both companies notably ruined the internet in the 2010s by consolidating discourse then taking various steps to destroy the user experience and the feel of the communities for profit.
so, broadly, the web went from cozy, small hobby forums in the 90s and 00s, then with the 10s as a transitional period, the 20s being practically complete corporate control of online discourse.
it’s a bummer. but nothing lasts forever. where will we go next?
I’m here. I don’t know about everybody else though.
I’m about 38% installed.
38% installed
That sounds like a superb band name.:-)
Take a look at the numbers - they aren’t exactly leaving so much as staying right there.
Reddit has become like YouTube (or Twitch, Tiktok, whatever) - it provides a never-ending stream of “content”, albeit most of it made from AI these days after they pushed a large fraction of the human content creators away. And the users seem to not care one bit if it is a repost made from a decade or year ago, even copying the comments section line-for-line. It’s not like anyone is really “listening” anyway, they are simply waiting for their opportunity to speak - “^This”, “I also choose this guy’s wife”, “and my axe”, etc. We might despite such, but they seem to enjoy it? (which is good for us, as it contains them over there:-P)
And Twitter, well, you can see for yourself. It could work itself up to offering full-on Nazi propaganda - oh wait, it already has!:-P - and those users won’t mind. “It’s where my audience is”, they cry - ignoring how that is becoming less & less true, but also… isn’t it? Why aren’t they moving their content to Mastodon? It seems to have too many systemic problems, hence is losing ground already before it has even really started. Some users might go to Bluesky though.
Perhaps we’ll see a situation like TV where every provider offers “exclusive content” - the Fediverse being one, the Twitterverse (or whatever) being another, Reddit still yet another (with zombie resurrected content that people deleted, but it managed to scrape before that could happen, now reposted as bot-content under a thin guise of “no I’m a totally really real human, trust me bro” - plus, can you prove it, since despite you recognizing your words 100%, did you keep a copy of it, plus anyway they can trot out their legal claim to it in any case, hence whether they win or not either way you lose).
When I joined Kbin.social, I used to hold out STRONG hopes for the Fediverse. But then the former started dying, I moved to Lemmy, made the mistake of making a comment in ChapoTrapHouse, and another somewhere in Lemmygrad.ml, the feedback from which caused me to almost quit social media entirely… and now I no longer think that Lemmy will end up being very popular, i.e. burst out to include a more mainstream audience (certainly not a single person that I have recommended it to irl has anything even neutral to say about it - even programmers - and instead every single one has expressed extreme distaste with the extremist propaganda that is allowed to be expressed here. every. single. one. I try to explain that you can block it all but… perhaps that’s not as fun for people, especially those not used to systems-level OS management tasks i.e. those who don’t use Arch btw:-D). I hope we are okay with that - definitely some people seem to prefer it that way even - but either way it is what it is. Though cross-platform aggregators like Mbin, Piefed, and Sublinks may hold some hope.
^This
^This
every single one has expressed extreme distaste with the extremist propaganda that is allowed to be expressed here. every. single. one. I try to explain that you can block it all but…
Are they using Reddit too? Because without blocking anything, the amount of political posts you see on Reddit is on par with here
(1) I don’t know for some of them, possibly not
(2) I don’t know if you’ve noticed but… Reddit has changed from what it used to be 😜
(3) One I know uses Reddit, but argued that the niche subs over there are fine - like maybe ones dedicated to a single game. Those likely escaped much of the controversy that we over here talk about happening in the big subs. I still left mine - bc fuck spez, and more importantly what he tried to do to 3rd party app devs, plus what that means for the platform in the long run, but if we are talking “mainstream” people here… they stayed, and like it more than they don’t like it. It takes all kinds, to fill a
worldsocial media platform.(4) “political” aside, I’m talking about extremist content, that advocates for literal murder, see e.g. some comments in here, which you may ofc argue that “it’s only joking”, but (a) no, it’s really not, and anyway (b) that’s besides the point bc it’s more about how people are receiving such messages, and deciding to leave Lemmy rather than stay (more commentary here)
This really resonates with me for the most part. I hate Reddit but it’s still the best I can find, especially for non-tech interests. At the same time nothing has felt personal for such a long time. On the 00s and early 10s I had forums that were mostly for a specific topic but they grew on me so I lurked their “off topic” channels a lot. I enjoyed it and felt like I belonged. Today it all hyper-optimized for maximum engagement, no matter how meaningful or enjoyable it is. A friend lured me into threads and I finally deleted it again two weeks in or so. I see nothing by people I care about but lots of bs from MAGAs or other idiotic takes that just scream “tell them how wrong they are” at me and I can’t take it any more.
