NeoDB is a review system with some remarkable tricks up its sleeve, and may provide a way forward for decentralized content discovery.
Today, we sat down and reviewed NeoDB, a Fediverse review system that lets you track books, movies, music, tv shows, games, podcasts, and more. There's some really incredible ideas beneath the surface.
the platform offers an incredible piece of insight about data: “You don’t have to start over from scratch. You can totally just add your old data to your graph.” This idea is key to understanding what NeoDB actually is: a tool for piecing your online data together under one open, free, federated account.
So I get that it imports your reviews and posts from the big, closed platforms like IMDb, but could it also be used as a hub for different Fediverse accounts? Because the first part is cool, the second could be significant in terms of profile management?
So, to be clear: it's not a concept like Nomadic Identity. Rather, it's a demonstration of importing data archives from other social networks and platforms, and integrating that data into an existing Fediverse account.
In other words: it's not a singular managed identity for all your apps, it's a mechanism for marrying data from different systems to a Fediverse Actor. Paired with something like Nomadic Identity, it would be a game changer.
Thanks for clearing that up 🙂 Still, migrating all your locked-in reviews or whatever to the Fediverse is a pretty big deal for compulsive opinion-havers!
I think it's a big opportunity that the Fediverse has largely slept on. A lot of people shrug it off, but Facebook, Instagram, Medium, and a number of other places offer an export archive of your data.
Some of it isn't all that usable, but there's something extremely appealing about being able to take old parts of your social graph with you, and merge it into a new identity. A fixation I've had for the past few years is consolidating all of my data into one place, under one identity, and I'm exploring the possibility of writing data converters.
Interestingly, Pixelfed allows you to import your Instagram archive, and it's fantastic.