require a disproportionate effort for what the project is at the moment: …notion.site/Fractal-Software-for-Fractal-Futures…
Some of them try and sneak an ad at the start or end. It’s rare though.
Most stuff now is mkv which has a good chance of including the subtitles straight from the Blu-ray or streaming service.
I tend to wait for at least a digital or physical release before downloading so I don’t get a load of blurry crap with an ad for an Asian gambling site splattered across the middle of it.
I’m on two. You can literally spin one up for probably $30/mo if memory serves (for a fancy Discourse server on Digital Ocean), then just invite people.
E: actually price looks to be between $5 and $12 dollars depending on your needs, and how much work you’re willing to put in
Having bought and sold there the rules are quite arbitrary, and their cryptic algorhitm is a nuisance to buyers (you clicked by accident on a stove? You’re gonna see a ton of stoves in the recommended for a while!) and periodically harms sellers (if you don’t post daily and basically make it your day job, good luck making money!)
a federated alternative, with different instances for various interests and categories, meta-categories even and so on. Maybe regional instances like we have on here, one for the EU (quite convenient to ship and receive packages from inside of it, no customs wasting time and money) one for North America, one for East Asia, etc. With one being able to purchase from all of them.
Federation would also ensure that rules are properly enforced without abuses or other malpractices like eBay does (did you know eBay shipped a pig head to somebody who publicly criticized them?) since those instances would naturally be avoided and new ones would be made. It would also prevent excessive fees, as the fediverse is generally not a for-profit endeavor, and still, there will always be the option to shop around from other instances.
PHP styled forums and Boorus would be cool. I know some PHP forums have recently added activitypub support, but it’s still pretty recent and doesn’t have much of a userbase.
Also a video platform like YouTube in a way. There’s still a lot of issues to solve with that though, like storage and monetization. PeerTube just isn’t going to cut it. Realistically if this were to ever happen, it’d have to be YouTube themselves to add activitypub support themselves and let people connect to them.
I’m not sure if you would classify this as a “social media platform”, but imagine a federated MMO. Each server could specify its own rules for things like XP and drops, allow or disallow mods among its playerbase, or even have custom items and quests - but in certain areas (ie “in town”) all of this stuff would be disabled so that players from multiple different servers could all interact. You could choose a server based on whether you like a high pop or a low pop experience, temporarily try other servers out by partying up with someone from it, major guilds could run their own servers with their own events and stuff, and so on. Admins would want to defederate from poorly-moderated servers, servers with cheaters or with mods/rules that they think disrupt the experience they’re after, or whatever other reason.
In one of my old jobs we had a couple thousand line shell script called something like prod_corrections_adhoc.ksh. It was used to jam through emergency fixes between code releases.
I’ve seen programmers who accidentally click left gutter(next to line numbers) on vscode and then are confused as to why there are “red dots” in their .jsx files.
As a graphic designer hearing people roast comic sans and papyrus to make small talk with me at work gets so god damn old.
Thank you for staying off the hype train. There is nothing wrong with these typefaces.
Unfortunately I even have to avoid them though because they have become the Hitler mustache of the type world. Sure you can say you are rocking the Charlie Chaplin, but everyone from a distance will wonder “why is that dude rocking a Hitler mustache? WTF!?”
It’s not that they’re bad. With Comic Sans, the issue it how often it’s used inappropriately. With Papyrus I think the issue is it’s too distinctive and too commonly used. Instead of creating the effect it’s going for, its affect instead is to remind you of all the other things you’ve seen that use Papyrus.
lemmy.ml
Oldest