rglullis

It may be, but could you try making the same remark without sounding like a toxic asshole?

Sorry! I was overconfident with a change. Please try again.

I think, sadly, that either sending in your national ID

That's why I mentioned the idea of "Zero Knowledge Proofs". Using a ZK-proof, one should be able to prove ownership of an ID without having to reveal it to anyone else.

At that point, it’s not its own web app anymore, more akin to an email program.

Yes, exactly. I am not a fan of the current way that the Fediverse is working though, and I think it would be better to stop thinking in terms of "servers/clients" and more in terms of "distributed applilcations".

Can you explain more? How would this do anything to prevent sockpuppets?

Imagine something like a verification check (like Twitter's old blue check) that is exclusively associated with your national ID. You can have only one of those. If you want to create sockpuppets, you'd have to convince someone else to (a) give them access to their ID and (b) be willing to lose their ability to prove their own identity elsewhere.

It's not absolutely safe against bots and sockpuppets, but it surely makes it more expensive than even a $10/account membership.

Pixelfed has support for most of the Fediverse.

PIxelfed is still just supporting ActivityPub. I'm talking about multi-protocol communication. A smart client should be able to let you communicate with Lemmy communities, subreddits, Facebook groups and all types of different platforms from a single unified interface. There are plenty of people that think this is something undesirable (like everyone that wants instances to block Threads), but I'd argue that building these integrations with closed platforms would eventually destroy them because they would lose the monopoly on network effects.

You can’t bring an actor ID to a new domain name, can you?

No, but you could have a web server that responds to multiple domains. Ideally, the server listening and responding to the AP requests should be able to work with multiple "virtual servers", instead of having to have only one instance == one domain that we today. AFAIK, only Takahe does this for microblogging.

No one is forcing you to see them, especially given that this is an open source system with open source clients.

Also, how much are you paying/contributing to the developers, admins and moderators in order to avoid the need of alternative methods of funding?

To be quite honest, I wouldn't mind sponsored posts as a way to support a community or instance, as long as they were completely disclosed as so and if the sponsor had no control over the moderation.

Yes, but not just that. For example, the top comment on this thread is just a sarcastic jab at SV startups and not a real answer to the question. This makes it easy to setup a whole comment chain of (imo) completely useless comments and drowns out any chance of a more serious conversation in the context.

This is not to say that I wish to get rid of all funny/casual commentary that might come off in a discussion, I just wish that I could have some form of context.

Some comments could be marked as "forgettable" so that servers could just drop them after a while, others should be saved because they are important as a reference. This is what I mean by "multi-dimensional". I think that downvotes are important to curate "bad content", but it would be even better if people could also signal why/what that comment is bad.

• Proof of Humanity. There is some work about using Zero Knowledge Proofs as a way to be able to indicate that the owner of a key can also prove ownership of another set of credentials without having to reveal these credentials to third parties. This would allow us to really get rid of bots and sockpuppets.
• The ability for users to bring their own cryptographic keys and actor id. This way even if a server goes down people could port their whole account over to a different server.
• Multi-protocol federation.
• Get rid of downvotes/upvotes and replace it with multi-dimensional scoring/ranking system.
• User-defined sorting/ranking. I do not want to completely block people, but I do wish to have a system that could boost/de-emphasize posts by certain people on certain topics, and completely ignore them in others.
• Cooperative media storage and distribution that could leverage the storage from clients as well as servers, something based on bittorrent.
• Custom widgets that can be attached to a post/community. For example, I'd like to have a play-by-play tracker for basketball/football games.
• RDF/Semantic Web descriptors. If people are talking about a TV show, or making a list of PC components that they want to review or anything that can be part of a knowledge graph should be linkable and browsable by a specialized browser.
• Collaborative lists/articles/posts. With the item above, it would be trivial to create wikipedia-style posts where a community can build their "common knowledge" and would make it easier for newcomers to get general recommendations and/or a sense of the community values.

Hi! Just wanted to let you know that it's now possible to sign-up to Fediverser with more traditional methods. :)

Community is not enough

I'm still doggedly working on Communick and on AP-based projects because I believe in open standards and because it is our best shot at us collectively take back the web. But if we continue on this idea that the Fediverse is somehow "better" because it discriminates against small business owners, or professionals who want an online presence to promote their work, or anything that resembles "profit-motive", then this whole thing will forever remain a wasted opportunity, and we will be (once again) be giving it all away for Zuckerberg.

What we have now is just a Tyranny of the Minority. We need to grow the open web. That includes getting normies here. That includes getting people who are not part of your tribe. This includes getting people that you are able to ignore.

A few reasons:

• The userbase on the Fediverse is not big enough to support a donation-based economy.
• The userbase on the Fediverse is not big enough to support an ad-based economy. Even if by some magical powers we got an ethical ad network working here (which didn't track users and focused solely on paying people by the opportunity of broadcasting their inventory) there wouldn't be enough eyeballs to attract advertisers.
• The userbase is still anti-business.
• For all its faults, Youtube is hands-down is the platform that pay the most to content creators.
• Content creators are not willing to spend their time building out audiences on new platforms. Principles be damned, they will just go where the money is.

I've added support for crowdfunding to Communick earlier this year, and even people who are active on the Fediverse and have a vested interest in having monetization alternatives turned it down. This is why all we see are these completely fringe ideas that can only appeal for the get-rich-quick crowd.

Great question and thank you for your interesting in helping. Authentication via Reddit OAuth does not give "access" to the account. Reddit will send only your username and the list of subreddits you have subscribed to. I've set it up this way to help build out the list of subreddits.

In any case, you are right that other authentication methods are needed. I'll change the setup soon to allow "traditional" sign-up, and I can also add other signup methods.