I see Fediverse as being the future of the internet. In my eyes, Fediverse is the modern social media equivalent of email, and I have some ideas of how to work towards the same ubiquity.
These aren’t moonshot ideas either, these are all things which I think would be pretty achievable in the short term. I think most of these ideas could be implemented by a solo open-source developer in a matter of weeks.
Multi-tenancy Mastodon-compatible server for shared hosting environments
Allow hosting multiple Mastodon “instances” on shared infrastructure, with efficiency gains by deduplicating data between instances. Similar to how email hosting software (such as exim or postfix) supports hosting mailboxes at multiple domains without requiring multiple instances of the server, so too should Mastodon.
This idea was actually proposed way back in 2017 but as far as I can tell there’s been no progress towards implementing it. I think this could potentially be implemented in a fork though.
Mastodon-compatible RSS/Atom bridge
Allow creating instances where each “user” is an external feed. I can see two primary usage scenarios, both of which I think could be supported by a single piece of software with some configuration differences.
Reader-operated bridges
Similar to how Guppe Groups work, an instance of the bridge software could be run that allows anyone to use it to follow an arbitrary feed. All you’d need would be to have some way to map between feed URLs and usernames. As long as at least one user was following a feed via the bridge, the bridge would retrieve updates from that feed.
Author-operated bridges
With a few access controls added, bridges could be limited to only following a select number of admin-defined feeds. This setup would potentially allow for the feeds to be given custom user-friendly usernames. If combined with the previous multi-tenancy idea, this could be offered to any blog operator via a shared hosting service.
MastoFeed achieves something similar, but not in quite the way I’d like. It allows automating the process of sending items from an RSS feed to a Mastodon instance. I think it would be nice to instead have a dedicated Masto-compatible instance server for this. I think this would allow for very lightweight software that’s easier to configure for self-hosters.
Lemmy-compatible RSS/Atom bridge
A Lemmy server where each community represents an RSS/Atom feed. Ideally communities would be moderated by the blogger and/or their trusted friends. This is similar to the previous idea, except for being Lemmy-compatible instead of Masto-compatible.
While Mastodon is useful allowing users to follow specific blogs and see all new posts from them, I think Lemmy could be interesting for enabling the discovery of new blogs via the algorithmic All feed. I also see Lemmy’s comment system as having the potential to enable more in-depth discussions of posts.
Lemmy feature to allow embedding posts on other websites
Add a cut-down single-post view to Lemmy, one that’s designed to look nice in iframes. Ideally this could have some parameters for colours and styling in order to make it fit in well wherever it is embedded.
This would allow blog owners to easily add a hierarchical comment section to their blog, even on static website hosts. Additionally it would make it easy for readers to upvote the relevant Lemmy post if they enjoyed the article.
Combining this with the previous RSS/Atom bridge idea would give each new post a comment section automatically.
This would basically turn Lemmy into a federated alternative to Discourse or Disqus.
Browser plugins to allow easier interactions when not on your home instance
Imagine if you were browsing a random Mastodon instance, but still had the full ability to favourite, boost, and reply to toots without having to locate the same content in your home instance. A browser plugin could enable this by contacting your home instance’s API.
Some care would have to be taken to ensure that this is done in a secure manner, the plugin would have to ensure that it only responds to genuine user interactions. Rather than seamlessly being able to compose a comment within a foreign instance’s UI, I imagine you’d probably click a comment/reply button on the foreign instance and this would open the plugin’s UI to allow composing the comment. Since the plugin’s UI can be made tamper-proof from untrusted websites, this would allow confirming the user’s intent.
I think this could be implemented cleanly by using URL scheme handlers, kinda similar to mailto: links, that way mobile apps (such as Moshidon) could also support these protocols. Maybe in future browsers might even implement native support for the protocol.
Some thought would need to go in to how to design the URL scheme to support the features of all the different Fedi ecosystems. I’d imagine Mastodon & Lemmy might need entirely different URL schemes, but Glitch and Sharkey might be able to just use the Mastodon schema.
If this was combined with the previous idea for embedding Lemmy within other websites, you could get to the bottom of a blog post and be able to upvote it or comment on it without even leaving the page. I think this kind of seamless integration of Fediverse into other websites has the potential to transform the way people interact online.
