What the title says. I think there is still a long way for that to happen but i’ve been hopeful. What do you think?
Being on the internet used to be not cool.
Email and www. … .com was as foreign to the mainstream as the Fediverse is to the mainstream today.
The nerds build cool shit, the corporations chase the hot new thing to milk every last dollar out of the mainstream who want the cool new toys, and the mainstream inevitably ruins the cool new toy because they don’t understand how or why it was made in the first place.
This is the way of human nature. It has played out on the internet since the start (and probably well before that) and it will probably play out again on the fefiverse (just look at Meta).
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I like how in your point of view it appears (please correct me if I’m putting words in your mouth or misrepresenting your position) that the platform getting better would be nice but it’s actually not that relevant compared to the fact that other platforms are getting worse and will likely continue to do so as they prioritize shareholders over users.
It’s like a reverse marathon where you win by not running backwards as fast as everyone else. A leisurely stroll forwards is like moving at super speed.
What makes you so confident users won’t by and large accept the charges and boot from large social media platforms? Debatably piracy and a home media server have a lot of the same pros as Lemmy and the Fediverse. For the most part, however, people tend to cough up the 10-25 dollars for a streaming service. It’s not because of any practical reasons, at least directly. The true decider is cultural and societal attitudes towards the platforms providing a service. People practically don’t pirate because of the learning curve, but realistically don’t pirate because of their preconceived notions surrounding the practice. Maybe they think it’s wrong. Maybe they think it’s too hard. Maybe it just feels like too much work to set up. Maybe the communities feel too insular. Whatever the reason, it’s fundamentally because of some idea or feeling they have surrounding the medium. Who’s to say these big tech companies won’t successfully execute their goal, and push a larger cultural shift to make the idea of subscription social media more appealing to the average user than the idea of a clunky service using ActivityPub. Maybe the narrative of these spaces being too techbro-y gets pushed, and they garner a similar reputation in the public eye that piracy communities have. It could be seen just like streaming services and piracy. The public could be convinced of the value of familiarity and convenience. Has great work been done to fight against this corpo push lately? Absolutely. But don’t look at these “blatant missteps” that places like reddit and twitter have experienced as of late as omens of an imminent downfall of centralized, capitalist social media. Rather, look at it as a warning sign. A warning sign that heralds the first in a long, deliberate line of many who will follow in those footsteps, gradually pushing the Overton Window surrounding these prices towards their goal. Today Reddit and Twitter are the bad guys so that tomorrow Meta and others can make the same moves, with the added benefit of “it’s just not our choice, we must make these changes to remain viable in the current market.” In the eyes of many, not all, but the majority; this is an absolution. They will be able to succeed. They know this, that’s why they’re doing it and it’s happening now. The Fediverse and a free net will not survive unless the battle can be won in the public consciousness. We must overcome the significant hurdles between federated software design and mass adoption. We must take a direct, meaningful, and effective course of action to directly fight against this, it will not passively be won.
EDIT: Typo; missing word “Rather, look at it [as] a warning sign.”
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It’s possible. I think the biggest obstacle is that the corporations feeding on people’s data are not going to just stand by while it happens.
Another big obstacle is the general UX of these platforms. Major companies have teams of user experience analysis and researchers that, while not always “winning” as compared to product or business driven decisions, absolutely have a (generally positive) impact on the product. Onboarding, retention, etc.
The fediverse has all the standard frictions of most OSS, like talking about itself, it’s technology, etc when the fact is 99% of users dgaf.
I might go so far as to argue the perceived complexity is a bigger barrier than the risk of sabotage from other businesses. I am optimistic the growing list of third party apps will help solve some of these issues, as long as they take things like the sign up process and server selection into their scope.
I don’t think UX will be that big of a problem, in the past the unofficial reddit apps were all better than the official one. Major companies design by committee and the UX is meant too maximize profit and engagement statistics for advertising, rather than be “good”. A lot of open source UIs are better than their paid counterparts. I think PopOS is far nicer than windows 11.
Nah, most open source UIs are really pretty bad. Most devs are horrendous designers.
Your comment about profitability is true when it comes to social media companies specifically but definitely not true for the industry as a whole. UX is a huge selling point for enterprise software and the goal there isn’t to drive clicks or views, because that’s not how those companies make money.
