I love to see the diversity of software increase. Once we clone all the major ones we can start innovating to the point where you have something completely new and bespoke and that will be really exciting
This quote has me reflecting on the diversity of software, especially in the realm of open source social media platforms. It seems like many of them are just clones of popular ones, lacking true innovation. Why is this the case? Are there any open source social media platforms that are genuinely innovative and offer something unique?
There’s only so many different ways you can accomplish “people can post things for other people to see and respond to”.
You can describe all social media as people posting stuff then other people subscribing to see that stuff either by person, by topic or indirectly by what other stuff you do (via recommendation algorithms) and commenting or voting on it.
If something doesn’t meet that description it’s not really social media.
Given that, there’s only really a finite number of ways you can display content with votes and comments.
What? The fediverse is the only place you will find a variety of social media implementations all cooperating while also innovating in unique ways. There are dozens of different projects on the network, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. There’s nothing else that compares to it when it comes to diversity of software.
For example, it may interest you to learn that I am not using lemmy right now.
How is the fediverse software innovating? Lemmy feels just like Reddit and Mastodon seems like Twitter but it doesn’t have algorithms so in practice it feels more like a chat.
but there is not only lemmy and mastodon
here you can find probably all relevant ones: https://github.com/emilebosch/awesome-fediverseSaying that lemmy is just a copy of reddit is like saying that reddit is just a copy of Usenet. There are fundamental differences, but they have some obvious things in common. Even if mastodon is just twitter to you, then what exactly do you think misskey is? I’m posting from mbin here which is not quite like anything else.
I mean mbin is just Reddit + Twitter
Sure, sure, and Facebook is just Geocities + phpBB + surveillance capitalism. Nothing is new since 1995.
If it’s too unique, no one will adopt it. You gotta start with a formula people actually know how to use and then try to come up with something new and novel that’s actually useful and people like. Otherwise you just end up with https://youtu.be/fV2AprdWKk0
At the end of the day, it’s all just more or less forums and chat.
