At the moment the internet is flawed, do you think the fediverse is the solution?
It’s more closely related to the initial intentions of the internet than most other social platforms. Ideally it could get things going back in the right direction again iif nothing else!
I think you’re on to something. I’m all in on the Fediverse. I still have some legacy stuff on traditional social, but I spend most of my time here. Though I have to admit I love me some LinkedIn.
Wait. What? LinkedIn? What’s the draw over there?
As a past follower of r/LinkedInLunatics I’m thinking the same, lol
I think ultimately that is going to be the goal. Security advocates for years have insisted that we OWN our own data.
Long term, the Fediverse is the way forward, but social media has staying power even if it dimishes from what it was. It will ages before the Fediverse replaces centralized social media, but I think it will slowly happen.
I saw a comparison here between the Fediverse and other federated services like emails and POTS. I think there are a lot of similarities, but if that’s true, the Fediverse still has a long way to go before it matures like traditional federated services like email. Things like spamlists and increased interoperability will be needed eventually.
At least in the short-term, I think Lemmy has a good base here to take over from Reddit, and the increased focus will help the Fediverse mature further. Lemmy won’t be another Voat.
Oh yeah, definitely not. FOSS combined with federation means that even if the main instance and dev team are toast, someone else could pick up where they left off and run with it. Lemmy doesn’t necessarily need Lemmy.ml to function, which you couldn’t say about voat (or Reddit, for that matter.)
No. And that’s fine. I don’t expect underground music to replace top 40. And there’s a place for both.
Very well said
IMHO these are fundamentally different concepts. Popular social media is made popular by pushing curated ‘engaging’ content, rather than organic content, to monetize gullible users. It has become an entertainment venue, giving their audience a steady stream of what they want them to see, even if by force. Popular “Social Media” has rapidly devolved into a real-life MST3K. Users feel betrayed that the sites no longer feel like the social experience/experiment they wanted… but are users really wanting to leave, or just switch to voice outrage?
Alternatively, the fediverse doesn’t appeal to those wanting force fed entertainment, or seeking viral fame amongst family/friends, and outraged users will complain it doesn’t function like so-and-so site, or work ‘their way’. It is more technical and takes more proactive actions to engage with others, which is a positive thing.
Users think they can switch from Coke to Pepsi, but the fediverse is more of a mixed drink with some extra bourbon.
Could it / should it replace popular social media? Probably not, unless more mindsets change over what a social media experience should be… but it can fill a growing gap as this happens (which will in-turn improve features & development).
I would say, if in theory a social media achieved a small community, informative and positive culture which avoided spreading misinformation or cultivating harmful stereotypes of those they disagree with via the mechanisms of that social media, that it should be more standardized and more widely accepted. Largely because that is just more healthy in general. Not that Lemmy will necessarily be that in practice in the long run.
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Great insight. I agree that the fediverse will never be anywhere near as big as mainstream social media, but I’m hoping it will continue to grow and be recognized as a valid alternative.
Personally I think of the fediverse as like diet social media. Just like how people switch from Coke to Diet Coke to avoid sugar, people can switch from Twitter to Mastodon to avoid recommendation algorithms and overly-stimulating content. At least that’s why I joined the fediverse. I know most people love algorithms and endless content (hence why Tik Tok is so huge) but for those of us who want something less stimulating, I’m glad that the fediverse exists as an alternative. As long as the fediverse is big enough to be enjoyable, but not so big that it becomes super addictive, that’s good enough for me.
yeah I definetly agree. specifically because of the lack of algorithms or profit motives it won’t be " addictive " nor as easy as traditional social media to find what I’m most likely to engage in. but it also means ragebait is less likely to be pushed to me, and for that, its actually quite fine…
im quite sick of the “few big websites” that the internet has become. I miss when there were a greater variety of forums, blogs and places to hang out, only supported through people’s passions. and it seems to me federation goes back to those old times.
Thanks for this insightful post. I agree that the fediverse feels different and that’s ok. It’s exciting to get the chance to build something new and be a part of it starting.
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People said that about reddit, I don’t think Lemmy is anywhere near being too complex for the average user. More that social medias generally favor simplicity because simplicity is easy to control, modify, and generally nudge from a developer side trying to guarantee a very specific use case that generates money, rather than just naturally occurring social systems.
Let’s be real, humans have been dealing with social networks far more complex, systems more complex, for almost all of human history. The sheer volume of people, no, but the actual processes of interaction, yes.
I agree. It’s been fun and challenging to learn even just as a user. I work in tech and it is a lot of concepts to grasp and understand. So much potential though!
“Servers? Instances? Is this a place to connect with my friends or a goddamn server room?”
That’s not a property of of federation (see email and websites) it’s just because early adopters are a little wired. In any new social phenomenon, it takes a second wave of adopters (first wave of followers) to bridge the wierdos from the masses.
Cue this classic study in leadership: https://youtu.be/hO8MwBZl-Vc be the first one to follow the wierdos and show the masses it’s cool.