UX won’t be a problem as long as the maintainers are open to feedback and not stubborn about their current approach. And even if they are, an alternate front end could be introduced separate from the default one.
That and the servers are under such stress that it makes for a stuttery beginning for any new usrrs. Even just trying to upvote you and comment was a process. First this page wouldn’t load properly, then then the upvote didn’t show, then the screen jumped around when I tried to reply.
This site and any other will only replace Reddit etc if it’s got people. It only gets people if new users can use the platform. We’re not quite there yet. The people here now are willing to put up with growing pains but if it doesn’t improve soon people will move on
The problem is that everyone has consolidated on one gargantuan server. The whole point of the fediverse is to spread out so no one server is carrying the entire load. I’m currently using lemm.ee and have experienced none of the issues being discussed here.
But yes, I agree that it could be a potential turn off for newcomers.
At the time of this writing, I have accounts on two servers. One on the big server, and one on a tiny server.
Obviously, the gargantuan server’s biggest issue is performance. That will probably improve with time, but with its size comes some noticeable benefits, which I will touch on shortly.
The tiny server, which I actually joined first, is blazing fast, but I’ve run into constant issues trying to find communities and posts that the bigger server can find no problem. Initiating a federation request is not intuitive at all, and your average user is going to wonder why the hell so much stuff isn’t showing up when they click All on a smaller server.
I tried manually copying my subscription list from the gargantuan server to the tiny one. It was quite a chore, even though it got better in 0.18. Most of the communities returned a “not found” error. Having to retry a search several times or manually input the URL and reload the page several times until the server can find the community on the remote server is not something the average user is going to want to deal with, so they’ll end up on the huge servers that already know about the communities on the other large servers, if they don’t give up.
Hopefully this gets better, but that’s my best guess as to why everybody ended up on the gargantuan servers.
Spreading out would help the performance of the servers but would still expose inefficiencies in the backend systems that they use to talk to each other. The page might load, but the content will be all kinds of fucked.
It’s a huge turn off. And federation itself adds to the problem when the servers don’t match up properly.
I’m testing out Mlem on iOS and so far it is a much cleaner experience than even the desktop version of Lemmy’s webapp. Lots of nice QoL features.
Yeah, the apps have been spotty for me, but at least the layout is cleaner.
Not a good sign when you need an app to properly use your website though.
The mobile site for Lemmy is at least usable, without a huge banner telling you to download the app. That’s more than I can say for Reddit.
We’ve been using reddit for years…
And? I don’t remember Reddit being difficult to use when I signed up a decade ago
I imagine reddit felt little different than this at launch in 2005. New services are never going to be perfect from the start and it’s obvious there is a community of devoted devs working on this project.
Why are you even here?
Create an account off of lemmy.world and see if you have the same issues. A smaller instance can handle things easier. It have 2 but use the one that was most up-to-date and responsive.
See that’s part of the problem. You shouldnt need to have to create a bunch of accounts just to use a site. People aren’t going to stick around to find time their social media. They want it to just work.
We’re still very early on. It’s not going to be a digg to Reddit style thing. But Reddit will keep making bad decisions and people will trickle over here over time and with each influx, things will have improved. I’ve been here a couple weeks and it seems like every day it gets better.
Also, the technical barriers aren’t as scary to people make it out to be. Yeah we won’t get all the boomers, which is very sad. But I’ve got some very tech illiterate friends who have started using memmy with no problems.
And do we even want to get as big as Reddit? Reddit was great 15 years ago. Then teenagers got smart phones and the olds spread out past Facebook and it’s been on decline ever since. I’d be perfectly happy if it got to like 20% the size of Reddit. Maybe not even that big.
Yeah we won’t get all the boomers, which is very sad.
I hope boomer is a state of mind, because otherwise you might be disappointed to learn how old some of us are.
I fundamentally disagree with the idea we will see a continuous trickle of users here as reddit makes more bad decisions. It will be waves, not a constant trickle. And each decision after the API changes will be incrementally smaller, driving fewer users away.
Right now we will also have a retention problem. People came here as an alternative to reddit, a d if the site is too slow, too hard to use because it is slow, then they won’t stay. Theyll fall back into old habits and go back to reddit, because it’s easier and familiar.
