At the moment the internet is flawed, do you think the fediverse is the solution?
No it turns the problem from your account being owned by a company looking to turn a profit to random people on the internet. If we had a way of downloading our accounts and transferring instances then maybe.
the OP is about fediverse replacing mainstream social media. self hosting is not viable in this context.
Yes but people run these instances to get users and help the community grow. A company is trying to make money from it.
It’s a big difference because people hosting instances have no intention of making any money from it. It’s the open source mentality of sharing because it feels good to contribute.
Not in its current state. Too much admin/mod control
Twitter doesn’t have much admin control at the moment. The amount of bigotted shit you can post there is insane
I mean, you can always go start your own instance with blackjack and hookers - but then oh no you are the admin/mod in control then!
In the sense that it would take over facebook or instagram? No, not a chance.
It depends on what you mean by “replace”.
The Fediverse may cause centralized social-media networks to join the Fediverse.
There are some hints of that happening now.
Facebook / Meta has created a new social-media network that is part of the Fediverse.
Tumblr and Flickr are said to be joining the Fediverse.
So, some “popular social media” may become one with the Fediverse.
Something along these lines seems more realistic to me. There will always be a place for easy, safe walled garden experiences with a low barrier to entry. In the fediverse, that could be a very large, curated instance where a broad group could find what they want without having to figure out how to subscribe to federated communities. Similar to how so many people were introduced to the internet via Prodigy, Compuserve, AOL, etc.
I don’t want it to. I enjoyed reddit the most when it was mainly a techier and generally thoughtful crowd, large enough to always be interesting but not so big as to be a gluttonous mass of nonsense. The ever-so-slightly higher barrier to entry to the Fediverse compared to other platforms (which spooks mainstream users even though it’s really not that hard) gives me hope that the Fediverse will keep its character for a good while.
That’s a good take on it actually!
If you consider how many people are using the Matrix network, then Lemmy instances will probably end up fine. Just gotta convert lurkers to active participants (like me, I mostly lurked on reddit, but have been a bit more active on my home instance)
That would be a bad idea. While only a small percentage of users actively create engaging content, the problem is that those active users will lose the incentive to participate if there’s nobody else to engage with, and this will cause them to eventually flock back to the non-Fediverse social media sites.
We should instead streamline Lemmy’s sign-up like how Mastodon did it. The easier it is to sign up and the more users there are (even if many are lurkers), the better.
