The problem isn’t that the fediverse isn’t viable. The problem isn’t that it’s “too complicated.” The problem is that the giants of Silicon Valley have spent 20 years convincing us that anything outside their control isn’t worth our time.
And that’s just not bloody true.
Couldn’t have said it better myself
Exactly! That’s how people usually argue against the Fediverse. People have literally been indoctrinated into believing the internet is centralised.
Our biggest enemy is actually the bootlicker.
Once that guy flips the regime will have hard time maintaining legitimacy
Americans don’t understand the politics of proper opposition and dissent
Voting for the other guy ain’t it… And it is a lot more than “politics” it is a life style.
Deny the parasite profit and engagement
too true, make it a lifes mission to avoid getting shafted. take pride in once ability, for me: that is repairing electronics, using privacy respecting platforms and having as small a finger print as possible.
Our biggest enemy is actually the bootlicker
I got a small dose of this at work. My coworker has a safety incident, almost fucked up her hand. She got made the safety champion the next day, and was concerned about the optics.
My lead told her “don’t worry what they think of you” but brother you are a leader. Public perception is your strongest tool. You absolutely should be worried what we think of you
I lately have a saying:
“If it’s not FOSS, it’s not worth your time”I don’t think it’s too complicated, but it is noticeably more complicated than joining traditional social media. People often get immediately freaked out by the whole concept of instances. I know everybody keeps trying to use the email comparison, but that just is not working. People cannot connect the dots between email and something like Instagram.
It would help to change the nomenclature. Joining a Facebook “group” makes sense to anybody. Change insider jargon like “instance” to seeker-friendly verbiage like “village.”
I like that, or something like that. “Server” and “instance” definitely sounds too prickly and technical to a lot of people.
I remember joining reddit when it had the old interface and thinking that it is super unintuitive and complicated compared to all other social media. This didn’t stop reddit from growing and i don’t think lemmy will be restricted by this in the long run. People generally are just not aware of the fediverse and how it works yet but they will get used to it.
Reddit’s complexity was always vastly overstated. You can login and be posting in seconds in a way that you simply can’t with the fediverse
The only additional step you have on lemmy is choosing an instance and honestly it does not even matter that much which you choose. I’m not saying it’s trivial but it is nothing that is inherently more difficult.
Reddit was really strange compared to everything else a few years ago. It only appears easy now because we are familiar with the concept of subreddits now.
You and I know this but people at first glance people generally do not. Then you try to explain to them how Federation works and their eyes gloss over.
I can grab anyone of basically any age and drop them on a computer/phone to sign up for Facebook for the first time and they will figure it out in seconds. Contrast that with joining Pixelfed which doesn’t even let people join the biggest instance anymore. I don’t disagree with their decision at all but the first thing people would likely tap just doesn’t let them move forward. Then a lot of the largest instances don’t carry much if any English content. Do you not see how that’s an issue for adoption?
Imagine trying to join Facebook and when you get through the multi step process everything’s in German, a mistake you made because the largest instance won’t let you in and you don’t understand instances in the first place. For most people that’s an issue.
What I’m trying to say is that every social network has it’s quirks that you just need to learn. The willingness to learn also depends on how attractive the platform is. With time i see no reason for lemmy to not grow like reddit did.
If you just google “Lemmy” one of the first results is https://join-lemmy.org/ where you are directed to an instance that suits you. Far from perfect but Lemmy is still young.
People probably don’t even really need to understand federation. They just need sane defaults to get started and work from there.
And what I’m trying to say is that the big dogs don’t have quirks. They are intuitive to the point where 98% of people can figure them out in seconds the moment they look at them. They have spent billions of dollars over decades learning how to create as little friction as possible to get new users onto their platforms.
There isn’t a single fediverse platform that is as easy to onboard new users to as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc. There’s just no comparison.
Edit: I also forgot to mention earlier: some instances have defederated from major ones and vice versa. What instance you choose can matter an awful lot. Additionally, people are going to be confused when they see multiple variants of the same communities on different instances (e.g. News)
Depending on the instance, you might have to put a little more work into it. Not that I’m saying that’s a problem - in my eyes that’s a feature.
To be fair it is easy, if it allowed you to comment and didnt delete them lol
No you cant, karma requirements bud, try making a new account and posting/commenting anywhere?
I’m down to have a serious conversation but please don’t be patronizing with that “bud” crap
That also doesn’t make any sense. You can’t get karma without posting or commenting. They put a temporary cap on how frequently you can post. Individual subs sometimes have their own karma threshold rules yes, but they also tell you they do.
