At the moment the internet is flawed, do you think the fediverse is the solution?
I expect good and insightful conversations to be moved here.
Reddit is about to become like twitter and facebook where it’s ad-ridden, toxicity cesspool.
People will leave to keep having the actual forum experience and will eventually move here as it looks like a very good alternative.
The various people who work on the fediverse are all doing it for fundamentally different goals, solving different problems, and building different things for different people. It just so happens that, more often than not, a lot of our stuff works together now thanks to the hard efforts put forward by people who cared about interoperability.
I personally believe that the fediverse will kill traditional social media platforms. Because if you can just communicate around a walled garden, what’s the point or value in staying in one?
I think we still have a long way to go in terms of usability and design. Those things, along with marketing, remain pretty steep barriers to adoption by people who are unfamiliar with it. There are also a lot of capital-H Hard problems that need to be sorted out down the road, like better filtering and moderation tools, and more robust controls for privacy. I have a feeling we’ll get there, but only through hard work and collaboration.
I guess a different way of understanding things is that, the fediverse might not kill the competition outright, but it has the potential to outlast them as something better. And hopefully someday, it’ll be as ubiquitous and ordinary as email.
Because if you can just communicate around a walled garden, what’s the point or value in staying in one?
Because people are happy with that garden and don’t think about others. Please remember that your average internet user doesn’t really know what an API is, or understand about open standards, they just want to find some content that matches their interests, upvote and share said content with their friends who are also inside that garden.
This average user isn’t a bad person, stupid or naiive, they just have other things going on in their lives and the internet is a small part of it. They use it, take what they want from it and move on, and there are so many more of those people than you.
People who switch from iOS to Android report losing friends who were on iMessage and are unwilling to move to something platform agnostic such as Signal or WhatsApp. I wouldn’t underestimate the walled garden effect.
No. And that’s fine. I don’t expect underground music to replace top 40. And there’s a place for both.
Very well said
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“Servers? Instances? Is this a place to connect with my friends or a goddamn server room?”
That’s not a property of of federation (see email and websites) it’s just because early adopters are a little wired. In any new social phenomenon, it takes a second wave of adopters (first wave of followers) to bridge the wierdos from the masses.
Cue this classic study in leadership: https://youtu.be/hO8MwBZl-Vc be the first one to follow the wierdos and show the masses it’s cool.
People said that about reddit, I don’t think Lemmy is anywhere near being too complex for the average user. More that social medias generally favor simplicity because simplicity is easy to control, modify, and generally nudge from a developer side trying to guarantee a very specific use case that generates money, rather than just naturally occurring social systems.
Let’s be real, humans have been dealing with social networks far more complex, systems more complex, for almost all of human history. The sheer volume of people, no, but the actual processes of interaction, yes.
You have to remember that the vast majority of people are, for lack of a better word, pretty dumb. You say the word “fediverse” and their eyes cross.
IMHO these are fundamentally different concepts. Popular social media is made popular by pushing curated ‘engaging’ content, rather than organic content, to monetize gullible users. It has become an entertainment venue, giving their audience a steady stream of what they want them to see, even if by force. Popular “Social Media” has rapidly devolved into a real-life MST3K. Users feel betrayed that the sites no longer feel like the social experience/experiment they wanted… but are users really wanting to leave, or just switch to voice outrage?
Alternatively, the fediverse doesn’t appeal to those wanting force fed entertainment, or seeking viral fame amongst family/friends, and outraged users will complain it doesn’t function like so-and-so site, or work ‘their way’. It is more technical and takes more proactive actions to engage with others, which is a positive thing.
Users think they can switch from Coke to Pepsi, but the fediverse is more of a mixed drink with some extra bourbon.
Could it / should it replace popular social media? Probably not, unless more mindsets change over what a social media experience should be… but it can fill a growing gap as this happens (which will in-turn improve features & development).
I would say, if in theory a social media achieved a small community, informative and positive culture which avoided spreading misinformation or cultivating harmful stereotypes of those they disagree with via the mechanisms of that social media, that it should be more standardized and more widely accepted. Largely because that is just more healthy in general. Not that Lemmy will necessarily be that in practice in the long run.
I don’t want it to. I enjoyed reddit the most when it was mainly a techier and generally thoughtful crowd, large enough to always be interesting but not so big as to be a gluttonous mass of nonsense. The ever-so-slightly higher barrier to entry to the Fediverse compared to other platforms (which spooks mainstream users even though it’s really not that hard) gives me hope that the Fediverse will keep its character for a good while.
I agree but also, gates are open wide if you ask me. I’m missing some communities here and it’s going to be a long time before there are enough users to make it a worthy replacement for Reddit.
Should we make it harder to join?
That would be a bad idea. While only a small percentage of users actively create engaging content, the problem is that those active users will lose the incentive to participate if there’s nobody else to engage with, and this will cause them to eventually flock back to the non-Fediverse social media sites.
We should instead streamline Lemmy’s sign-up like how Mastodon did it. The easier it is to sign up and the more users there are (even if many are lurkers), the better.
