Skip Navigation
Asklemmy @lemmy.ml
z3rOR0ne @lemmy.ml

What Major Social Media Platforms Would You Like To See Federated Alternatives To That Don't Exist Yet?

Pretty much in the title. Maybe you wouldn't even use it, but would like to simply see it exist for the sake of having a federated alternative.

For me, it'd be the following:

  • LinkedIn
  • Meetup
  • Tiktok

I am on the first two, but would prefer a federated alternative. I'm not on Tiktok, but would like to see a federated alternative.

I'll admit these might not be a good idea. But as a thought experiment, I'd be curious about the community weigh in on what you all think this might look like.

189 comments

  • This is by no means a vital service, but Imgur. Not the image hosting part itself, although the multiple self-hosted alternatives available are mostly aimed at photographs and surprisingly very few if any to memes and reactions for chats, forums and social media. On the other hand, the particular use case of sharing memes and meme dumps is not being fulfilled by anything else at the moment. Go to Imgur even on it's current sorry decayed state and at any time you'll find multiple people sharing image galleries, usually of up to 50 memes at a time, sometimes more. Lemmy, Mastodon and Discord servers try to fill that gap but right now they can't.

  • Some kind of marketplace like eBay.

    Having bought and sold there the rules are quite arbitrary, and their cryptic algorhitm is a nuisance to buyers (you clicked by accident on a stove? You're gonna see a ton of stoves in the recommended for a while!) and periodically harms sellers (if you don't post daily and basically make it your day job, good luck making money!)

    a federated alternative, with different instances for various interests and categories, meta-categories even and so on. Maybe regional instances like we have on here, one for the EU (quite convenient to ship and receive packages from inside of it, no customs wasting time and money) one for North America, one for East Asia, etc. With one being able to purchase from all of them.

    Federation would also ensure that rules are properly enforced without abuses or other malpractices like eBay does (did you know eBay shipped a pig head to somebody who publicly criticized them?) since those instances would naturally be avoided and new ones would be made. It would also prevent excessive fees, as the fediverse is generally not a for-profit endeavor, and still, there will always be the option to shop around from other instances.

  • There is already a Meetup alternative - Mobilizon

    • Thank you so much. Have you used it? Care to expand on uour experience with it?

      • You probably want to use a regional instance to have more relevant users, groups and events, but there is a global search engine for Mobilizon

        For example, I am using a Polish instance, with an unsuprising domain https://mobilizon.pl

        With an account, you are able to publish events, with header image, title, category, tags, date, place, description (with formatting available), and metadata. The event can be accesible publicly, or only via link.
        The event (if public) can federate (and be boosted to e.g. Mastodon) and be commented, but you are able to turn off the comments.

        Individual account can only be followed from Friendica, but not from Mastodon.

        For more features you want to create a group. A group can be followed from Friendica and Mastodon, but only Mobilizon accounts can become its members. Group members are able to participate in discussions (not visible from outside), manage a "common resource folder" - links, make group events and group announcements

        You can experiment with Mobilizon features with a demo instance

    • Fuck yeah, thank you. I went to check up meetup and it was like 90% liberal "how to be your own boss" "how to pay taxes on cypto" shit. I clicked on one that looked kinda neutral and the first thing I saw was the speaker bragging about being on, I kid you not, capitalism .com. Can't even make this shit up. Also as a nice little bonus they had a tab just for conservatism but nothing even related to socialism. Fuck that place.

      EDIT: I checked it out and it seems primarily focused on French language and severely underpopulated by English stuff. I'll have to check it out again in about a year and see if it's going to be another mastodon situation because there just isn't enough on offer at the moment.

      EDIT2: And I tried to make an account but it said my email was already in use. I emailed the instance admins to let them know.

    • I looked in their FAQ but couldn't find an answer. It looks like they support ticketing for events. I assume users can claim tickets. Is there a payment method built in as well, if so, what is it?

    • Thanks for the link! Checking this out now

    • oh man, that's not pretty enough to start using as an alternative to, like, partiful (oh, yeah, I totally want to give my phone number to some random fucking website to go to a party) or wedding registry sites... but those don't really need to be federated, huh?

  • A lot of the ideas presented on this thread are less applications for federation and more applications for blockchain of some kind. For example, wikipedia or uber eats replacement. Before you blindly downvote me for this suggestion, let me explain why.

    In federation, you have servers which talk to each other. Users own their own accounts and there are multiple repositories of information. Lemmy is a repository of links and comments, each lemmy instance has its own repository. Mastodon is a repository of tweets, replies, and DMs. This works great. Everybody makes their own repository of information, and users can subscribe to any repository they like. They can also, via federation, access other repositories and "pull" or "push" data to them. That last sentence is the magic of federation you don't get on platforms like Facebook. ActivityPub and federated platforms solve this problem of provider lock-in, at least partially.

    This fediverse is not great when you need to establish a single repository of information that everybody in the network uses and is in sync for all users. Because it has no mechanism to arrive at consensus as to what should go into that authoritative repository. Even if all participants can be relied to act honorably (something the internet rarely provides), there will be disagreements about what should go into that repository. Edits may come in at different times, how do we resolve which edit goes "first"? Because it may make the second edit irrelevant, etc. Federation can't solve this problem. ActivityPub can't solve it and Nostr can't solve it. But..

