The idea is not to have to talk with everyone in the circle, but to have enough people to create a long tail of niche interests.

Takahe is IMO the opposite of “single user software” . It shines when you want to host multiple users with multiple different domains and identities.

This is not a matter for instance admins but for proper community moderation.

I think, sadly, that either sending in your national ID

That’s why I mentioned the idea of “Zero Knowledge Proofs”. Using a ZK-proof, one should be able to prove ownership of an ID without having to reveal it to anyone else.

At that point, it’s not its own web app anymore, more akin to an email program.

Yes, exactly. I am not a fan of the current way that the Fediverse is working though, and I think it would be better to stop thinking in terms of “servers/clients” and more in terms of “distributed applilcations”.

Can you explain more? How would this do anything to prevent sockpuppets?

Imagine something like a verification check (like Twitter’s old blue check) that is exclusively associated with your national ID. You can have only one of those. If you want to create sockpuppets, you’d have to convince someone else to (a) give them access to their ID and (b) be willing to lose their ability to prove their own identity elsewhere.

It’s not absolutely safe against bots and sockpuppets, but it surely makes it more expensive than even a $10/account membership.

Pixelfed has support for most of the Fediverse.

PIxelfed is still just supporting ActivityPub. I’m talking about multi-protocol communication. A smart client should be able to let you communicate with Lemmy communities, subreddits, Facebook groups and all types of different platforms from a single unified interface. There are plenty of people that think this is something undesirable (like everyone that wants instances to block Threads), but I’d argue that building these integrations with closed platforms would eventually destroy them because they would lose the monopoly on network effects.

You can’t bring an actor ID to a new domain name, can you?

No, but you could have a web server that responds to multiple domains. Ideally, the server listening and responding to the AP requests should be able to work with multiple “virtual servers”, instead of having to have only one instance == one domain that we today. AFAIK, only Takahe does this for microblogging.

• Proof of Humanity. There is some work about using Zero Knowledge Proofs as a way to be able to indicate that the owner of a key can also prove ownership of another set of credentials without having to reveal these credentials to third parties. This would allow us to really get rid of bots and sockpuppets.
• The ability for users to bring their own cryptographic keys and actor id. This way even if a server goes down people could port their whole account over to a different server.
• Multi-protocol federation.
• Get rid of downvotes/upvotes and replace it with multi-dimensional scoring/ranking system.
• User-defined sorting/ranking. I do not want to completely block people, but I do wish to have a system that could boost/de-emphasize posts by certain people on certain topics, and completely ignore them in others.
• Cooperative media storage and distribution that could leverage the storage from clients as well as servers, something based on bittorrent.
• Custom widgets that can be attached to a post/community. For example, I’d like to have a play-by-play tracker for basketball/football games.
• RDF/Semantic Web descriptors. If people are talking about a TV show, or making a list of PC components that they want to review or anything that can be part of a knowledge graph should be linkable and browsable by a specialized browser.
• Collaborative lists/articles/posts. With the item above, it would be trivial to create wikipedia-style posts where a community can build their “common knowledge” and would make it easier for newcomers to get general recommendations and/or a sense of the community values.