Hey 👋 if you don’t know us already, we’re building Frontpage; an AT Procol based federated link aggregator. We shipped an initial MVP in closed beta recently and have since been thinking about the road to general availability.
This post is an RFC (Request for Comments) targeted at technically minded folks who are interested in seeing the progression of atproto for non-Bluesky/microblogging use cases. All that’s to say the language that follows assumes some knowledge about how Bluesky and atproto work! I’ve tried to include links to explain what all of the jargon means though, so hopefully it’s not entirely nonsense for folks a little less familiar!
When you post on Frontpage, we propose that a mirror post will also be created in your Bluesky account. When you comment on Frontpage, we propose that a mirror reply will be created in your Bluesky account.
Conversely, when you reply to one of these mirrored posts in Bluesky - we will show it as a reply in Frontpage.
Additionally, Bluesky likes will be translated to Frontpage votes and vice versa.
If you’re still on reddit at this point, there’s nothing short of Spez showing up and killing your cat that’s going to make you leave.
There are a few reasons why people on Reddit prefer to stay there rather than move elsewhere
- the other place lacks content
- the other place does not have their specific niche communities
- Reddit is still okay to use
We are kind of working on the first one (and anyway, the only way to get content is to get more and more users)
For the second one, that’s something even harder to tackle. !newcommunities@lemmy.world tries to fill that gap, but same as above, it needs more users.
The third one is the most interesting. At some point in the future, Reddit is going to kill old.reddit. By that time, people will look for an alternative, and if they know about Lemmy, they’ll give it a try.
unless you’re better in some way that a normal person will care about.
Lemmy is better than Reddit on the following points:
- Third party apps actively developed
- No ads hiding as posts
- Cleaner web interfaces
It’s just not enough at the moment, as stated above.
If I were a dev, I’d probably prioritize that awful ‘THIS HAS FAILED!’ error when you search for a new community that your server doesn’t know about because well, new users who don’t know that doesn’t mean what it says are going to walk away thinking something either doesn’t exist or is broken.
I also kinda think that community lists and activity stats should somehow be federated between all the servers that know each other.
Like, lemmy.world knows uncomfortable.business exists, so both servers should know the full list of non-private communities that COULD in theory be federated and be pre-populated in the search results.
And then feddit.org is federated with lemmy.world, so all 3 of the servers should be fully aware of each other’s communities so that a user that lands on ANY instance immediately has a working searchable list of all communities that exist.
Some overhead, sure, but the amount of data here is probably just a one-time big sync and then a small number of updates which is certainly not going to break anything given how chatty lemmy already is.