“Lemmy is an alternative to Reddit, you can visit https://phtn.app/ to have a look at the content. If you prefer an app, https://vger.app/settings/install has download links.”
Here’s how you get on Instagram or Reddit or whatever:
- Go to whatever app store you use
- download
- enter email, username, and password
- verification email
You’re done. Your voyager link is not the whole process.
Well said indeed
Personally, I prefer an intellectual barrier to entry. It’s one of the things that made the internet of the early days so much better than today.
Everybody who says this assumes they wouldn’t have been barred from entry were they to try and get in now.
I was speaking more to the early days of the internet. You had to be relatively smart, and determined to get on it.
I’ll never forget when the AOLers started showing up.
yeah, they sure ruined newsgroups…
Eternal September
Yup. I’ll admit, I didn’t foresee AI coming along and finding a way to make the quality of discourse even worse
I would argue it is closer to 60 years.
Refugee here. Think I’d agree. A subconscious bias / misunderstanding we bought into
I jumped over here a couple weeks ago at the request of another redditor and it’s like a breath of fresh air.
I still check out reddit for a couple subs that just don’t have enough interaction over here “yet”.
I’ve mentioned lemmy a couple times over there and got replies like " it’s just too complicated " etc. and now that I think about it they were most likely bots 🤔
Ima go back to the cesspool and investigate
Honestly lemmy specifically is good enough to scratch my Reddit itch. We may not be able to post our way out of fascism, but we can certainly post our way out of the centralized, enshittified platforms like Reddit where we came from.
I think it’s more difficult in applications where you want or have to bring a lot of friends to make the apps useful, but in the case of lemmy specifically if there’s a baseline level of activity that’s enough to fulfill 90% of what i used Reddit for (i.e. snarky memes and random back and forths with relative strangers).
Yep, dont really use mastodon or even bluesky, my twitter groupchat is still my hs friends and I like it when they arent talking about sports. I do post there more than I do on X, I miss twitter I used to tweet so much, before the changes. (Stopped seing friends likes on my feed, I followed funny ppl and without that it was over)
It’s the social media equivalent of supporting a bunch of Mom and Pop shops (or opening your own!) vs some hyper-sanitized, corporate monstrosity like Wal-Mart.
There are a lot of people who prioritize convenience above all else. Why go shop at a butcher, baker, green grocer, and a liquor store when you can go to one place and get it all? Doesn’t matter that the separate entities are specialized and therefore more knowledgeable about the product vs. Walmart where asking an employee is the most useless thing ever.
Same with social media or things like Google. People are lazy. Why shop around when Facebook gives you everything? Why learn how to use the address bar when Google will do the work for you.
So the fediverse goes against that in that it asks users to actually think for a moment about things and requires them to shop around… which, that’s just too much work for the average person.
It’s more like supporting “open to all” maker spaces. Many contribute to what’s there and its existence itself.
Not one mention to moderation. The strength and focus of our “small isles” is on taking control of moderating the contents. We can stop fascists posts, and we can share alternative narratives (e.g. solarpunk) to Sillicon Valley. Plus, spoiler alerts as content warnings, etc. I think mastodon with their covenant is the greatest example of this ethos.
I love the user level control. block urls, instances, communities, users. I really would love like trust cafe where you can rank things from 0-100 where 0 is block and 100 is subscribe and your feed will prioritize posts from things you rank higher for the in between values.
on taking control of moderating the contents. We can stop fascists posts
.ml tankies and right-wingers: “Wouldn’t that be…CeNsOrsHiP”
I know you jest but I will note that freedom of speech is not freedom from consequence, if you say something abhorrent enough and I decide that you in fact are a threat that deserves to be gutted then I am in my right to take said action and face said consequences myself.
I’m mixed on her articles. Is she a journalist or is she just posting fediverse circle jerk on the fediverse? She writes well but feels like pretty much the same article every time
I’m actually a fan, but I get what you mean. I feel like she just writes what’s on her mind, when she’s writing for her named website. Her writing for The Index is a bit more by the books internet journalism.
And yeah I agree sharing this on here is a bit of a circle jerk, but articles like this get shared around in the mainstream and show people still captured by the big platforms another way. I’ve definitely emailed a couple of her articles around to friends, and I can’t be the only one.
I liked her enough to follow on Mastodon so I’m with you there. Thanks for explaining that. I didn’t realize she had her own site and her own publication.
I didn’t mean just sharing here but she frequently writes on exactly this topic then shares to mastodon then here. Almost like all the HN posts sharing their own blogs about why blogging is good, lol. Which I still enjoy.
