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
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.
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
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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.”
“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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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?
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I don’t want to have any kind of conversation with you just here to speak my mind and make you reas it
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I’m the type to beat my head against a wall until the wall breaks. Then through that hole, I lead my friends. Fewer and fewer of my friends follow me through such holes. Last time I did such, I brought all my friends to discord (and now I regret it). It is hard as fuck to convince normies to adopt a new platform. If they’re not already invested, it will take a serious investment for them to give half a shit. I was able to get some people on discord by promising them that I was running a dnd campaign (I was at the time, but it fell apart shortly therefafter), and those people haven’t been on discord since.
How do I convince them that lemmy is the future? I don’t think I can. Fundamentally, lemmy is objectively better than reddit (not for features, but because lemmy won’t ban you for mentioning green mario and other similar administrative bullshits). I wasn’t able to convince them to use reddit back when reddit was good!
I lately have a saying:
“If it’s not FOSS, it’s not worth your time”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
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
Well said indeed
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
I jumped over here a couple weeks ago at the request of another redditor and it’s like a breath of fresh air.
Literally a breath fresh of air is what I can relate to. I also realized how it’s way way smaller in the size of communities and I appreciate it. My other favorite is no advertisement. I am as well trying to introduce a couple of my friends to move over the Lemmy. It is a little bit of a curve to learn, but it’s not as hard.
Seems like a lot of people will be coming from reddit.
Hopefully some of the niche communities get a little more traffic over here. Most of the subs I visited over there weren’t very toxic and i actually referred to reddit over google for info on a variety of subjects. It’s just hard to support the platform at this point it really went downhill since 14 ~16
I would argue it is closer to 60 years.
Refugee here. Think I’d agree. A subconscious bias / misunderstanding we bought into
Welcome to Lemmy, here are a few pointers to help you settle in
I grew up in the age of Internet forums, in the ancient days of the late '90s-early-00’s before the (Eternal September) Smartphone dumped every human being onto the landscape.
Having small communities is so much better. I often hear people complain that Lemmy isn’t big because there are not communities with 3 million people like there are some subreddits. Much of the reason that Reddit is shit is because of how big it is.
On the old Internet, you could know the people who were part of the community. I have old friends, that I’ve known for 20+ years, that I met playing MUDs on BBSs. Now, I couldn’t tell you the name of a single person that I’ve ever interacted with on social media in the past year.
Digg and Reddit came on the scene and pulled a huge crowd because we didn’t have The Algorithm to recommend content and these link aggregation sites were the first time people got a taste of that kind of ‘See all of the newest things from every corner of the Internet in a single place, curated by a process that produces good quality results’ that we now just expect from recommendation algorithms.
The old communities were essentially starved of population. Nobody wants to take the social effort required to become part of a community when they can just scroll Reddit mindlessly.
There’s very few people that even had a chance to experience the magic of spontaneous communities full of people working together.
If you still want a taste, check out the Something Awful forums.
The barrier to entry is higher: you have to learn the rules (read the rules), the social norms and there is a $10 one-time fee (so getting banned has some sting to it, read the rules).
In exchange you get an actual community of people. Many of the people posting there (or, in the various Discords now because that’s a thing) have been on SA since they were edgy teenagers and are now professionals with careers. That isn’t to say that there are not trolls and assholes, those exist in any community, but there’s a much higher ratio of good to bad posters.
One of the interesting decisions that they do is that rulebreaking posts are rarely ever deleted. If a person is probated (temp ban) or banned, their comment stays up with a “(User was Probated/Banned for this post)” edited into the post so you can see, and hopefully learn, from the bad behavior. In addition, there’s a ‘Wall of Shame’ section where you can see everyone who’s been actioned against, who the moderator was and the moderation reason.
I’ve always hated the fact that comments on Reddit just disappear. You can never see what a mod removed and there is no reason why it is removed. This allows all kinds of bad and manipulative behaviors to be done by people with moderation access.
I’m also from that era of the Internet and you’re so right about smaller communities being better. One great example was Wil Wheaton’s phpBB forum. Probably a hundred active users including Wil and we all got along and more or less policed ourselves.
(Plus I helped him out with some car trouble. Let me repeat that: I helped Wesley Crusher with an engineering problem. One of my proudest moments.)
One of the interesting decisions that they do is that rulebreaking posts are rarely ever deleted. If a person is probated (temp ban) or banned, their comment stays up with a “(User was Probated/Banned for this post)” edited into the post so you can see, and hopefully learn, from the bad behavior. In addition, there’s a ‘Wall of Shame’ section where you can see everyone who’s been actioned against, who the moderator was and the moderation reason.
That’s a really great feature.
I am a hostage that has been set free from a prison camp. Thank you Fedi.
Where moving from one service to another doesn’t mean losing everything you’ve built and everything you’ve ever said.
I generally agree with this post, but this isn’t true. It would require portable identities.
“Portable identities” is a major feature of Mastodon and ActivityPub platforms in general. It’ll be on Lemmy one day too.
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)
The infrastructure is there, and most of the features are there, but the content comes from content creators and they’re not here yet.
For example, we have grimdank, but we don’t have vezimira and emmawatnot. We have users who repost their content, but they’re not posting here directly.
You can be a content creator. It’s not that difficult to post a meme. Content creators aren’t another species.
Agreed. We should take the extra time to upvote, comment, and share on this app. Cheers mate!
That’s the spirit. Reddit and all other social media died for me during the exodus 1 1/2 years ago. Since then i go to lemmy and I’m fine. Tbh I’m not really sure if more user will not also pull commercial interests into the fediverse and if that is something I’m looking forward to, but for now, everything seems like reddit around 2010, not too big but big enough to not being out of content after scrolling for 10 mins.
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.
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.
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 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.
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 :)
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?
Listen, I am a Lemmy supporter at the highest level. I believe that the Fediverse model for social media is the next step in evolution for the industry. But Lemmy itself, in terms of the front end, is a near exact copy of Reddit. And was created, at least in part, with the idea that from the beginning, it couldn’t be heavily monetized and become a profit-driven and publicly traded company. That it wouldn’t sacrifice the quality of the product and lead to the enshittification of the service like so many other digital offerings.
But currently, if you were to compare Reddit and Lemmy. Reddit’s digital content offerings are significantly better than Lemmy’s. Which makes sense. Reddit has been around for much longer than Lemmy and is much more known by the general public. It has a much larger user base as a result. Which for a user generated content platform is everything when it comes to the pool of individuals that can generate and submit interesting content.
Don’t let the grabbing hands grab all they can.
