I’m personally crossing my fingers for Discord.
Personal Knowledge Management Apps / Note-Taking Apps.
After EverNote and Co. many people got angry / fustrated.
Since I found https://obsidian.md I’m actually happy with everything - as the plugin’s are open-source, it’s flexible and there is no lock-in as it’s all simply markdown format. ObsidianMD is just a markdown viewer - but with superious UX. There are also alternatives to that like Logseq though.
After seeing this, I cannot imagine anymore to use something like Google Notes, OneNote, etc.
Check out org-mode in emacs. It’s amazing.
Also shoutout to Logseq, love this app. Open Source and privacy focused. https://logseq.com/
How do you manage tasks in obsidian?
There’s a tasks extension that will show all of the tasks across any note in a sidebar
I have reluctantly been using obsidian after trying every floss alternative. It is portable, easy to start with and there is a rich plugin community. Unlike joplin, the closest floss competitor, it actually stores files in plain markdown so if you need to access them through another tool you can. Obsidian adheres to the unix philosophy better than joplin. :(
They are both electron which sucks but at least with obsidian you do not have to be running the application all the time because of the plain markdown thing.
Well some Discord channels are already synchronising their content with Matrix, using the room feature to mimic the channel structure. OpenStreetMaps does this for example. I wouldn’t mind that normalising as at least, it stops me from needing to use Discord myself. But the fact it still synchronises back to Discord is, of course, not ideal. Small steps to the right direction I guess.
Replacement would be nice, but I mainly use it for some local communities which I expect will be the last to migrate. They barely got a start on Discord…
You can synchronize with Matrix? How?
With a bidge like the guy below said. I think the owner of de Discord server needs to set it up tho, and I don’t run any Discord servers, so I don’t know the details. But I noticed sone servers do it.
I just hope this is the start of an internet renaissance with less corporate control.
yeah the corporate greed is at its peak lately…
That’s certainly what it’s feeling like to me.
I remember when I was a kid and the Web 1.0 stuff was popular, things like IRC chat and forums were too intimidating/confusing for me to get into. My introduction to being an internet “citizen” was Web 2.0 and the MySpaces/Facebooks/Reddits of the world, where I had a UX approachable enough not to intimidate my teenage self.
The shift towards the Fediverse feels like a blend of many of the best aspects of Webs 1.0 and 2.0 – I have a UX that feels familiar, but one that comes with a bottom-up, decentralized grassroots feel that is reminiscent of the early internet.
I’m bullish for sure.
I always like to hear about when internet was at its early stages. I’m born in 2001 so never got the chance to live through that era, but to me it always feels so much better than what it is right now.
Hearing you say that we are experiencing a moment similar to those is making me so happy.
People do remember it with rose colored glasses - there were fewer niche communities, fewer lgtbq+ communities, slower connections, 240p video at best (so much anime I somehow watched like that… Sorry anime), sexism and racism in a more general way vs now as like society and particularly techie culture at the time in general, not being able to use the internet when someone needed to use the phone, and so on - but while we gained a lot with time that we take for granted now, we did lose stuff, too.
I hope we can bring back something of the good that was lost, now and in the future, as well as find new good things.
At least, surely, there will always be cat pics.
I was absolutely amazing!
complete wild west. only limit was your mind/imagination.at least it felt like that, when I was young ;-)
The other limit was the speed of your dial up modem.
I doubt it, things cost money, that’s how we got in the corporate trap originally. If you invest a ton of time and money into something sooner or later you need to get something back.
I’m not convinced you need corporate money though. I think grants/user contributions (add the awards concept like Reddit has?) can get you pretty far a la Wikipedia.
It’ll be hard to get people to not only detach from something they’re accustomed to, but also then attach to something unfamiliar.
I tried and am trying again with Mastodon, but a lack of users I wish to follow, a more confusing premise at times, and just overall more enjoyment overall (if that) with twitter as a platform makes it a challenge.
Lemmy however has checked all the boxes. It literally feels exactly like Reddit, and honestly like a fresh start to avoid the various decisions both Reddit admins and the community itself made along the way. I’m hoping more for the latter experience than forming when diving into the fediverse, but my above statement is most likely applicable for a wide sample of people out there.
I’ve been having trouble getting going with Mastodon. But I’ve also had issues with Twitter as well. Lemmys been great so far.
I had the same issue with Mastodon when I tried to get into that, although perhaps worse because I was never into twitter either (thank goodness, honestly).
