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.
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But the fediverse isn’t ready. Not by a long shot.
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:
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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.)
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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.
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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.)
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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.
easier way discover existing community
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.
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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”.
…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.
We are on the cusp of a potential paradigm shift of the internet and we can shape what it becomes!
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.
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.
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.
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.
I really don’t want to sound snobbish, but people are really entitled these days.
“Omg you have to pick a server?! I’m going to have to spend more that 30s figuring out how this works? There is no alternative!”
When did everyone become a spoiled toddler? Just calm down, take some time to figure things out, and be patient.
/rant
I’m honestly starting to feel like it might be a net benefit for the barrier to entry to be higher. Since I switched to the Fediverse I have found that post quality is higher here than on Reddit, there’s less flaming, fewer low-effort overdone joke comment chains etc. Also it reminds me that there is better shit to do with my life than spend 3 hours a day reading a bunch of hyper-specific subforums that I’m subscribed to.
There are lots of cases though where it’s beneficial to have the social media be as accessible as possible. I’ve seen many thoughtful and insightful posts from people who wouldn’t be able to figure out the more technical social media. Their knowledge of the Internet and computers had nothing to do with their ability to contribute to the subject of that particular site (like books or tabletop gaming subreddits). Especially for those “help me find the source of this gif” subreddits where it’s important to just have as many people as possible see it, that’s what maximizes the chance of someone knowing the source.
(That, and I liked the joke comments on r/nottheonion. It did- and still does- have an amazing sense of humor to me.)
My feelings exactly. I find myself more engaged here, but also not sucked into spending countless hours scrolling.
Well we went from an era where only a small portion of the population congregated online in forums and chats, which basically required you to either be a kid or a techie of some kind, to a world where your grandma was on Facebook because FB made it hella easy to signup and adductive as hell to stay. The Grandma (or even Parent) on Facebook types have never interacted with the internet in the ways we (rightly) romanticize
Remember that detailed computer knowledge is no mainly the preserve of Millenials and Gen X as we had to work around the abstractions all our life. Gen Z have grown up with smart devices that remove all this and older generations didn’t get interested until it was easy.
What’s crazy is it doesn’t even take long to pick a server lol. Spent all of a few seconds. Just as long as any other service honestly.
I think the jargon can make it confusing more than anything. Treat the instance like an email provider and do away with terms like ‘federated’ and people would get it.
It’s easier for new terms to embed into people’s consciousness if there’s marketing behind it but, by the nature of the fediverse, it doesn’t have marketing.
It’s a world of decreased attention spans, minimized further by bad diet, bad sleep, constant stress and dopamine triggers; not to mention barely a few years off the start of a pandemic, with long term effects apparently right down that same line. It shouldn’t be surprising people find hard stuff intolerable, and those who can make things can also lower the technical barrier of entry.
So I’m a millennial who remembers getting shit on by boomers for stuff they never taught us how to do. If I’d struggle with something like, oh I don’t know, cutting down a tree inevitably someone would crawl out of the woodwork to complain about kids these days and their lack of basic skills.
A lot of stuff around difficulties onboarding users to the fediverse sounds tonally very similar. Yes it is simple, if and only if you already have a bunch of basic knowledge in your head. That knowledge is easy to teach, but it needs to be taught with a welcoming and warm attitude or it’ll just be another corner of the internet populated by increasingly bitter and irrelevant grognards driving away new social connections.
The internet is healing ha ha
I didn’t know what the Fediverse was a week ago, and now I’m active on Lemmy and Mastodon. I think people are dramatically overstating how difficult it is to sign up. It’s not hard, it’s just new.
And besides, I don’t think the fediverse needs to take over at all. It just needs to have active, viable, engaging communities. As Iong as enough people end up here to sustain that, it doesn’t really matter if they overtake the places we’re coming from.
