At the moment the internet is flawed, do you think the fediverse is the solution?
I think it could, and I also think it won’t and that it will stay in the relative niche. But that’s a good thing. So it replaces all social media for me but doesn’t bring the general public. Win-win situation
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.
Before we had the fediverse - long before it - we had Usenet: people conversing globally in email-shaped units. It was shared and synched.
It was awesome. Questions answered, points debated, everything you wanted.
I don’t think the fediverse is a magical solution, but it does have a familiar feel to it. Not as good when it comes to spelling, but “it’s just the web,” so the rules are maybe different.
This is fine.
Probably not replace, but certainly it could be a viable and thriving part of the picture. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with having options.
And maybe it’s a good thing it’s not dumbed down. Keeps the cruft out! LOL
No, I don’t think the Fediverse can replace social media.
People are drawn to social media exactly because of its flaws. The algorithms are what keep people engaged.
When the first waves of Twitter refugees hit Mastodon, a common complaint was that the site felt dead. There was plenty of activity, but the truth is that Twitter’s algorithm was designed to be engaging while Mastodon is more of a “you get what you want to get” kind of deal.
Then there’s federation. It’s impossible for every server to federate and exchange content with every other server in the Fediverse. The network just doesn’t scale that well. That means you’ll have to be aware of communities on other servers and interact with those if you want to find like minded people. On traditional social media, you can probably find a complete community to your tastes just by using the search bar.
Then there’s the technical challenge. Federated series don’t scale as well. You can see this when a Mastodon post hits the front page of Hacker News and the instance instantly goes down as hundreds of thousands of requests come in, some users, some bots. Twitter can withstand being linked, but the server running on some poor guy’s VPS simply can’t.
Money is also a challenge. Servers cost money and moderators are only free up to a certain point. Social media companies can afford their servers, either through VC money or through conducting business, but there’s no profit model for the Fediverse. You can set up donations, but you’ll probably still be doing all the work to maintain the servers unpaid.
Interestingly, BlueSky seems to be going in a different direction. I don’t know if it’s part of the Fediverse (they are working on federation) but their designs allow for the things that pull people into Twitter while also being hacked by large spenders. Nostr also solves some of the Fediverse’s problems while introducing others, but I don’t expect them to end up as big as BlueSky. But hey, who knows, maybe someone will write an efficient bridge between these services so the Fediverse can enjoy the success of its competition.
The Fediverse is great for what it does, and for many people it will be a great alternative to social media. However, without the constant pull of algorithms and a way to make money, I don’t think it’ll ever replace social media. And, to be honest, I wouldn’t want it to; without a significant amount of extra moderators, the toxicity of traditional social media will just overwhelm all the attempted alternatives anyway.
yeah I definetly agree. specifically because of the lack of algorithms or profit motives it won’t be " addictive " nor as easy as traditional social media to find what I’m most likely to engage in. but it also means ragebait is less likely to be pushed to me, and for that, its actually quite fine…
im quite sick of the “few big websites” that the internet has become. I miss when there were a greater variety of forums, blogs and places to hang out, only supported through people’s passions. and it seems to me federation goes back to those old times.
“do you think the fediverse could replace popular social media”
Already has for me
Would be cool and technically possible, but I doubt it will happen.
Big Tech throwing millions into marketing and vendor lock-ins vs OpenSource projects that are decentralised and often running on donations and goodwill. That’s a very touch battle to win, especially when most people care more about ease of use and amount of possible followers than about privacy and decentralisation.
Mastodon grew, but only took a tiny slice of Twitter and half of Mastodon are bots or people who crosspost to both. I expect the same to happen to Lemmy/Reddit, and any other SNS that goes this direction.
I’m content with a stable and active niche group of SNSs. Hopefully the open source and decentralisation aspects can prevent it from dying and going to the next SNS as the big ones tend to do. Which cóúld be as people can make newer applications that work with the old ones as long as it all runs on ActivityPup. I feel it’s the most realistic way of thinking.
But maybe I’m just too pessimistic. Even the biggest people in tech stuggle to predict the future of it. So who knows.
Mastodon grew, but only took a tiny slice of Twitter
Growth is not the only, nor even main, metric to measure success of fedi. Fedi is not a VC-funded startup that needs to grow exponentially to remain viable (consider how that worked for Twitter and Reddit…).
Building a resilient, safe, longterm-viable communities is the metric to measure fedi by. That takes more time, than hooking people on endorphin/noradrenalin high and slick interfaces.
half of Mastodon are bots or people who crosspost to both.
This is false. I follow a couple of thousand people and have an interesting, diverse, funny, and informative timeline. Very few accounts I follow crosspost.
There is no recommendation algorithm so your timeline is what you make of it. It takes a bit more time to curate, but you end up with your own thing that suits you — if you put in the tiny bit of effort required.
Building a resilient, safe, longterm-viable communities is the metric to measure fedi by.
100% agree, especially on the resiliency part.
A community with 100 users but will never die is much better than one with a million users but might kick the bucket anytime.
The way the Fediverse works, and assuming that not everyone goes to the same instance, then it will be pretty much guaranteed to exist as long as there are users. And this is huge in terms of community building.
Obviously there are also threats, but they are different threats than those that apply to centralized platforms. One of the threats, in fact, is centralization itself — if people flock to a few gigantic instances, that creates a central point of failure, potentially.
But there are currently ~20k independently run fedi instances. Some had been running for a decade or longer.
As I said, we’re here for the long run.
No, marketing rules the world. In tech, it seems to me that the average person does not give much thought to their software at all. They will use defaults or the products they know about the most (Chrome).
I do not think replacing centralized social media should be our goal though. I believe the Fediverse needs more diversity of content. Right now, I see a lot of people from the FOSS community. People should be able to see a good variety of subjects being discussed or shared. FOSS is great but it should not be the only thing we see.
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
The federation aspect of it has to be invisible to the user. The user shouldn’t have to pick an instance (unless they want to) and they should see communities from all instances by default. Also we need a discovery algorithm. That’s the most needed feature.
@Bicyclejohn I hope fediverse helps us return to small blogs and forums that we had before facebook and twitter took over. no more monopolies
Me too. Lemmy is a step in the right direction (along with the rest of Fediverse).
Absolutely yes, better than the others.
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 think its going to split and fracture, at least for the forseeable future. Just like how people who want too be free from corporate influence moved permanently from twitter to mastodon, so to will users who want to be free from corporate influence be drawn here. Those who don’t care, or who buy into corporate propaganda will stay until and unless they can’t tolerate it anymore, and even then they may just move to a different corporate platform.
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.
That’s just because they haven’t been taught about it yet. Once it catches on more (Twitter and Reddit refugees, Meta app) it’ll become more widely understood and more people will start using it. Once you understand the point of the Fediverse, using it isn’t a whole lot harder than any other social media.
that’s putting it lightly. But remember Twitter wasn’t mainstream for a while. And tbh it still isn’t.
I mean, tweets are pretty regularly cited on the news. Not sure how much more mainstream Twitter could become.
