The fediverse offers an exciting alternative to centralized social media silos like Twitter and Facebook. As someone passionate about the fediverse, I think a lot about what features would make up my perfect social media platform. I’m curious what ideas other fediverse users have!
What features, functionality, and design would your dream social media platform have? Here are some of my top wishes:
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User curation and tagging - Allow users to tag and organize content instead of relying purely on titles. Improves discoverability.
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Advanced search - Support complex search queries with boolean operators, field filters, date ranges etc. Makes finding relevant content easy.
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Custom feeds - Users can create customized feeds to follow or hide specific users, communities, instances, keywords, etc
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Multi-criteria ratings - Beyond likes, allow rating content on multiple criteria to allow sorting by quality and not just entertainment value.
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Affinity system - Connect users with similar interests. Recommend content based on affinity.
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User trust levels - Grant privileges based on user reputation to lessen reliance on centralized moderation.
My Dream Social Media Platform
Those are just a few of my ideas. What features would your perfect, decentralized social network have? How could we improve on what the fediverse currently offers? Let’s dream big about the future of social media!
All the individual details are nice-to-haves, but the main important criteria I’m looking for, is no one trying to make money off of it.
What is the problem of having someone offering a service (social media hosting) at a fair price? There is virtually no way that we can have an universally accessible social media if we don’t have people paying for it.
Paying for services is fine, profit is the problem. Covering costs is all I want. No need for any agenda or hidden user costs. Just providing a service that people actually want to use.
Why is profit a problem? How do you account for the cost of the labor of the developers, or the time spent by volunteers?
Why isn’t that deserving of profit?
If we’re talking about my dream, that is my dream. A platform that isn’t trying to make money. It’s not wrong to want to make money, but a platform that is trying to make money isn’t my dream platform.
All of my favourite stuff is run by non-profits.
I think that my argument here is that “the platform” doesn’t exist. The fediverser (much like the internet) is not made of one single entity that defines its direction.
Maybe I missed some context to the question, but I didn’t know my ideal social media platform had to be something that already existed.
Your original answer was about “main important criteria I’m looking for” and everything else being “nice-to-haves”. You are taking OP’s description of desirable features that are completely attainable and turned into some pointless grandstanding against “profit”.
It’s the kind of thing that makes me lose all hope that we can ever win the fight against Big Tech and Surveillance Capitalism. Instead of saying “I’m so willing to have social media that doesn’t suck that I’m willing to pay $ for it”, you are saying “I don’t really care, as long as it magically materializes in front of me at the expense of someone else”.
It’s a lame, lazy cop-out.
Umm… not sure you are aware that non-profits still pay their employees. Non-profit is a pretty common way of running a business. All it means is there is no incentive to make more money than is necessary for the companies needs. Any extra income is just re-invested in the company or donated to charity if un-needed.
Basically just means there’s no need to look for more ways to squeeze money out of the customers if they are already happy. And prioritizing usefulness rather than bloating the software is incentivised.