Feels like a smear campaign at this point. They’re making it sound like you have to dig through instances and code your own interface or something
I’ll be honest, “dig through instances and code your own interface” is kinda where I’m at right now with Lemmy. I love Beehaw as an instance, but because of the demo it’s attracted there are relatively niche topics I am interested in that it can’t support an active community for. Those communities are already humming along on lemmy.world – but I can’t interact with them because of the (justifiable) decision to defederate from them due to moderation concerns.
So where does that leave me? I am trying to stand up my own instance right now… but the build directions available don’t work for my homelab setup (for some reason the backend only responds to requests from localhost, which means I can’t set Lemmy up to work with my existing reverse proxy?). I guess I could go rooting around in the code to change that, but at that point I’m committed to maintaining a personal fork of Lemmy just to be able to use it in a way that is analogous to how I used Reddit… which just worked out of the box.
I really wish that in addition to federation, Lemmy offered some sort of OAuth-style portable identity that would allow users to interact directly with instances off their “home” one. As it stands, the Fediverse has ended up a bit more balkanized than I think was intended or anticipated
So where does that leave me?
you could sign up for a different site which isn’t defederated from beehaw or the other instances you’re interested in. lemm.ee for instance.
Sure, I could, but for me the whole appeal of a federated service is its interconnected nature. If I have to create an account on the “right” instance to interact with all the communities I’m interested in – potentially repeatedly, given that operators may choose to defederate from each other at any time and for any reason – that has already defeated the purpose of the exercise.
I see this as a major driver of the “default instance” issue that both Mastodon and Lemmy have experienced. If you both have a hard time finding content off your home instance and have no guarantee of continued ability to interact with that content down the road, the safest choice of home instance becomes whichever is biggest, and from there the network effects just make the problem progressively worse over time. Federated services need some way to reduce the friction of traversing the Fediverse if they’re going to avoid that.
I guess I disagree with your assertion as to what is the ‘purpose’ of the fediverse. To me choosing associations is the point, so admins disconnecting from abusive instances fits well within that belief. If the fediverse meant accepting all input from all instances without question, I’d leave here as quickly as I did voat.
I don’t mind creating a couple accounts on different instances as need be. Though I’m also the kind of person who had a handful of reddit accounts for various purposes, so I understand my perspective isn’t likely the norm.
I agree though that based on your requirements, spinning up your instance might be the best bet.
I don’t disagree with your points, necessarily. I just think that the way most federated services function, there’s no way for the needs/concerns/feelings/whims of an instance operator to be met without also impacting the users of their instance in ways that might not have been necessary just to protect that one instance. I only ever had one Reddit account, and thought of my post history as something of a corpus that represented me to those who might be inclined to look, so to me portability of my federated Identity is important – without it Lemmy is just a bulletin board with extra steps. That said, it’s clear that our user cases differ, and that’s OK! For my part, I’m gonna keep trying to get this thing self-hosted…
Create an account on an instance like Lemmy.world. Subscribe to whatever you want. Problem solved?
I don’t know why you are looking to set up your own instance, that is not necessary for “normal” users at all.
Like Drew got no clue said, the issue is that the author can’t handle the tiny amount of friction encountered during the process. IMO, it keeps out those that wouldn’t be contributing anyway.
Edit: Our -> out
IMO, it keeps our those that wouldn’t be contributing anyway.
I disagree strongly with this view. One of the truly valuable elements of reddit is/was the shared knowledge for a lot of things that are not techy. As a somewhat recent homeowner, the r/homeimprovement subreddit and the mildly related ones have been invaluable. It’s populated by random homeowners of all types and experts in various professional and DIY fields. These are not people who are likely to migrate to Lemmy in droves and that’s a loss, as far as I’m concerned. Maybe some will make it and smaller communities might grow to have similar knowledge wells, but they won’t be as deep.
I’m all-in on the transition away from the social media giants, but there’s a lot about the simplicity of a non-federated platform that won’t carryover which will make the barrier to entry higher than many people want to navigate, and that is definitely a shame.
That’s something I hadn’t considered!
