It’s been a long journey, but here we arrive. Welcome home.
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I skipped Fark, but my progression is largely the same. Once in a blue moon, I still visit Slashdot. It’s like checking up on an ex to see how they’re doing.
It’ll be great to see more people showing up on Lemmy.
People are so confused and overwhelmed about the fediverse mechanics though.
Maybe there is room for a product that is an aggregator for aggregators. Like, a centralised service that scrapes and collects all Lemmy instances into one super instance.
Its actually simple. Tell them, its like Email. You have an email account at gmail, but can perfectly fine have email conversation with someone on outllook. Lemmy instance = the same as a web email interface of any email provider. Most people will get their head around that.
As soon as you have to explain the fediverse to someone using analogies my experience is that most people have already given up. They just can’t be bothered to learn something new.
do birds fly? do ducks duck?
Ohhhh I kept hearing the email analogy but never WHY it was like email. Thanks for the ELI5!
Great description. Im stealing that one
I don’t think such an aggregator is required. Interoperability is smooth enough that you don’t have to think about different instances most of the time. I’ve only really noticed two points that would be confusing:
- the sign up process
- the “local”/“all” distinction
So I think what we really need to do to make this platform intuitive to people that aren’t already familiar with it is:
- Somehow streamline signing up. The process from googling Lemmy to having an account on an instance should not be confusing or intimidating.
- Filter by “all” by default. The default should cater to the users which are less likely to figure it out themselves. If you don’t understand what instances are and what “local” vs “all” means, then you are probably here for the “all” experience. If you understand and really want “local” you are probably fine having to set it yourself.
The all for default is actually an admin setting (for users not signed up)
That would be https://lemmy.directory
OMG the “All” on that thing is about as useless as Mastodon"s “All”. Crap flying by so fast you can’t read it.
Don’t look by new?
Pardon my confusion since I’m new to the fediverse as well, but isn’t every Lemmy instance like the super instance you are describing? You can access any community on any instance from any other; there are commentors in this thread from beehaw.org, lemmy.world, lemmy.sdf.org, programming.dev, and many others.
Nah those are like sibling instances. I’m talking about a parent instance that combines all the children instances with a new community that aggregates multiple remote communities.
Just thinking out loud, haven’t really fleshed out the idea yet.
That already exists. ATM, the thing you’re confusing it with is that there are 4-5 “gaming” subs, but eventually if one gets big enough or the others get taken in by one this will happen, and it’ll look like this instance “Technology@Beehaw.org” (p.s. I’m accessing this from Sopuli, so not on Beehaw).
Yeah, I think I get it - there’s a bunch of smaller gaming@<lemmy-instance> kind of things, you’re talking about a master c/gaming that combines all of the smaller lemmy instances of gaming channels, right?
Yeah, like multireddits!
It’s funny to read this article about the death of Digg again:
In reality, Digg changed their business model and pretended that they didn’t. That is something that is unacceptable with communities and won’t be forgotten. Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian hit the nail on the head in an open letter to (now former) Digg CEO – Kevin Rose:
“You chose to grow with venture capital and you’ve no doubt (I hope) taken some money off the table in your Series C round. I say this because this new version of digg reeks of VC meddling. It’s cobbling together features from more popular sites and departing from the core of digg, which was to “give the power back to the people.”https://searchengineland.com/digg-v4-how-to-successfully-kill-a-community-50450>
Oh sweet, sweet irony.
At least Ohanian is married to Serena, and left reddit 10 years ago. Spez (aka Steve Huffman) is a fucking piece of shit that betrayed both of his co-founders
Tbh, I totally forgot that Ohanian left Reddit like 10 years ago 🤦
Sadly, this is the only logical conclusion of things that are run for profit. Here’s hoping the federated model proves more resistant in the long run.
Doctorow has it right. Enshittification.
Funding, even in a not-for-profit sense, will always be an issue. Wikipedia struggles, but kinda makes it work. We’re going to need something creative for the fediverse…
that doesn’t really hold because Wikipedia does not struggle with funding in the sense you’re thinking: https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/wikipedia-millions-bank-beg/
so, survival doesn’t necessarily have to be at stake
In the medium run federated instances will have to be financed somehow as well. We’ll see how that goes.
Depends on how many volunteers you have who are actually willing to donate
I realise that this is unpopular. But personally while I disagree with the decision to charge (exorbitantly) for the api and appalled at the slander hurled at the dev, I think that is an business choice and one more item that I have to disagree and live with.
