Well, if you haven’t heard, I’m the Ratifier of JoinFedivri.
What’s That?
It’s an Israeli attempt to create a proper Israeli social network. Currently, most Israelis are on a combination of WhatsApp, Facebook, Telegram, Discord, TikTok, Instagram and BlueSky; all corporate websites, and all but-ish the latter centralized.
It’s also a Hebrew attempt to bring more people to Fedivri (Fediverse + Ivri, “עברי” — Hebrew for “of Hebrew”), the Hebrew Fediverse.
Well, what about Arab Israelis, then?
Although we are trying to have more people, well, join Fedivri, we’re actually planning on our social network being bilingual.
And Palestinians?
We’re not going to exclude anyone. However, it is unlikely that Palestinians would be interested in joining; regardless, we’d be happy to help found a sister server!
Wait, Israeli? Does that mean you’re [insert politics]?
No. We do not embrace any political idoelogy, and forbid racist, xenophobic, and homophobic talking points on our services.
Anyway, what did you say a ‘Ratifier’ does?
The Ratifier, or in Hebrew, “מאשררת” (feminine) and “מאשרר” (masculine), decides when a discussion is ready for a vote, and performs all kinds of daily maintenance.
But didn’t you say everyone are already on other networks?
Yes, I did, but here’s some context:
- WhatsApp and Discord are used for messaging.
- Telegram is mostly used for, let’s call it, alternative news sources, and borderline illegal stuff (as usual for Telegram).
- Facebook is a more personal social network, and it’s ‘only’ used by Millennials and Boomers anyway.
- TikTok and Instagram have a widely different content form.
- And yes, a lot of people are on BlueSky. But, we’ll natively support ATProto, the protocol BlueSky is based on, in addition to ActivityPub.
Support how? What’re you gonna run, anyway?
Well, we’ve looked into a lot of options.
- We saw no reaosn to use Mastodon or any of its forks.
- We considered using Sharkey, but ultimately decided it is too complex for our liking.
- We also looked into Bonfire, but considering it is still in beta for over three years now, and the amount of bugs we encountered, we gave up on it.
We now have three last options:
- Hubzilla — its UI is quite complex, and we would need to modify it a lot. If you’re a PHP and/or CSS developer, we would love to get your help.
- Friendica — we aren’t done checking it out yet, but it looks promising – it aleady has BlueSky support!
- And finally, our own solution.
Wait, if this is a Hebrew social network, why is this post in English?
Because this post’s target audience is non-Hebrew speakers, who cannot be a part of our Hebrew conversations.
What’s the name of this social netowrk gonna be, then?
I won’t tell you. We haven’t bought the domain yet, so we’d prefer to keep this knowledge to the smallest group possible — in this case, Hebrew speakers. We’ll refer to it as “Join Fedivri” for now, K?
Will I be able to join it when it’s up?
Yes, but it’d be very preferable for you to be a Hebrew speaker, as a first language or not — otherwise, you simply won’t find what to do here.
Can I help?
Yes. See: