Fedi-fanfiction: How would a society look like in which the fediverse is established as THE social media platform?

Eggyhead , 10 months ago

Trollfare between popular instances leads to irl confrontations and wild accusations spread across media. Throwing illegal content up onto adversarial instances in community raids becomes a standard way of "swatting" that instance and getting it taken down and posted across the news. Governments start taking over major instances and using it to disseminate fake news and propaganda leading to further polarization and confrontation. Governments set up their own instances with communities for various branches of government. Eventually joining any federated instance requires a government federation account, and your citizenship status dictates where and to what extent you're allowed to participate. Spies are sent into various instances to try and gain political power and influence. Corporations buy up all the biggest instances and eventually the software it runs on. All data is collected and sold.

blue_berry OP , 10 months ago

Aka “the Birth of Skynet”. Let’s maybe avoid that.

sab , 10 months ago

Hopefully: more gradual exposure to contrary opinions, allowing to decrease the amount of polarisation. Less filter bubbles, and more cooperation.

gonta , 10 months ago

Hopefully the worst it can be is a reddit-clone and not other big social media. I wish there’s a better way to aggregate all lemmy posts and make them searchable in search engines. I reckon it’s the allure of reddit, the random collection of information and discussion from ordinary people you can easily find from search engine without (or at least, less obvious) marketing ploy to sell something. That’s the one thing sadly can’t be replaced by lemmy yet.

Maybe there should be a universal lemmy search engine for that? Not just to search communities but also for posts and comments (outside the search option in an instance because it’s limited to communities that are joined by the members of that particular instances). I’m not sure how difficult it’s going to be.

falkerie71 , 10 months ago

Theoretically, you could have a bot account that subscribes to every known instance in your instance. That would solve the search problem. I’m thinking that would also be the solution to how search engines would index the content on here.

maegul , 10 months ago

I think it’s somewhat of a false premise … the attraction of the fediverse is that at a large scale it would be hard to predict. It’s more dynamic and flexible to where people are actually up to with things. So the promise of the fediverse at least of such a future would be many things constantly changing without as much inertia built into the system.

Beyond that, if it were truly successful, I think, or would hope, that it would bring about a true democratisation of the internet, where people could truly feel like they personally own a part of it and contribute to other parts as a collective.

blue_berry OP , 10 months ago

Beyond that, if it were truly successful, I think, or would hope, that it would bring about a true democratisation of the internet, where people could truly feel like they personally own a part of it and contribute to other parts as a collective.

Now we are talking!

Lazycog , 10 months ago

Lots of drama, sometimes defederations would make headlines on world news.

blue_berry OP , 10 months ago

Media outlets would try to stay neutral and describe it from the meta-perspective (no pun intended), but would have hard time doing so. The New York Times would write long, interesting articles describing clashes between instances, media observers would analyse the impact that it will have on matters of societal debate new, words from the fediworld would be introduced into daily language like “you sound like someone from the opposite end of the fediverse”, “defederate yourself” or “build your own instance then!” etc. etc.

blue_berry OP , 10 months ago

images of monuments of avatars will be added to a blockchain for someone who kept the peace between instances that wanted to defederate each other

Blaze , 10 months ago

A lot of instances would have average Facebook quality posts.

A few more demanding instances would emerge.

It would be nice to be able to access your local/neighborhood instance instead of the Facebook group

otter , 10 months ago

That’s what I’m looking forward to most. I used Reddit for my local stuff (Vancouver/Canada), but still used FB for marketplace and local buy&sell things. Replacing all of that would be nice.

A while ago it was worse, where some organizations only had Facebook groups, or you could only buy a ticket/item through Facebook. That has mostly changed… to other proprietary platforms.

blue_berry OP , 10 months ago

It would be nice to be able to access your local/neighborhood instance instead of the Facebook group

You mean local going into the direction of the metaverse-idea? That would be pretty neat (I mean metaverse without VR/AR)

Blaze , 10 months ago

Not sure if we are talking about the same thing, I was thinking about a city Lemmy instance, with communities for neighborhoods

blue_berry OP , 10 months ago

I thought in the direction of location-based technology like Pokemon Go. Maybe this goes in the same direction? Could maybe be a basis for it. That’s also what the idea of the metaverse to me: if you get rid of the VR stuff its an infrastructure for location-based services/technology.

Blaze , 10 months ago

Both could coexist indeed!