this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2023
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Creating greater accessibility might eventually be about building packages that have preloaded common setups for different audience-types and use cases.
The problem is less so the accessibility I think and more so how to make it valuable enough for them for it to get some momentum. I think one of the things that has always bugged me about following artists in recent years is that there's no one single place I can view their entire portfolio. Their content is spread out over ten different platforms from Deviantart to tumblr to pixiv to twitter to whatever else they were trying at the time. And finding their art is incredibly hard in this way. If they actually owned their own platform they might actually post all of their art.
Ideally you would have the artist post their art to their lemmy, and then they would post links to their lemmy posts on other platforms bringing people into lemmy. Because they own and host the instance they can safely know that this content is never going anywhere for as long as they continue hosting it.
There are a lot of possibilities here but tailoring it into something and then getting the right people to start using it is the hard part.
For the audiences (i.e. content creators who would want websites) I have in mind, it has to be dead simple to set up, like a Twitter or Instagram profile. Anything that involves sftp, ssh or configuring nginx isn’t going to work. Pretty much, automated installers and GUIs.
I think people are increasingly seeing the value in owning their online identity - if you’re nixed by the Etsy algorithm or they or OG delete your account you’re pretty much screwed. Email marketing has stayed steady and is increasing in popularity for that reason as you actually own your customer list.
I tried to find a solution to the issue you bring up years ago when I was an admin on an art discussion forum. The owner wanted to find a way to sustain the site and bring in revenue, and I saw the problem of how people had their digital identities and promotion spread out across 4-5 different websites. My idea at the time was a profile site which would be a central place listing everywhere someone could view or buy your artwork. This was before linktree etc (around 2013) so in retrospect, it was a pretty decent idea. At this point, software has advanced a lot but the problem remains the same, as you describe. I think Lemmy and ActivityPub in general is a viable solution to that. People post on Instagram and Twitter because they provide broad distribution potential. Lack of true ownership is a real drawback, though. Platforms like Shopify are great and very sophisticated, but they’re also turning up the screws (a recent price increase to $40 a month for the basic membership, for example).
The way to get people to use it is of course to build easy to use, powerful software, of course. I suppose this is a decent idea for a project I could work on.
The biggest problem causing this is that artists are basically all forced to go wherever the users are, because they have to feed the audience their art. Users don't come looking for it, the artists chase them with it in order to survive. This is the harder problem to solve because ultimately you won't solve it until Lemmy is big enough to force artists to chase its userbase.
The technical problem isn't too hard. But it would mean setting up a hosting company, or a reseller that uses hosting with a frontend for one click installs.
You could add value to this with additional code for Lemmy that allows you to turn on "shop" plugins and such that essentially function like shopify.
This actually makes me wonder what a federated marketplace might look like. Federated ebay, federated amazon. These are essentially centralised shop markets with lots of individual sellers on them, what if the individual sellers were actually a decentralised federated network of sellers instead? The problem you face with this of course is how to resolve the issue of distribution and logistics.