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?
For me, it’s full text search.
I tend to want to find an opinion on something very specific, so if I can just toss a phrase or model number or name of something into a search field and get actual non-AI, non-advertisement, non-stupid-shit results, that’d be absolutely ideal.
Like, say, how Google worked 15 years ago.
That was a big complaint during the 2022 migration. And it’s something that’s basically available on every fediverse platform not called Mastodon. I wish that fact had caused more people to actually check out those platforms, rather than further entrench Mastodon as the core of the fediverse.
Looking back at my own life, I found the first few online communities I ever seriously joined (when I was a preteen, for context) through a web search, then discovered most others (recursively) from there, until I ended up (among other places) here on lemmy (which I can trace back to reddit, which I can trace back to a forum I started to pay attention to because of one of these original online communities preteen me found through a web search; not providing more info for privacy reasons). :P
So #1 and #3 are how it should work, IMHO, although #3 mostly for people who aren’t yet engaging with anything at all, most things will be discovered through #1.
I think most people use the Internet not for posting anything (or at least not much) themselves, but for looking up things they want to know (through a web search). In the pre-smartphone era, web searches would often direct to specific websites which might have forums attached to them, that was how I first started to seriously engage in my first online community actually. This isn’t the case much nowadays: many search results are either wikis (which are communities themselves, but don’t really invite discussion that isn’t about working on the wiki) or blogs/WordPress websites which may or may not have a comment section, but it’s relatively rare for them to have forums or even to link to reddit/fediverse communities to discuss their subject matter.
So I think it would be desirable if we managed to change that last part: top search results for many terms on search engines should be, or link to, fediverse communities, which should make it clear that users are invited to join. That would help us get more users engaged with fediverse communities in the first place, they would naturally discover more communities once they’re here.
A unified fediverse search service would be awesome, and its something I may try to tackle in the future. Part of why I’m asking this question here!
I have already found my instance’s “all communities” link fairly useful for finding communities.
The problem is I am subscribed to many communities that hardly anyone ever posts anything to, and the answer is not always “be the change you want to see in the world”. For example, I’m a native speaker of German and enjoy helping learners of German with grammatical questions, so I am subscribed to !german@lemmy.world – yet, almost no one ever posts any questions there for me to answer. (This is in stark contrast to reddit, where there is a very active /r/german.) People who see that community on lemmy probably think no one will ever read their question if they post it there. Chicken and egg problem.
I am a bit confused, and have a feeling you replied to the wrong comment somehow?
No, I was somewhat expanding on my previous thoughts on how to discover things on the fediverse and make it more active. Maybe that was a bit off-topic, sorry if it was.
I personally wouldn’t mind algorithmic recommendations if:
- you can control or choose the algorithm
- you can turn it off, or it turns off after you follow N amount of users
Discovery is important when you’re initially signing up, but once you found the people you want to follow, you don’t really need it any more. It should just be there to help new users, essentially. As long as it’s open source and not run for profit, there’s not the traditional incentive to keep your eyeballs on the app like we see with the other networks.
Given the way things are in my perspective, what I want on mbin & lemmy is somewhere like a mix of 1 & 2, with 3 as a solid option. I know that the torches and pitchforks are about to come out, but I’ll try to outline the way I see it.
When I’m in a meme-scrolling mood, I have to look up meme magazines / communities to start (Method #3). Fine, that’s working as intended. Obviously that will lead naturally to Method #1; as I subscribe and gradually follow other posters, my bubble will grow.
But what I want for the ‘threadiverse’ is a more unified suggested page. If I’m in, let’s say, memes@lemmy.world, I’d like to also have my feed show content from memes@fedia.io, or lemm.ee, or whatever other threadiverse instances that my chosen instance is federating with. I’d also like to see “subject memes” on my meme feed as a default - Science Memes, Star Trek Memes, etc… That falls under Method #2 - because I want the software to predict that because I’ve subscribed to memes@*, and interacted with content from memes@*+1, that I will also like *memes*@*. Obviously this could also be a matter of tagging and magazine integration, but that’s something that would help the fediverse feel more united and less daunting for people.
Obviously dealing with the microblog side, mandatory tags or some form of community selection would be great to help out. It would be nice to see more microblog entries from Mastodon, Misskey, Pleroma, etc., sorted into magazine-like collections by tags.