    This is the exact problem blockchains solve: how can you establish a centralized repository of information (ledger) and administer it in a decentralized, P2P way where you can't trust all participants to honestly participate? You cannot develop P2P systems which maintain a centralized repository of information without blockchain because no other P2P system has been able to solve this problem. There is no other mechanism of arriving at consensus and prevent sybil attacks.

    Wikipedia? Centralized repository of information. Uber eats? Centralized repository of foods available, drivers, customers, and orders. eBay? same. And by the very nature of blockchains, they can also have an economic layer built into them which provides a means of exchange among participants. Useful for an eBay replacement, maybe less useful for a wikipedia replacement. Those means of exchange ("tokens") can be used not just for transfer of funds, but also for things like building/scoring user reputation and incentivizing specific behaviors, especially if you want to incentivize behavior that is contrary to a user's normal economic interest, such as providing a subsidy for restaurants on Uber who use more expensive, but more sustainable food packaging.

    The non-P2P solution is to trust the administration of this centralized repository to a trusted authority. We trust wikipedia to administer articles and decide what ultimately goes in them. That system works fine for wikipedia, I'm not convinced we need a decentralized version.

    There are many blockchains with various technical attributes which may work better or worse for solving these problems. They may use proof-of-work, proof-of-stake, etc. Some are more decentralized than others and have features like censorship resistance, privacy, smart contract, etc. But they solve this exact problem.

    • Isn't the point of blockchain that it's immutable? What about people who want to delete their own stuff? Or even mods or admins that have to delete stuff for legal reasons?

      • Immutability is not bad, there are some situations you want immutability. For example, to secure voting systems, you may want to be able to write on the chain that "precinct 156 reported votes x/y/z in this quantity" so that if anybody comes along and tampers with those numbers later on, you can point to the chain and say "no see, actually, these are the real original numbers that the precinct published". The precinct could lie about their numbers of course and publish bad numbers to the chain, blockchain doesn't protect against that (unless the votes themselves are recorded on the chain by the individual voter), but the blockchain protects against those numbers changing in the future or another party incorrectly claiming they are a/b/c when they are actually x/y/z. That's a situation where immutability helps. Same with financial transactions. If you sent somebody money, you want a record of that (a receipt) if they later claim you never sent it to them. Examples of records which have a high degree of immutability that people use in everyday life are: court records, census data, house deeds, etc.

        Blockchains usually have some degree of immutability but from a technical perspective they don't necessarily have to. If we're talking about data storage, you don't have to store the data itself on the chain, the chain data can just "point to" off-chain data which you can take down or modify at will.

        An example of a scenario where this could work is: you have a blockchain for coordinating the sharing of medical information between different parties. You, as a user, have an account on this blockchain. The only data stored on chain is a list of parties and who you have authorized to receive your medical data along with a pointer to a file storage system like Amazon AWS which contains your medical data in encrypted format. You can add or revoke authorization at any time by changing how that data is encrypted. Whoever you gave authorization to prior may have made a copy of the data at that point in time, but you can block them from accessing new data you put out. When Amazon AWS gets a request to transfer a copy of your data to a new party, they can check the blockchain to see if that party is authorized to receive it.

        The benefit of such a system would be that:

        • Your medical records are yours and stored in your own data storage system over which you have complete control.
        • You can choose to share it with parties like insurance providers or researchers who need large medical data sets to comb through.
        • You could set this control at a very granular level or grant access to all your data.
        • Your data becomes portable between insurance providers and your insurance provider can't make your life difficult by refusing to export data to your new one.

      • Deleting anything from the internet is theorically impossible, it shouldn't a mandatory requirement for anything.

        Instead you publish a deletion request that politely asks everyone to pretend it doesn't exist

  • Meetup. And I'd like to see nostr make a reddit clone. I love lemmy, I don't love my identity being tied to an instance. A platform based on nostr's protocol would solve that.

  • Instead of yet another globally massive social media, I want to see regional social media that's not massive globally, but popular in their country of origin. Or niche social media.

    List so far:

    • Post.news
    • Koo (India)
    • Cohost
    • Hive
    • Plurk (still relatively popular in Taiwan)
    • Lofter (Chinese Tumblr)
    • Xiaohongshu (Chinese version of Instagram and Pinterest on one app, probably Pixelfed can clone their unique UI)
    • Lemon8
    • Weibo

    Art general:

    • Cara
    • Artstation
    • Xfolio
    • Pixiv
    • Deviantart

    Design:

    • Dribbbble
    • Behance

    Hobby specific:

    • Anilist
    • Kitsu
    • Annict (Japanese anime-tracker and social)
    • ComicSpace (Japanese manga tracker)
    • MyAnimeList
    • MyFigureCollection
    • MyDramaList

  • Not social media but I'd probably like the idea of social games like these little timekillers from Facebook, chess, worms, poker, whatever that's not that dependent on speed\ping and lightweight. Basically an app platform that can be easily included into other apps. Some different Lemmy communities can even challenge each other or hold events.

189 comments