I appriciate the reply. It’s kind of frustrating the way the fediverse works right now. I feel like we’re in 1994 era of the internet. Back then AOL was trying to BE the internet. URLs existed, but to give you an idea of how overlooked they were, Yahoo at one time in the mid 90s valued the AOL keyword for Yahoo over the URL. There are ads where they DON’T list the URL, but they do say “Visit us at AOL Keyword: Yahoo”.
Everything feels very day 1. Like I can clearly see a future for the fediverse where the common man can be interconnected. Much like I said in 1994 using my libraries technology center to access the internet for the first time. I can remember watching the news and the one anchor was trying to explain the internet to people. Specifically email. He said “Ok, so I just put my name in first, Tom, and then I put the anarchy symbol, and then after the anarchy symbol I put AOL.com”.
Meanwhile today we have shopping, and news, and social media, and videos, and everything else from one end to the other.
I could see all that back in 1994. It was obvious what needed to happen.
And right now, what needs to happen is for all services to operate with each other as if you’re always a local user. Everything in the fediverse needs to 100% play nice. The example I always see stated is that the fediverse is like email. Your email can interact with other emails services, but must always be done from your own inbox. But that’s kind of misleading to a degree. Because email is JUST email. The fediverse is email, video, photos, article sharing, social media, I assume there’s a music based aspect I haven’t found yet. The point is, right now these services are very VERY fragmented. I understand it’s decentralized, but it shouldn’t be this fragmented. It doesn’t have to be, and to grow we are going to need to get to a point where we can go to our instance of choice, log in, but then use any number of these services with one account. I can’t currently log into lemmy.world, and browse peer-tube, yet if I leave my instance, I’m no longer in my account. So you say to just create a peer-tube account. Ok, but now that’s fragmented. There’s two accounts. And then maybe I want to share pictures. Well now I need a pixelfed account. Ok, now that’s 3 accounts for 1 fediverse. And the list only grows. Mastodon? 4 accounts.
You get the idea. You can’t say it’s just like email, because with email it’s just one service, therefore always just one account.
I see a future where you log into 1 account from your instance. From that home page on your instance, you can interact with any service that hasn’t banned you, or defederated from your instance. ANY fediverse service. With one account. You can write mastodon messages, post a video to peertube, check your email, post some pictures, whatever. And all your notifications will be in one place. Organized. A centralized decentralization if you will.
Because right now, it’s kind of looking like a patch blanket, where everybody makes their own one patch…but then none of it makes sense together.
And here’s the other thing. EVERYBODY needs to be included. YES, EVERYBODY. You can personally block someone if you like, but right now Lemmy is very very left leaning. And that’s fine. BUT, I do see how it will play out once Threads starts fully federating. It is going to be a culture clash. And that actually in the long run is fine too. Lemmy.World can be very left leaning. But there might be another instance. Lemmy.Republican and that leans very right. Which is actually good. You can block that instance if you want. Instances SHOULD start developing their own personalities.
We should have major instances, and minor instances. The major ones should be general purpose. They can still lean left or right. This is where you’ll find all the popular topics. And I don’t mean Lemmy popular. I mean real world popular. If we’re going to get every single human on the fediverse, we need to realize that our opinions on everything are NOT going to mesh. So, you have each instance cator to a different audience.
Then there’s minor instances. These will be smaller, but host the niche topics. Maybe you have a hobby for collecting trains. That’s going to be a less popular topic, so you’d find an entire instance just dedicated to collecting trains. Different communities on that instance for different aspects of collecting trains. Smaller but dedicated.
Sorry for the long reply. I just see a world that doesn’t exist, and I want it to hurry up already…but then I see people on Lemmy who are actively opposed to, or confused by the idea of how big the fediverse CAN get. We just need to iron out the kinks. I’m having a nerdy day, and just imagining living in this world where the fediverse isn’t some linux crowd only niche topic…but instead the dominant everything connected universe it could be. Which will completely disrupt the power of these corporations to rule the internet. If we can achieve my dreams of the fediverse, these corporations will be forced to give up huge chunks of their power, or risk losing it all to irrelevancy. The fediverse can put the power back into the hands of the people. We just have to allow it to grow to become bigger than the culture of being linux’s sidekick.