But fediverse isn’t ready to take over yet
But the fediverse isn’t ready. Not by a long shot. The growth that Mastodon has seen thanks to a Twitter exodus has only exposed how hard it is to join the platform, and more importantly how hard it is to find anyone and anything else once you’re there. Lemmy, the go-to decentralized Reddit alternative, has been around since 2019 but has some big gaps in its feature offering and its privacy policies — the platform is absolutely not ready for an influx of angry Redditors. Neither is Kbin, which doesn’t even have mobile apps and cautions new users that it is “very early beta” software. Flipboard and Mozilla and Tumblr are all working on interesting stuff in this space, but without much to show so far. The upcoming Threads app from Instagram should immediately be the biggest and most powerful thing in this space, but I’m not exactly confident in Meta’s long-term interest in building a better social platform.
But the fediverse isn’t ready. Not by a long shot.
I, really, do not believe in the strength of this statement. There has been a huge injection of people into the Fediverse and this will continue. This wave has brought in an enormous amount of highly qualified programmers, sysadmins and the like. And these people are contributing to Lemmy and a bunch of mobile apps for the Fediverse.
I am excited to participate and watch as the Fediverse explodes.
I don’t know why people look for feature parity between Lemmy/kbin and Reddit. With a bigger audience, its bound to happen that Lemmy/kbin will catch on features. People waited years and years for reddit to become what it “was”. The fediverse isn’t a stop gap. It’s the next potential platform once foss devs see the potential and have an audience to satisfy.
These articles always feel like the push us towards looking for a commercial option when we already have the right option under our nose. Just give it a few dev cycles.
Or to put it in other words: what features are lacking?
Do people seriously miss ‘awards’ and other not very interesting functions.
Moderation tools and bug stability are the things I want to see
Those are being worked on right now.
It’s going to be the same when people bailed Digg.
They all complained about the interface and lack of features but then spent all their time pasting ascii images comments and starting pun threads.
I would rather there be a slow decline in Twitter & Reddit than a mass exodus. An immediate consequence is the loss of signal to noise ratio and that would be too much to take for a second time!
[Apologies for the double post - liftoff indicated that it had failed to post both times]
deleted by creator
Fediverse is not ready yet, that’s for sure, BUT we don’t need it to be “ready” to take on big tech giant backend to be usable user dispersion. IMO, smaller but high quality user that cross critical amount to sustain the community is good enough. I don’t need to engage with another 20k people, I just need to engage with maybe 1~2000 high quality post/comment(not lurkers) in different domains that I am interested in. All the rest can have their own thing and we never really cross each other and that is fine.
What I think Fediverse currently lacking is the following:
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subscription can be abused, I don’t know the underlying detail, but if one user from small instance sub to another instance that have really big traffic, I guess it won’t deal well with that. There should be ways to tier or tag posts/comments so good informative one can be kept longer, but shitpots, meme, etc can expire quicker and not even archived. We really don’t need to keep all the stuff like tech giants do. (heck, even email provider starts to trim your old emails if your account exceed certain amount of storage(cause 80% is spam/notification mail that no longer serve any purpose.)
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easier way discover existing community. I really don’t like to checking “All”, search community function is updated to a bit reddit like so it’s really mixed up with post/comment and actual community. And low traffic community can be buried really far down the list. ie. I created Rocket League on lemmy.ca, and periodically searching for another to see if there are better ones. Then I found out there is none and my community link keeps “sinking” in the result list. There needs to have better filter for searching.
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there should have a say, a common bestof or community of this week community. Which helps with discovery as well. (up to instance admins decision of course.)
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the web interface can still be improved. One thing that’s very hard to keep track of even on reddit is how the branching thread and responses can be all over the place. It’s still kind like that here on lemmy(but less user make it more bearable. I am not smart and do not have a better alternative, I hope someone can come up with a better more readable one.
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Reddit has almost twenty years of development under its belt. How much development has it done in that large amount of time. I would bet Lemmy developers will run circles around Reddit in terms of how fast they advance the platform.
It’s pretty obvious that reddit has never really spent much money on engineering.
The only way the Fediverse gets ready is by going thru the growing pains that Reddit had to when we all fled from Digg. It also wasn’t ready then but the community stepped up and became mods and built apps and made it awesome. We will do it again… and this time it’ll be distributed and much harder for one person to screw over all of us
All of that didn’t happen overnight. It took literally years for all that to get baked.