At this point, I’m not looking for a replacement, but an improvement. I will miss the niche groups in Reddit and especially the fact that I could find a specialist in dryer repair, saving me the cost of replacement or read all about Miele vacuums from a seasoned vacuum tech. The benefit of the Fediverse is tied to it’s size. It keeps the ecosystem more manageable and as far as I have seen, more humane. The people are nicer and I’ve seen an improvement in life since moving here because of it. The size and the type of environment surely go hand in hand!
I feel that this is just another growing pain, that I can still get help with a dryer or finding a good vacuum or whatever, it will just look different going through that process here.
I think that in time, more users will come and create further specialization in the platform, but at a rate that will allow for proper moderation and innovation to overcome performance and management hurdles.
Congratulations on the new home, or maybe congratudolences. It’s been a whole new phase of my life and a wonderful, intermittently painful, learning experience.
I told someone about uBlock as they were getting ads left and right, and I was told “oh no, I don’t wanna install anything!”
So if it’s not extremely frictionless, many people won’t even try…
(I agree with your second point BTW)
You can link people to the page to install uBlock origin and say “you just have to click install and the ads go away” and they just won’t do it. Very weird in my experience as I’m a bit of a tinkerer, so it’s hard to relate.
Lemmy and the larger Fediverse really shouldn’t even be trying to convert minimum effort users anyways. If someone isn’t willing to expend even a modicum of effort signing up for and understanding a new platform, I doubt they will be a very valuable addition to the community. The Fediverse needs to grow some more, but not at any cost.
This sounds kind of mean, but I kind of agree. One thing I miss from the earlier days of the internet was that communities could be more niche, and the slight barrier to entry of making a new account for a forum or something meant that you’d mostly get people who were very interested in a topic in the community. It feels kind of bad to be in favor of barriers for a community, but I think it can make a bit of a difference in the mix of people that you get and how the community feels.
This, so much. People will not load additional apps. And they will not give up ‘their’ Facebook.
I agree with you that it isn’t that difficult. I signed up on mastodon.social months ago. It was a little confusing about picking an instance so I just arbitrarily picked one. The same was true for lemmy. Now I’m on lemme.ee and behaw.org.
In the case of Matodon, I recently discovered the Explore option. There’s more than enough posts to keep me reading for hours. And most of them are interesting. Imagine reading an unfiltered Twitter feed. I don’t need Mastodon to get any bigger for my needs. It may even be better if it doesn’t get a huge membership. The same holds true for lemmy and kbin, bigger and better yes, but they don’t have to be a Reddit replacement.
When I joined there were a ton of posts recommending that you just aggressively follow people (in a positive way) and that’s led my feed to be full of artists, photographers and writers. Which has been awesome.
I don’t know if I’d want to hop back into using an algorithmic feed and, as you note, it’d probably become trash pretty fast.
People are fucking stupid bro. They just need that algorithm to tell them they dont even want to search for communities explore and learn.
Completely agree. I think the growth/winning mindset is subconsciously guiding people to make these criticisms. You don’t need to be part of the “Best” or “Largest” platform for that platform to be amazing and provide you value. Additionally, once I understood why instances are critical to keeping control of the fediverse in the hands of the community, I was excited about picking an instance to belong to.
That so many people think Mastodon is hard to join makes me think that there are a lot of people on the internet now who have never learned how to use the internet
I think there’s active misinformation being shared about the difficulty of use for fediverse playforms. Yeah it’s 20 clicks instead of 5 but it’s not that hard.
Something I often need to keep in mind is that when I was growing up the home PC was pretty crude and mysterious. You had to learn what a command line was, you had to learn about data backups and file trees, you had to learn about navigation and discovery of the web.
Sure you might not have done any of this stuff for decades now, depending on how you engage with the infernal devices, but if you see a forum you know what that is, how it works, what you expect to find inside. If you see URLs with like foo.com/place@otherfoo you kinda intuitively grasp what that is saying.
But if you’re like 20 now probably the first computer you ever touched was a magic box where you just clicked things to open stuff and they managed their own little things. Clicked a thing to install other clicky things. You don’t know what a config file is, why would you? you don’t really use URLs much, you just click the internet and start typing and then click the right link etc.