Okay one powerful attraction of Lemmy is that here, some people are outright fucking KIND, and thoughtful, and considerate. And we can recognize their names more easily, due to the lower volume of content, and especially the lack of an algorithm pushing profits over your interests (you know that’s on purpose, right? People who pay money to X have their posts promoted more highly than those who do not - your own interests be damned). Like whenever we see a comment from Lvxferre I’m excited and always anticipate good things coming:-).
I gave up on that happening on Reddit a year ago - really multiple years but I stayed to help mod a couple small communities. There, thoughtful people are too often blown away by replies coming from the toxic scum, to the point where they, like me, didn’t even bother trying anymore.
Therefore I was going to leave Reddit anyway, no matter what happened. I did not like who it was turning me into - always defensive, always encouraged to pounce on trivial matters just to have something to talk about I guess. Imagine staying on Truth Social - you will be affected by them, you may think that you won’t, but you will.
Whereas here, if you block the big three (and are at least aware of Midwest.social), then you’ll still need to block hundreds of trolls - but it’s doable, one at a time, screetching their conservative agendas (even/especially those who label their thoughts as “leftist”). But it’s manageable, unlike on Reddit where outside of the niche subs with good moderators, it’s too difficult.
Btw those subs may increasingly come under Huffman’s control - he worships the Musk, and he’ll at some point make an announcement about “we aim to provide a more consistent experience across Reddit” - and those mods will lose their ability to decide who is or is not a troll, especially when they say things that Reddit wants to keep (bc of increasing
profitsengagement). Whatever Reddit is now, just like X (though far slower it would seem), it will change.Btw you may be interested in this article: https://medium.com/@max.p.schlienger/the-cargo-cult-of-the-ennui-engine-890c541cebcb - this is what convinced me to leave Reddit, regardless of whether I could find a home here or not.
Wow, this is super helpful! Thanks! I’m starting to feel like lemmy is more „home“
Mind you, it’s not perfect, and it definitely needs to grow or it will fall back into obscurity, but it does have a lot going for it:-).
There’s a big diaspora right now.
If the fediverse can get more user-friendly instead of being a bunch of programming linuxites lying that their stuff is totally intuitive, it could be a lovely new home with lots of flexibility.
99% of the time when I would get the most batshit insane replies to a comment, they would be from three instances that mine had not defederated from. i.e., instances are not just like emails - not entirely - but instead there is a whole culture associated with each, made more complex to learn bc people lie about them, especially each of us about our own:-).
Also links to communities are totally broken in the web UI - e.g. unless you happen to have your account at midwest.social, clicking [email protected] will take you away from your instance, where you can’t vote or comment and your preferences are all ignored ([email protected] will work fine, but there are zero indicators for that in the GUI, you have to know the secret knowledge and trust the process, or flip back and forth between the Preview button and editing).
But the codebase for Lemmy is in Rust so… not a whole lot of contributors to fix such things. Plus most people seem to simply lurk anyway, based on the differences between upvotes vs. comments in most content.
[email protected] will work fine, but there are zero indicators for that in the GUI, you have to know the secret knowledge and trust the process, or flip back and forth between the Preview button and editing).
If you see it a few times, are you not going to notice intuitively how it works? Also, even if you don’t use a ! link, usually people with comment with one
But the codebase for Lemmy is in Rust so… not a whole lot of contributors to fix such things.
Piefed is in Python, Mbin in PHP, Sublinks in Java. It’s more about the lack of contributors than the languages themselves
the lack of contributors then the language themselves
That’s a one-two punch.
Not everyone is tech savvy, e.g. creative writers who know how to work the English language rather than coding ones, like maybe poets.
