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?
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.
You are assuming that A. Google isn’t scraping data for their own AI, B. that these companies will create their own instances (which opens them up to a certain amount of liability and requires them to retain moderation/admin and maintenance staff (which costs money)). C. That the enshittification of corporate owned versions of Lemmy and the fediverse won’t push people to Lemmy sooner or later.
A fourth assumption you made is that the Threads federation push was made in order to do anything other than create hype around a feature that might draw people away from places like the fediverse. I kind of assumed (maybe I’m wrong) that they were offering it as a way to have all the benefits of federation - namely the assumption of FOSS adjacent services, but with all the “benefits” of corporate social media.
The truth is that it’s likely that Meta absolutely has had a detrimental effect on the fediverse because it has things that pull users away from the fediverse. Instagram has content. For days. And because the fediverse is small (shrinking as you say), and because it doesn’t have an algorithm that pushes certain content to certain users, Meta and the other services that have analogs in the fediverse continue to be popular.
A lot of this is because the fediverse still hasn’t figured out a way to be profitable to content creators and we no longer live in the early 2000’s of YouTube etc where content creation for free was popular.
I’d argue that a lot of the appeal of the fediverse is organic conversation and communication. The popularity of that as a whole is declining because of algorithms that tickle just the right feel good chemicals in our brains.
As for your comment about these corps investing in the fediverse? The only reason for them to do that is if they can make money off it. The major money making scheme the internet is relying on is ad service. So there’s a catch 22 here. I would rather donate money to fedi services than have the fediverse infested with ads.