But I am very excited about the rise of the fediverse. I know that a company will eventually make a decision that I feel very passionately about, but I will be stuck making a difficult choice. With the fediverse, it provides the users with the opportunity to have control. This power of course often comes with various other costs (lack of a dedicated sre or moderation teams, etc). But I expect that over time this will evolve into options where paid offerings will come up that allows for higher QoS where required.
Honestly, if spez hadn’t already sold the site to white supremacists, I’d be a lot quicker to defend this.
Who are the white supremacists he sold to?
It was the Chinese that he sold out to. Not the white supremacists.
The api changes really were about protecting their gold mine of data from ai data models scraping for data. Reddit wants to use that data to create its own models and then replace moderators with those models. The ultimate goal here is to turn the existing dataset into an automoderator on steroids that they could sell anywhere. Trouble is someone else is going to beat them to it.
There was a reason these changes lined up so nicely with Google doing the same thing. Everyone’s realizing they’ve been spouting their gold from firehoses for any machine to pick up, and they’re being reactionary and turning them off asap instead of just like, accepting it as a facet of having a public social network.
It is just the catalyst we need to transcend the status quo and normalize technology that respects its users.
I had the same journey but I’m pretty sure I found Slashdot by way of boingboing which I found by way of Diesel Sweeties blog posts when I first got a DSL connection in 2002 and was looking for comics and blogs to fill up my trendy new RSS reader lol
Lame. You weren’t even on Usenet in the 90’s.
- Signed, Zoomer.
We you even on FidoNet?
I am old enough to not care what people on the internet think which is why I posted this, I am battle hardened
In case it wasn’t clear from my ironic youth, that was not intended as negative.
for me it was just
reddit --> Lemmy
You are here, so you are not late.
Renegade BBSes -> IRC -> slashdot -> digg -> reddit -> imgur -> discord -> mastadon -> lemmy
with plenty of side quests along the wayPre search engine time on Geocities trading mutual linking on each other websites, reams and reams of messages and emails
So we’re a side quest then?
It’s hard to tell… it doesn’t feel like one, but it remains to be seen.
But I feel like the other alternatives to Reddit and the fediverse are more of a sidequest at this point.
Where does somethingawful fit in
Eating popcorn watching goons, dey scury
The Fediverse seems like an interesting idea, but I hope it actually holds together.
Let people on other platforms know that we exist! Lol
I imagine as Mastodon and Lemmy pick up more users, we’ll see a lot of activity and improvements in the underlying tech of the fediverse. Should be a fun ride, especially since it’s in the hands of the community.
Let’s see if the technology can improve fast enough to retain users.
idk, I think it’s there already. I’m already having enough content to engage with and post comments.
Sure, I can’t scroll through new content endlessly, but there’s enough to replace Reddit.
I might actually make posts here, too, since it’s likely to gain traction. On Reddit, there were only a select few smaller subs I’d generally post to, and even then, only rarely.
I mean even Reddit wasn’t really “endless” for me. On particularly boring days I could definitely reach the end of content that interests me.
The bar for being Reddit circa 2010 isn’t that high to be fair, I know expectations have changed but Reddit was down intermittently for years to the point I’m amazed it got the traction it did in hindsight. People talk about Lemmy having tankies on it as though early Reddit didn’t have some even worse unsavoury subs and users too.
A lot of instances block the tankie instance anyways.
No kidding, wasn’t r/jailbait the biggest sub for a while there?
There were and are to this day a ton of subs with similar content.
Tried the official Reddit app today and boy people weren’t joking when they say it sucks. I thought it’d just be the usual experience plus some ads but I was totally wrong.
The official app doesn’t respect your subreddit subscriptions at all, instead force feeding you feeds of whatever their algorithm thinks will drive maximum engagement just like a shit version of Facebook. The “hot” etc functionality is completely stipped from it entirely.
Guess I’m here to stay on the fediverse now.
What absolutely sucks about this is that I had carefully curated my subscriptions on RIF in order not to exacerbate my dumb mental health issues.
Hell, I’ve read angry posts about people in recovery from addiction and alcohol saying how they keep seeing ads for beer or gambling and things like that.
It’s horrifying!!
The algorithm really doesn’t work when you are critical or sceptical over a subject. For instance crypto sceptics from r/buttcoin being shown binance ads. Yes, they do show an interest in crypto, but may be the least suceptible persons to that ad.
people in recovery from addiction and alcohol saying how they keep seeing ads for beer or gambling
Not that this is how it works, but I imagine a diligent algorithm looking at those individuals and that content, and then thinking “mhhmm this will generate maximum revenue!!”.
