Not a great day for social media. Twitter down, Reddit has not 3rd party apps, Lemmy is being hugged to death by people bailing Reddit and Twitter.
I guess I’ll go outside.
Lemmy isn’t hugged to death. The issue is that everyone is just heading to the same handful of instances.
I didn’t realize this until I started self-hosting my own instance, but if you don’t join one of the 3 large instances (beehaw, world, ml) then you miss out on a LOT of historical content. The way federation works is that it only pulls in new post/comments after someone on your instance subscribes to a community on another instance. So if you find a cool new community on another instance, you can subscribe to see any new posts and comments, but you won’t see any of the old content at all unless you manually search for the post/comment.
Long winded way of saying, the best user experience (content wise) is always going to be on the largest instances unless Lemmy/ActivityPub changes how content backfilling works.
Maybe they should update the join-lemmy.org page to suggest joining smaller instances. They put popular instances at the top and presumably that’s what everyone wants to join.
Edit: and then randomize the list of smaller instances to further distribute the load.
Here’s the current usershare breakdown by instance, if anyone’s curious:
Source: https://github.com/tgxn/lemmy-explorer/tree/main/frontend/public/data
Lemmy.world is getting a very big chunk, but other than that it actually seems fairly distributed.
Really everyone always wants to be on the most popular “site” instance to ensure it will just not go away suddenly. After that they go for ones that give them a cool @ domain name. This is how email and Jabber/XMPP worked for years. Modern fediverse should be using some form of modern distributed identity, not 1965 email style identities.
Yes, I figured. My domain name is not as cool as “shitjustworks” or whatever. But I can say that my instance is gonna stay for as long as Lemmy as software is supported, no matter if there are many users or not. I strongly believe that FOSS and the Fediverse are the future and I want to give something to the community by hosting the instance.
The instance I’m on is working fine, I think the problem is people are gravitating towards the largest 2-3 instances.
This is true. I was having a lot of issues with lemmy.ml it’s getting overwhelmed. I wish there was an easy way to carry over subscriptions between accounts.
I’ve been feeling a significant amount of sadness at the feeling like I’ve now fully lost the 2 places that were my havens for safety and community during the pandemic (Twitter and Reddit). I mostly disconnected a few weeks/months ago, but this weekend feels like the full, official breakup. I wonder if anyone/everyone else is feeling the same?
Yesterday felt to me like the day Web 2.0 died. It’s actually rather awkward. Web 2.0 devolved into enshittification, Web 3.0 to many looks to be a scam from the outset, and that leaves us with the Fediverse as the most hopeful continuation of what we liked about Web 2.0. But what is the Fediverse? More of the same as Web 2.0? An entirely new thing? I’ve been coming to view the Fediverse as being Web 2.0.1. It’s a bug fix. The corporations controlling Web 2.0 were the problem, not the idea of a more dynamic and interactive web. The solution isn’t strictly speaking Peer 2 Peer solutions, as many people still want a curated and moderated space, so they’re not dealing with a constant onslaught of dicks and nazis they didn’t ask for (I’m sure someday the Peer 2 Peer networks will have a viable solution for that, but for now, they don’t as far as I can tell). But a networked governance structure in which volunteers own the instances and the users have more choice in how their space is moderated seems like a major fix to what we were seeing before, and I think it’s a major benefit for all of us
I’ve been really intrigued by the developments coming from the Web0 / small web train of thought. https://web0.small-web.org/
Totally. I was just thinking about how my very specific life circumstances mean that I’m otherwise distracted and handling it pretty well. But if I were in a rough patch right now this situation would be really, really, really hard. I hope the people in that situation are okay and finding new refuge in places like this ❤
I truly don’t understand why people keep trying to use Twitter despite open and obvious changes designed to be hostile to users. Not to mention the reliability issues that continue to crop up as a result of axing nearly your entire engineering staff.
Some people can’t figure out Mastodon, but I don’t think enough of the people who can’t figure out mastodon are realizing that nothing would be better than twitter. And I mean literally just not doing social media anymore would be a marked improvement over using twitter
I think most of them just don’t even know about Mastadon. I didn’t until after Reddit announced it’s API changes and people started talking about Lemmy and the fediverse.
I just simply had heard about none of this.
Well, I apologize for my slightly elitist attitude. I sometimes forget just how online I am. I’m glad you’re taking a chance on this technology! I hope you come to like it! It’s come a long way since I first tried it 7 years ago, and I believe is now viable for people who want to talk about things
Imo, there was no greater news aggregator than 3rd party Twitter apps. I will miss them very much. A couple of my favorite sources are not on Mastodon (yet?) and the 3rd party apps aren’t up to snuff yet. Hopefully we get there one day.
We need the big media companies to leave twitter - it seems almost every business and public figure that people actually want to follow has a Twitter account. This is especially true for media talents and talent agencies like hololive, and the YouTube/streaming space as a whole.
Once they finally realise that it makes sense to create a mastodon account it might actually push another wave over to mastodon.
I wouldn be surprised if talent agencies like vshojo and hololive eventually created their own mastodon or lemmy instances for their talents to have an account and community on - it seems the best way to validate and verify real vs fake talents. As well as moderate to their own standard.
People will be able to ask Is it @user@talent.agency? Yes it is, therefore they must be the real one.
I’m overdosing on schadenfreude right now.
The “scraping” they are claiming may be coming from inside the house, so to speak, as it appears they are DDoSing themselves.
