Why Decentralized Social Media Matters
Why Decentralized Social Media Matters
Leaving a social media platform often forces content creators to start over from scratch on a new site. But what if that didn't have to be?
I will never go back. Lemmy and Mastodon are just amazing.
Same brother. Still using Reddit from time to time though but wouldn't touch Xitter with even a pair of pliers.
It's true that Lemmy doesn't have the same magnitude of content as Reddit but I'm trying to cut down on the doom scrolling so it's a good thing for me personally.
^Because of your username :p^
They really are, wished they had more diverse communities like reddit.
That'll come over time. Reddit didn't start with all those diverse groups either. It was mostly tech based stuff with some news sprinkled in initially.
I'm not used to shitposting being called "content creation" but whatever.
I just had my morning coffee and I need to head to the bathroom to create some content
“Content creation” IS shitposting. Interacting on social media, on the other hand, is actual posting.
Leaving a social media platform often forces content creators to start over from scratch on a new site.
Don't Lemmy and Mastodon also have this problem to some extent? Like, all the comms on lemm.ee will have to start over on new instances, no? Is it possible to migrate all subscribers, comments, and posts? Or just partial migrations?
As Lemmy is federated but not fully decentralised, continuation of communities hosted on a dead instance is not currently possible. (Compare this to Matrix, where a room can carry on even if its original homeserver dies, so long as at least one other homeserver participates in it.)
So that is indeed still a problem here, although not as severe, because I think the posts in those communities will still be available on instances that participated in them. Such communities would be forever frozen, though; carrying on from where they left off would require migrating to (or creating) communities on still-running instances.
Lemmy does allow you to export your own data and import it into another instance. That includes settings, subscriptions, and links to saved posts/comments. So I guess maybe you could save your own posts, export your data, and import it elsewhere to keep links to what you wrote on the dying instance. I have not tested this to be sure.
They don’t have nearly as much of a problem as non-federated social media. The short answer is that it depends on how instances have things set up and how users decide to migrate- but still, compare that to non-federated social media where you’re just given the boot when things shut down
I think it'd be great as well for giving better control towards what the user can block. Like servers or regions.
Respectfully I don't care for German or Indian meme culture. It's just noise I have to scroll by.
You can already block instances in your profile. Just block feddit.org , never hear from me again, but also you won't see much german content. And you can deselect languages in your profile, too.
Is there any Mastodon server that actually has an experience closer to Twitter? For example, having search enabled
No. Unfortunately, ActivityPub just isn't geared up for that kind of thing. It's why BlueSky uses a different federation protocol called AtProtocol which is a lot more demanding than ActivityPub but is specifically intended for Twitter/TikTok style services.
Doesn’t mastodon leak a ton of metadata