You’d be surprised, this has always been something of a weird schism within open source. There’s a synthesis between socialist and libertarian ideals, the overlap of which is broadly seen as a beneficial social good. So, you get contributors and users that fall on opposite ends of a spectrum. This is just as true for the Fediverse, only the dynamic is much more pronounced, because it’s a social network populated by people who got off of other social networks.

Technically, SoapBox and Rebased were forks of the Mastodon frontend and Pleroma backend by an alt-right dev that found some level of success in the alt-right part of the Fediverse. So, it’s not completely unheard of.

It’s basically an open source, federated clone of GrooveShark, which was kind of like Plex but just for music.

Yeah, the UX is historically not great. I’m also pretty sure that the federated social layer is still kind of non-existent at this point. It used to be that you could upload your own music and share it, but you’d never see replies from anybody.

It’s like someone took a Grooveshark clone, shoehorned federation into it, and then kind of made some features act like SoundCloud, if you squint. But, they didn’t really finish the transition.

Generally speaking, I agree. It’s just interesting to see a platform force a mechanism into itself that admins can’t turn off. The only thing that really bugs me about that is that admins are kind of supposed to have the final say on what their server does, and some of the infrastructure for this idea seems a bit shaky at best.

You might want to check out Bandwagon. It’s ActivityPub-based, and you can use it to submit your music to The Indie Beat Radio: https://bandwagon.fm/

Yeah, that was the Content Nation debacle: https://wedistribute.org/2024/03/contentnation-mastodons-toxicity/

What’s really sad is that the CN dev is actually a super nice and thoughtful dude. In his jurisdiction (Germany) he could’ve gone to prison after being caught with said materials.

Same thing initially happened with BridgyFed: https://wedistribute.org/2024/02/tear-down-walls-not-bridges/

I run Spectra Video at https://spectra.video/. We have gated signups: basically, someone fills out a request form, we review it, the account gets approved within a short turnaround time, and the user’s channel gets created.

There is a PeerTube plugin for premium subscriptions that does exactly this: https://github.com/kontrollanten/peertube-plugin-premium-users

Yeah, I’d say it might have more to do with the fact that making texts posts is a lot easier than making videos. It’s still possible to introduce too much noise, regardless of medium, but there’s a lot less friction when the medium is simpler and doesn’t require much work.

It would be nice if there was an easy and straightforward way for instances to create their own shared indexes. There’s a feature for this in PeerTube, which I guess is supposed to act like instance following + a shared search catalogue. It would be handy to know how to easily make sort of the federation equivalent of a webring.

The devs are also working on a mobile app, which I think is something the platform is sorely missing.

I actually wrote a bit about this in the past: https://deadsuperhero.com/2021/10/peertubes-content-wasteland/

TL;DR - Yeah, it’s possible to fill up your local catalogue of remote entries really quickly through instance following. The problem is not a shortage of instances or videos, the problem is that cutting it down to the good stuff requires a lot of active curation. It’s very easy to just open the firehose and drown in a never-ending stream of junk.

To be fair, the flagship instance recently had a surge of 200,000 new sign-ups. Dansup mentioned to me that he’s currently seeing like 50 new posts every minute. He’s probably scrambling to upgrade infra.

I agree, but there’s still plenty of time for that to happen. I wish them all the success in the world.

That’s not what this is. It’s more of a feed aggregator / reader with social features, framed as a browser of sorts.

The main thing it’s used for is feed curation and content discovery. You can basically use anything with a feed as a source, then aggregate and filter things.

It’s kind of like a news reader version of Yahoo Pipes almost.