To a lot of those people some of this stuff is as arcane as like arch linux is to your average millennial PC user. Despite fedi (and arch! I use arch btw) actually being really simple and obvious there’s a barrier of unfamiliarity and a lot of basic skills you need to learn first.
This is what I’ve observed in Gen Z and younger - they just expect functional UIs, and to have pre-setup file directories and libraries, but don’t actually know what those things are and what they do.
Yeah it’s just the result of progress. I’ve watched people my age get stunlocked by carburettor issues or the concept of a choke. It’s unfortunate but sleekness often trades off with user serviceability.
Rather than being all “hgngh grrr the damn kids with their geegaws and whimgets don’t know how to use a simple butter churn” we have to teach people how to feel confident learning different ways of doing things and most importantly why they should care to do so.
It’s easy to forget outside of communities like this how low tech literacy actually is.
I think I don’t understand probably 95% of how the internet works and I’m fairly sure that I’m above average in my general understanding.
If the Fediverse really wants to break into the mainstream, and I’m neither saying it does or it should, then these things need to become easier and straightforward.
Joining a server isn’t hard, but finding content outside of the server you have chosen can be. Lemmy seems to be better than Mastodon here, but still.
People don’t care about federation as such. They want their social network and they want it all, regardless of which server it sits on, and they want it easy.
The vast majority of social media users are convenience junkies. They want their bread and circuses, and they don’t care who hustles it to them. My personal opinion: I don’t want the fediverse to be “easy” for EVERYBODY. Because everybody means you also get the shit along with the shinola. Dumbing things down helps nobody. Encouraging others to smarten up and go a little ways out of their comfort zone is the way to go.
As someone who works in IT, I can tell you that ive witnessed firsthand so many people who get viruses because when someone gives them a URL, they dont just go to that site. They go to www.google.com, search for the URL, and blindly click on the first result, which is almost always an ad, and which sometimes is a link to malware. Fun times.
There are a lot of people who grew up with iPhones as their first device and things “just worked” so they never learned how to troubleshoot or have to muck their way through learning software.
This is a big part of it. I work in higher education, and it’s not uncommon for university students to slap their computer on my desk and ask me where their essay is.
There was an article going around academia for a while about how students don’t know how to organize their files: https://www.theverge.com/22684730/students-file-folder-directory-structure-education-gen-z
The relevance to this particular discussion, I think, is that it’s all pretty intuitive with a little patience and time trying to understand it instead of expecting everything to be automatic.
I added organizing files to my assignments rubric. It’s part of the course objective. Any unorganized files will not be graded. It’s a bit learning curve for the 1st week but after that mostly it’s OK. My take is, thay can, if we teach them.
People in 90s and 2000s used to get informed before going online, as it used to be a big spending and commitment. Between all the tech-utopia hype you also got to hear about what to avoid and how to behave.
Nowadays you only need a cheap smartphone and start scrolling through algorithm-fed content indefinitely. No need for technical knowledge because the company takes care of that. No need for an intro class, because who even bothers anymore?
It’s not hard to join, it’s a pain to use. Lemmy is much much better
The Fediverse has this really organic, underground feel to it that I don’t think I want to lose.
If people want to leave Reddit/Twitter/Facebook/whatever and come to Fedi, I don’t mind there being a 1-hour learning curve to read an intro, find an instance, and sign up.
Peeps who aren’t willing to do that are probably better off on other social media.
Is there a reason to want to compete with Mainstream Social Media?
Content I guess. As much as we like niche stuff people will go to where the content is.
The one benefit you would have is the up-to-the-minute news on important world events. A smaller userbase may mean that you don’t have someone in every corner of the world who is willing to provide updates like that.
However, we have survived before without minute-by-minute updates on world events, so surely we can do so again.
Thats the one thing that has made the jump over to lemmy slightly difficult for me. The niche subreddits for retro gaming, various hobbies etc don’t seem to be a thing here? Unless I’m just not understanding how to search for them which could be the case.
