I’ve explored a few platforms within the Fediverse, but most of them seem to be inspired by and mimic existing mainstream social media platforms like Twitter, Reddit, and Facebook. While this familiarity can be comforting, I can’t help but wonder if there are any truly innovative and original platforms out there that offer a unique experience.
What makes them unique? How do they reimagine the social media experience?
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i think this misses the point of the fediverse… we need to supplant those giant 3rd parties with something less corporate, more co-op.
sure, we can extend functionality and do cool new things while thats happening, but that migration is a big part of the fediverse movement. it needs to be somewhat familiar to those users migrating.
Indeed, that’s an excellent point. Additionally, the fediverse is already an innovation in and of itself.
Yeah most fediverse projects mimic Twitter, reddit, etc. But they all add the key innovation of federation. Just by conforming to ActivityPub, each fediverse project features a key innovation in its respective niche.
I think part of the reason this doesn’t seem as impactful as it could is because federation is still very rudimentary. We are only scratching the surface of the potential that federation theoretically provides. It’s a feature/innovation that becomes more useful the larger the network grows, and the fediverse isn’t large enough yet for that to become apparent.
The problem with this innovation is that federation is hard for people to understand, let alone see the benefits of.
It’s easy to innovate in at least some ways. But innovations will only draw new users if those users can see the benefits of the innovation to them. I’m not sure federation passes this test on its own. So finding other ways to improve the social media experience may be necessary for the fediverse to succeed in replacing corporate sites.
Maybe https://bonfirenetworks.org ?
This looks so interesting but after reading the homepage I still have no idea what it is. Is it like chatrooms?
Sounds like a bit of a Swiss army knife for the fediverse. This kind of thing may take off with developers but I’m uncertain what regular selfhosters need it for.
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The major difference is that it’s modular. So you can pick and choose which traditional social network features you want to use.
Owncast is rather interesting to me. Self-hosted streaming platform that can use the ActivityPub to publish streaming notifications, if desired.
I stream on Owncast and really enjoy it. One of the easiest installations I’ve ever had with software. And despite what lots of folks think you don’t need a million dollars to stream to groups of folks.
Full disclosure I run the !owncast@lemmy.world community and actively promote it on Matrix if anyone is interested or need help. :-D
I’m setting up some things for myself before I start proper streaming but little test streams I’ve done have been very successful!
And I’ve subbed to the community, so really appreciating the advertising. Cx
https://fediverse.info/explore/projects
There are a few projects that give some idea a new spin. Most of them are about microblogging or alternative platforms for some existing concepts, though.
Thank you very much for that link, great resource.
At a glance, Misskey and associated forks may appear to be Twitter-clones, but dig a little more and you’ll find they’re a lot more, for better and worse.
The interface is highly customizable, not just with some different colored themes nor a multi-column interface, but that you can stack page elements in columns and set up “antennae” or filters to surface posts including specified keywords and/or hashtags while excluding others via keywords/hashtags as well. There’s also what they call “channels” which I think are sort of like groups or dedicated topics apart from hashtags to post to and discuss whatever the channel topic is.
Oh, and because it seems *key wants to have a little of everything, there’s Pages, which is basically longform blog posting, and some versions include simple games. There’s also options for some other widgets I’ve not mentioned here. It’s genuinely pretty wild compared to the other federated microblogging services with how much flexibility it has and all that it has packed in.
I think the only other federated service I’ve found that’s comparable in flexibility may be Hubzilla, albeit I got the impression it’s less user friendly, but still, very customizable and a lot you could do with it.
https://thirdroom.io is based on matrix, not activitypub, but it’s trying to be some kind of federated 3d world.
If Ghost fulfil their wish to get payments and subscriptions working over the protocol then that would count. They said they think they can in their recent announcement. But then it seems they may have crypto in mind for it.
I think social media is a solved problem at this point, you’ll need something radical or game changing to actually break through in this market. Combined with the fact that the fediverse is inherently much more difficult to monetize I don’t see many companies taking on that challenge.
FOSS projects might though, but they tend to grow too slow to be disruptive.
If you’re thinking of it in market terms, then it being a “solved problem” should mean that it’s effectively a commodity and nothing radical or game-changing is needed at all to eventually break the monopolies and win all the market share. All that’s needed is to offer the same old thing at a slightly lower price, and wait for people to catch on.
But I disagree; there are plenty of unsolved problems.
I’m thinking the same way smartphones are solved where only small increments of improvement happen. Radical changes happenen, like folding phones or the rise of Tiktok. Some have long lasting problems like the former, but the latter managed to pick a fight with the giants and come out on top.
Back to market terms, they’re mature but new players have proven to disrupt the market. When the general public start caring about privacy, federated social media will rise. Seeing how that is quite a politicised thing, progress will be slow. I’d love to be proven wrong though.
https://bonfirenetworks.org/ approach is quite unique, this might be what you are looking for
We are building one since almost 10 months. It is just a week or two away from feature completion of v1. Hope to launch it soon. We have some innovation baked in and some coming later.
What do you have in mind? What kind of innovation or features are you thinking of?
Given that you’ll want to save details for your launch, I understand why you can’t give too much away but… could you give a hint at how your project aims to innovate?
Is it completely outside the known social media paradigms (microblogging, communities, review sites, etc), does it spin or combine them in novel ways, or “just” add original features to one or more of the existing models?
completely new unproven paradigm would have low chance of actually working, so we are not trying that.
The site is primarily like reddit or lemmy but with different way of doing business, technology, features.
Hello again,
Our product is ready. Here is starting point to read about what all we are doing
A key feature we have is “Live” comments, just like facebook feed, this is live feed of comments, this way without clicking, user can navigate various new posts and comments. This is available at
Any good, bad or ugly feedback is helpful and appreciated. Please join our discord to talk to us and give feedback at https://discord.gg/2nzhRpmw9A
All of those sites were inspired by previous sites, everything is some sort of iteration of something.
I think the open data projects have a fair potential for innovation. They need some kind of backbone for permanence which would need widespread federation, but they’re a conceptually interesting addition to the Fediverse.
Edit: spelling (“to”, not “YO!”)
I will try and make a federated anime tracking website in summer. Not sure if that is unique though.
I’d be very interested in this
Like MAL or Anilist?
What part will be federated? Reviews?
Reviews and the forums is my idea. Basically, every anime, manga, etc. will have its own community and the reviews and forum threads will be a new post. I also want to include VN tracking in it if I can find a source for it, unlike MAL.
Slowly.app? It’s like having a snail mail pen-pal.
where’s the Fediverse part?
Sorry, I thought platforms in general, not specifically in the Fediverse.
Late, but still: I dare say that what Mike Macgirvin has done.
Mistpark/Friendika/Friendica looks like and is marketed as a Facebook alternative. But it comes with extra features on top like a built-in file storage, and its actual killer feature has always been that it federates with everything that moves.
Red a.k.a. the Red Matrix used to handle much like Friendica on the surface, but it introduced nomadic identity and permissions as early as 2012.
Hubzilla, into which the Red Matrix was turned in 2015, is probably the most powerful of all Fediverse projects. It was the first Fediverse project to implement ActivityPub, two months before Mastodon. And it was the first nomadic one to actually kind of take off.
Finally, the latest offspring of 14 years (plus two days) of development since Mistpark is the streams repository which isn’t as feature-heavy as Hubzilla, but the most innovative one, and it’s constantly evolving. It will be there first that nomadic identity and even permissions beyond what Hubzilla has to offer will be implemented in ActivityPub. And it’s likely that this will happen this year.
