So about a year ago, I remember seeing a guy testing out his blog comments section. What he had done was made a lemmy community, and every blog post he made, was a thread on the lemmy community. But here’s the interesting part…all comments on Lemmy in a thread were the same comments on his blog.
So if you have user@lemmy.world, and you go to his community, you see a thread, you comment…your comment is now in the comments section of his blog.
Now today, I see these websites, from corporate websites that have reviews sections. Or news sites with comments sections.
And unless you’re on a mega corporation like amazon, or youtube, these comments and reviews are mostly dead.
So I was thinking. What if there were a way to do this with multiple fediverse services?
What if you have an article, and the comments are 1 lemmy user, 1 mastodon user, 1 misskey user, 1 friendica user, ect ect ect? Basically start making ANY fediverse service a viable way to leave a comment, which can be replied to by any other fediverse user, regardless of service?
Now imagine all these websites that sell things that have 1-2 reviews. They almost always seem to be propriatary comments section that you need to register for that one website. And it doesn’t work anywhere else. Which is usually why there’s only 1-2 reviews.
But if they were using their lemmy account, that they already have, they could leave a review TODAY, and in a month leave a comment on another website using the same account.
And this would start to standardize the fediverse accounts as being universal across the internet, besides mega corps.
This in turn will grow the fediverse, because eventually people will say “hey, you know your fediverse account that you use to leave comments? Well thats a mastodon account. You already have it, and you CAN go on mastodon, and use it like you used to twitter back before it was a nazi platform. Mastodon isn’t fascist.”
From a technical limitations standpoint, is that even possible?
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I don’t want that. Part of the fediverse’s appeal for me is that people aren’t constant trying to sell me things on it.
While I can understand certain communities having "suggest a (game, service, product), for the most part I really don’t want to basically invite corps to think this is free real estate. And that’s exactly what I think this would do.
It’s seems like it would invite corps to basically astroturf Lemmy and the fediverse the way they’re doing with bot armies over on reddit.
The difference is, reddit has Spez. Spez has the authority to sign contracts that allow google to send him checks in exchange for AI scraping.
Whereas google (or other corporations) would have no one to send that check to. Nobody owns the fediverse.
They could create their own instance. And you could block/defederate from them if you want.
Threads is owned by Meta. Meta is a mega corporation. Threads took steps this past summer to federate. And IMMEDIATELY anyone who didn’t want to see them defederated.
Today, I can’t say Meta has made any impact whatsoever on the fediverse. Which to me is a bad thing. It tells all profit driven companies that there is no profit to be made on the fediverse. So rather than invest in the fediverse’s future, they will instead invest in other platforms where they aren’t driven out.
Whereas if they invested in the fediverse, they would have no way to truely control the fediverse. But they can buy Spez. So now instead of growing, Lemmy is shrinking. And the alternative, reddit, IS fully controlled.
I don’t believe that’s even possible on the fediverse. But we can let them pour their resources into growing it until they figure it out.