I miss the 3ds, gameboy, wiiu, splatoon, gunpla, plantedtank and bonsai subreddits. Oh an animal crossing. Those subs were really chill.
They often exist but there usually isn’t much content in niche communities. There just aren’t enough users yet.
I think the desire there is the faster you can replace a mainstream site the faster it’ll go down.
Also, it’s hard to deny that part of the draw of social media is following/interacting with certain people, so if they move it makes it even easier.
For social media, it’s a double edged sword. You’re right in that creating a small barrier to entry will prevent low quality users to an extent. But social platforms can’t survive on low volume, high quality alone. There needs to be a certain critical mass of users for a platform to be successful. With forum type platforms, the numbers supply the diversity of content so that even small niche areas have regular content. For social platforms like mastodon, it’s about communication and most people want to be where there IRL friends are.
I never interacted much with Twitter and I’m not a hardcore Mastodonian either, but I don’t understand why people say it’s hard to join.
For me, the process was simple:
- Install Mastodon app
- Create account
- Select a server from the list presented in-app
That was it. There was only one step (selecting the server) that is different from any other site. And it didn’t require SMS verification like Facebook, Twitter, and even Google do nowadays. It was objectively easier than signing up for Twitter.
Am I missing something, or did these people just shit their pants at the server selection screen? I get that it’s a little unfamiliar but…just pick one. It doesn’t really matter. That’s the whole point.
I don’t get it either… Like Mastodon looks slightly different than twitter, and maybe it’s a bit confusing having things on different instances… But it’s basically the same? I guess there’s some cultural differences around content warnings and stuff that caused a lot of drama, so maybe that’s part of why people are confused…? I’m trying to have empathy about it, but it just seems like a lot of learned helplessness or something.
I think the biggest issue is finding the content you are looking for.
Sometimes people aren’t on Mastodon and even if they are it’s not alway easy to find them if they are not on the same instance.
The discoverability is a uniquely Mastodon problem though. Mastodon’s lack of keyword search really hinders discoverability. I get why they don’t want site-wide keyword search (to reduce harassment) but it also really hurts usability. Hashtags only work if everyone uses the same tag (and actually tags it in all their posts).
This doesn’t seem to be an issue on Lemmy. Site-wide keyword search works fine here.
Yes, stealing all users personal information makes it a lot easier to connect them. So all ethical alternatives will have a harder time with this.
This has been my biggest issue. Finding and carefully curating what I’m looking for. My twitter (which I had for nearly 15 years) got so cluttered I kind of gave up on it. Add in the people/places I followed suddenly getting political, and I was just over it.
I don’t want that to happen with my “refresh” so I’m being a lot more careful. That said, a lot of the problem is some of the people I really cared about simply won’t change from those platforms. I’ve not used facebook in years, but I still get friends and family asking if I’ve seen whatever bs was posted there.
How did you create an account before selecting a server?
Sorry, that was a little confusing. When you select the signup option in the app, selecting a server is the first step (IIRC). You can’t finish creating an account without selecting a server.
how hard it is to join the platform
I seriously don’t belief the learned helplessness that makes it hard for people to join Mastodon or Lemmy. It’s literally one signup page. People have just completely lost any semblance of tech literacy.
Federation is a pretty unique concept when learning about it and can be confusing at first. Then after you understand it, you need to choose an instance from god knows how maby and you don’t even know how to find what is out there. The first 2-3 days of my migration to lemmy was research. And while it is not hard with just a bit of tech literacy, it’s not as easy as finding one site and register - which can be easily done by most people with little tech literacy.
People have just completely lost any semblance of tech literacy.
I think you heavily overestimate the technical literacy of most people. I’d say majority started with 0 and stayed that way, because they only ever use stuff that causes little friction so that even they can use it. It’s not that people lost it, it’s that the way tech evolved it allowed people with none to go in.
I agree with the general notion that it is a nice filter for the feddiverse and might keep some of the most stupid at bay - at least for a while.
