Put another way, what are some examples of software built with federation in mind from the start, rather than on top of a more centralized design?
Misskey. It’s second most used software in fediverse. Used in misskey.io, which has 10 thousands daily active user (possibly 100K-200K MAU).
Developed since 2014. Originally function as self-hosted microblogging, now turns into unique social media. For example:
- Misskey-flavoured Markdown, example
- social games (only two so far: Reversi and Bubble Game)
- emoji reaction like Discord (they’re the first one to implement it on fediverse)
- Antennas (tracking post with any keyword)
- Pages
- Channels (groups)
- Clips (bookmark with multiple groups, kinda like Facebook bookmarks)
- Achievement
- optional ads banner (just in case the server admin wants to do community ads, usually used for indie games, comics, vtuber, or IRL art event)
Their community is mainly Japanese, they desperately need English contributor and community to help them grow.
The UI of misskey + forks is so gorgeous. If I enjoyed using social media, I’d definitely use it.
I keep wanting to try Misskey, Sharkey, or Firefin. I like the concept but keep sticking to Mbin, Mastodon, and Threads.
Ew threads
The Misskey forks are in English, the only bad thing is that they are a little resource intensive
If it was soft-fork, than its fine. Almost all previous forks are hard-forking, splitting English community into another one.
A lot of FOSS project from non-English community often having hard time to broaden their community unless English community embrace them first. Helping non-English community also broaden FOSS community diversity and perspective, allowing them to collaborate and do cultural exchange.
I’d like to try it out. Do you recommend some instance with English UI?
This will also be my first microblogging platform, so any and all beginner tips are welcome.
blahaj.zone uses Sharkey (which is a fork of Misskey)
calckey.world is one.
If it helps, here’s a (partial) list of ActivityPub software - I’m not sure why it doesn’t include things like Friendica or Owncast: https://github.com/BasixKOR/awesome-activitypub
But regarding your question, the first example that comes to mind is PeerTube. Not only does it look to me like it was designed from the start with federation in mind (I don’t know this for a fact though), but it also seems pretty innovative with its use of peer-to-peer video streaming. This 2 minute animated video does a good job of explaining what it does: https://framatube.org/w/217eefeb-883d-45be-b7fc-a788ad8507d3
Owncast seems somewhat similar.
It seems that most Fediverse/ActivityPub software is a “twist” on something that existed previously, but there is still a lot of innovation going on, instead of pure copies of existing centralized platforms.
Maybe mbin or piefed? They don’t exactly seem to have 1:1 copies among oligarch run services.
Mbin (rip kbin) reminds me of TweetDeck and the like from back in the day, when I could monitor feeds across Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. That’s part of why I like it. It puts everything in one place.
A nice example is https://castopod.org/
I don’t understand the question. Pretty much all fediverse software was built with federation in mind from the start. They all started from scratch afaik, nothing was built on top of a centralized design.
They also happen to perform similar functions as earlier centralized websites, but that’s simply because those are the ways that people commonly prefer to use the internet. People use it to share photos, stream videos, connect with friends, microblog, blog, browse content aggregators, etc.
There could definitely be new paradigms of internet usage waiting to be discovered, but if the fediverse can’t even replace the existing functionality of the web first, it’d be very ambitious to start building brand new types of sites already.
What’re you looking for that isn’t all the 20 some fediverse softwares?
My interpretation is something that isn’t the fediverse version of something else. Like Lemmy doesn’t count because it’s the fediverse version of Reddit.
I think the question at that point is “How often is there a completely new way to use the Internet socially, either inside or outside of the federated space?”
I don’t think it happens very often. Blogs, messsage boards and dating sites in the '90s; microblogs, photo and video sharing in the '00s; short form video sharing in the '10s if that counts as a separate thing. There’s only like seven types of social network in the three decades or so they’ve existed.
One major change that has happened is: forums used to be linear with thread bumping (phpBB, SMF), now they are mostly conversation trees with sorting by upvotes or similar (Reddit, Lemmy).
I guess NodeBB or Discourse would not qualify as they were forums that now have AP tacked on as an afterthought. Same for WordPress.
But yeah all the big names are original, fediverse-first software.
hubzilla?