I am a hostage that has been set free from a prison camp. Thank you Fedi.
That’s just like, your opinion man.
The fediverse won’t succeed just because it’s better. It will succeed if and only if people choose it.
Part of that is making it monetizable. Influencers can build huge followings (and make some cash) because existing platforms recommend their content to other users.
Mastodon devs have chosen not to provide recommendations and quote posts. That’s reasonable, but it reduces the utility of the platform, and it cedes space to Twitter & co.
To my knowledge, the only creator that’s exclusive to Lemmy is the unix surrealism author. Until it’s easy to monetize content, we’re gonna have a hard time attracting creators, and a hard time attracting users.
I hate the idea that everything should be monetised, that only gives us loong videos with laughing heads and so on “to keep you engaged”.
We’re here without all that crap and well the fediverse is definitely less active but it’s content made by people because they like it, they believe in it. Not to shake the money tree.
It’s an interesting take though because a lot of good content requires funding too, as well as hosting etc.
So how can we solve that in a reasonable way that doesn’t lead to all the bullshit?
My take is that hosting is no longer expensive, I have a 30€/month fiber link with 700Mb/s up and could theoretically host my videos for hundreds or even thousands of interested people. At 40€ I can have a 10Gb/s up if needed. That’s a lot of videos served daily.
Now, I also think that the monymaker needing to serve millions of people can go and do that elsewhere.
So what’s missing is a sort of search engine so that when I want to check out fly fishing or knitting I can check out the exquisite videos from the respective community.
Something along those lines.
If people are interested I’ll host their videos, and it shouldn’t be that hard to make them searchable, but for sure, I can’t do it all by myself. What do you think?
Now, I also think that the monymaker needing to serve millions of people can go and do that elsewhere.
That’s the issue. If we’re gonna get evil tech bros out of our human interactions, we need to build a platform that doesn’t reject people who like to eat.
Journalists need to get access to sources, and want to see when events are happening.
Documentary creators want a way to create interesting and useful videos that will earn them a living.
Streamers want a platform that can serve a bunch of users with near-realtime (okay, just fast) interactions.
That’s what OP’s link is missing: being able to use a platform to do your preferred job is one of the things that makes a platform compelling. Until we have that, we’re rejecting a big part of our audience.
We wanna grow too and hopefully be a place with more authentic conversations (better anti-bot defenses) - hyperbolic to say “future’s at stake”?
I think truly delightfully UX would be very yuge. I should learn and contribute :)
There are a million and one great reasons to be here on Lemmy, but using it to get cash from fellow users wallets is not one of them.
I think we should be realistic. Content costs money because it requires a lot of effort. It’s naïve to think that content would just be created because people feel like posting something. If the Fediverse is to compete with companies like meta, this is only possible if there are opportunities for content creators to earn money. That should be self-evident, but it obviously isn’t here.
I’m not saying it’s necessary, but it is if the Fediverse is to have mainstream appeal.
Simply because the absolute majority of people are out and about where everyone is. And that’s where the content is. That’s the point: if you want good content, it costs money. It’s not just corporations that make a living from it.
What I want to say is this: The Fediverse could provide fairer conditions for the people who produce content. That makes sense and is necessary because the Internet lives from that.
I just don’t understand why people here don’t want to realize that work has to be paid for. That’s really strange.
Things need to be paid for, but why does that mechanism need to be baked into the platform?
Imagine I’m the best, most engaging poster and commenter on Lemmy. Everyone loves my posts and comments, shares them, quotes them, and responds to them endlessly. (Maybe in this scenario everyone has brain damage for some reason, and this allowed me to become the top Lemmy user.)
If I’m in that position, what’s stopping me from just putting a little blurb at the bottom of each comment saying, “this post is brought to you by Carls Jr.” or whoever wants to sponsor my comments. If people for some reason loved my posts and comments enough, I could find sponsors and just put those sponsorships right in whatever comment or post I make. Lemmy doesn’t need to be involved. They don’t need to go out of their way to recommend my posts either. If they’re good enough, then they can be spread naturally by people sharing and engaging with them.
It makes sense for platforms to provider revenue to creators, but only if the platform has substantial ad revenue. YouTube pays its creators, but it also brings in billions of ad revenue. I don’t think most Lemmy servers even have ads.
Because the advertising business is highly centralized. Getting sponsorships is not as easy as you think.
An example: YouTube pays content producers per click, so to speak, a ridiculously small amount, but in total, with billions of clicks, a crazy amount. The money to finance this comes largely from advertising revenue (also Google’s main business model). They are the Gatekeepers so to speak.