And no I don’t think the exclamation mark followed by community name syntax is intuitive in the slightest (edit: whoopsie, see below, but TLDR I was half-wrong i.e. not correct on this point) - for one thing it runs entirely counter to how username tagging works, and for another if you allow the UI to guide you then it will give the wrong answer, so these “pitfalls” act as barriers to learning, which imho are the polar opposite of “intuitive”, for this matter. Instead, I end up memorizing three rules (usernames are like so, community links similarly are… NOPE, that’s a trap!, and instead here’s how community links actually go…)
Excellent point about the non-Lemmys - those have different barriers I believe. e.g. if you visit the Sublinks demo, there are no posts from sooner than 5 months ago (plus ironically sorting by New shows zero posts, so it seems broken:-). I doubt people are wanting to contribute to a project that isn’t released yet, but then again I can’t ascribe motives to everyone, it just seems to make sense to me that having to learn Rust would be one type of barrier (although not even the major one, since many people may want to do thus for their careers - Rust is arguably the hottest new language right now?), and a project not being able to be used is another type of barrier.
if you allow the UI to guide you then it will give the wrong answer
How so? Adding “!test” shows the dropdown menu, that seems quite intuitive :
How would you make it more intuitive?
For Sublinks, if people go on the Github (which you expect people wanting to contribute to do), they’ll see it still has active contributions: https://github.com/sublinks
Edit: Whoopsie - some of this is incorrect, see Blaze’s extremely helpful answer below. Many things on the Fediverse are still not intuitive, but I was mostly incorrect in stating that one of reasons is particularly wrt the dropdown menu.
Try it - you can use me + this back-and-forth as a test platform, or really at any time you can do something and click the “Preview” button to see how it will render before you send it to someone else (I do this anytime I have even the slightest encoding - it really helps to spot e.g. a backwards parenthesis that would have displayed a link rather than the link text:-). Ofc clicking it would destroy your message, so make sure to select open in a new tab, to test how it would work:-).
Basically: yes the dropdown menu appears, just as for usernames, but if you choose the item from the dropdown that you see, the Lemmy UI will do the wrong thing. My first link was made using the dropdown, while my second ignored the dropdown and just used the exclamation mark. Notice how my first link takes you to an entirely different instance? But the second link goes to the version of that community while keeping you on your same instance.
Btw, here is a post that describes all of the variations that you can try - there are more than just these two - and the relative merits of each. I highly recommend that [email protected] community overall btw!:-)
Oh that reminds me: there is also no possible way to share “post” or “comment” links that will auto-adjust to allow you to remain on your logged-in instance, unlike username, community (despite the dropdown route being broken), and instance links. So what you can do is on your instance click the search button / magnifying glass, then paste in a link, and that should take you right to it.
Except ofc when it does not, although with you being on a major instance there’s an extremely good chance that it will… but not guaranteed. The reason is that there must be someone (else?) from your instance who has subscribed to that community first, for you to be able to see it. And that person must blaze the trail, not merely by clicking around on an existing link, but by piecing together a URL in the proper format (c/communityurlname) and then clicking subscribe, and then waiting for the list of posts to populate over the next several days. Once the first person has blazed the trail, it should work for everyone else much more smoothly, but that trailblazing process is not automated or anywhere close to streamlined. Furthermore, reasons that that might not work is that the “community url name” is not always the same as the “community long-form name” that is displayed at the top of it - those can be different. e.g. an example is “Dungeon RPGs” (a community that I just happened to see one day in the right-hand sidebar of my own instance, discuss.online, and btw it’s not a terribly popular community - to this day I’m literally the only one who has ever posted to it:-D), although the url for the name is not “dungeon rpgs” or “dungeon_rpgs” or some such, but rather “drpg”.
On the other hand, I mentioned that there’s a good chance that it will already work - this is b/c of some seriously irl actual fucking heroes who go around making alts on every major instance, and keep very long lists of every single community that they can find, and subscribe to them. Except… not drpg, so if you attempt to visit https://lemmy.world/c/drpg you will get an error, as if that were an invalid community. It is a valid community though, it is just on a tiny instance that such people have not included in their nets - not that I’m complaining or whatever, just using this as an illustration (the top community on this instance has only 67 users per month, and its url at lemmy.world does not work either, and then the next community after that has only 18 users, and is for a small town:-D so this is a tiny instance, with virtually no actual communities).
Most of these activities, from what I can see, are done by one person, these days at least - Blaze - but like, what if they ever get sick, or lose their job, or get hit by a bus, will all such things on the Fediverse cease functioning in such a horrible scenario? I did see a post asking if people would like a bot that would do this… but even once this particular issue is solved, by a bot, it still will only be a solution for a subset of the issue. e.g. what if someone spins up a fake community, calls it “Kamala Harris rules”, waits for a month and then fills it with child pornography? This sounds like a joke, but people do these kind of things, on purpose, and laugh and laugh about it. But I am not joking when I say that full-on, actual federal fucking agencies - of far more than merely one nation - will find it no laughing matter.
