The fediverse offers an exciting alternative to centralized social media silos like Twitter and Facebook. As someone passionate about the fediverse, I think a lot about what features would make up my perfect social media platform. I’m curious what ideas other fediverse users have!
What features, functionality, and design would your dream social media platform have? Here are some of my top wishes:
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User curation and tagging - Allow users to tag and organize content instead of relying purely on titles. Improves discoverability.
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Advanced search - Support complex search queries with boolean operators, field filters, date ranges etc. Makes finding relevant content easy.
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Custom feeds - Users can create customized feeds to follow or hide specific users, communities, instances, keywords, etc
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Multi-criteria ratings - Beyond likes, allow rating content on multiple criteria to allow sorting by quality and not just entertainment value.
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Affinity system - Connect users with similar interests. Recommend content based on affinity.
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User trust levels - Grant privileges based on user reputation to lessen reliance on centralized moderation.
My Dream Social Media Platform
Those are just a few of my ideas. What features would your perfect, decentralized social network have? How could we improve on what the fediverse currently offers? Let’s dream big about the future of social media!
Your original answer was about “main important criteria I’m looking for” and everything else being “nice-to-haves”. You are taking OP’s description of desirable features that are completely attainable and turned into some pointless grandstanding against “profit”.
It’s the kind of thing that makes me lose all hope that we can ever win the fight against Big Tech and Surveillance Capitalism. Instead of saying “I’m so willing to have social media that doesn’t suck that I’m willing to pay $ for it”, you are saying “I don’t really care, as long as it magically materializes in front of me at the expense of someone else”.
It’s a lame, lazy cop-out.
Umm… not sure you are aware that non-profits still pay their employees. Non-profit is a pretty common way of running a business. All it means is there is no incentive to make more money than is necessary for the companies needs. Any extra income is just re-invested in the company or donated to charity if un-needed.
Basically just means there’s no need to look for more ways to squeeze money out of the customers if they are already happy. And prioritizing usefulness rather than bloating the software is incentivised.
By definition, a business can not be a non-profit.
Having individuals and companies being able to sustain or to invest resources because they expect to have profits is a good thing. The profit motive is a net-positive force for wealth creation:
Linux only became the dominant operating system on the server when companies like IBM decided to pour billions of dollars into it? Were they doing it out of kindness? No, they were doing it because it was part of their strategy to commoditize the OS so they could profit more by selling beefy servers and specialized consulting.
Mozilla can not survive without Google’s money, and even with it is dying a slow death. Would you rather have this zombie Mozilla “Foundation” or do you think we would be better off if they Mozilla could find a profitable service or product to let them grow independently from Google?
Mastodon’s has two full-time developers. Gargron, the founder of the project, is reportedly making 30k€/year. This is the kind of salary that if a recent grad would laugh at if it was offered in Germany. Facebook put 100 people to work on their project Barcelona (Threads). Do you really think that Mastodon is getting all the resources that it “needs”? Wouldn’t it be better if Mastodon GmbH could make more money to develop things faster and to serve people better?
Pixelfed and Lemmy were funded mostly by NLNet grants, but do you really think that those resources are enough to compete with Instagram or reddit? Wouldn’t it be better if Pixelfed had more than one talented-but-ADHD-riddled developer? Wouldn’t it be good for society if, e.g, my for-profit operation was profitable enough so that my pledge of giving 20% of profits to these projects was meaningful?
I’m totally with you. It’s honestly one of my best gripes with the culture of the Fedi. They hamstring admins. They don’t want capitalism. Admins are expected to beg for money when the vast majority of people using the service never donate. I believe as long as admins/devs are being reasonably transparent. To me it makes more sense to pay for services such as these as opposed to paying big companies. People should be rewarded for their hard work