Lemmy though feels like old reddit from before the Digg exodus, if anything, or like other old forums that reddit drove either out of business or at least out of sight. It feels familiar and nostalgic and fresh at the same time, and there’s an element of hope to it to because it’s not just another corporate monster.
There isn’t much left.
First Facebook with their whole meta thing, then Imgur deleting all NSFW content and images uploaded by non-registered members, afterwards Twitter and now Reddit.
Twitch made a big mistake with their new sponsoring rules, but seems like they are reverting / changing it again due to bad community feedback.
Discord had a few changes the community didn’t like, but nothing ground breaking yet. But they get more and more greedy and their platform is filled with scams, hackers, bots and sadly many bad people like child predators and content which Discord support does nothing against. They seem not to care.
YouTube, well, I think they might be next actually. More and longer unskipable ads, restricting or demonetizing many videos, bad communication with their creators and less rewards for smaller creators. In addition, they might put high quality resolutions behind their already existing expensive subscription paywall. There isn’t any competition which is urgently needed.
UPDATE: Bad news about YouTube continues. Just now, YouTube Ordered ‘Invidious’ Privacy Software to Shut Down in 7 Days.
Which other big social media platforms are left?
The problem with anything video is still that it costs way too much to host, unless you’re a giant who already has their own data centers and massive data pipes. You can’t just throw it on a cheap VPS like text-based services
Are you thinking of it as a centralized replacement to YouTube? If you’re centralized, yeah, you probably need a data centre the size of Malta. There are decentralized alternatives (like PeerTube) where the cost is also distributed. If you’re using PeerTube, you literally can “just throw it on a cheap VPS”, and lots of people do, with no problems.
I think the real reason decentralized video isn’t going to catch on is because video (and YouTube in particular) has not been a community thing for many years now. There are very few YouTubers who make videos to build a community or connect to a community. YouTubers are on there for money, and there’s really no alternative that can both host the videos and pay out big cheques to content creators.
@duncesplayed @kalleboo tbh most of YTs I know either run sponsor ads, or have Patreon/paid for community. It is already slowly moving away from ads system in YT, which simply does not work.
That is a good point actually! That means they would have the freedom to move over to a new platform.
@duncesplayed imho making PeerTube or other Fediverse video service very good at UX and easy to use will allow these communities migrate when they feel like it.
I think biggest issue might be running video service like this and having running costs for video storage, etc. As always, communities might be willing to factor those costs in their pledges.
I think PeerTube needs easy to use setup / reliable network of hosters, and good UX to manage community, live streams, chats, etc.I think it needs to be made very, very easy (for people who understand Zero about the tech behind it) to set up and host their own peertube “channel” off their home computer. It needs to be just as easy and straightforward as setting up a youtube channel.
Anything that requires people to understand even a bare minimum of tech jargon, or even that exposes them to too much such jargon too quickly, will be too much of a barrier to entry for most people, vs youtube or similar corporate platforms.
Tiktok, Snapchat, OnlyFans
Signal would actually be a decent Snapchat replacement since it can do both disappearing messages and stories. now if only they’d finally release usernames and phone number privacy.
Tiktok is Chinese military funded. It’s not going away.
Even though Tiktok isn’t a one-to-one equivalent of youtube, I wouldn’t be surprised to see a closer youtube equivalent come out of China, Russia, or even North Korea (the people are poor mainly because the country puts all its wealth in the military, and it already has extensive foreign espionage and media manipulation arms - if it wanted to, it could pour a lot into controlling a major video platform to get ahold off all that data).
In a more hopeful world, maybe a different small country might invest in it on a governmental level, similarly.
Saudi Arabia is already heavily investing in the gaming industry, in an attempt to diversify their economic reliance away from just their oil.
Qatar already has a lot invested in, and profit from, aljazeera (state-owned news) poking at all its neighbors’ human rights abuses, too.
Saudi Arabia - or another, unexpected country - could absolutely do the same with English-language social media, especially given the current lack of competition for youtube. Government funding could scale that barrier and snag a source of income and an espionage advantage for the host country.
Especially since Saudi Arabia, though rife with human rights abuses, is allied with the U.S. and thus less likely to become the target of a “ban tiktok specifically” push.
(sidenote: the “ban tiktok” bills would ban a lot more than tiktok, including VPNs - that subject’s a whole can of worms too).
Edit: especially now they’ve seen Tiktok as a template for this.
