At the moment the internet is flawed, do you think the fediverse is the solution?
Probably not replace, but certainly it could be a viable and thriving part of the picture. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with having options.
I expect good and insightful conversations to be moved here.
Reddit is about to become like twitter and facebook where it’s ad-ridden, toxicity cesspool.
People will leave to keep having the actual forum experience and will eventually move here as it looks like a very good alternative.
Sometimes I feel like my reddit experience was so different from a lot of people’s. I unsubbed from all the default subs and built a specific homepage for the things I found interesting. Unfortunately for me, that means the communities were (relatively speaking) smaller than the popular ones, but still large enough to have frequent engagement. Going to be hard to replicate that, I think.
My approach as well, it took me a long time to realize why I got weird looks saying I browsed reddit at work. My page was opensource,computer, tech, stuff with some other hobbies.My friends was just porn lol
@Alkalyon @Bicyclejohn #Reddit was already toxic, but I guess now people will begin to recognize its toxicity.
@realcaseyrollins
> Reddit was already toxic, but I guess now people will begin to recognize its toxicity
… just like Titter.
Yup, that part.
We been knew about Twitter but for a lot of us, Musk taking the wheel was the push we needed to find greener, less toxic pastures.
To some extent this is a feature, not a problem though. I know it’s elitist, but in a lot of ways the internet was a much nicer place when it was just a bunch of tech nerds.
I hope you don’t mean nicer as in “friendlier,” because the internet has always been a hellscape
“Servers? Instances? Is this a place to connect with my friends or a goddamn server room?”
That’s not a property of of federation (see email and websites) it’s just because early adopters are a little wired. In any new social phenomenon, it takes a second wave of adopters (first wave of followers) to bridge the wierdos from the masses.
Cue this classic study in leadership: https://youtu.be/hO8MwBZl-Vc be the first one to follow the wierdos and show the masses it’s cool.
But couldn’t it be made easier? Who cares which server a community or a user is registered on. I register where a friend sent me the link to and from there on it shouldn’t matter and could be handled in the background.
The big sites are also not one central instance. They have several distributed instances all managed by the same company.
Future instance owners and moderators don’t want users and communities to be able to migrate seamlessly. Mastodon has the same fatal flaw. They want to keep your history and relationships hostage so you can’t leave. This is the only thing turns signup to Lemmy and Mastodon into an important decision you don’t want to get wrong. That’s why you have to read and read and read before signing up and be a Lemmy expert before choosing the right instance for you.
Of course by this time 99% of users have gone back to Reddit. And the 1% that stays still feels like a huge wave.
Also many elitists are happy signup is clunky, it filters out the rif raf and the common Joe. It creates an exclusive space where everyone uses Linux, loves anime and don’t like sports.
A place with no cultural relevance ree from eternal September.
Mastodon has the same fatal flaw. They want to keep your history and relationships hostage so you can’t leave.
You can migrate your relationships to a new Mastodon server.
And while you can’t directly transfer the history (the debate over how/whether to do this has gone on for literally years), you can export an archive you can keep locally, and there are tools out there to parse it and convert it to some other form (static website, whatever). Someone’s probably written an importer by now, though I’d have to look.
Future instance owners and moderators don’t want users and communities to be able to migrate seamlessly. Mastodon has the same fatal flaw
This is misrepresentative for a few ways.
For one, you can in fact migrate your mastadon account, fairly easily in fact.
For another thing, instance owners and moderators don’t really get to choose whether migration is possible, the code contributors do. I suppose instance owners could start forking their own version of lemmy to make that harder, but ultimately there will always be folks willing to host the “best” version, and so people will just leave
People said that about reddit, I don’t think Lemmy is anywhere near being too complex for the average user. More that social medias generally favor simplicity because simplicity is easy to control, modify, and generally nudge from a developer side trying to guarantee a very specific use case that generates money, rather than just naturally occurring social systems.
Let’s be real, humans have been dealing with social networks far more complex, systems more complex, for almost all of human history. The sheer volume of people, no, but the actual processes of interaction, yes.
The various people who work on the fediverse are all doing it for fundamentally different goals, solving different problems, and building different things for different people. It just so happens that, more often than not, a lot of our stuff works together now thanks to the hard efforts put forward by people who cared about interoperability.
I personally believe that the fediverse will kill traditional social media platforms. Because if you can just communicate around a walled garden, what’s the point or value in staying in one?
I think we still have a long way to go in terms of usability and design. Those things, along with marketing, remain pretty steep barriers to adoption by people who are unfamiliar with it. There are also a lot of capital-H Hard problems that need to be sorted out down the road, like better filtering and moderation tools, and more robust controls for privacy. I have a feeling we’ll get there, but only through hard work and collaboration.
I guess a different way of understanding things is that, the fediverse might not kill the competition outright, but it has the potential to outlast them as something better. And hopefully someday, it’ll be as ubiquitous and ordinary as email.
Because if you can just communicate around a walled garden, what’s the point or value in staying in one?
Because people are happy with that garden and don’t think about others. Please remember that your average internet user doesn’t really know what an API is, or understand about open standards, they just want to find some content that matches their interests, upvote and share said content with their friends who are also inside that garden.
This average user isn’t a bad person, stupid or naiive, they just have other things going on in their lives and the internet is a small part of it. They use it, take what they want from it and move on, and there are so many more of those people than you.
People who switch from iOS to Android report losing friends who were on iMessage and are unwilling to move to something platform agnostic such as Signal or WhatsApp. I wouldn’t underestimate the walled garden effect.
No. And that’s fine. I don’t expect underground music to replace top 40. And there’s a place for both.
