For any social network, not just a federated one.
My thoughts: The way it works in big tech social networks is like this:
- **The organic methods: **
- your followee shares something from a poster you don’t follow
- someone you don’t follow comments on a post from someone you follow
- you join a group or community and find others you currently don’t follow
- The recommendation engine methods: content you do not follow shows up, and you are likely to engage in it based on statistical models. Big tech is pushing this more and more.
- Search: you specifically attempt to find what you’re looking for through some search capability. Big tech is pushing against this more and more.
In my opinion, the fediverse covers #1 well already. But #1 has a bubble effect. Your followees are less likely to share something very drastically different from what you already have.
The fediverse is principally opposed to #2, at least the way it is done in big tech. But maybe some variation of it could be done well.
#3 is a big weakness for fediverse. But I am curious how it would ideally manifest. Would it be full text search? Semantic search? Or something with more machine learning?
A unified fediverse search service would be awesome, and its something I may try to tackle in the future. Part of why I’m asking this question here!
I have already found my instance’s “all communities” link fairly useful for finding communities.
The problem is I am subscribed to many communities that hardly anyone ever posts anything to, and the answer is not always “be the change you want to see in the world”. For example, I’m a native speaker of German and enjoy helping learners of German with grammatical questions, so I am subscribed to !german@lemmy.world – yet, almost no one ever posts any questions there for me to answer. (This is in stark contrast to reddit, where there is a very active /r/german.) People who see that community on lemmy probably think no one will ever read their question if they post it there. Chicken and egg problem.
I am a bit confused, and have a feeling you replied to the wrong comment somehow?
No, I was somewhat expanding on my previous thoughts on how to discover things on the fediverse and make it more active. Maybe that was a bit off-topic, sorry if it was.