The problem with existing services¶
One of the biggest issues with the model of centralized social networks is the fact that they are in a perpetual quest to increase their users number.
Besides the (mostly) unethical motivations for this, having a large number of users raises a number of problems that an indie service can not overcome with ease:
- Increased operational costs.
- The focus of the topics of interest is being lost.
- Increased human cost for policing unwanted content.
This is a wider problem than just “link aggregators”. In present day all mainstream social networks are guilty of it.
Federated services as a solution¶
The main reason why I think that link aggregators lose their appeal is the increasing number of users, which more often than not, do not share the existing group’s interests and philosophies. As the number grows, the topics start to expand over a larger spectrum, people get flooded with irrelevant content, while what is relevant gets buried.
From an old member’s perspective it’s the “eternal September” effect.
This is why the main component which will be missing in this implementation is the concept of using the same instance for merging multiple interest groups and replacing it with the different instances themselves. This way every community will be able to create one of their own and enforce (or not) their own moderation rules and topic preferences.
At the same time, through the federation mechanism between instances, the users can subscribe to other streams and will receive updates from them. As a plus, due to the interoperability that ActivityPub brings, they are not only limited to link aggregators, but can also interact with other fediverse services.
Misc¶
The project attempts to provide solutions for some of the issues we perceived existing with the current link aggregators.
The problems it tries to solve are, the dissolution over time of the community’s interests and its split into groups with tighter focused interests and dissenting opinions.
It leverages the ActivityPub web specification for social networking and uses federation to prevent some of the problems that exist currently in similar communities.