Federation is a pretty unique concept when learning about it Not really. All of this stuff is just a rehash of nntp and IRC.
the average layman has no idea what either of those are, either
Yep, exactly - no idea what nntp and only heard legends about IRC.
What percentage of the world do you think has even heard of nntp and IRC, let alone has direct experience with them? I think it’s a pretty small proportion of the broader population. A lot of people seem to think that “the internet” and anything resembling it started in the 2000s or late 90s, and they didn’t interact with those parts of the internet in my experience. I’d agree that e-mail should be familiar to people, though…
irc peaked in the early 2000s… hell one of the first things I did with my first 4 android phones was install an IRC client haha
Federation was hard to understand until I was old enough to read, then I got my first e-mail address and had it explained how it works.
I mean it’s not super hard, but it is quite a unique concept. I get the email comparison, but this is not an email. It is a good example to explain it thouhg.
It wasn’t that easy for me - took over a week and probably about 15 hours of troubleshooting/research due to bugs in the software. Ultimately I had to contact the admin for this instance on a different social network and ask them to fix it.
I think a lot of it is just that folks don’t want to take the time to learn how to use & navigate a new platform.
This feels like the same anti-FOSS FUD that was there 20 years ago against linux: ‘it’s not ready!’ and ‘who will provide support?’ and ‘it’s too hard for people to figure out!’ and ‘how can you make money if it’s free?’ and so on.
Of course, the whole world runs on Linux now and it’s eaten the lunch of every single proprietary competitor… it just took more than a week to do it, which is far too long of a cycle if you’re a clickbait “journalist” on corpo-owned media.
The Verge peeps are rather enthusiastic about Activity Pub based platforms, I wouldn’t attribute bad intent there.
Linux is used by most of the world but it’s either backend where techies take care of things or super streamlined experiences like Android etc.
Maybe this time it’s not bad intent, but it’s the same arguments that have always been made against FOSS and open platforms. But, if you use the same arguments people have used in bad faith, then you should expect people will attribute previous experience to your opinions as well.
Of course, the whole world runs on Linux now and it’s eaten the lunch of every single proprietary competitor.
On the server side, maybe. On the consumer side? No.
Depends on which consumers you’re talking about: in the education market, it’s eaten Windows and MacOS’s lunch (Chromebooks), and for gamers, it’s making great inroads and is greatly praised while doing so (Steam Deck) and well, you can’t argue that Android’s 70% global market share isn’t anything other than a stunning success for it.
Now are any of those “Linux” as in rolling your own kernel and spending half the week deciding on which distribution you should use before using Ubuntu anyways? Well, no, but it is Linux and it’s dominating mobile, eating into the sales of Windows laptops, and has actual good press for a game platform, which is something someone from 2010 wouldn’t believe if you told them was happening.
right, because those are the ones feverishly musing about when “the year of the linux desktop” will arrive, as though the fact that it hasn’t displaced Windows yet proves its inferiority.
“Mastodon isn’t ready,” I read every day, posted on Mastodon.
I just read another news article about why mastodon didn’t make it and is dying. It’s very sad to hear and probably explains why I have to keep adding more server capacity to handle all the people quitting mastodon.
Yeah it’s dying off according to the 300k new users who joined in the last day 😜
I think people really confuse “it’s not as polished and mature as twitter was” with “it’s not ready”.
Go outside
Touch grass
You say such horrible things
All this pearl-clutching makes me want to punch a wall.
I initially rejected Mastodon, being overwhelmed by its decentralization. I even proclaimed it “too complicated.”
Not even 8 months later and I’m fine. It’s all fine. My hysteria was sound and fury, signifying nothing. This hysteria is also pointless.
Is the fediverse the exact same experience Twitter and Reddit were? No. Do they need to be? No.
No one pearl-clutched when Facebook wasn’t exactly like LiveJournal or MySpace. No one pitched a fit when texting replaced IM. Folks organically flowed from one platform to the next as need and want allowed.
Technology solutions change and evolve. No platform rules forever.
