And maybe it’s a good thing it’s not dumbed down. Keeps the cruft out! LOL

Sometimes I feel like my reddit experience was so different from a lot of people’s. I unsubbed from all the default subs and built a specific homepage for the things I found interesting. Unfortunately for me, that means the communities were (relatively speaking) smaller than the popular ones, but still large enough to have frequent engagement. Going to be hard to replicate that, I think.

@Alkalyon @Bicyclejohn #Reddit was already toxic, but I guess now people will begin to recognize its toxicity.

To some extent this is a feature, not a problem though. I know it’s elitist, but in a lot of ways the internet was a much nicer place when it was just a bunch of tech nerds.

“Servers? Instances? Is this a place to connect with my friends or a goddamn server room?”

That’s not a property of of federation (see email and websites) it’s just because early adopters are a little wired. In any new social phenomenon, it takes a second wave of adopters (first wave of followers) to bridge the wierdos from the masses.

Cue this classic study in leadership: https://youtu.be/hO8MwBZl-Vc be the first one to follow the wierdos and show the masses it’s cool.

But couldn’t it be made easier? Who cares which server a community or a user is registered on. I register where a friend sent me the link to and from there on it shouldn’t matter and could be handled in the background.

The big sites are also not one central instance. They have several distributed instances all managed by the same company.

I agree. It’s been fun and challenging to learn even just as a user. I work in tech and it is a lot of concepts to grasp and understand. So much potential though!

People said that about reddit, I don’t think Lemmy is anywhere near being too complex for the average user. More that social medias generally favor simplicity because simplicity is easy to control, modify, and generally nudge from a developer side trying to guarantee a very specific use case that generates money, rather than just naturally occurring social systems.

Let’s be real, humans have been dealing with social networks far more complex, systems more complex, for almost all of human history. The sheer volume of people, no, but the actual processes of interaction, yes.

Very well said

Because if you can just communicate around a walled garden, what’s the point or value in staying in one?

Because people are happy with that garden and don’t think about others. Please remember that your average internet user doesn’t really know what an API is, or understand about open standards, they just want to find some content that matches their interests, upvote and share said content with their friends who are also inside that garden.

This average user isn’t a bad person, stupid or naiive, they just have other things going on in their lives and the internet is a small part of it. They use it, take what they want from it and move on, and there are so many more of those people than you.

People who switch from iOS to Android report losing friends who were on iMessage and are unwilling to move to something platform agnostic such as Signal or WhatsApp. I wouldn’t underestimate the walled garden effect.

I mean yeah, that’s me. I’m just a regular guy, but since reddit decided to screw up in the worst ways possible, I need an alternative. I don’t fully understand the fediverse but I’m going to make an attempt to use kbin and see how it goes.

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.

Thanks for this insightful post. I agree that the fediverse feels different and that’s ok. It’s exciting to get the chance to build something new and be a part of it starting.

Great insight. I agree that the fediverse will never be anywhere near as big as mainstream social media, but I’m hoping it will continue to grow and be recognized as a valid alternative.

Personally I think of the fediverse as like diet social media. Just like how people switch from Coke to Diet Coke to avoid sugar, people can switch from Twitter to Mastodon to avoid recommendation algorithms and overly-stimulating content. At least that’s why I joined the fediverse. I know most people love algorithms and endless content (hence why Tik Tok is so huge) but for those of us who want something less stimulating, I’m glad that the fediverse exists as an alternative. As long as the fediverse is big enough to be enjoyable, but not so big that it becomes super addictive, that’s good enough for me.

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.

I believe that’s the point: Coming from Reddit, I don’t understand what Mastodon (yes, I thought it is something similar!), Fediverse, Lemmy.ml and feddit are, have in common or where the differences are.

And furthermore: Why should I care?

I think it will be hard to convince a significant number of people to come here and STAY.

I hope I’m wrong. I just created my first community :-)

@matthieu_xyz @Bicyclejohn

We are still missing basic tools, like the ability to import full history from one instance to another. To import posts and comments, not just followers and those we follow, or lists (which often isn’t functional as on my current instance). Frankly we should be able to import history from non-fediverse social media too, if one has output files from them. Nobody I’m aware of has built a single tool to help them navigate those histories, let alone import them.

I would say, if in theory a social media achieved a small community, informative and positive culture which avoided spreading misinformation or cultivating harmful stereotypes of those they disagree with via the mechanisms of that social media, that it should be more standardized and more widely accepted. Largely because that is just more healthy in general. Not that Lemmy will necessarily be that in practice in the long run.

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.