Raphael Lullis (@raphael@communick.com)
mastodon.communick.com
So, it is really hard for me to share personal things online, but I need to get out of my comfort zone: I was fired from my day job last week and now I need to figure out if I should double down on communick.com or I should keep it as side-project and look for another job. I will make a series of polls to see if there is any viable business. Please boost for visibility.

I believe that the Fediverse can and should be more than a niche thing for those that reject Big Tech.

I also believe that to get there we will need businesses, service providers and professional developers who work on it because they are motivated by more than just “community values” and goodwill. For example, I have quite a bit experience with distributed systems and I know I could work to make Lemmy federation more efficient, but I can only do that if I can secure a stable income.

Please follow the linked Mastodon thread and vote on the polls. The idea is to find out if there are enough people willing to pay for services that can ease their pains with Mastodon/Lemmy/Matrix.

  • marsara9@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3·
    1 year ago
    1. Would you be able to share the results of the survey here once it’s complete?

    I don’t run my own instance, at least not publicly, but I’m very curious in the answers to some of those questions and I don’t want to skew your results by voting.

    1. Primarily I’m curious what feedback you get on search.

    As I’m already working on on search engine, that’s already public for Lemmy but I hope to add Mastodon in the future. So far many Mastodon users seem to be very anti-search, so I’m curious of your results.

    • rglullis@communick.newsOPEnglish
      41·
      1 year ago

      Will make a follow-up post next week when the poll ends.

      Re: search in Mastodon. The anti-search crowd is a minority, and as the fediverse grows they will become less relevant. Anyway I think we can build a search engine that can respect their wishes and keep them out of the index.

      • marsara9@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        Anyway I think we can build a search engine that can respect their wishes and keep them out of the index.

        I’d love to hear your ideas on this. At least initially I don’t see a way to build a crawler that can ignore select individuals. But I haven’t really dug into the Mastodon APIs just yet.

        • rglullis@communick.newsOPEnglish
          21·
          1 year ago

          There were some ideas of adding tags like noindex or nosearch to their profiles as a way to indicate they don’t want to be listed in public search results. We can, e.g, de-boost any post from a profile with those tags.

          • maegul (he/they)@lemmy.mlEnglish
            1·
            1 year ago

            Another compelling proposal from an admin/dev of blahaj.zone: https://blahaj.zone/notes/9ev0kge0aj

            From what I understand, as they run their own platfrom software that’s a small fork of Calckey, and which has search built in, their aim is to implement their proposal on their own instance and hope that it spreads (where spreading to other clackey servers, which encompass around ~10k monthly active users at the moment, would likely happen quickly)

      • marsara9@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        Thank for sharing the results.

        I can say one of the most requested features I keep getting requests for is a global search as well. I’m just blocked by a bug in Lemmy at the moment.

        A tool to see better recommendations on who to follow could be interesting as well. I’ve recently added a new feature that allows for users to search communities (on Lemmy and Kbin) about what posts are actually talking about. I wonder if something similar could be built for users…

        But again thanks for sharing.