But couldn’t it be made easier? Who cares which server a community or a user is registered on. I register where a friend sent me the link to and from there on it shouldn’t matter and could be handled in the background.
The big sites are also not one central instance. They have several distributed instances all managed by the same company.
Future instance owners and moderators don’t want users and communities to be able to migrate seamlessly. Mastodon has the same fatal flaw. They want to keep your history and relationships hostage so you can’t leave. This is the only thing turns signup to Lemmy and Mastodon into an important decision you don’t want to get wrong. That’s why you have to read and read and read before signing up and be a Lemmy expert before choosing the right instance for you.
Of course by this time 99% of users have gone back to Reddit. And the 1% that stays still feels like a huge wave.
Also many elitists are happy signup is clunky, it filters out the rif raf and the common Joe. It creates an exclusive space where everyone uses Linux, loves anime and don’t like sports.
A place with no cultural relevance ree from eternal September.
Mastodon has the same fatal flaw. They want to keep your history and relationships hostage so you can’t leave.
You can migrate your relationships to a new Mastodon server.
And while you can’t directly transfer the history (the debate over how/whether to do this has gone on for literally years), you can export an archive you can keep locally, and there are tools out there to parse it and convert it to some other form (static website, whatever). Someone’s probably written an importer by now, though I’d have to look.
Well there’s also techies who don’t (only) use Linux and like (some) sports. More of a Sci-Fi and Comic Book guy than anime here.
Let’s see how this grows.
Future instance owners and moderators don’t want users and communities to be able to migrate seamlessly. Mastodon has the same fatal flaw
This is misrepresentative for a few ways.
For one, you can in fact migrate your mastadon account, fairly easily in fact.
For another thing, instance owners and moderators don’t really get to choose whether migration is possible, the code contributors do. I suppose instance owners could start forking their own version of lemmy to make that harder, but ultimately there will always be folks willing to host the “best” version, and so people will just leave
To some extent this is a feature, not a problem though. I know it’s elitist, but in a lot of ways the internet was a much nicer place when it was just a bunch of tech nerds.
I hope you don’t mean nicer as in “friendlier,” because the internet has always been a hellscape
No, I didn’t. Maybe “more interesting” would have been a better phrasing. The signal to noise ratio is so much worse now than it was 20 years ago.
as popular social media is getting crap the fediverse will grow on users and content
a replacement is a very long term action that involves not only the users so nowadays: no maybe in a far future
In the sense that it would take over facebook or instagram? No, not a chance.
The issue is that without marketing or any big scale advertising, the fediverse is never going to take off. Because it is not backed by a big corporation with enough capital like Reddit, it won’t ever reach the masses, even with all the advertising the recent Reddit API changes have brought to lemmy and the fediverse, even if Fedi were to be 10x better than anything else.
Any instance starting to use ads would likely lose a lot of users. We don’t want to look at ads, they are everywhere and they are poison.
I could see a small membership fee as being more acceptable, like a dollar per month. It’s not a big deal for a lot of people. But we are not there yet.
@retreat3926 @Bicyclejohn If that really is the case, then there needs to be a happy medium between intrusive ads that uglify a UI and spammy nonsense that plagues corporate social media. But even then, a lot of people came here to get away from corpo spam, and will not take kindly or lightly to ads suddenly appearing on their feeds (and some instances have and will outright ban it)
You mean, to get the money to actually advertise the Fediverse? Or to advertise IN the fediverse?
The federation aspect of it has to be invisible to the user. The user shouldn’t have to pick an instance (unless they want to) and they should see communities from all instances by default. Also we need a discovery algorithm. That’s the most needed feature.
Before we had the fediverse - long before it - we had Usenet: people conversing globally in email-shaped units. It was shared and synched.
It was awesome. Questions answered, points debated, everything you wanted.
I don’t think the fediverse is a magical solution, but it does have a familiar feel to it. Not as good when it comes to spelling, but “it’s just the web,” so the rules are maybe different.
This is fine.
Probably, since it’s decentralised people can just move to another instance if the mods on theirs abuse their power.
If you move you lose your history and relationships behind. There is no migration, same as Mastodon. On purpose so as not to disempower instance owners
It works be nice if there was a way to verify that a user is the same one across Lemmy instances.
That is one of the main function of public key cryptography
You can append your digital signature to your messages and it becomes possible to confirm the same person made all the messages
Is there some backing for the idea that it’s intentional? There’s not technical reason that we couldn’t implement migrations.
It’s an open source project. Anybody can fork it and create a separate and incompatible network. What they’re is, is lack of interest in allowing frictionless for the users. Which would streamline onboarding.
https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/12423
This long standing issue, which has been closed before, most be completed before the users can sign-up without worry what their instance owners thinks.
I think it could, and I also think it won’t and that it will stay in the relative niche. But that’s a good thing. So it replaces all social media for me but doesn’t bring the general public. Win-win situation
