But fediverse isn’t ready to take over yet
But the fediverse isn’t ready. Not by a long shot. The growth that Mastodon has seen thanks to a Twitter exodus has only exposed how hard it is to join the platform, and more importantly how hard it is to find anyone and anything else once you’re there. Lemmy, the go-to decentralized Reddit alternative, has been around since 2019 but has some big gaps in its feature offering and its privacy policies — the platform is absolutely not ready for an influx of angry Redditors. Neither is Kbin, which doesn’t even have mobile apps and cautions new users that it is “very early beta” software. Flipboard and Mozilla and Tumblr are all working on interesting stuff in this space, but without much to show so far. The upcoming Threads app from Instagram should immediately be the biggest and most powerful thing in this space, but I’m not exactly confident in Meta’s long-term interest in building a better social platform.
I, really, do not believe in the strength of this statement. There has been a huge injection of people into the Fediverse and this will continue. This wave has brought in an enormous amount of highly qualified programmers, sysadmins and the like. And these people are contributing to Lemmy and a bunch of mobile apps for the Fediverse.
I am excited to participate and watch as the Fediverse explodes.
I don’t know why people look for feature parity between Lemmy/kbin and Reddit. With a bigger audience, its bound to happen that Lemmy/kbin will catch on features. People waited years and years for reddit to become what it “was”. The fediverse isn’t a stop gap. It’s the next potential platform once foss devs see the potential and have an audience to satisfy.
These articles always feel like the push us towards looking for a commercial option when we already have the right option under our nose. Just give it a few dev cycles.
Or to put it in other words: what features are lacking?
Do people seriously miss ‘awards’ and other not very interesting functions.
Moderation tools and bug stability are the things I want to see
Those are being worked on right now.
Yeah sure, that’s what spez told us for years! /s
It’s going to be the same when people bailed Digg.
They all complained about the interface and lack of features but then spent all their time pasting ascii images comments and starting pun threads.
I would rather there be a slow decline in Twitter & Reddit than a mass exodus. An immediate consequence is the loss of signal to noise ratio and that would be too much to take for a second time!
[Apologies for the double post - liftoff indicated that it had failed to post both times]
I’ve noticed post flairs missing mostly. Not a big deal but matters in some subs where users are verified.
we now have mlmym.org to provide the old reddit interface, so all i’m missing now is integrating RES.
Fediverse is not ready yet, that’s for sure, BUT we don’t need it to be “ready” to take on big tech giant backend to be usable user dispersion. IMO, smaller but high quality user that cross critical amount to sustain the community is good enough. I don’t need to engage with another 20k people, I just need to engage with maybe 1~2000 high quality post/comment(not lurkers) in different domains that I am interested in. All the rest can have their own thing and we never really cross each other and that is fine.
What I think Fediverse currently lacking is the following:
subscription can be abused, I don’t know the underlying detail, but if one user from small instance sub to another instance that have really big traffic, I guess it won’t deal well with that. There should be ways to tier or tag posts/comments so good informative one can be kept longer, but shitpots, meme, etc can expire quicker and not even archived. We really don’t need to keep all the stuff like tech giants do. (heck, even email provider starts to trim your old emails if your account exceed certain amount of storage(cause 80% is spam/notification mail that no longer serve any purpose.)
easier way discover existing community. I really don’t like to checking “All”, search community function is updated to a bit reddit like so it’s really mixed up with post/comment and actual community. And low traffic community can be buried really far down the list. ie. I created Rocket League on lemmy.ca, and periodically searching for another to see if there are better ones. Then I found out there is none and my community link keeps “sinking” in the result list. There needs to have better filter for searching.
there should have a say, a common bestof or community of this week community. Which helps with discovery as well. (up to instance admins decision of course.)
the web interface can still be improved. One thing that’s very hard to keep track of even on reddit is how the branching thread and responses can be all over the place. It’s still kind like that here on lemmy(but less user make it more bearable. I am not smart and do not have a better alternative, I hope someone can come up with a better more readable one.
Especially on smaller instance, since the instance needs to know there is a community you look for on another instance first. Apparently the community isn’t inherently known by the instance becore at least one user “opens it up” for the rest by searching on web by a full web address. It may happen you search for a specific community and not find it, even though it exists and might be booming.
We do have the community where you can post new comminities at least but it’s still not ideal. Though I think I see why it needs to be so, it needs to be easier somehow, while bot overloading all the servers.
Reddit has almost twenty years of development under its belt. How much development has it done in that large amount of time. I would bet Lemmy developers will run circles around Reddit in terms of how fast they advance the platform.
It’s pretty obvious that reddit has never really spent much money on engineering.
There is a common and strongly held belief that if something isn’t perfect - if it’s not a 1:1 copy, if it’s not the silver bullet - it’s worthless.
Also I feel like we don’t immediately need everyone from Reddit here. It’s cool to get all the tech-sawwy people and maybe let them do their thing before Lemmy or other alternative platforms take off. I for one have been waiting for an idea for a hobby project to work on besides my freelance projects and already have a few things in the back of my head that I want to try after my summer holiday.
Fediverse is inspiring and exciting platform and I feel like it has the critical mass now to actually take off and succeed.
I keep seeing articles posted on Mastodon about how Mastodon is doomed. Meanwhile, I only follow around 300 people, but my feed is constant.
If it’s failing, then someone forgot to tell it. Unless of course, by failing they mean “isn’t making money for rich people”.