It was at least 2 years before Imgur was created & then after that stuff like RES & mobile apps
Okay. So we’ll do it again in less time because we have lessons to draw on. This version of Lemmy is already better than early Reddit for anybody that remembers.
But it’s not about replicating what Reddit was about, then or now. It’s about getting back to what we had before the centralisation of the net but with the lessons learnt. To build a more egalitarian platform without the necessity to drive engagement at whatever cost.
We don’t need to, nor should look to set up tooling with what we learnt from Reddits failures. We’re building a new, better experience of the web and we definitely shouldn’t be looking to just migrate the user base from one site to a bunch of federated servers. We need people to definitely experience a cultural cleanse. Not to just have an exodus from there with all the bad habits and aggressions. We know where that path leads.
We are on the cusp of a potential paradigm shift of the internet and we can shape what it becomes!
Exciting times!
I knew this part would ruffle some feathers since whomever is reading it here is probably on board with Lemmy/Kbin.
I do think that for many it’s too early but there’s now significant interest into making everything a bit more stable and streamlined. I think Mastodon is already there but it is suffering from bad rep from their own waves of migration. I’m a bit worried it’ll be the same for Lemmy.
Paid fear mongering. You go to lemmy.world (or any other instance) and sign up. Done. It’s not difficult at all. It’s rich assholes trying to keep you on reddit.
I literally signed up for Lemmy a half hour ago. Picked Reddthat.com, searched for some topics I was interested in, subscribed, this is my first post. If a 50+ old man can do it, well…it ain’t that difficult!
I keep seeing articles posted on Mastodon about how Mastodon is doomed. Meanwhile, I only follow around 300 people, but my feed is constant.
If it’s failing, then someone forgot to tell it. Unless of course, by failing they mean “isn’t making money for rich people”.
…by failing they mean “isn’t making money for rich people”.
That’s exactly it. Mastodon won’t live or die by how well it can compete with Birdsite. After making the switch I see that it’s all I wanted from microblogging as a practice.
I keep seeing articles posted on Mastodon about how Mastodon is doomed. Meanwhile, I only follow around 300 people, but my feed is constant.
If it’s failing, then someone forgot to tell it. Unless of course, by failing they mean “isn’t making money for rich people”.
I really don’t want to sound snobbish, but people are really entitled these days.
“Omg you have to pick a server?! I’m going to have to spend more that 30s figuring out how this works? There is no alternative!”
When did everyone become a spoiled toddler? Just calm down, take some time to figure things out, and be patient.
/rant
I’m honestly starting to feel like it might be a net benefit for the barrier to entry to be higher. Since I switched to the Fediverse I have found that post quality is higher here than on Reddit, there’s less flaming, fewer low-effort overdone joke comment chains etc. Also it reminds me that there is better shit to do with my life than spend 3 hours a day reading a bunch of hyper-specific subforums that I’m subscribed to.
Well we went from an era where only a small portion of the population congregated online in forums and chats, which basically required you to either be a kid or a techie of some kind, to a world where your grandma was on Facebook because FB made it hella easy to signup and adductive as hell to stay. The Grandma (or even Parent) on Facebook types have never interacted with the internet in the ways we (rightly) romanticize
The Fediverse has this really organic, underground feel to it that I don’t think I want to lose.
If people want to leave Reddit/Twitter/Facebook/whatever and come to Fedi, I don’t mind there being a 1-hour learning curve to read an intro, find an instance, and sign up.
Peeps who aren’t willing to do that are probably better off on other social media.
Is there a reason to want to compete with Mainstream Social Media?
All this pearl-clutching makes me want to punch a wall.
I initially rejected Mastodon, being overwhelmed by its decentralization. I even proclaimed it “too complicated.”
Not even 8 months later and I’m fine. It’s all fine. My hysteria was sound and fury, signifying nothing. This hysteria is also pointless.
Is the fediverse the exact same experience Twitter and Reddit were? No. Do they need to be? No.
No one pearl-clutched when Facebook wasn’t exactly like LiveJournal or MySpace. No one pitched a fit when texting replaced IM. Folks organically flowed from one platform to the next as need and want allowed.
Technology solutions change and evolve. No platform rules forever.
The conspiracy theorist in me leans towards this being manufactured “concern” because the monetization solution to decentralized architecture isn’t ready for prime time, and “Late Stage Capitalism” is trying to herd the sheep into a temporary enclosure of fear until their new “farm” is ready. This explains why all the financial and corporate entities are singing the praises for Bluesky, and casting doubt on Mastodon. Last I saw, there is no word on how Bluesky is going to be supported, but it has a Board of Directors, which tells me it will be ad and subscription based, which means it needs a lot of people.