YouTube has been enshittified long ago, especially after the Adpoclaypse
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I don’t really see YouTube failing anytime soon. They have such a massive userbase, it’s hard to imagine any other platform taking over anytime soon, regardless of shitty UX decisions. Creating a successful video platform like they have is an enormous challenge, the only reason they succeeded is because they were early.
@hampter @noodlejetski @Nankeru *cough* TikTok *cough*
In all seriousness, Google does not know what to do with YT. It is very hard to monetize. They tried to do whole TV thing, which fell flat on it’s face. it keeps being huge money sink, and moderation is nightmare and algorithms seems to fucking up constantly.
They can’t get rid of it, because it is huge, but it is not fire sure profit.I don’t know about YouTube not being profitable, but even if they aren’t, you’d be hard pressed to find a company better equipped to handle a money sink that Google. In 2022, they had a gross profit of 156 billion… I don’t think they are panicking, scrambling to monetize YT at Alphabet HQ.
More to the point, hosting video content is costly. Being backed by the deep pockets of Google is what keeps YouTube rolling.
Matrix, what seems to be the most ovious replacement to Discord, is an incredible piece of software from a technical point of view. It have Conflict-free Replicated Datatype, which give an hard guarantee that no message will be skipped over and old message will also be fetched. Something that ActivityPub doesn’t permit, and is quite a problem with Mastodon at times (much less on lemmy, given you follow communities, and so everything on these communities will be synced, thought not backfilling)
Stackoverflow (not quite a huge tech company) is edging.
I think it would take a while for any social media to have one, then again I didn’t expect Reddit to shit the bed the way it has. If there’s any that I think will be specifically fast, it would be Twitch.
Youtube is the least likely, no matter how many times it shits the bed, people stick to it because all the other video sharing services simply aren’t supported by the big content creators.
i would never watch youtube if i cannot use newpipe : as soon as youtube blocks newpipe, exodus to peertube may happen
as soon as youtube blocks newpipe, exodus to peertube may happen
I’m willing to bet that the percentage of people watching Youtube via Newpipe is at least an order of magnitude smaller than of people browsing reddit through third party clients.
I’m 90/10 on it being YouTube. I mean, they’ve already shit the bed plenty in the past. But with all the fediverse stuff picking up steam, Peertube is just sitting there waiting to enter the discourse.
That would be awesome.
But video traffic and storage is so much higher than text and images (like Lemmy or mastadon).
The cost of running it would be pretty hugeTrue. It does look like Peertube has some instances with videos hosted on them. But yeah, storage and bandwidth costs would be much tougher problems to solve than for lemmy as soon as it started to scale up.
Man it would really suck if we ever lost the backlog of YouTube videos
Discord already kinda sucks, I find the app not nearly as smooth as before, and it tries so hard to choke nitro into you, it also has so many bloaty extra features.
Maybe it’s just the use I try to get from it. Discord has evolved more towards community channels, and for that (at least the bit I tried to use them) it seems fairly decent. Most of the time I just wanna use it to play with 2 or 3 friends, I could definitely use a minimalistic app that does just that.
Wait a little until https://github.com/vector-im/element-call / https://call.element.io/ is done. It’s not polished yet so I can’t really recommend it but once it is properly intergrated in Matrix this will be my go-to solution.
I want lightweight-as-possible app that just does voice chat for games AND facecam chat for games, now that so many people have those. With little overlay boxes for your friends, similar to what streamers do. Partly because this would also enable deaf people to play with sign language chat.
Just go back to IRC if you hate it that much.
Isn’t that sort of like saying “go back to Digg if you hate Reddit so much”?
Mumble used to be great for that back in the day. It is FOSS.
If you really only want group calls for a handful of people I can only recommend Signal for that. Just create a group chat in there. You can start a call and select it to not ring on the other peoples end and then you can just hop in and out just like a discord vc. It has a desktop app for Mac/Linux/Windows too so you could use it while gaming too. The app is not pretty but it’s minimalistic and it works. Everything is end to end enrypted even the calls and video calls.
You could even screenshare with it but i never tested how well that works. It’s free and open source. It is not federated however. But still the most easy to use and best secure and private messenger out there.
Discord is a likely contender, but I think it’s likely to be Instagram. It’s got a very dissatisfied userbase, and there’s already a few reasonably active pixelfed servers
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Why is (part of) their userbase dissatisfied? I know almost nothing of instagram.
As others have said, ads. The app is also overrun with spambots posting links to scams to buy followers or ForEx or whatever they’re selling. The algorithm is really, really bad, at least if you’re an artist of any kind. IG was one of the first apps to attempt to steal TikTok’s short-form video format, which means it’s hard to get your content out there if you’re just posting images. And there are a LOT of content reposters.