“do you think the fediverse could replace popular social media”
Already has for me
For me it almost has. While I’ll be part of the protest I still use reddit
Same here. I never used twitter, but joined Mastodon and have enjoyed it. I’ll use lemmy and expect (hope!) that it will get polished and streamlined enough to take over Reddit
Don’t forget matrix and peertube as well!
I know peertube, but what is matrix?
Matrix is federated discord. And it also supports bridges to other networks like signal, WhatsApp etc.
Oh okay, sounds neat. I’ve never really been that into Discord, unfortunately. I’d like to use Peertube more too, but it seems pretty empty rn, and idk anything about making videos!
Yeah, unfortunately, not many content creators put their work there. (AFAIK it’s just Linux people). I have honestly found more use of Matrix as a central hub, that I control, to talk to all other messaging platforms I need to be on. There’s a good collection of bridges that are (hopefully) growing.
For most of the users currently online it’s extremely difficult to understand the concept of federation and how everything works, so I doubt it’ll ever be as prevalent as “the big social media platforms”, but for technically-inclined users, it’ll definitely have at least moderate success.
I believe that’s the point: Coming from Reddit, I don’t understand what Mastodon (yes, I thought it is something similar!), Fediverse, Lemmy.ml and feddit are, have in common or where the differences are.
And furthermore: Why should I care?
I think it will be hard to convince a significant number of people to come here and STAY.
I hope I’m wrong. I just created my first community :-)
I think the fediverse should replace popular socmedia, but it will never be able to compete financially.
We’ve already got Bluesky, which is the same thing but controlled (and sponsored) by the usual suspects, poised to snap up any users that bail from twitter. And popular opinion favours Bluesky thanks to the positive coverage it gets compared to fediverse projects.
The fediverse in the form it’s in now will never replace twitter while the free market controls the distribution of users. They’ll always go to the places controlled by big money.
I kind of agree… And also kind of disagree.
I think people will be attracted to places like blue sky because they are more similar to what they are used to and more user friendly. When people were looking to leave Twitter, I remember Mastodon being talked about. When I first looked into it, it was super confusing. I’m literally a software developer, and I was having trouble figuring out what was even going on here.
I understand that different platforms will have different features, and don’t expect lemmy to be exactly like reddit or mastodon to be exactly like Twitter. But to get casual users to come to either, they need to be easy to join, easy to use, and easy to understand. I think that starting off by explaining to users what the fediverse is is too confusing.
Frankly, I think the biggest thing right now, by far, is that there needs to be a centralized, or pseudo-centralized, login system. That is the biggest hurdle for all new users, and explaining how to make an account basically requires explaining how the fediverse works-which for most people is just too much information at once. They’ll see that, think “this is too confusing,” and leave.
Ease of use and adding more features will come with time, more users, and an influx of money from those users to support development. But we need to attract users first, and to do so we need to make the process of joining really clear, concise, and easy. And we need to remove the risk that if your instance gets deleted, so does your account.
It’s more closely related to the initial intentions of the internet than most other social platforms. Ideally it could get things going back in the right direction again iif nothing else!
Fediverse will go through what Linux went through. Be seen by businesses as an existential threat. Then face FUD and EEE campaign.
One day, likely earlier than Linux witnessed the rise of RedHat, Google, Facebook as prominent businesses that became poster children for Linux, new or existing businesses could be built around and/or on fediverse. They may as well come together to form an ActivityPub foundation similar to the Linux Foundation for all we know.
Email went through similar trajectory too. SMTP, IMAP, pop are are open protocols. Yet we have a sort of oligopoly on email.
Similar to how Windows did not die away because Linux came along, existing social networks may remain in existence. The availability of fediverse as an alternative would keep them busy
It depends on what you mean by “replace”.
The Fediverse may cause centralized social-media networks to join the Fediverse.
There are some hints of that happening now.
Facebook / Meta has created a new social-media network that is part of the Fediverse.
Tumblr and Flickr are said to be joining the Fediverse.
So, some “popular social media” may become one with the Fediverse.
Something along these lines seems more realistic to me. There will always be a place for easy, safe walled garden experiences with a low barrier to entry. In the fediverse, that could be a very large, curated instance where a broad group could find what they want without having to figure out how to subscribe to federated communities. Similar to how so many people were introduced to the internet via Prodigy, Compuserve, AOL, etc.
Tumblr and Flickr are said to be joining the Fediverse.
yay! its AOL meets the internet v2.0
/s
No. Fediverse is great by design, but is too complicated at the moment (maybe it’s just how platforms are set up at the moment).
The design is not too intuitive in looking at other posts from different instances/servers.
For example going to this post:
- Clicking
!freemediaheckyeah@lemmy.fmhy.ml
in the sidebar directs me to
lemmy.fmhy.ml/c/freemediaheckyeah
(different instance) - Clicking
FREEMEDIAHECKYEAH@lemmy.fmhy.ml
at the top of the post directs me to
lemmy.ml/c/freemediaheckyeah@lemmy.fmhy.ml
(same instance)
- Clicking
Long term, the Fediverse is the way forward, but social media has staying power even if it dimishes from what it was. It will ages before the Fediverse replaces centralized social media, but I think it will slowly happen.
