I'd like to see them actually make it so the common person can understand federation and see it as a plus rather than a confusing onboarding roadblock.
The main driver behind current social media's shittiness is the user-hostile business model that means the incentives of the user and the platform are opposed.
Federation doesn't actually address any of this, and currently the federated social media world "runs" on effectively charity. "Runs" in quotes because we've already seen instance shutdowns which caused a fair bit of trouble. It only currently "runs" because the scale is small enough that it can indeed be sustained by charitable efforts, and hasn't devolved into a unusable spam-fest because it's too small to actually be worth spamming.
If your "solution" to social media shittiness is effectively turn it into something ran by charities, that's fine but you can achieve this much easier (and more efficiently) by just having one charity run one centralized service with an open API (since the business incentives around lock-in are no longer applicable).
Some of those communities might go on and last a while and accumulate knowledge.
Ah maybe not, sounds like a path the gamergate stuff. But the concept certainly feels nostalgic.
And besides now I have a job and a small amount of extra cash to pay for a small community website.
Would be nice to have federated reddits instead of reddit.
Maybe it's the opposite, a community like reddit if You're banned or maybe shamed or even down voted for an ignorant take, not even a bad faith argument, maybe that user stays on Reddit but joins a different subreddit that new subreddit may be more likely to indulge in that viewpoint, maybe even sarcastically.
While on small websites I think a user in that case might just be dissuaded from engaging in the community outright.
I don't believe gamergate to be a special thing, just oxygen, fuel, and a spark.
Personally I've found reddit karma to be correlated with the obnoxiousness of the user, not the inverse. There's plenty out there who feel the same. Even with that point aside, what is there to prove? I don't understand the assertion. Wrongthink will get you censored on Reddit faster than anywhere else regardless of how much karma you had.
Even good posts on Reddit get shuffled past the first pages after a few days. There's too much negative incentive to put effort into content when it can get censored, downvoted, or buried. Sure, you might potentially reach more users in the right circumstances, but many of those users are addicted to notifications and doomscrolling, not enthusiasts of the subject matter. Plenty of that here on HN as well (more on the side of trend-chasing, manufactured two-minute hate about climate or national news, while rarely challenging the status quo) but it's at least tolerable, and I know the moderation is fair here.
Forums haven't "lost out" when they can still serve to bring people together who have, or want to read unpopular opinions. I could go on about use cases. If there were none, there would be no forums.
The takeaway here is that Reddit can be and is considered by a decent proportion to be a dystopian failure, not a "convenience". A black hole of siphoned search traffic that regurgitates a watered down and sanitized imitation of something resembling a community.
Ignoring all the publication of content bits, I always felt like what the internet really needed to improve portability of accounts and data was just a federated user authentication standard.
https://engineering.fb.com/2024/03/21/networking-traffic/thr...