Ads upon ads upon ads. And then for some it is just that it is owned by Facebook.
I’m not very familiar with Instagram either, but it’s infamously bad for its users’ mental health, it’s recommendatiom algorithm is unreliable, and it collects a lot of data. Honestly it’s possible that a lot of its regular users do like it and that I just don’t tend to hear from them
Yeah I’m loving pixelfed way more than IG
The day I don’t see “join our Discord” where I would earlier expect to find “visit our forums” will be a good day.
A bloated live chat monolith is not what I want to use to discuss game bugs or podcast episodes.
Discord HATER here. Im happy for gamers to have their stuff; makes sense in that context i guess. As im not a gamer it is not an appropriate tool for anything i want to do.
Completely agree! Especially if it some kind of product support. I hate having to scroll through thousands of chronically ordered chat messages to find the solution to the problem I’m having.
Ab. So. Fucking. Lutely.
So much!
It’s just hard to really focus on the content. Short term chatting? Ok! Longterm discussion? BAD!
Discord is a replacement for Skype and IRC. People use it as a substitute for all that plus forums and sometimes an entire website and it’s exhausting.
Agreed. Live chat has its place for certain things, but for other things a forum type interface is better suited.
Yeah, several groups of friends of mine are using Discord to chat and arrange roleplaying nights and such. I use those regularly. But I’ve got several “project” Discords that are forum replacements and I find I almost never go there. Certainly never when I don’t have some specific goal I’m trying to fulfill.
I don’t know when they introduced it, but at some point, in some servers, I noticed a new channel type: forum. The fact that this is a thing is the greatest proof that Discord is not the end all, be all solution to communication.
Nothing is, really. One thing I really enjoyed about the 00s web was its diversity, because different things had different places and different formats, and the ever-lasting stakeholder grasp wasn’t as successful at trying to put people in one place to show them ads and drive engagement to please the statistics gazers.
The “forum” was introduced within the last year or so.
Revolt seems to be to Discord what Lemmy/Kbin are to reddit, but I dont see most people bothering with it unless discord makes some reeaaallly huge mistakes to piss the community off.
People seem pretty annoyed at the changes to usernames, but probably not enough to leave Discord.
Tbh that whole change has been kinda blown out of proportion, it doesn’t really affect people in any meaningful way IMHO. Discord will have to do much worse to get people to actually stop using it, it is way too convenient as it is, unfortunately.
Hah, yeah I don’t see people going from “I gotta change my username” to “I gotta change my username and find all my communities in matrix etc.”
I see this as falling under painful but kinda necessary admin, which is nowhere near the level of friction required for a platform switch with massive disruption to communities.
That said, the barrier is lower for chat servers than it is for social media - history matters less in discord than it does for reddit, for example. If the server owners decide to migrate to another platform, they can probably convince people to migrate given a good enough reason and alternative. The people online at any given moment matter more than the last couple months of chat history.
that’s my biggest pet peeve, too.
GloriousEggroll, the mastermind behind modified version of Valve’s Proton, posts his code on GitHub, and then links to his Discord as a place for reporting bugs.
Thats uhhh… interesting. Why…?
the only reason I can think of is “to spite me”.
I actually quit using his Linux distro in large part because the communications were so terrible with Discord being the only way he disseminates information (so so poorly).
There were issues and the necessary information couldn’t flow effectively in either direction.
Yes please Discord, it is so worrying how everyone has all their private messages and content in an unencrypted app owned by a corporation who gives 0 shit about privacy. They won’t even delete your messages if you delete your account/leave servers / get banned. In fact there is no way to delete all your messages
Feels like I’ve been stuck using it just by default, because everyone else I know is, and there’s nothing decent fitting that particular use case. Skype definitely wasn’t cutting it. I at least avoid communities that are trying and failing to be forum-like, and just keep it to ones with people I know, and my viewers. Still run a Teamspeak server for a select set of friends to do YT recordings on, as it predates Discord, and is generally more stable (avoiding voice dropouts).
I honestly don’t think the fediverse will become nearly as popular as many seem to.think. It’s still complicated to use/understand for many non-tech enthusiasts, and in the case of Reddit, while people are angry, I doubt most of their users are going anywhere any time soon. Some will leave, but it’s not going to be a small number.
We keep going on about how Reddit relies on it’s “creators”, without whom they’ll die. Frankly, a lot of the highest rated content is just repost of old videos or tiktok videos. A lot of that stuff isn’t original, and the deep conversations are, in my opinion, few and far between. Sure there are some communities whi h have this, but they’re not exactly over represented.
