It wasn’t until I saw that Metafilter owner, @jessamyn, was here on Mastodon, that I fully realized that in the back of my mind, MetaFilter was always the closest analogy to what I thought typical and lasting Fediverse “communities” should feel like.
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compete with Big Social, and not focused enough on what it does well, which is facilitate smaller and ultimately more impactful and necessary creative, professional, civic, and educational communities. And for all of them to much better served, we need far more than these extremely simple, brute-force communicators like microblogging. We need things like textcasting standards, personal and group repositories, clearinghouses, verifiers, metadata, more robust full-text search indexes, and …
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lots of other tools so far beyond what big social would ever be capable of providing. That is crazy-exciting to me. The potential is enormous. But we’re still talking about not having quoted posts, and whether we’re appealing enough to sign-up Brazilian refugees who just lost their Twitter.
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@shoq Honestly I wish there were a bunch of MetaFilters which could all cross-post to each other so that it was easier for people to find their communities within the larger one. Like... I am on a GLAM instance on Mastodon and it's a good starting place. MeFi gets a lot more people who have come from Big Social and so have slightly off-kilter expectations of community norms and how moderation works, or should work.
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@jessamyn Indeed. Which is one reason I am working with @newmast and @tchambers on first getting activityPub group actors working well, and then building on that. Integrating and cross-connecting groups should be easier than entire instances. May I add you to our “interested parties” list? I’m organizing a chat about it.
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@jessamyn @shoq @tchambers Sounds like metafilter needs a Lemmy (or similar) instance. That sounds like what you're describing to me.
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@steve @jessamyn @tchambers that was my first thought which is why I'm asking for clarification. There are other possibilities.
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@shoq @steve @tchambers it would definitely be cool to federate the posts at least. Everything has RSS anyhow so my guess is it wouldn't even be that tricky to set up but it's definitely outside of my capabilities.
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@jessamyn @shoq @tchambers You could do the bare minimum today with an RSS to fediverse bridge. There are tons of those available now.
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@steve @jessamyn @tchambers RSS feeds are fine for consuming content generally, but they get messy fast without some degree of moderation. And they’re not designed for thread-specific moderation as Lemmy and like products are.
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@shoq @steve @tchambers Ah I gotcha. So this is one of those "Yes it's a good idea but someone would need to moderate it" in which case I love it but our mod team is running on fumes as it is (tho it's possible I misunderstood in which case do clarify, is there an ask here or is this a "just tossing around ideas" stuff)
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No ask yet, but tossing stuff around is how ideas are born here. Sometimes the tech can drive the idea, and sometimes the quality of the content can. RSS is not going to help you much. But a well constructed group and some bots might. When I have a little more time, I’ll outline a few ideas.
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@shoq @steve @tchambers Cool thanks for the heads up. I am interested in this idea and have a lot of content which could be massaged and toyed with, just not a lot of time/energy. Thank you for clarifying.
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@jessamyn @steve @tchambers BTW, there are fairly easy ideas that could put a toe in the water, if you haven’t already. A “Best of Mefi” feed, for example, only requires a good posting tool and some guidelines to curate. I think Tim could hook you up with some existing solutions for that.
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@shoq @steve @tchambers We have a Best of MeFi blog that is pretty good and MeFi.social is the instance (not official but it's very well run) and it might be a good partnership with them somehow. Tagging @pronoiac in this because why not?