Before you start throwing 💩 , hear me out…

I’m a huge fan of the fediverse…it’s returning to the original design of the Internet…where everyone can communicate freely and openly and corporations have a very difficult time pulling anything creepy that LinkedIn/Twitter (yes, I’ll still call it Twitter)/Facebook does.

But I sense a huge frustration with businesses that want to network with others but feel their hands are tied by these walled gardens.

I figure, why not make the fediverse business friendly?

Right now most people on Mastodon/Lemmy/etc. seem to be more of the anarchist/weekend hacker types. So part of my concern with this is that it would taint the fediverse with a bunch of spam. But by the same token it would also help grow the job market and provide opportunities for people that they may not have had on LinkedIn. Of course, I’d stress for anyone on the site to operate in a community-first mindset.

So, some question…

  1. Would this type of instance be met with disgust? I mean, obviously the great thing about the fediverse is that you can block servers you don’t want on the network, but having the instance blocked would kind of defeat the purpose. 😅

  2. If you’re excited by the idea, what things would you like to see? In my own armchair brainstorming, I thought joint accounts would be a good idea, as well as analytics.

  3. Suggestion for already-existing platform? Can’t find a good one that would be ready-to-go to build off of. There’s friendica, but I’m not much of a fan of PHP, and it seems to not have great adoption, either.

  • jolEnglish
    4·
    10 months ago

    I’ve been thinking about creating a federated LinkedIn but still haven’t totally nailed the concept, as it goes far beyond just posting content. But no, I doubt you could convince anyone to pay for it.

    My main frustration right now is that with the downfall of twitter, LinkedIn became the defacto business contact that people exchange at conferences and meetups. What I’d love to have is an alternative to that for starters.

    If you’re serious about that, I would love to have a chat.

    • Bob 🇺🇲♒🐧@beamship.mpaq.org
      2·
      10 months ago

      @jol @PlanetOfOrd

      I knew it wouldn’t be long before someone started looking into a LinkedIn type ActivityPub 😂

      Not thrilled about it being a “paid” service though. I’ve not been on here for a year yet but this is the first I’ve heard of anyone wanting to do a paid for ActivityPub…

      • jolEnglish
        4·
        10 months ago

        I think the main challenge of the fediverse will be cost. The bigger the network becomes, the more data each instance will have to handle, because each instance will have to communicate with more instances and copy data from them. The average person without disposable income will probably not afford to run their own instance at some point. So unless we figure out monetization, the future of the fediverse at scale is at risk.

        • Bob 🇺🇲♒🐧@beamship.mpaq.org
          3·
          10 months ago

          @jol

          At MPAQ, we run 4 Internet radio stations, an XMPP server, Beamship and working on an email server.

          We have donation buttons but very rarely does anyone send anything.

          99.9% of our cost is working small jobs here and there. I think our network admin will agree with me when I say: Our services will ALWAYS be free. And as a way to introduce our team:

          @seige
          @evi
          @kahlen
          @LaraMae
          @Joshua
          @erinwutzke

          • jolEnglish
            2·
            10 months ago

            That’s great, but in the end of the day they are only free because you have a charitable admin. It’s free for users but not free to run. How big could you grow and still be sustainable? Could you handle tens of millions of users?

              • jolEnglish
                1·
                10 months ago

                This makes no sense to me. Someone still has to pay the bills if there’s not enough donations. You may wish to not be part of the system but still are required to pay electricity and Internet. I guess you can use solar panels for power, but the ISP will probably not feel so charitable.

      • PlanetOfOrd@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
        2·
        10 months ago

        Years ago I think I would have been in the same boat about not being a fan of something like this being paid, but I think the main reason why big tech platforms have become enshittified is because we haven’t demanded value and instead demanded free. And because we’ve demanded free we have two camps: big tech that can yank our chain, and free/libre solutions that may survive just barely on donations and the good will of people (and wanting it to be free as in $ IMO is devaluing the importance of the fediverse). I think a good solution to promote software freedom and the fediverse is for some paid instances to be part of it.