Having a Board also means that Bluesky can go public and can be sold to yet another nitwit.
So if long term stability means I am going to have to wake up and do a bit more to shape a fediverse solution to my needs, it’s worth more to me to do that than to go all in on a platform that is going to force ads on me and wind up being sold to the next billionaire imbecile.
I think that is disingenuous. People did complain (and pearl clutch) about reddit as it’s tree comment structure was vastly different than what people were used to and the upvote / downvote didnt make any sense. But people adapted quickly just like they always do. This move to lemmy is exactly like how the digg -> reddit move went.
I wasn’t there for Reddit, but was there for the MySpace/LiveJournal/Facebook/Twitter migrations. There will always be those who are confused, but I have not seen this level of histrionics, most of it coming from those with an agenda.
Regular folks will figure it out.
I didn’t know what the Fediverse was a week ago, and now I’m active on Lemmy and Mastodon. I think people are dramatically overstating how difficult it is to sign up. It’s not hard, it’s just new.
And besides, I don’t think the fediverse needs to take over at all. It just needs to have active, viable, engaging communities. As Iong as enough people end up here to sustain that, it doesn’t really matter if they overtake the places we’re coming from.
Feels like a smear campaign at this point. They’re making it sound like you have to dig through instances and code your own interface or something
I’ll be honest, “dig through instances and code your own interface” is kinda where I’m at right now with Lemmy. I love Beehaw as an instance, but because of the demo it’s attracted there are relatively niche topics I am interested in that it can’t support an active community for. Those communities are already humming along on lemmy.world – but I can’t interact with them because of the (justifiable) decision to defederate from them due to moderation concerns.
So where does that leave me? I am trying to stand up my own instance right now… but the build directions available don’t work for my homelab setup (for some reason the backend only responds to requests from localhost, which means I can’t set Lemmy up to work with my existing reverse proxy?). I guess I could go rooting around in the code to change that, but at that point I’m committed to maintaining a personal fork of Lemmy just to be able to use it in a way that is analogous to how I used Reddit… which just worked out of the box.
I really wish that in addition to federation, Lemmy offered some sort of OAuth-style portable identity that would allow users to interact directly with instances off their “home” one. As it stands, the Fediverse has ended up a bit more balkanized than I think was intended or anticipated
So where does that leave me?
you could sign up for a different site which isn’t defederated from beehaw or the other instances you’re interested in. lemm.ee for instance.
Sure, I could, but for me the whole appeal of a federated service is its interconnected nature. If I have to create an account on the “right” instance to interact with all the communities I’m interested in – potentially repeatedly, given that operators may choose to defederate from each other at any time and for any reason – that has already defeated the purpose of the exercise.
I see this as a major driver of the “default instance” issue that both Mastodon and Lemmy have experienced. If you both have a hard time finding content off your home instance and have no guarantee of continued ability to interact with that content down the road, the safest choice of home instance becomes whichever is biggest, and from there the network effects just make the problem progressively worse over time. Federated services need some way to reduce the friction of traversing the Fediverse if they’re going to avoid that.
I guess I disagree with your assertion as to what is the ‘purpose’ of the fediverse. To me choosing associations is the point, so admins disconnecting from abusive instances fits well within that belief. If the fediverse meant accepting all input from all instances without question, I’d leave here as quickly as I did voat.
I don’t mind creating a couple accounts on different instances as need be. Though I’m also the kind of person who had a handful of reddit accounts for various purposes, so I understand my perspective isn’t likely the norm.
I agree though that based on your requirements, spinning up your instance might be the best bet.
Like Drew got no clue said, the issue is that the author can’t handle the tiny amount of friction encountered during the process. IMO, it keeps out those that wouldn’t be contributing anyway.
Edit: Our -> out
IMO, it keeps our those that wouldn’t be contributing anyway.
I disagree strongly with this view. One of the truly valuable elements of reddit is/was the shared knowledge for a lot of things that are not techy. As a somewhat recent homeowner, the r/homeimprovement subreddit and the mildly related ones have been invaluable. It’s populated by random homeowners of all types and experts in various professional and DIY fields. These are not people who are likely to migrate to Lemmy in droves and that’s a loss, as far as I’m concerned. Maybe some will make it and smaller communities might grow to have similar knowledge wells, but they won’t be as deep.