I think that’s absolutely how it works (in part). Ads curated toward your demographic! Maybe it’s not inherently purposeful, but it’s harmful, nonetheless.
In a subr×ddit about alcohol recovery? “Our algorithm detected that your post history contains the word “alcohol” or “beer” a lot! We will tailor your ads to cater to your interests for maximum profits!” Boom. There you go.
It takes the human aspect out of the community and drives it to become harmful at worst and soulless at best.
Even more than that, you have the idea that ‘similar users to yourself buy a lot of alcohol, so you probably will too’. Of course alcoholics, whether attempting recovery or not, are likely to buy alcohol. So if you’re a recovering alcoholic, ‘similar users to yourself’ are gonna be buying more alcohol than usual, and so you’ll see ads for it. Totally heartless and just for-profit.
Anyone remember a small post-fark forum called bannination?
I sure do! I wrote the initial comment de-htmlizer.
Loved the “Nancy” score.
The one true constant for me is 4chan 😅
I kinda grew out of it. It was funny when I was an edgy teenager but it got progressively more cringeworthy as time progressed for me, even though the content may not have changed much.
I stopped engaging with Reddit when meme-ification happened.Wheb it became all about the lolz abd short pithy responses, I started using it to find more interesting articles. Gone are the days wheb the average Redditor would read and make thoughtful contributions.
That depended on the subs you were in IMO, there was a lot of that but there were others that still had worthwhile stuff that wasn’t just silly shitposting for fun. Now we’ve got Lemmy though and multiple instances of it!
That is in part because the reddit algorithm doesn’t like thoughtful contributions. These take time and understanding of the discussed matter. When your metric is positive (upvote) interaction per timeframe you need easily digestable content that people immediately react to. If I have to carefully read and think about the content my vote/comment is far too late to be “hot” on reddit.
Yeah that’s basically it. Bots had overtaken Reddit too and just propagated that problem by re-posting posts/top comments.
I used 4chan when I was younger but trying to go back after reddit was super depressing, I lasted about 5 minutes.
I stopped using 4chan when the probability of getting goddamn CP snuff videos in the browser cache because of a /b/ raid got beyond trivial, so like pretty fucking early on.
4chan definitely got worse. like it was always edgy and stupid, but after 2015 every board just kind of became /pol/
Yeah, nazis kinda ruined it. pre-2010 it was more whimsical and ridiculous as opposed to cringey and unironically bigoted.
Digg -> Reddit -> Lemmy
After experiencing the death of two “power to the people” platforms due to profit-driven VC-backed corporate meddling, here’s hoping the third platform is the charm Lemmy & the fediverse.
I don’t think the Fediverse will suffer the same demise as Digg and Reddit, precisely because it’s not owned by a profit-driven VC-backed corporation, but there are a couple of other serious threats to its longevity:
- Moderation. If the Fediverse isn’t adequately moderated, it will quickly be overrun by Nazis, pedos, and spam. That’s what killed Voat and Usenet.
- Funding. This isn’t like IRC, where a modern server can support tens of thousands of users in its sleep. Running a system along the lines of Reddit or Twitter requires a lot of computing power, and that’s expensive. Where’s the money going to come from?
I think smaller instances of a maximum of 1-2000 people are the way to go for the future. Most instance owners are hosting it because they want to and they have a lil extra cash to throw at it, the 500-2000 people instances are usually funded by the likes of a patreon ko.fi or other donation setup.
These instances aren’t big enough that the cost is of an instance isn’t massive and can therefore avoid the likes of Venture capital and Angel investors, and if they start to reach the level where funding is getting a bit short even with donations, they can close new account creation untill the number of donators increases beyond a point
TL;DR: Essentially instances should be welcoming new accounts in waves. So that their growth doesn’t outpace donation income.
I think the difference here is that Digg and Reddit were both VC-driven companies that wanted power, and the fediverse is fundamentally different.
Journey Before Destination
Do we have a sub on this side yet?
Not that I’ve heard of or seen unfortunately
Fuck Moash
Air-sick low lander, that one.
:D
You’re missing the precursors:
Email -> Newsgroups -> CGI forums / IRC -> Slashdot… :)
The new Fediverse really is kicking up IRC and newsgroup vibes for this old timer. Its very exciting.
If we’re including those then I think we have gone full circle and are back in the safe waters of protocols
IRC is STILL running to this day
Yup, and some servers are very active.
+1 you’re right. Especially IRC…oh how I miss those days.
I miss that moment when I became the cool kid in the channel because I had an IRC bouncer
As a really old person, I was thinking today the vibe was unlike anything I’ve felt since Fidonet ;)
