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.
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
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
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.
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.
Neither is Kbin, which doesn’t even have mobile apps
not everything needs a mobile app, sheesh. both kbin and Lemmy have great mobile websites.
They must be used to all the major social medias having absolutely butchered their mobile sites
The fediverse is ready, if you build it they will come!
I think there needs to be a sensible way to crowdfund the server costs, but I can’t see any other reason why it shouldn’t succeed
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 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.
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)
People are fucking stupid bro. They just need that algorithm to tell them they dont even want to search for communities explore and learn.
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
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.
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 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.
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…
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.
“Mastodon isn’t ready,” I read every day, posted on Mastodon.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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 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.
I don’t understand why some people get so confused either. It’s just like choosing an e-mail provider.
Create the account, try it out, if you don’t like it, delete it. If you do like it, keep it. How hard can this be? Then again, it apparently is.
The client apps might help out by including an account creation wizard.
I sold computers at best buy for a few years around a decade ago, and this particular experience burned itself into my brain:
Me: introduce myself, ask what he was looking for Guy in his 30s: wants to look at chromebooks Me: tries finding out what he’s using it for to make sure it’ll be enough Guy: web browsing mostly, asks me if he can get his email on it Me: yeah no problem, what email client do you use now Guy: Gmail
It was hard to not laugh, but I am reminded of this when I think of the average person’s technical ability.
Why would you laugh? You asked a question and he answered.
I think mostly because it was unexpected for his age, usually questions like that came from much older people and it was surprising to me that someone barely older than me didn’t understand web based email. He seemed like a smart competent dude, so it was just not an answer my brain was ready for. Laughing might not be the best gauge for anything for me, laughing is also my fear response.
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.
Mastodon can be heavy on censorship by banning IP addresses rather than individual accounts. Not banning an account, but IP. So when one instance bans an IP, that means that IP is blocked from all users on that instance.
Twitter has never banned IP addresses, only accounts. Twitter does not keep a list of naughty words that result in immediate ban after posting, and suspended users can still reaxh Twitter to discuss the issue.
It seems that federated platforms are more ban happy than the corporate platforms. If Lemmy and Mastodon really want to challenge the bigger companies, protect offensive posts, protect mockery and insults, people challenging or correct someone’s statement, and distinguish them from actual attacks and degrading words.
If Lemmy and Mastodon really want to challenge the bigger companies, protect offensive posts, protect mockery and insults,
This sounds awful and was exactly the kind of thing that made me want to leave Reddit.
Exactly.
Why the fuck would "protect offensive posts, protect mockery and insults " ever be the kind of ethos anyone would ever want? Yeah, I would totally love being called a fa**ot 37 times a day, and totally want to be sure anyone can do that.
Fuck that shit.
The only reason anyone wants to protect offensive content is that they want to be able to post offensive co tent themselves without consequence. They might as well admit that they just want to say slurs and be done with the pretense.
And just to head things off: no, I am 100% NOT a free speech absolutist, and I think such a mentality is extremely harmful. It destroys communities and it destroys people.
Go outside
Touch grass
