Why do we advocate for, and pour hours of development into, ActivityPub rather than building clients which add a social layer to existing content distribution and communication protocols?

If clients built their own social layer, those would be limited to users of that client. If they opened up the social layer with an interoperable protocol, now you just made ActivityPub again.

Yyeess! 🤘

Right now, it looks like the only way users on my instance will get to see content from other instances is if I manually search for just about everything they’ll get to see.

They can do that themselves.

Agreed.
Until people started following hashtags. Then they were trying to be about more than just people, and doing it poorly. Kind of like wanting to subscribe to people on Lemmy. That’s not what it’s for, and just shouldn’t be an option, so people know that.

They really aren’t.
They’re a user created workaround, attempting to fix the structure-less, findability problem. Twitter embraced and officially incorporated them, because they had no better solution that wasn’t completely rebuilding the entire system. They rightly new everybody would hate that.

Yes exactly! It’s just like Twitter or Blusky. It’s 99.3% people just shouting into the void, without form or structure. You’re not confused.

also if it uses a common input name (which it would because it’s the same Lemmy software) then your webbrowser would suggest/autocomplete it

That’s exactly the local software I’m talking about! Now we’re on the same page. Rather than being a form, the local software could just detect and do it all seamlessly.

The All feed is for All. If you don’t want All don’t use All.

It’s designed as a White List system, with subscriptions. You pick the things you want to see.

You’re asking for a Black List system, where you see everything accept what you don’t want. That only works while things are small. As they grow, Black Lists become much larger, and more difficult to manage. When you get to the point where their are tens of thousands of communities, and hundreds of thousands of posts every second, they become useless.

You’d have manually enter your home instance on every site you visit. Super annoying. Not a solution.

That would require some kind of local client side software.
Some kind of browser extension.

Now here’s the bigger issue. Lets say I can click a button, and now a home instance, and all its communities could be saved to a special drop down tab that replaces the local. Your instance is always the default, but the rest are alphabetically listed.

I don’t think I understand. You mean choose a local view of a different server? That would require every instance to duplicate everything on every other instance. Not possible.

What makes Communick.News different from Lemmy.World?

It’s a paid instance. I pay a subscription fee to ensure it won’t die do to lack of resources.

The idea isn’t to centralize the instances. The idea is to theme them.

What benefit would themed instances have. You can’t follow an instance…
Oh! That’s what your trying to do! You want to be able to see some logical grouping of related communities, and follow that! Now I get it.

Yah. That’s not the way to do that. The “MultiReddit” concept is what you want for that. A shareable list of related communities. That’ll work regardless of what instance they are hosted on. Multi-communities are on the pre v1.0 list already

Lemmy privacy isn’t a joke, because there isn’t any. It’s 100% public by design.
If you want to keep something private, don’t post it publicly online.

Use Mastodon. Lemmy is built around topics, not people.

That’s exactly what the Local feed is for.
If you don’t want All, don’t use All. Because All will give you All, not just Local. If you want Local, use Local.

Being an idiot in a hurry, I saw the medication Warfarin

Look for Signage Displays. They’re basically TVs with different software.

It sounds like you’re thinking there is no way to compete with Reddit. If you charge, people will use Reddit. If you have ads, people will use Reddit. People are only here because there aren’t ads and it’s free?

If you charge, you also have to offer a better experience than the free options. There’s no reason instances can’t use ads for people unwilling or unable to pay. For me I’ll gladly pay for an ad-free experience.

That’s not really how it works. If it was made to work that way, it would still be a relatively small group donating their own compute resources to subsidize everyone else. Which is what we already have, and isn’t very scalable.

The only real option is to charge people.
Hosting isn’t free. It costs money to run a website. That money needs to come from somewhere. If it doesn’t come from advertisers, it must come from users.

There could be a verity options for that. But I like the simple annual subscription. Each and every user pays. Spread out the cost as much as possible. It’s only fair.