Pretty happy.

The place and platform is capable of growth and diversity … on which, many should consider starting their own instances just to spread the load and allow people to find their moderation homes.

I’ve been wanting the fediverse to be more topic/group/community based than a twitter clone since I got here, so it makes sense to see some interest in these “Threadiverse” style platforms.

There’ll be growing pains, and the current admins and devs are probably going through some pain now. Sorry! I just hope enough community leaders, former sub-reddit mods and future admins will see the value in distributing social media and help pick up the slack.

More broadly, for those who don’t know, IMO, the fediverse has been suffering from an essentially oppressive dominance by Mastodon. Everyone thinks the fediverse is just Mastodon. Though that’s completely untrue, as there are a number of alternative platforms, some of which are rather novel and interesting, it is numerically very true with Mastodon comprising >80% of fediverse users.

Generally, this amount of dominance is almost certainly bad for the future health of the fediverse and the values it seeks to promote (ie, interconnected platform and community diversity). Mastodon, at the moment, is creeping towards being just another centralised platform … essentially an OSS non-profit Twitter in its own right, which isn’t a bad thing at all, but not what the fediverse is about.

Enter the Threadiverse! Lemmy, /kbin (and even calckey a little with what will hopefully become its federated channels), and others. Not just platform diversity, but medium or format diversity.

At this moment, IMO, it is very valuable to the fediverse at large, that lemmy, /kbin etc grow and do well.

FWIW … as someone who’s gone from lurking to posting in a few places, and in fact in real life at times … go for it! … it’s fun and makes the place more fun for you and everyone else!

So … starting your own community is pretty straight forward here.

You get moderation powers too, that can be shared, even between users on different lemmy instances.

See, eg, https://join-lemmy.org/docs/en/users/04-moderation.html

• reading
• TV / movies
• video games
• listening to music (it’s important to remember that this was an active thing to do … you’d listen to an album beginning to end, digest it, read about it etc)
• playing music
• Hanging out with friends, either doing some of the above or going here and there on pushbikes.

Not gonna lie, I honestly think it was overall better. If the internet were just Wikipedia, blogs and casual non-profit social media, the world would be a better place.

So I think I just hadn’t had enough coffee when I asked this.

Most of the information is available in the docs. I think, right here: https://join-lemmy.org/docs/en/users/04-moderation.html

A pleasant surprise for me was that community moderation can occur over federation.

Integration across various platforms is one of those things where I’m not sure even know whether they want it or not. We’re so used to disconnected platforms that it really is new ground for most.

It’s also probably hard and very open ended.

Which is all to say absolutely, there’d be interest, it’s just that it’ll be a bumpy ride but also worth it for showing people what is possible.

Allowing multiple accounts across multiple platforms to be merged into single timelines in customisable ways, alone, would be awesome.

As far as platforms go, I’d prioritise, on the basis of popularity and uniqueness:

1. Mastodon (for obvious and sad reasons)
2. PeerTube (video is unique on fediverse)
3. Lemmy (communities, link aggregation posts, no character limits, thread management etc are all unique and powerful on the fediverse … could have been 2nd but pushed out IMO because of uniqueness of video).
4. Pixelfed (for the instagram people, but, ASAIK, not too distinct from microblogging, but it is popular, though easily viewed from mastodon I think)

Roll those 4 into one (and maybe even just the top 3) and you would have a banger of an app. Even rolling mastodon and Lemmy into a single interface would be quite a demonstration.