The whole concept of “federation” is exciting… but not terribly polished as of yet. The Lemmy UI comes the closest, having the bulk of the development efforts so far put into it, yet even here it is telling that something as foundational as choosing the dropdown menu for community links results in a URL that takes you away from your instance, when the aforementioned post explaining the URLs makes it look naively to me like a 30s change would have fixed it? (but maybe I’m missing something, if e.g. changing “example.com/c/community” to “/c/[email protected]” would indeed fix it, as it says). Notably in relation to the devs prioritization incentives: if you are a member of lemmy.ml and click a community that is also on lemmy.ml, then you are not affected. Everyone else… can wait until the developers decide to get around to it, one day. Maybe they already have even, and it simply hasn’t made its way around to the rest of the Fediverse yet. But even if so, that still points to how these very foundational matters, about “whether communities show up on your instance or not”, and “sharing a community link” have been broken, all this time. And again, sharing links to individual posts and comments likewise does not work - this time there is no dropdown, there just simply is no possible way for it to work (afaik, and confirmed by e.g. Blaze), without UI changes in the code.
People coming from single-instance platforms - Reddit, Facebook, X/Twitter, etc. - do not expect to see this level of complexity. This is not “intuitive” that you see a URL in your browser, yet when you try to share it to someone else, it does not work as they expect. Mind you, that is understandable - Lemmy’s version is 0.19, notably very far aways from 1.0 - I am just saying that realistically, we have a ways to go for things like that to happen.
really at any time you can do something and click the “Preview” button to see how it will render before you send it to someone else (I do this anytime I have even the slightest encoding - it really helps to spot e.g. a backwards parenthesis that would have displayed a link rather than the link text:-). Ofc clicking it would destroy your message, so make sure to select open in a new tab, to test how it would work:-).
How does clicking “preview” destroy your message? I use it regularly, and never encountered this
Basically: yes the dropdown menu appears, just as for usernames, but if you choose the item from the dropdown that you see, the Lemmy UI will do the wrong thing. My first link was made using the dropdown, while my second ignored the dropdown and just used the exclamation mark. Notice how my first link takes you to an entirely different instance? But the second link goes to the version of that community while keeping you on your same instance.
Jumping in, but I’m very curious about this. I’ve never seen the dropdown menu not create “[email protected]” links.
I am now taking my discussion.online alt to see, and with [email protected], created from the dropdown, the link works as expected.
How do you manage to get harcoded links from the dropdown?
My first link used the dropdown menu. Fwiw, discuss.online says it is using “BE: 0.19.3”. So if I type e.g. exclamation-mark then start typing “newtolemmy…” it will fill in to
[[email protected]](https://lemmy.ca/c/newtolemmy), and then iirc someone told me to remove the exclamation mark and… omg, it looks like *I* am the one messing these up!? Removing the exclamation mark results in [email protected], which takes me away from my instance, but leaving it in allows it to work properly.Regardless, that is still NOT intuitive, like AT ALL, b/c the URL makes it visually look like clicking it should go to “https://lemmy.ca/c/newtolemmy”, so what difference should the click-here text make - whether I call it “I am the very model of a major general” or
!newtolemmy@lemmy.ca, the URL is what governs where a link goes, literally everywhere I’ve ever seen in the entire internet? (and the[whatever text here](URL goes here)format definitely presents itself as a “link”, not “code that will change the URL endpoint later”)Even so, it seems I have been spreading a bit of misinformation, and I apologize for that.
Most especially for this reason and for so many others, I appreciate you so much, for taking the time to think about and correct me on this score - that is so very helpful, THANK YOU!!!
a bunch of programming linuxites lying that their stuff is totally intuitive
This is my least favorite part of the fediverse. I’m pretty tech savvy, and the jump to Mastodon when Elon took over and Lemmy when apps stopped working wasn’t easy. Having to pick an instance to sign up with was a huge roadblock for me.
Mastodon discovery seems harder to achieve than Lemmy, probably because there are only a few Lemmy instances with active communities, so as long as your instance is federated and there are enough users to have subscribed to most of the communities, you’re good.
