The Fediverse Isn’t the Future. It’s the Present We’ve Been Denied.
The Fediverse Isn’t the Future. It’s the Present We’ve Been Denied.
For years, the internet has been shrinking. Not in size, not in data, but in ownership. A vast, decentralized network of personal blogs, forums, and independent communities has been corralled into a handful of paved prison yards controlled by a few massive corporations. Every post, every “friend,” e...
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.
This reads like an angry old man complaining how the internet was better back in my day. It may have been better, but it didn't have every human being plus armies of bots. It was not user friendly. It was hard. So hard most people didn't bother with much more than email. Neither is the fediverse easy. Facebook, xitter, reddit, Instagram etc... they are as easy as passively watching television or listening to radio. They require no thought, or even much interaction. There are so many trackers across the web that they already know you and what bullshit you'll eat. That's both their greatest secret to success and their greatest danger to society.
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.
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).
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
I hated forums. I was part of one which got take over by right wing mods since the owner was pro religion+nationalism. All the good people left and it is dead now. I love reddit because it is not personal, I don't know anyone unlike in a forum with 50 active users, you become a regular and before you know it, people make it their personal agenda to attack you because you are a libtard as they used to call me.
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.
Obligatory !fedibridge@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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.
Don't let the grabbing hands grab all they can.