Is there any real or serious conversation or work around the idea of a feature-full social media browser?
Basically something like a web browser but for “all the social media” along with useful organisation features too.
For locked down big social APIs, this makes less sense nowadays, but for open alt-social systems, it is likely the most valuable promise of such systems that they can become like the web, reachable through an awesome all-in-one app.
Personally, I'm there with you I think. I only use default web-UIs on all fediverse platforms I've used, and advocate for that.
But should multi-protocol systems and multi-platform clients become normalised, I think this goes beyond "to app or not to app". What I'm talking about could likely just be a web-app.
The issue is more around aggregation and creating something "greater than the sum of its parts" out of open alt-social.
Hmmm … seems my response from mastodon didn’t federate (sighs) …
copy-pasted (sorry, for whoever federation did work, this is likely making things worse):
Personally, I’m there with you I think. I only use default web-UIs on all fediverse platforms I’ve used, and advocate for that.
But should multi-protocol systems and multi-platform clients become normalised, I think this goes beyond “to app or not to app”. What I’m talking about could likely just be a web-app.
The issue is more around aggregation and creating something “greater than the sum of its parts” out of open alt-social.
A useful lens I find is whether a social media system is good at creating, facilitating and hosting genuine communities.
Alt-social right now is struggling with this I think and, IMO, has plenty of room to grow in this regard.
The difficulty though is that it requires more features in our platforms, some likely non-trivial. That’s a big ask for an open non-profit ecosystem.
An effective means of aggregating multiple parts into a unified view could alleviate this.
To go on about it … I don’t think the browser does much at all. Unified feeds and notifications, with helpful filtering, sorting and organisation? Helpful account management? Making it easy to cross-post or copy across platforms or protocols?
Why have an RSS Feed reader if you could just visit each of the web pages individually? Obviously one can, but the feed reader is still useful.
While I think I understand where you’re coming from, I fear it’s coming from a position of habit and app fatigue rather than from a general consideration of what could work well on alt-social (where my position is that it isn’t really working well enough (yet)).
The browser solves the problem of not having any open API. Each platform wants to handle things in its own way, and the browser is the perfect way to do that. Each service, including both the open and the proprietary ones, can present the feed in the way that they decide is right. The browser already does handle rudimentary account management via form auto fill, as well as a unified notification system.
But as for a unified feed… I think the best example is the issues with that come from Lemmy/Mastodon integration. Mastodon posts have a different mentality than Lemmy posts do, not to mention with structure of responses. I just don’t think it does us any favors to have them share the same feed. Now we have replies that have a clear structure of who they are responding to, but Mastodon users come in adding the user tag into the comment, which is messy at best, and bordering obnoxious at worst.
But I get it, I’m not the audience you’re looking to cater to. I don’t particularly understand the value of RSS readers at all, because I just go directly to the services I want to see the feeds from. Hell, I don’t even use bookmarks. I type in the web address for my services every time
Hell, I don’t even use bookmarks. I type in the web address for my services every time
Yea, I hear you (I don’t use bookmarks either) … but I don’t think this is the average user.
I think the best example is the issues with that come from Lemmy/Mastodon integration. Mastodon posts have a different mentality than Lemmy posts do, not to mention with structure of responses.
This sounds to me like a design issue. In fact, this is kinda my point … better interaction here, which is the “promise” of the fediverse, may be best addressed with good aggregating clients rather than relying on too platforms to work out their historical differences over the protocol.
I don’t particularly understand the value of RSS readers at all
Notifications are the value for me. I don’t have to regularly check infrequently-updated sites if my RSS reader pings me whenever there’s a new post. Largely a different use-case to social media though.
@maegul@fediverse Some ActivityPub implementations already work as social media browsers. For example, my server can interact with microblogs, but also forums, blogs, events etc. The more activity / object types are supported, the closer software is to a browser.
Reminds me of how Thunderbird does Matrix, IRC, Pidgin, RSS and others.
I think there is room for something like this.
My only request would be that I can have filters in my feed to remove posts with certain words or emojis or profiles with descriptions including emojis of people I don’t want to converse with online.
Yea. The basic idea feels like something that's kinda been forgotten in the wake of big-social's long dominance and vanilla-ification of online activity.
I even once asked the dev of a popular mastodon app who was expressing interesting in making a lemmy app too ... "why not just add lemmy compatibility to the mastodon app".
Their response was that they couldn't see what that would look like or how it would work.
It's all just text messages ... I don't think this is hard!
I think this is the next big step for fediverse adoption. Mobile apps can easily obfuscate the different servers, but an integrated browser solution would be huge.
Like imagine commenting on a blog directly with your Lemmy account, without first navigating to your instance. No more “please link to the original source”.