early_riser

This is correct. I use "ASCII art" to refer mostly to fancy CLI welcome messages

I miss those thin serif fonts that were all over tech magazines in the 80s and 90s

Thanks!

On Lemmy you can see (and search) a list of all the activity from every instance federated to your home instance. Looking at Ibis, which a few posters have mentioned on this thread, it has a discover page with a list of federated instances and articles on those instances. The current format is hardly scalable, but it's a start.

But, as I said before, the issue is less about discoverability and more about editing. Just like I can post in this thread even though I'm on a different instance, you can edit an article on one instance even though you're on another. The alternative as used by Wikipedia, is to allow anyone, account or not, to edit. Requiring someone to have an account on a federated instance would mitigate a fair amount of spam and ease moderation.

In addition to discoverability, I'd say it provides a happy medium between letting every rando with an IP address edit a page and requiring account creation. Part of the point of the fediverse is to have (almost) everything in one place under a single account while still keeping things decentralized.

I wouldn't doubt it, though MW seems hard to manage.

This looks interesting.

Seems like it's still early days yet, but are there plans to add things like namespaces and categories?

I'm not thinking of a single distributed wiki, but something more like Fandom where you can edit pages on other wikis that are federated to yours.

Easy hosting isn't quite the issue. Dokuwiki is trivial to self host. What I'd like something that's a happy medium between requiring account creation to edit pages and letting literally every rando with an IP address go to town.

I'd like to see a federated, self hostable forum platform. I believe NodeBB is implementing or has implemented activitypub, but while it's open source it seems even less of a turnkey solution than Lemmy or Mastodon.

I'm getting two points from the article. One is addressed handily by the Fediverse, the other is not.

First the centralized (I prefer to say "urbanized") nature of social media means a handful of companies control all the conversations. The Fediverse is a decent (though not perfect) solution to that problem, and I think everyone on here knows that.

However, the article also talks about the problems with the format of social media, not just who's hosting the platform. On traditional forums, conversations can last for years, but on Reddit, Discord, etc. new topics quickly bury old ones, no matter how lively those old topics are. Sure, you can choose to sort by "last comment" which replicates the traditional forum presentation with topic bumping, but it's not the default, even on Lemmy, so 90% of people won't bother.

I get to know people on traditional forums, even miss them if they leave, but on Reddit, comments are just disembodied thoughts manifesting in the ether. That may be due to the size of the community rather than the format, though.