But the content producers can’t live off this because Google keeps most of it for itself. They do give people the opportunity to find sponsors themselves tho - and that’s how people actually make the most money. But you have to find them for yourself or through intermediaries (that’s an industry in itself). This is only realistic if you have sufficient reach (subscribers in the example). And that, in turn, is only possible if you have already invested hundreds of hours in the production of content (you can’t make a living if you don’t get paid for that).
So I think it would be best if the platforms themselves were powerful enough in terms of reach to be able to negotiate well with advertisers. But not as powerful as Google, for example, who can afford to pay content producers a pittance because - unlike small platforms - they are not dependent on them.
I get what you’re saying. This stuff hinges on essentially finding small businesses to run, for example, a commercial PeerTube instance. And then leave it up to the rest of the fediverse if they want to federate with them.
I don’t think any of us, or the current devs, would be the ones to add this commercial functionality just because we’re not the sort to chase those types of incentives. But who knows, maybe some business will develop a plugin or peertube wrapper, or hell just a whole new thing, and see if anyone federates. 🤷
The unix surrealism Lemmite is awesome. They deserve my donations. Saying that people shouldn’t be able to use the platform to express themselves rejects a whole bunch of people.
I’d rather have one unix surrealism than a thousand influencers with lots of followers. These days, I want to be among people who interact as equals, who share ideas, who cooperate in a genuine way. If we try a shortcut to more users through money, what is the point?
I want to be among people who interact as equals, who share ideas, who cooperate in a genuine way.
I think online journalism might be a good example of influencers and users interacting as equals. Users provide extra information, ask questions, reify, and help highlight where the journalist can focus. The journalist does the leg work to produce novel news.
If we try a shortcut to more users through money, what is the point?
To build an interesting, self sustaining network, where people can express themselves fully, and understand each other.
The features I’m suggesting would benefit everyone: a decent view of trending topics/posts/tags; mod-controlled tags; stuff like that. Most users would find them helpful, but a few could use it to build a livelihood that others value.
The journalist does the leg work to produce novel news.
Just to add that in addition to novelty, journalists provide valuable services, like
- holding up a mirror to the present culture
- documenting and disseminating happenings
- packaging up events into narratives
Not to say that you weren’t including these in “novel news,” but just to make it explicit.
Absolutely - I wanted to list interactions between regular users and someone who makes money with a platform.
After a bunch of Twitter users (including journalists) bounced off Mastodon when Elon bought it, the fediverse needs to understand why, and think about what it means to be a viable platform.
Agreed. The only thing I actually miss is geographically local contacts. But as far as just culture and discourse goes - I’m good.
I feel like this is comparing the mall to the park.
They both attract people, but not always the same people, or for the same reasons. And that’s OK.
I get what you’re saying though, because I’ve felt this way when trying to come up with reasons for people (sole proprietors) to get with the fedi, but maybe this place is just not for influencers - not like the corp platforms, anyway. I think the fediverse will attract more and more people with its network effects, but probably never all of the people all of the time.
My modest hope is that the fedi bleeds the big platforms just enough to put them in their place and keep from enshittifying to infinity.
maybe this place is just not for influencers - not like the corp platforms, anyway
The things people need to build a livelihood on a platform are quality of life features. In a lot of cases, I think it’s small stuff: being able to reward patrons with a tag on a specific community; automatically highlighting popular posts; making it easy to find a user’s monetization page; etc.
I think the fediverse will attract more and more people with its network effects, but probably never all of the people all of the time.
At the moment, Lemmy is an ad-free version of Reddit missing some community and notification features. There are good political reasons to be here, but that hasn’t driven a sustained increase in users.
So we won’t get critical mass for network effects by being a better Reddit.
One to make the platform self-sustaining (or grow) is to give creators a reason to use the platform, which will give people a reason to come and stay.
Don’t let the grabbing hands grab all they can.
Ho does one even use mastadon, it seems to require a login on every instance?
You navigate from your local instance. So like you just use hyperlinks (like here on lemmy, I’m clicking around, but my URL still shows
slrpnk.net/...- yours probably showssh.itjust.works/...), or if you try to do something like follow/reply/boost/etc on another instance, it’ll prompt you to connect from your own.
So like here I’m looking at a post on mastodon.social, which I don’t have an account on. If I just type in my home instance in the pop-up modal there, then it’ll complete the action from my home instance. If you’re already signed in on home instance with a cookie then it’ll to it automatically.