I’m all-in on the transition away from the social media giants, but there’s a lot about the simplicity of a non-federated platform that won’t carryover which will make the barrier to entry higher than many people want to navigate, and that is definitely a shame.
People are fucking stupid bro. They just need that algorithm to tell them they dont even want to search for communities explore and learn.
I agree with you that it isn’t that difficult. I signed up on mastodon.social months ago. It was a little confusing about picking an instance so I just arbitrarily picked one. The same was true for lemmy. Now I’m on lemme.ee and behaw.org.
In the case of Matodon, I recently discovered the Explore option. There’s more than enough posts to keep me reading for hours. And most of them are interesting. Imagine reading an unfiltered Twitter feed. I don’t need Mastodon to get any bigger for my needs. It may even be better if it doesn’t get a huge membership. The same holds true for lemmy and kbin, bigger and better yes, but they don’t have to be a Reddit replacement.
I told someone about uBlock as they were getting ads left and right, and I was told “oh no, I don’t wanna install anything!”
So if it’s not extremely frictionless, many people won’t even try…
(I agree with your second point BTW)
I never interacted much with Twitter and I’m not a hardcore Mastodonian either, but I don’t understand why people say it’s hard to join.
For me, the process was simple:
- Install Mastodon app
- Create account
- Select a server from the list presented in-app
That was it. There was only one step (selecting the server) that is different from any other site. And it didn’t require SMS verification like Facebook, Twitter, and even Google do nowadays. It was objectively easier than signing up for Twitter.
Am I missing something, or did these people just shit their pants at the server selection screen? I get that it’s a little unfamiliar but…just pick one. It doesn’t really matter. That’s the whole point.
I think the biggest issue is finding the content you are looking for.
Sometimes people aren’t on Mastodon and even if they are it’s not alway easy to find them if they are not on the same instance.
I don’t understand why some people get so confused either. It’s just like choosing an e-mail provider.
Create the account, try it out, if you don’t like it, delete it. If you do like it, keep it. How hard can this be? Then again, it apparently is.
The client apps might help out by including an account creation wizard.
I sold computers at best buy for a few years around a decade ago, and this particular experience burned itself into my brain:
Me: introduce myself, ask what he was looking for Guy in his 30s: wants to look at chromebooks Me: tries finding out what he’s using it for to make sure it’ll be enough Guy: web browsing mostly, asks me if he can get his email on it Me: yeah no problem, what email client do you use now Guy: Gmail
It was hard to not laugh, but I am reminded of this when I think of the average person’s technical ability.
Why would you laugh? You asked a question and he answered.
I think mostly because it was unexpected for his age, usually questions like that came from much older people and it was surprising to me that someone barely older than me didn’t understand web based email. He seemed like a smart competent dude, so it was just not an answer my brain was ready for. Laughing might not be the best gauge for anything for me, laughing is also my fear response.
“Mastodon isn’t ready,” I read every day, posted on Mastodon.
The fediverse is ready, if you build it they will come!
I think there needs to be a sensible way to crowdfund the server costs, but I can’t see any other reason why it shouldn’t succeed
That so many people think Mastodon is hard to join makes me think that there are a lot of people on the internet now who have never learned how to use the internet
I think there’s active misinformation being shared about the difficulty of use for fediverse playforms. Yeah it’s 20 clicks instead of 5 but it’s not that hard.
It’s easy to forget outside of communities like this how low tech literacy actually is.
I think I don’t understand probably 95% of how the internet works and I’m fairly sure that I’m above average in my general understanding.
If the Fediverse really wants to break into the mainstream, and I’m neither saying it does or it should, then these things need to become easier and straightforward.
Joining a server isn’t hard, but finding content outside of the server you have chosen can be. Lemmy seems to be better than Mastodon here, but still.
People don’t care about federation as such. They want their social network and they want it all, regardless of which server it sits on, and they want it easy.
As someone who works in IT, I can tell you that ive witnessed firsthand so many people who get viruses because when someone gives them a URL, they dont just go to that site. They go to www.google.com, search for the URL, and blindly click on the first result, which is almost always an ad, and which sometimes is a link to malware. Fun times.
Something I often need to keep in mind is that when I was growing up the home PC was pretty crude and mysterious. You had to learn what a command line was, you had to learn about data backups and file trees, you had to learn about navigation and discovery of the web.