The conspiracy theorist in me leans towards this being manufactured “concern” because the monetization solution to decentralized architecture isn’t ready for prime time, and “Late Stage Capitalism” is trying to herd the sheep into a temporary enclosure of fear until their new “farm” is ready. This explains why all the financial and corporate entities are singing the praises for Bluesky, and casting doubt on Mastodon. Last I saw, there is no word on how Bluesky is going to be supported, but it has a Board of Directors, which tells me it will be ad and subscription based, which means it needs a lot of people.
Having a Board also means that Bluesky can go public and can be sold to yet another nitwit.
So if long term stability means I am going to have to wake up and do a bit more to shape a fediverse solution to my needs, it’s worth more to me to do that than to go all in on a platform that is going to force ads on me and wind up being sold to the next billionaire imbecile.
I think that is disingenuous. People did complain (and pearl clutch) about reddit as it’s tree comment structure was vastly different than what people were used to and the upvote / downvote didnt make any sense. But people adapted quickly just like they always do. This move to lemmy is exactly like how the digg -> reddit move went.
I wasn’t there for Reddit, but was there for the MySpace/LiveJournal/Facebook/Twitter migrations. There will always be those who are confused, but I have not seen this level of histrionics, most of it coming from those with an agenda.
Regular folks will figure it out.
We really need to start asking ourselves what a “future-proof” social media could or should actually look like.
Does any media company actually think about it? I know there are some big tech ideas like Meta or whatever but I’m serious, it feels like no one running anything has any real thoughts about the future except for in terms of propaganda or advertising. No one actually cares about the social part of social media which is why people have to build it on their own… Hence, the fediverse.
IMO, when corporate media asks about “future-proofing, it’s not about the tech, it’s about ensuring the persistence of the human farm: how do “we” create a social media platform that can’t be escaped.
A big reason why I have gone “all in” on the fediverse is because the folks who figured this out will figure out the next, just in case Meta, bluesy, et. al. EEE the current platform.
I don’t think the Fediverse will or should “take over”. It already exists in a highly-usable form. I suggest the author stick with Reddit, Twitter, and Discord.
I’d personally like it better if nothing tAkEs oVEr. I’m comfortable with the internet having more than one website.
I’m uninformed about the interesting stuff from Mozilla, Tumblr, etc. that the author mentioned, but I hope it’s cool and varied.
Lemmy taking over as a protocol would not be a bad thing, because by design it promotes the creation of multiple federated instances. At least the UI woukd be standardized, lowering the user friction in case he needs to migrate.
I don’t think the UI even needs to be standardized. Imagine all the old-style forums except that they share content with each other so that they’re more accessible. I could see it becoming something like this, where each instance defines its own identity and cooperates with other instances to build a web of connected forums.
For the time being though, there is little divergence from the base Lemmy UI.
It seems like the author is asking “why isn’t there a just-like-Reddit or just-like-Twitter site that was totally ready and waiting for this moment, and even though we’d never heard of it before now has everyone using it?”
Fediverse is different, and that’s a good thing. Because note how all of these corporate social media platforms are ending up…
Nothing to it but to do it. How is the Fediverse supposed to accommodate growth before it grows?
It’s a ridiculous catch-22 to expect there to be a fully-scaled replacement for any dying platform to already be ready to go.
This article’s argument against Lemmy is nonsensical, which is why they try to reinforce their point by focusing on Kbin instead, which actually isn’t ready because it’s much harder to create and run an instance of.
It’s like telling your spouse you want chicken for dinner, then when they get some raw chicken out of the fridge saying “that chicken isn’t ready to be eaten”
why they try to reinforce their point by focusing on Kbin instead, which actually isn’t ready because it’s much harder to create and run an instance of.
I have a kbin account, and there are a lot of things I like better about kbin than lemmy, but I’ve decided to pretty much let my kbin account tread water until they actually have a functional “block” feature. Especially since there have been so many sealions over there lately advocating for “blocking” at the individual user level rather than defederation from obviously-/pol/-inspired instances. It’s like, sure, I’d love to block you, it just doesn’t fucking work yet.
