The problem with federated alternatives to centralized services (and also one of the main problems with centralized services which lead people to look for an alternative) is Discovery.
Etsy and Twitch and YouTube provide an audience, supposedly. With the right pitch (and the right advertising dollars) you can get your own slice of that audience. (For as long as the algorithm graces you, and as long as you're willing to stomach the other things your viewers will be algorithmically suggested.)
The reason people flock to centralized services is to have an easier time finding the the thing that they want.
They often don't even have the chance to bounce off of indie services, but rather never find them to begin with. When they do find them, the discovery problem creates a high bounce rate.
This is why things like peertube struggle. Creators think their audience isn't there. Audiences can't find creators. No one makes any money.
On the flip side, youtube and facebook are built to maximize engagement, which means maximizing outrage in most cases, which turns them in to machines for turning people in to reactionaries.
@ajroach42 I can help actually. This is something I think about constantly and have been working on content exactly to answer that final part of how to scale curation and word of mouth.
I’d be happy to get on a call or set up an email thread to help you workshop this. Feel free to email me - Mariya(at)kalynamarketing.com
I don't think there is an answer to this question. I think scale is a trap.
I think that the fediverse, a bunch of small neighborhoods through which things bubble around and eventually reach escape velocity, is the closest to a real solution we're likely to find in the real world.
(Hell, I wrote about hyperlocal BBS systems as a potential solution for content discovery 8ish years ago, and then ended up on the fediverse and updated the article to indicate that it was working.)
@ajroach42 search, crawling, curation, and rendering of interfaces to those systems needs to be disintermediated. Individuals need to each have powerful tools for navigating the world they are connected to.
I.E. if "algorithms" are individually chosen and controlled, you don't have a platform problem.
Good question. I think a means to tip and transact fluidly, especially in the fediverse is a missing element. Tricky when payment comes into play, but it’s as essential to a digital world as commerce and press freedom is in its physical equivalents.
so, hot take, but I think the answer is "other human curators" and I think it can work even though it sounds like an ouroboros type impossible system.
the trick is that the curation focus of one curator needs to source from curators with slightly different yet often (for various definitions of often) overlapping foci, and at least some curators need to be sourcing from direct sources - the people making the thing that needs discovering.
and I think we have to duplicate work a lot to avoid over-amplification of a subset of voices creating a quieting effect on the majority of voices.
if I curate music recommendations, ideally our curation system should not allow my voice, or any voice, to dominate that space. some mechanism to turn off the attention tap once a curator hits some audience size kind of thing.
@whitneymcn@ajroach42 webrings are absolutely a reasonable model for human-scale discovery and definitely a form of curation-based discovery - someone somewhere is deciding which sites get added to any given ring, based on whatever basis they choose.
@whitneymcn@ajroach42 add a "directory of webrings" layer (of which there should be multiple directories obviously) and promote strong local per-site search capabilities and you're well on your way to a decentralized yet discoverable web imho.
@whitneymcn@ajroach42 directories are just curation too! but I feel like directories should probably have a lighter touch than a webring? like, opt to add more pertinent listings rather than find more ways to limit the scope. but maybe that way lies madness and web crawling again, and I'm not convinced we really need much of that.
@djsundog@ajroach42 Yeah, I see webrings as social/topical groups that might require approval of members, where a directory aims broader (though moderation, at least, would be necessary).
@djsundog@ajroach42 We're at a point where these things can [still, maybe for the moment] be operated at human-manageable costs, which wasn't really the case before.
I only had websites in the 90s because a friend had a server colocated in his company's data center, and his company didn't ask a lot of questions.
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