Sure you might not have done any of this stuff for decades now, depending on how you engage with the infernal devices, but if you see a forum you know what that is, how it works, what you expect to find inside. If you see URLs with like foo.com/place@otherfoo you kinda intuitively grasp what that is saying.
But if you’re like 20 now probably the first computer you ever touched was a magic box where you just clicked things to open stuff and they managed their own little things. Clicked a thing to install other clicky things. You don’t know what a config file is, why would you? you don’t really use URLs much, you just click the internet and start typing and then click the right link etc.
To a lot of those people some of this stuff is as arcane as like arch linux is to your average millennial PC user. Despite fedi (and arch! I use arch btw) actually being really simple and obvious there’s a barrier of unfamiliarity and a lot of basic skills you need to learn first.
This is what I’ve observed in Gen Z and younger - they just expect functional UIs, and to have pre-setup file directories and libraries, but don’t actually know what those things are and what they do.
Yeah it’s just the result of progress. I’ve watched people my age get stunlocked by carburettor issues or the concept of a choke. It’s unfortunate but sleekness often trades off with user serviceability.
Rather than being all “hgngh grrr the damn kids with their geegaws and whimgets don’t know how to use a simple butter churn” we have to teach people how to feel confident learning different ways of doing things and most importantly why they should care to do so.
People in 90s and 2000s used to get informed before going online, as it used to be a big spending and commitment. Between all the tech-utopia hype you also got to hear about what to avoid and how to behave.
Nowadays you only need a cheap smartphone and start scrolling through algorithm-fed content indefinitely. No need for technical knowledge because the company takes care of that. No need for an intro class, because who even bothers anymore?
how hard it is to join the platform
I seriously don’t belief the learned helplessness that makes it hard for people to join Mastodon or Lemmy. It’s literally one signup page. People have just completely lost any semblance of tech literacy.
Federation is a pretty unique concept when learning about it and can be confusing at first. Then after you understand it, you need to choose an instance from god knows how maby and you don’t even know how to find what is out there. The first 2-3 days of my migration to lemmy was research. And while it is not hard with just a bit of tech literacy, it’s not as easy as finding one site and register - which can be easily done by most people with little tech literacy.
People have just completely lost any semblance of tech literacy.
I think you heavily overestimate the technical literacy of most people. I’d say majority started with 0 and stayed that way, because they only ever use stuff that causes little friction so that even they can use it. It’s not that people lost it, it’s that the way tech evolved it allowed people with none to go in.
I agree with the general notion that it is a nice filter for the feddiverse and might keep some of the most stupid at bay - at least for a while.
Federation is a pretty unique concept when learning about it Not really. All of this stuff is just a rehash of nntp and IRC.
This feels like the same anti-FOSS FUD that was there 20 years ago against linux: ‘it’s not ready!’ and ‘who will provide support?’ and ‘it’s too hard for people to figure out!’ and ‘how can you make money if it’s free?’ and so on.
Of course, the whole world runs on Linux now and it’s eaten the lunch of every single proprietary competitor… it just took more than a week to do it, which is far too long of a cycle if you’re a clickbait “journalist” on corpo-owned media.
The Verge peeps are rather enthusiastic about Activity Pub based platforms, I wouldn’t attribute bad intent there.
Linux is used by most of the world but it’s either backend where techies take care of things or super streamlined experiences like Android etc.
Go outside
Touch grass
I don’t think the Fediverse will or should “take over”. It already exists in a highly-usable form. I suggest the author stick with Reddit, Twitter, and Discord.
Nothing to it but to do it. How is the Fediverse supposed to accommodate growth before it grows?
It’s a ridiculous catch-22 to expect there to be a fully-scaled replacement for any dying platform to already be ready to go.
This article’s argument against Lemmy is nonsensical, which is why they try to reinforce their point by focusing on Kbin instead, which actually isn’t ready because it’s much harder to create and run an instance of.
My only issue with Lemmy is that it’s not a true Reddit replacement, especially when places keep defederating from one another. Like I spend far less time here on Beehaw because it’s defederated from some of the major instances - I understand the administrators’ concerns about moderation but over time a lot of the activity will center itself around the most active instances (i.e., users may come from a diversity of instances) but only interact with content on Lemmy.world.
Every time I visit lemmy.world I find myself coming straight back to beehaw because insufferable people make lemmy.world feel just like reddit did and I just get pissed off after 5 minutes of scrolling. Beehaw is perfect for me specifically because there are less people.
