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I think they mentioned this on the WAN show were we had an unusual length of time where things were stable. We used to pick up and drop websites all the time. Facebook, Twitter and Reddit’s dominance was great stability in a time when things were constantly changing.
I emphasize with the writers viewpoint of a space where everyone is on, but all three have been shown to be run by what seems to be people with dubious judgement (putting it lightly).
I think these changes are long overdue.
I agree. It’s funny when myspace died and facebook rose from the ashes I told some friends I wouldnt bother doing a facebook because it would probably rise and fall as fast as myspace did. Oh how funny I was and how the internet changed.
That said I dont think we’re going to go back. The internet still has the capacity for big shakeups and movements but at the end of the day it’s gone mainstream and that means there is a lot of money flowing into the web to make sure that the sites that rise to the top are corporate driven. Unfortunately everyone seems to want everything in one place and is very unmotivated to leave.
It took reddit having a PR disaster for reddit alternatives to actually reach enough critical mass to not be a ghost town. I’ve been taking a gander at things like lemmy or tilde in the past but you’d have very little activity very few posts and I’d check periodically and get nothing. When spez continued to keep tripping over his own feet again and again I was delighted to see it lead to just enough of a shedding of users to get some communities active!
While I think we may see some big online businesses shift and die, I think that for the most part we’re not returning to the old in flux era of the web we once knew.
Huh, where could everyone go? I haven’t t he foggiest.
I think the issues with lemmy are overstated. Lemmy is still new and going through growing pains as the community explodes and servers are pushed, but overall in terms of usability, connectability, and such you can use Lemmy today and get your community link aggregate fix.
Mastodon does have a lot of issues with connecting and being clunky, but I think even the .17 release of lemmy already had that figured out better. Following people on mastodon can involve having to open up a new tab and copying and pasting information from a different instance into your own and even then the old posts from that person will not show up. You may or may not be able to find posts even if theyre in an instance that federates with your own.
Perhaps because Lemmy deals in communities and not individuals this is a pretty moot subject. If you are subscribing to an obscure instance then you might need to do the ol’ copy and past over, but otherwsie I can mostly just go to communities up top on lemmy, type “star trek” and get into a star trek instance. I can also view old posts from that instance and(bugs aside) things should update for me in real time.
Lemmy is already fairly user friendly compared to mastodon.
Some good points by the author, especially around us likely being in a state of flux in the social aspect of the Internet.
One thing that I don’t agree with is that lemmy and other fediverse options have “a long way to go” to shore up the onboarding process. Sure, the concept of the fediverse is fairly unfamiliar to people. And yes it’s currently a little clunky to sign up…
But with some honestly pretty minor handholding added to the onboarding process, and some nice polish, people would have no problem picking an instance and signing up; “tell us your interests and we’ll show you some home bases for you to pick from.” And then boom, they’re in!
Default to “all” rather than “local”, and people will be able to ease in to this new experience without too much delta from what they’re used to–and people can onboard without ever needing to learn about the unfamiliar fediverse concept. They can learn that on their own time, after finding content and a community that speaks to them.
At least in my experience (which is admittedly limited in the fediverse at this point), it seems to be that the concept that lemmy is hard to onboard is because we’re trying to teach people about the underlying tech during the onboarding process rather than helping people get through the door to a familiar experience.