Fediverse

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A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).

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Ideally, what would "discovery" look like on a social network? (lemy.lol)

submitted 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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For any social network, not just a federated one.

My thoughts: The way it works in big tech social networks is like this:

**The organic methods: **

your followee shares something from a poster you don't follow
someone you don't follow comments on a post from someone you follow
you join a group or community and find others you currently don't follow

The recommendation engine methods: content you do not follow shows up, and you are likely to engage in it based on statistical models. Big tech is pushing this more and more.
Search: you specifically attempt to find what you're looking for through some search capability. Big tech is pushing against this more and more.

In my opinion, the fediverse covers #1 well already. But #1 has a bubble effect. Your followees are less likely to share something very drastically different from what you already have.

The fediverse is principally opposed to #2, at least the way it is done in big tech. But maybe some variation of it could be done well.

#3 is a big weakness for fediverse. But I am curious how it would ideally manifest. Would it be full text search? Semantic search? Or something with more machine learning?

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 9 hours ago

Search will never search non-local content.

Which is the point I'm trying to make: right now, you cannot use search as a discoverability medium, unless you're on something the scale of mastodon.social.

Search with a focus on new content discoverability is utterly useless for smaller or single user instances, because a search that only finds things you already know about isn't exactly a useful search for discoverability.

If I have to be on the biggest instances, then there's very little difference between something like Bluesky and Mastodon in terms of usability, and uh, I might as well pick the one that's more likely to have the most growth and diversity of content.

We have to give up on the idea of having easy and direct access to the whole of thw fediverse.

I agree, and it's why I've pretty much migrated back to centralized services with the exception of Lemmy, because Lemmy works very well in terms of finding useful shit to follow in a way that literally no other federated platform does.