this post was submitted on 17 Jun 2023
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I have to admit I'm not sure what you're asking anymore, what exactly would a "better UI for viewing content across these instances" be? You can already search for communities that your instance knows about (and force it to search for any instances that you know elsewhere) using the search system, and browsing the All feed will show you all posts from communities/instances that your instance knows about as well. Trying searching gaming to see what I mean
I will say the search page feels incredibly disjointed though; I think it should group all the same content (communities, posts, comments) instead of whatever it does right now.
It sounds to me like you're asking for some sort of discoverability/content recommendations, perhaps? If this is the case, the general Fediverse culture tends to be against this sort of stuff as they see them as systems that promote more screen time and unhealthy habits, instead of actually engaging with what you know you want to engage with.
That's because I am confused on what I am asking for myself, but I can't figure it out until I have discussions about it.
This is one thing. Another is a being able to possibly toggle views of different instances within one UI. Another is something like multireddits, where you can view multiple communities contents together (/r/funny from one instance, and another).
Thats a reasonable concern. The problem however I see is that if you don't have way to easily discover communities, or have a way in which communities link to each other, then you end up with a single or perhaps couple massive instances and were essentially back to where we started.
Back in the day, the single entry point of discoverability used to be Google. You'd search for some topic and come onto some forum of that topic. That's no longer really an option. If every instance is isolated on its own domain with no gateway between them, I don't see much point to the fediverse.
The biggest problem to starting a new social media alternative has been the critical mass needed. I see the fediverse as a way of solving this problem, as you already have a bunch of users/content which can be shared with new instances.
I only really want to touch upon this point, but the Fediverse platforms were originally designed as a return to the old forum-style format of communities, where you have your own little cozy corners of the internet, with your own rules and culture, while also being decentralised and resistant to the problems of centralisation.
The fediverse, however, allows you to reach outside of your own community and follow/socialise with people inside other communities seamlessly (which, in truth, it does do), negating the need of everyone having to make accounts and identities on every single site/community they come across.
The concept of having the fediverse just be thousands upon thousands of instances seamlessly all connected to each other for maximum content discoverability is only really a mindset that has occurred recently after Musk's acquisition of Twitter, and attention was put on Mastodon. Before this, people just resided in their own little communities and talked to people they knew rather than specifically looking for more people.
The developers of these platforms are looking into what they can do regarding this, but they don't want to stray far from the principles of these software platforms by making them into social media sites that are just clones of the social media sites they're trying to move away from.
I mean you can still create the old style forums. If you want a single log in, just add Oauth, not sure why you need the whole activitypub protocol. But presumable if you want to stay in a little community, creating a few logins is barely a problem.
I like the old style mentality of small communities. I hate reddit. But sites like reddit/twitter are fundamentally different. You NEED a sizeable amount of content/users. I am not saying this needs to grow into reddits scale, in fact Im happy at the scale lemmy.world is at, but I would like to see a decentralized alternative to a corporate monolith. To me that looks like several hundred or thousands of instances of anywhere between 20-100k users each. To achieve that, we have to balance the influx of new users into different instances, which is why I am talking about inter-discoverability within instances. Otherwise you have a couple instances which get all the traffic and that turns right back into reddit. But maybe there is a different way to achieve that.
Does that make sense?