On Mastodon I always felt like the number of different instances and different people posting (each being their own mini community) made it harder to assess whether you were actually seeing everything
Although part of the difficulty is that if you’re coming from a centralised place like Reddit, Fediverse takes a bit to wrap your head around. Lemmy had a whole issue going for a while, where people logically flocked to the largest instance that they could find, possibly out of the misunderstanding that you had to pick and choose an instance.
To other websites.
Like where we are right now.The experience from Brazil suggests that the viable ‘post-twitter’ is BlueSky. So one corporate-controlled platform that starts out okay and gets steadily worse is replaced by another, and the cycle continues.
I don’t think there is a viable ‘post-reddit’ unfortunately , because they built up their userbase at a time when people would actually want to use a link aggregator, before the experience of clicking any external links became fraught and exhausting. So now reddit has the userbase, and they have the means to host images and videos internally, and none of the bots or the lack of API or the general weirdness of the place is enough to get people to leave. Potential competitors assume that they should offer an alternative link aggregator, whereas really the only competitor is something that could magically offer a comparable userbase size.
Bluesky had the first wave of noticable spam accounts follow me this week. It’s going to be interesting to see how quickly they can quell that.
It depends on how optimistic, I feel:
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Very - Digg died and Reddit rose, MySpace died and Facebook rose. “For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die.” Reddit and Twitter are enshittifying rapidly and we are here for when people wake up.
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Not very - Big Social Media has reached critical mass/achieved escape velocity and they’ve hoarded all the “fuel” (people) that got them there. Other places aren’t going to take off like they did without hitting some unknowable level of active users and so growth is slow (if there is any growth) which creates a Catch 22 situation. It is easy to see this as all doom and gloom but the Fediverse is growing and may well wander across the threshold in which a positive feedback loop of growth starts happening at which point it seems like a viable alternative to the masses and they leave in droves putting the old places into a death spiral.
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Not at all - most people just don’t give a fuck how the sausage is made as long as they get enough attention and have no incentive to leave. Elon Musk good live stream himself barbecuing puppies and enough people would be able to shrug it off because they don’t want to lose their few thousand followers and all the little dopamine rushes that Big Social has trained us to rely on.
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The Internet does not care is the bottom line. Both are still large platforms. Should they stop existing in the distant future, nothing really will happen, people find new ways to waste their time or find 1:1 copies of what they miss.
Outside I hope.
IRC, duh!
Something yet worse.
Probably will be decided by Gen Alpha. Once interest rates come down maybe Skibidi Toilet will start a social network and that will get lots of quick attention followed by VC funding and eventually we’ll all be yes-yessing each other’s dum dums.
fr fr no cap skibidi rizz yolo fam, strenk whoie.
One of those words I just made up btw… but only one. Though it happened to already exist, meaning “fruit or seed of leguminous plants” fwiw.
-
Also, I lied - I made up the last two:-).
We all came here. If Reddit and Twitter just deleted themselves, everyone that currently uses them might also come here. Or quit the Internet. 🤷🏻♂️
Right now Discord, Slack, and other chat platforms seem to be becoming dominant. But now everything is not only locked away from the open web, but also ephemeral.
Mastodon seems to be doing pretty well and continuing to grow. Lemmy seems to have been stagnant for many months now though. I guess we’re waiting on Reddit to piss their users off about something again before we’ll see another surge here.
we’re waiting on Reddit to piss their users off about something
Except that’s already happened, multiple times - stuff has happened with mods, with bots, with server outages, with stock pricing, and more. I’ve seen a couple new people but server stats for Lemmy report roughly the same, and remember people will leave here too, as e.g. hopes do not materialize, and as political season in the west approaches a peak and people need a break, but apparently don’t want to block, etc.
We may not even have enough people here for sustainability, much less growth. Plus I for one keep user blocking gigantic whole entire instances, which is a further limiter of content for anyone who does likewise.
So there are some major challenges facing the Fediverse, and I am no longer so hopeful for it as I was, seeing the evidence that we aren’t really doing all that much to face those and attract additional users who may post high-quality content. On the other hand, seeing things like Mbin, Piefed, and Sublinks that will show content across multiple streams is highly encouraging, if we can see content from both Lemmy and Mastodon that way.
There’s no shortage of cess pools
Hopefully people will start going back to independent forums. Google just added a “forums” tab at the top of their search, so they seem to want that too. It’s not good for them that so much information is private on chat programs like Discord, other big social media sites, and concentrated on Reddit.
Lemmy never shows up in search results for me despite some instances having good domain authority, but more people should start using it when it starts showing up.