That’s exactly it. Mastodon won’t live or die by how well it can compete with Birdsite. After making the switch I see that it’s all I wanted from microblogging as a practice.
The only way the Fediverse gets ready is by going thru the growing pains that Reddit had to when we all fled from Digg. It also wasn’t ready then but the community stepped up and became mods and built apps and made it awesome. We will do it again… and this time it’ll be distributed and much harder for one person to screw over all of us
All of that didn’t happen overnight. It took literally years for all that to get baked.
It was at least 2 years before Imgur was created & then after that stuff like RES & mobile apps
Okay. So we’ll do it again in less time because we have lessons to draw on. This version of Lemmy is already better than early Reddit for anybody that remembers.
But it’s not about replicating what Reddit was about, then or now. It’s about getting back to what we had before the centralisation of the net but with the lessons learnt. To build a more egalitarian platform without the necessity to drive engagement at whatever cost.
We don’t need to, nor should look to set up tooling with what we learnt from Reddits failures. We’re building a new, better experience of the web and we definitely shouldn’t be looking to just migrate the user base from one site to a bunch of federated servers. We need people to definitely experience a cultural cleanse. Not to just have an exodus from there with all the bad habits and aggressions. We know where that path leads.
We are on the cusp of a potential paradigm shift of the internet and we can shape what it becomes!
Exciting times!
I disagree on a fundamental level. You’re literally saying not to learn from our past mistakes with your quote “nor should look to set up tooling with what we learnt from Reddits failures.”
That’s just nonsensical.
Exactly, which is why we need to look at our past and make this attempt better by not falling into the same pitfalls we did before. Then when this falls apart (everything does) we can look back at what we did here and learn from those mistakes to do it better next time. That’s how progress is made, looking at the past and improving on it. Sometimes that means adaptations to old ways, sometimes that means new systems entirely. But you start by looking at where you began.
Paid fear mongering. You go to lemmy.world (or any other instance) and sign up. Done. It’s not difficult at all. It’s rich assholes trying to keep you on reddit.
I literally signed up for Lemmy a half hour ago. Picked Reddthat.com, searched for some topics I was interested in, subscribed, this is my first post. If a 50+ old man can do it, well…it ain’t that difficult!
Same here. Same path to sign up and same age. Wait did I post as you last night when I was high 🤔
Ditto ibid likewise. Well not the part about being high. ;) Signed up the moment rumblings about reddit being on the way out really began to gain in volume. Had heard about how daunting this place was to suss - are you kidding me? That’s all either propaganda, or whining from people who have been spoon fed everything imaginable for their entire lives.
It is super weird the level of vitriol you see on Reddit over fediverse stuff. Like it’s one thing to think it’s not for you, but it’s really weird to spam 20 posts about how much it sucks in a day.
It makes a lot more sense when you consider those comments were likely bought by someone at Reddit.
Seriously, the anti-fediverse stuff is all coming from paid, commercial outlets. Even if they’re not being paid by Reddit, Twitter, or Meta, they’re all scared of non-commercial options not run by greedy capitalists gaining control of the Internet again. As the corporate social media dies the corporate news media may suffer the same fate. Money protecting money is what this seems like to me.
I knew this part would ruffle some feathers since whomever is reading it here is probably on board with Lemmy/Kbin.
I do think that for many it’s too early but there’s now significant interest into making everything a bit more stable and streamlined. I think Mastodon is already there but it is suffering from bad rep from their own waves of migration. I’m a bit worried it’ll be the same for Lemmy.
I keep seeing articles posted on Mastodon about how Mastodon is doomed. Meanwhile, I only follow around 300 people, but my feed is constant.
If it’s failing, then someone forgot to tell it. Unless of course, by failing they mean “isn’t making money for rich people”.
It’s not ready right now this minute to accommodate the some two billion monthly active users between Reddit and Twitter, but it seems to be keeping up with current growth and that’s what matters. It may never get as big, but do we even want it to?
I must agree with you. I’m very bullish on the Fediverse. There are some gaps for sure. As long as the right people come here and help build a strong community, these gaps will close.
The Fediverse is definitely ready. Lemmy was super easy to get set up with on Jerboa. Albeit, I don’t know about just using it on the.web yet. I’ve been without a PC for the past month or so.
Agreed to a point. As a proof of concept / alpha it’s more that demonstrated the potential, and the pluses outweigh the minuses. If the writers point was that it is mature enough as a swap-in replacement I think that’s fair. Hopefully it will move beyond it’s aping of web 2.0
I believe it. Some instances are having load issues now and it is only going to get worse as the system expands. There are also issues with mod and admin tools that are well below the standard to what Reddit just lost.
It will take effort for Lemmy to handle the increase in people.
As I see it the issue isn’t with structure–it’s with mass appeal and convincing potential users that Fediverse systems are worth investing their time in. That’s going to take convincing as the systems involved are a bit more complicated to get started in than with a centralized site where you just open the page, maybe log in, and are set to go.
General users largely won’t care one way or the other what type of system they have–they just want it to work. On top of that there’s a bit of a marketing problem. Just looking at YouTube for an explanation as to what decentralized sites or decentralized social media is, and the top videos are a bunch of 20 something Crypto Bros relating everything to block chain or decentralized finance or crypto or what have you. Less than 20 seconds in and I’m already shutting off to the idea, and that’s as someone who already has a surface level understanding of the concepts going in.
I agree with you that on a structural level the bones are strong and will only get stronger, but I don’t know if we’re quite there yet on general appeal as a next wave of the internet.