Reddit started out with more tech-y users, then got more mainstream. Maybe the same can happen here.
Reddit blew up when it got decent mobile apps. If the fediverse (is that really what we’re calling it?) gets decent mobile app support that helps simplify the onboarding process and connection to communities there’s a much higher chance.
We may be few, but I’m proud to count myself among those who quit Reddit because of this. (Not that I wasn’t looking for a good reason for a long time).
As long as there’s enough of us to maintain a community here, then we’re golden 🙂. And I’m definitely under the impression that we’re getting there.
Imo Reddit is dying, and while I’m sure some people will get confused by the way it works at first, i think people will stick around
I hope so.
I don’t have statistics to back this up, but I’d be willing to bet an entire doughnut that most reddit users have never posted even a single comment. People with that level (dis)engagement aren’t the type to seek out alternatives. They just kind of drift away.
I honestly don’t think the fediverse will become nearly as popular as many seem to.think.
Probably not gonna get Twitter/Reddit-sized, no, as those platforms have userbases the size of a large country. It’s mostly a question of “can we attract enough users for the ecosystem to be workable” and I think the answer is “yes.” Hell, for me it already is.
It’s mostly a question of “can we attract enough users for the ecosystem to be workable” and I think the answer is “yes.” Hell, for me it already is.
And this I completely agree with.
I really hope communities like !asklemmy@lemmy.ml and !tifu@sh.itjust.works get up and running
undefined> A lot of that stuff isn’t original, and the deep conversations are, in my opinion, few and far between. Sure there are some communities whi h have this, but they’re not exactly over represented.
If you get the deep conversations and the conversationalists the fluff will follow.
I knew about Lemmy, Mastadon, and PeerTube before this this latest mess with Reddit, but this finally gave me the push to come over as I’m sure it will for many.
@alehel @noodlejetski I’ll add that when Twitter first hit the fan there was a large influx of Mastodon users, but it quickly fell off. Perhaps there are more tech-savvy Reddit users who will dive into the Fediverse than did with Twitter/Mastodon, but for your average user we’re not approachable enough yet to overcome the inertia of familiarity.
Even if it quickly fell off, I think approximately 70-80% of current Mastodon users came from Twitter, and a big reason for people leaving (after poor onboarding experience) was the small size of the Fediverse. There just weren’t enough people in the Fediverse for the network effect to take hold. With each influx of users I expect to see a slightly higher proportion to stay, although I don’t see this influx (from Reddit) as being particularly large in the first place.
Discord is not a bad bet, but I think they still have like 2-4years in them.
but that i think would rather make matrix servers go boom … literally i am afraid when i look at the various bugs and performance bottlenecks of synapse, which at least right now is the most popular server
Absolutely, I tried switching to it using bridges for all my messaging accounts and the performance was abhorrent, mind you just me, a single user on a self hosted instance.
It’s hard to predict - because despite the bad decisions from platforms like Facebook, Twitch, and Reddit, they are still always going to be immensely more popular than Fediverse / FOSS equivalents due to the network effect.
Despite all the bad moves from YouTube, Twitch, and Reddit, the vast majority of people aren’t interested in another platform, they just want the current platform to not be rubbish, so they don’t lose their current communities and contacts.
While I’d like for all the Fediverse platforms to become relatively “mainstream” that people will sign up for them, I don’t think it’s ever going to happen any time soon, but I’d love to be proven wrong.
Absolutely right. What makes or breaks any social media platform is the ease of forming large communities (which goes hand in hand with the number of total active users) first and the user experience second.
“Fediverse” seems to suffer greatly from a UX point of view, mostly due to decentralization, which creates this isolation effect for newcomers.
Take mastodon vs twitter for example. For someone used to signing up for twitter and instantly gaining access to virtually everything the platform has to offer, mastodon has a big threshold to jump over before you can have a twitter-like experience. At least it feels like it until you get used to the experience. That’s still the biggest barrier in front of large scale adoption of decentralized social media platforms.
Right - I think people are willing to learn things, but only if they have an incentive to do so.
Using bigger platforms such as Twitter or Reddit took some learning, but people and content were already there, this gives people the incentive to figure out how things work.
When you sign up to something like Mastodon, you have to learn how it works, and while it is not particularly complicated at all, why put the effort into figuring out Mastodon when you can just go back to Twitter and have the content and community already there for you?