Edit: case and point: I’m using Jerboa. I just posted this comment, but when I did it took about 30 seconds, then I got a network error, and it didn’t seem to post but it had, in fact, posted. This is pretty normal on this app right now. I understand stuff like this will get ironed out, but for new users who aren’t fully committed it’s a BIG turnoff.
I don’t disagree that it’s a weakness. But that just is how it is for now. I’d guess that it will settle down to a few dozen “strong” instances that are all federated together, with hundreds more smaller instances available, but right now there are like 5 super-packed instances (lemmy.world, sh.itjust.works, kbin.social, etc) which are getting killed with a double-whammy: all the users and all the communities are on them.
Decentralized nature of Lemmy is also going to be confusing for the average Joe. When they to go to web site of Lemmy and see a list of instances to choose from, with communities spread all over them they are just going to nope out.
yeah, lemmy’s current web app is very much in the “made for nerds by nerds” category as far as i see. lots of cool tools to express yourself and not many useless limitations, but on the other hand it’s kinda confusing if you’re not that techy. it’s absolutely learnable but it would do very poorly on a hallway usability test.
and it’s understandable why that is so, lemmy itself is being developed by two people who have their hands full putting out a thousand other fires, as well as sorting through the community’s contributions. but there’s still a lot that will have to improve in the future – although I’m completely sure that when it does, it will be way better than what a corporate alternative would be like. those tend to do well with attracting new users but they also tend to be out of touch and suffer from stupid one-off decisions by middle managers trying to get promoted.
Even a healthy competitor, niche, or mainstream would be so nice. Lemmy already hits with some solid weight imo.
And do what? Make a better product? The beauty of Capitalism is that consumers really are the final say on whether your product succeeds. You can make an app with as many addictive hooks as possible, but that doesn’t make those users permanent. And any sabbotage by Reddit will only dig in our heels at this point.
I hear what you’re saying, but Lemmy was created to oppose the capitalist exploitation cycle. With Lemmy, we aren’t consumers or a product. Lemmy is actually firmly rooted in anti-capitalism and arose because capitalism destroys choice.
Capitalism isn’t necessary for innovation. It is just the private ownership of things. Spez didn’t make Reddit great, for example. Other people did. Spez is just a do-nothing owner who is now the mouth piece for bigger do-nothing owners looking to wring out maximum profit from unpaid laborers.
I’d argue that capitalism stifles innovation, which is why everyone agrees that you need competition. A market economy. And broad anti-trust regulations, since capitalism is inherently authoritarian since it is a top-down hierarchical structure. A free-ish market is what allowed us to innovate so quickly.
But Lemmy is outside of that since it isn’t driven by profit.
People use “capitalism” in different ways. The person you responded to probably meant it as “free marked system”, which Lemmy absolutely fits into. Often “capitalism” is used to mean “profit seeking system”, which Lemmy doesn’t fit into.
Both of these uses are common.
If the fediverse starts gaining traction, you can bet the mega-corps will use every dirty trick they have to co-opt it or, if that fails, undermine it.
Threads is already expected to be that answer. Mindless instagram folks won’t have a clue.
Threads is only slealing twitter’s user space, which i can totally get behind. Fuck elon musk. Even if it benefits the lizardman.
Yeah I mean I HATE Facebook…. But I hate what musk did to Twitter and crypto more…
I sure as hell hope not.
To me, that’s like looking around a great little cafe with terrific food and saying, “Do you think this could ever become McDonalds?”
Why would I want that?
Yea that’s a good point. I want it to be popular enough to have a good time and business to thrive but I don’t need it to have all the users from previous places. A smaller, more involved community is good for me
Yes please. First thing I had to do on new Reddit accounts was always unsubscribe from the giant, bot-infested communities.
What is crazy is that I feel like Lemmy is already approaching that fun size, you know? There’s a steady flow of content and comments. But it’s not full of shit yet.
Personally I would love to see it grow by enough that some of my favorite types of communities (specially state-specific and sports team specific) can thrive. But I am really not interested in Lemmy becoming big enough to rival centralized alternative platforms like reddit. Being that large brings far too much baggage along for the ride.
I definitely feel that it is almost there. Most enthusiat forums are filled with millions of users, but a couple thousand max. Dedicated users and some casual users would be best for this place to get to where it needs to be
Because of quarterly profits. We have to hit those KPIs!
