Thank you for the nice feedback, feed categorizing is exactly what I was thinking about with the Feeds list to the left. I’m glad to hear that I’m not the only one who miss/want this feature.

Thank you for sharing. I have looked at Diaspora, but not much at Hubzilla. I’ll make sure to check that out, at least to get inspiration. The reason why I am thinking about building a site from scratch is that many existing projects try to do too much, or are doing somthing way different than what I want to achieve. I have looked at some potential candidates (Mastodon, Pleroma, Pixelfed) to build on top of, but none of them seem suitable to me.

Thank you so much for your work on this and for sharing it here. Much of the interpretation of the ActivityPub specification has been quite clear to me by reading the W3 spec and looking at implementations.

But I currently only have a vague idea of how groups should work and since it will be an integral part of the platform I want to get it right. I haven’t read the threads you linked yet, but I will make sure to read them carefully.

Maybe your app can shine here, by allowing integrations to the websites that these local communities have. Like GoToSocial the app may be a back-end service, where different UI’s can consume the API.

That’s a great idea, I hadn’t thought of that! Maybe building a small Wordpress plugin aswell since most of smaller communities tend to use that for their websites.

My biggest problem with social media is that if I follow someone, I’m not interested in seeing everything that everyone posts in my feed.

This really resonated with me, and I feel exactly the same way, especially for the fediverse since the content can be so diverse. Much like when I put on music, I often put on an Album rather than a playlist consisting of completly different genres and moods.

And I think this is a problem that hasn’t been fully solved yet on the fediverse.

I’m looking forward to pixelfed introducing groups.

I will also be following that tightly, and probably build something very close to their solution. Pixelfed will be a big inspiration for the project as their goals are much aligned with what I’m trying to achieve, but with another focus being images.

Being old school in my tastes, I prefered the old usenet format better and using a feed reader.

I have used usenet very little, I had a subscription for a short while but never got the hang of it, I might not be old enough to have caught that train. But maybe I should look more into that as a source of inspiration.

Hi @weex@lemmy.ml, I think you’re right that a community is very important, and thinking about what kind of community will use it from the beginning is important, such that one doesn’t build a platform for a community/segment that doesn’t exist.

1/Easy-to use-is good, yes but it’s kind of a given for all software.

You are right, but when I say that I mean that it should appeal to an average user. For example, I see many federated platforms that have a thousands settings and customization options and try to do many things at once, that certainly works for some people but as a new user you can quickly be overwhelmed.

I think Pixelfed is doing a great job in this regards, the UI is familiar and simple.

2/Organize

You might be right in that it doesn’t feel like there’s a huge demand for this, but maybe that’s because the right medium doesn’t exist yet?

I feel like the problem with Mobilizon it only does events, no groups or posts etc. I don’t see that big of a need for that, especially not federated.

But maybe I sould focus on the core federation experience first, like nested lists, great integration with Mastodon, Pixelfed and Lemmy. Then move the focus from there, I also might understand the problems and needs better at that point.

3/Lists exist in Mastodon but not nested lists.

Yes, I really like Mastodon lists, but I feel that they are too simple that I would actually use them that much. For example to add a user to a list, you first have to follow them, then go to the list page, click edit lists and search for the user to add them.

Also there are no way to have someone show only in a list and not in your main feed, like on Facebook you can be friends with someone, but hide them from your timeline. I think this would be an especially needed feature for the fediverse, because in many cases if you don’t follow someone from another instance, their posts won’t synchronize to your instance.

In terms of greenfield projects, I would think a TikTok-clone would be interesting.

I’ve heard this proposal before, but going back to thinking about communities, I don’t think see a community for this. The people who are interested in fast pased, AI autosuggested videos, are not the people who are interested in a federated network. I simply see no benefit for federation here.

Instead I think federations shines for large discussions, where people comming from different places and communities can be a part of the same discussions. On a side note, I would also like to see more blogs and websites integrate with ActivityPub but not allow user registration, such that you don’t need to have an account on every single small website, just to leave a single comment.

Getting back to community, how do you feel about the strength of the photoview community and how do you think you might improve on what was done there in this new effort?

This is a good question. I love the Photoview community, we have a Discord server with 250+ users and a lot of constructive discussions on Github. I have also worked with EmbassyOS to integrate it into their platform.

I think it was much easier to build the community around Photoview, since there’s already a passionate community around self-hosting and Photoview directly targets people who want to host it themself. But the community around a social network shouldn’t mainly be the instance maintainers, but instead the users, and I don’t have a clear idea of how to target and grow that kind of community yet.

I feel like the Photoview community hasn’t been growing by adding new features, but rather by things like helping people with installation, writing documentation or by fostering discussions on Github.

I agree, it’s probably a hard task to make people switch from Facebook.

I maybe see happening by first of all making a great piece of software, that people would like using at least as much as like using Facebook. That would maybe be hard but I don’t think it’s impossible, am I the only one experincing that Facebook has become extremely slow and also hard to navigate?

Secondly, if the community features are more powerful than those of Facebook and communities started moving to the platform, then that could also help move people to it.

Such community features could be things like:

• Some organizations would like have their own instance to have control of their data, in the same way as Zoom provides on-premise solutions.
• Public communities should be completely viewable without requiring an account on the platform. I know multiple people who cannot read announcements from their community Facebook groups because they don’t have/want an account. This could be a solution for communities to be more inclusive.
• The same can be said for events, on Facebook you are required an account to even view a public event. So if a local football club wants to make an event about an upcomming turnament, they either have to require members to have a Facebook account, or also write about it on their website, assuming that they have one.

An example where this approach has worked is for Discord, where a lot of people have moved from Messenger since Discord makes things easier for certain use cases.

How far can we go! Here’s my sub-sub-sub-comment!