The north star goal is to make this app give the user the feel of being officially supported by the platforms it reads from

This is the exact opposite of what I’m working on. My idea is to embrace “Protocols, not platforms” and treat all the different places are sources of content (like RSS) but with the added two-way interactivity that is enabled by ActivityPub and Linked Data.

So of course the UI will need to adapt: threaded discussion forums would be presented in a different way in relation to long form blog feeds. But luckily this is already part of the benefits from Linked Data. A Lemmy post is presented in the Fediverse as https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams#Page, and each response is a https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams#note, while a blog entry from WriteFreely is a https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams#Article and an video from PeerTube is a https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams#Video… this information about the object type should be enough for us to figure out the best way to handle the UI.

what would you want to see on this app?

Believe it or not, I would like to have a read-only view of the Big Tech feeds. Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Reddit, Twitter, Facebook posts from your friends, all of that crap. Like what GrayJay is doing. The idea though would be not to interact with it, but to have a way to people to ease their way out into the open alternatives.

I reply when I see absolutes such as “all communities on Lemmy are dead”, "all mods are bad ", “all communities are about politics”

1. I didn’t make any of these statements
2. There is a big difference between “sweeping generalizations” and “categorically correct statements”. The former are the statements you give as examples, but the latter can apply to the absolute majority of cases, even if someone has a data point (“the exception that proves the rule”) in the contrary.

It paints the platform in a bad light

Why would you think that?

The original argument was “Communities don’t need a lot of posting to survive here”, and my response is basically saying “we should strive for more than surviving”.

It seems like that instead of focusing on the part where I am calling for more action, you decided to focus on what you perceive as criticism and you try to attack that as soon as possible.

Stop using absolute statements and I’ll stop replying

It feels like your problem is not with the “absolute statements”, but that you are doing your best to reject reality.

It doesn’t matter if the number is 100% or 99% or 92.376%, what matters is that it has been two years since the Reddit boycott and we still do not have a good example of a thriving community here. We had many attempts (the /r/selfhosted people, the /r/blind), but they are by and large still on Reddit. Can you at least agree to that?

Oh, wow. Thank you for a very good example for self-selection bias!

Seriously, though: why is it that you feel this intense urge to dismiss any and everything I am saying? Don’t you think that is a little bit sad that all you can do is this mindless pontification?

You don’t need 5 posts a day for a community to survive here

“Surving” != “Thriving”.

A couple of years ago, I noticed that the front page of HackerNews was consistently getting links from Mastodon posts. That was interesting because it showed that at least one significant part of the tech conversation had moved away from Twitter and into the Fediverse.

No such thing has happened for Lemmy. There is no particular community which is thriving. There is no example of subreddit community that had successfully boycotted Reddit and transplanted here. We have the usual handful of posters, each one trying to maintain their communities “alive”, but that is far from its true potential.

Let’s get rid of open registration instances and look for alternative models that are actually sustainable:

• Small servers run by self-hosting enthusiasts for their friends and family.
• Institutional servers (schools/universities running servers for faculty and students, companies running servers for their own employees)
• Servers run by media institutions for journalists + maybe for subscribers (on a separate domain)
• Servers provided by telcos, tied to their phone service (get a contract for mobile and that gives you access to our AP server)
• Commercial providers who charge a flat subscription for access (mastodon.green, omg.lol, my own communick)

We need to get rid of the idea that we can have a sustainable Fediverse infra running on volunteers alone. It is not working, all the growth potential that we have is stunted because people keep lying to themselves.

I will repeat my comment from yesterday.

the following communities have already an alternative on instances that I run

• [email protected] -> [email protected]
• [email protected] -> [email protected]
• [email protected] -> [email protected]
• [email protected] -> [email protected]

All these instances have been running for close to two years and are part of the “topic-specific” network of servers that I set up to help during the migration.