But, yeah. Honestly, I’m fucking done with mass appeal websites. You know what else is mass appeal? Reality television and pop music. Let the idiots have TikTok, Instagram and Twitter, that should be enough for them.
Yes, I learned not to advertise to anyone about a great thing. Idiots would flood and troll leading to decline. But you’d still want some diversity of opinions and not create an echo chamber.
Lemmy has a long way to go in terms of user experience before it can effectively compete with Reddit. The majority of new accounts in the last weeks have been spite users. That is, they’re here not because they love Lemmy - but because they hate Reddit.
That’s not a bad thing, per say. It doesn’t matter how people get here. It’s more important that they have a good reason to stay.
And the average user doesn’t care if something is federated or centralized. They just want a product that works and is simple to grasp. In my opinion, app developers are going to be the gamechanger Lemmy needs Stuff like Memmy (on the iOS app store today!), Mlem, Liftoff, Thunder are pretty much better than the official Reddit app. And that’s how most people consume content these days. When there’s no enshitification ads or microtransactions - there’s clearly going to be a winning experience.
It’ll take time, but as more Federation communities build - the less Reddit is necessary. As well, it usually takes a long time before people start catching on that the tools they once loved have turned to into bots and spam.
Mastodon is in it’s 7th year, and has like 8 million active users. Twitter had 200 million users by it’s 7th year. On one hand, Mastodon is the biggest Federation app. On the other, Twitter was 25x as large. Of course, Twitter is no longer the relevant “town hall” it once was - and is hemorrhaging users and respect. So who knows. It only takes a few celebrity endorsements to get countless folks switching. Who knows
As long as you all stay here, I’m happy.
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fuck dude I hope not. The best part of Lemmy to me is the fact that it’s not as big as the others, and what Lemmy gives me is that same feeling of freedom websites in the 2000s and early 2010s felt like they had.
This is true. There’s so little threads, you can follow something that was posted a day or two ago and chime in just like the discussion boards of old.
My biggest fear is that it develops a “hive-mind”.
Before the migration, lemmy.ml was the biggest instance, and is explicitly communist.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for communism, but I don’t want to be part of a circle-jerk and read about it every day.
Agreed. Either way - I’m just happy to see they content flourishing here. Just regular-ass shit.
I hope it does, but before that we need a more stable server, horizontal scalable, and better apps, they are being worked on
I think anyone who was around, and online, before reddit/twitter/Facebook became the consolidated social media behemoths that they are, are willing to learn something new. The before-times were replete with smaller communities where your internet handle was the only real source of continuity (and even then, only if you wanted it to be).
But those whose ONLY experience of online discourse is the big 3? It’s a lot to adjust to. I don’t know if this is what will hit critical mass, but then, maybe that’s setting the wrong goal to begin with. Can the communities connected here be self-sustaining for a time, regardless? Definitely.
Absolutely not in their current formats.
Sign up needs to be simplified enough that your gran could do it and we need way more professional UIs. After those two things, it could happen.
Agreed. Not sure if there is a fair and easy way for the whole “instance” user distribution but the current set up isn’t straight forward. Not to say it was difficult but my experience with it was an immediate thought of this barrier of entry is too steep. It’s unlike what most anyone has likely ever encountered. (at least knowingly.)
Like mapping a network drive. Is it an actually difficult task? No. Can any significant portion of the general population identify what I just stated? Probably no. Sure a small percent may go on to Google that and figure it out. But in general I find it bad practice to ask that of them.
Would it be reasonable if some algorithm handled that aspect and just default assigned people based on location, maybe a couple quick questions of their interests, and the hosts willing capacity increase rate? Plus some other factors I didn’t think of. In some text could also say you can choose from a list of instances if you so choose or just leave it as is.
It should automatically assign by default, but have an “advanced sign-up options” button that you can use if wanted.
Yes. Sign up needs to be like users are accustomed to. but i think the ui is fine.
Only if we fix the servers and reduce the bugs.
I think there’s good chance for Lemmy and mastodon to become mainstream but I don’t they can replace their centralized counterparts. Mainly because I think that the social media in its current form is changing.
While platforms like Reddit, Twitter, Facebook and Tiktok are likely not going anywhere for a while, each time these platforms break the trust of their users the more cracks start to form to the service that leak out users. Some of these users will look for something new, some of these users will look for alternate services, some of these users will create their own services.
Many of these platforms rely on the attention economy, so all it really takes to make these platforms struggle is to divide that attention more and more to competitive platforms and services. This fragmentation has been happening for years now with people dividing their attention between multiple services like reddit, twitter, discord, facebook, tiktok, snapchat and whatnot. Now creating similar service for smaller audience is easier than ever and with A.I tools it’ll probably get even more easier.
Its a bit similar to video games and live services, with competition for players attention getting more fierce by the day.
What I keep wondering about is what if Reddit changes their app to be like Apollo or RiF? Will they get desperate and self aware enough to give people what they want? Is this and other apps doing copy-cat reddit doing this because we want to force change? I wonder which way the future will take this race?
I don’t really think that Lemmy or Mastodon will really replace their counterparts. At least not for now. As many have already said, the federation system is too complex for many non-technical people. It would take something like a de facto standard app, that abstracts everything federation related away and make it feel like another centralised solution.
Another point for me is the searchability of federated systems. Say you are searching for a technical problem right now, google will surely bring you to a related subreddit in just seconds. I have yet to see a Lemmy related search result.
I don’t think you need to have the largest following to have great value, even lemmy as it is right now feels great. I’ll actually want to dive into comment sections compared to the endless scrolling on reddit.
As long as there’s enough people using a platform for a variety of ideas and experience in topics, I think that’s good enough for me.
Personally, I don’t even want Lemmy/kbin to become Reddit 2.0.
Reddit from 10 years ago is the goal for me. Reddit has become far, far too bloated for its own good, and that line was crossed a long time ago IMO. Let’s just enjoy what we have. Let all the normies stay on Reddit, the people I wanna vibe with are here already.
The problem is that nitch communities won’t get populated unless a lot of people join. The league of legends sub is the largest video game sub on Reddit, and here it’s barely active at all.
I want it to be Reddit 2.0 in the sense that I can find active communities for specific or niche interests. Before July 1, the smallest subs that I participated in to have similar communities here were ones that had ~400k subscribers on Reddit.
The value of Reddit was never in the 1M+ communities, any content there was usually present elsewhere, and the discussions rapidly became dumpster fires. It was in the smaller dedicated subs for topics that might not have another human-centric discussion forum.
As a normie, I’d still like to vibe with you.
I agree. A vast majority of the userbase don’t mind the countless ads on Reddit or Twitter, on even FB. I think people are leaving FB because it’s not cool anymore, not because the UE has gotten worse.
I’m just glad that there now are smaller, more tailored for my preferences alternatives like Lemmy
I think you meant
UXasUser eXperience.
Yes I think about Hacker News, which isn’t technically sophisticated nor does it have a massive userbase (a little less than 1 million registered accounts).
It manages to have a steady stream of content and an active commenting base
A big part of it is probably having full time paid moderators to manage their community well.
Reddit, in my opinion, has become mainstream due to its ability to be searched via engines such as Google. I think Lemmy would need to have that same level of discoverability if the platform should take off. I’m not sure if doing this risks Google or others threatening the platform via “embrace, extend, and extinguish”, but perhaps Lemmy needs to be accompanied by a decentralized search engine itself that can browse the entire Fediverse. I’m new to the fediverse so I’m not sure if such a software exists, but clearly I think discoverability is paramount for giving new users a reason to see Lemmy and maybe stick around
When I first started using it I did not think so. In the week or so since I’ve sort of wrapped my head around some of it, and now I think it’s certainly possible.
The biggest hangup in my opinion is the very concept. As a normie I get to the login screen and I see that it’s asking for an instance along with a username and password. That’s scary and you’re curious what that even is, so you Google it. And that doesn’t help at all. You’re fed a very technical description that feels like a brick wall of information. It’s intimidating.
Once you are set up on a large instance and logged into a good app, subscribed to some of your niches… Well in my experience at all clicked together pretty quickly. The only thing that’s missing from the Lemmy experience is traffic. I know there are already some pretty big communities and people are starting to say it’s too big or something, but there’s many interests of mine that are booming on Reddit that have a handful or less posts here. Naturally things take time, and I am genuinely starting to believe we’re on the way there with this platform (network of platforms?)
