I’m personally crossing my fingers for Discord.
I honestly don’t think the fediverse will become nearly as popular as many seem to.think. It’s still complicated to use/understand for many non-tech enthusiasts, and in the case of Reddit, while people are angry, I doubt most of their users are going anywhere any time soon. Some will leave, but it’s not going to be a small number.
We keep going on about how Reddit relies on it’s “creators”, without whom they’ll die. Frankly, a lot of the highest rated content is just repost of old videos or tiktok videos. A lot of that stuff isn’t original, and the deep conversations are, in my opinion, few and far between. Sure there are some communities whi h have this, but they’re not exactly over represented.
I don’t have statistics to back this up, but I’d be willing to bet an entire doughnut that most reddit users have never posted even a single comment. People with that level (dis)engagement aren’t the type to seek out alternatives. They just kind of drift away.
Matrix, what seems to be the most ovious replacement to Discord, is an incredible piece of software from a technical point of view. It have Conflict-free Replicated Datatype, which give an hard guarantee that no message will be skipped over and old message will also be fetched. Something that ActivityPub doesn’t permit, and is quite a problem with Mastodon at times (much less on lemmy, given you follow communities, and so everything on these communities will be synced, thought not backfilling)
I still like IRC and I’m surprised that it got almost completely murdered by Discord.
There isn’t much left.
First Facebook with their whole meta thing, then Imgur deleting all NSFW content and images uploaded by non-registered members, afterwards Twitter and now Reddit.
Twitch made a big mistake with their new sponsoring rules, but seems like they are reverting / changing it again due to bad community feedback.
Discord had a few changes the community didn’t like, but nothing ground breaking yet. But they get more and more greedy and their platform is filled with scams, hackers, bots and sadly many bad people like child predators and content which Discord support does nothing against. They seem not to care.
YouTube, well, I think they might be next actually. More and longer unskipable ads, restricting or demonetizing many videos, bad communication with their creators and less rewards for smaller creators. In addition, they might put high quality resolutions behind their already existing expensive subscription paywall. There isn’t any competition which is urgently needed.
UPDATE: Bad news about YouTube continues. Just now, YouTube Ordered ‘Invidious’ Privacy Software to Shut Down in 7 Days.
Which other big social media platforms are left?
The problem with anything video is still that it costs way too much to host, unless you’re a giant who already has their own data centers and massive data pipes. You can’t just throw it on a cheap VPS like text-based services
Are you thinking of it as a centralized replacement to YouTube? If you’re centralized, yeah, you probably need a data centre the size of Malta. There are decentralized alternatives (like PeerTube) where the cost is also distributed. If you’re using PeerTube, you literally can “just throw it on a cheap VPS”, and lots of people do, with no problems.
I think the real reason decentralized video isn’t going to catch on is because video (and YouTube in particular) has not been a community thing for many years now. There are very few YouTubers who make videos to build a community or connect to a community. YouTubers are on there for money, and there’s really no alternative that can both host the videos and pay out big cheques to content creators.
@duncesplayed @kalleboo tbh most of YTs I know either run sponsor ads, or have Patreon/paid for community. It is already slowly moving away from ads system in YT, which simply does not work.
The day I don’t see “join our Discord” where I would earlier expect to find “visit our forums” will be a good day.
A bloated live chat monolith is not what I want to use to discuss game bugs or podcast episodes.
Revolt seems to be to Discord what Lemmy/Kbin are to reddit, but I dont see most people bothering with it unless discord makes some reeaaallly huge mistakes to piss the community off.
Agreed. Live chat has its place for certain things, but for other things a forum type interface is better suited.
Well, I don’t think it will STB, but YouTube needs a FOSS equivalent that has the same capabilities sans ads. But, that’s $$$$ infrastructure so I don’t know if that will ever come.
BUT, I really hope that by the time Discord pisses off its users, that matrix or another federated equivalent will have figured out the UI/UX to capture a large chunk of those users. I used to live in IRC, but discord finally killed it. And I hate using proprietary software for so much chat.
What about YouTube?
I looked online and there seems to be PeerTube at least.
I would love for something to replace YouTube, especially something in the Fediverse, but video unfortunately has much higher storage and bandwidth requirements, so it’s hard to imagine that not being totally cost prohibitive at high levels of traffic, even if it’s split across so many different servers. I’d love to be wrong on that, though.
Discord is doing a lot of stupid things lately i must say
God I hope so. Discord works fine as a voice chat and groupchat for games. But it’s insane to me that people use it as a replacement for message boards or websites and hosting files. It isnt indexed so you cant google it and a groupchat is a terrible format for this. Even as reddit dies you have some people acting like a glorified group chat is a good alternative. As an addition and supplement to a message board or website community sure this is how it’s always been even in the old days there were boards with an active IRC chat. As the replacement? Awful.
Teamspeak has a pretty slick new version that looks very much like discord. Not fediverse but pretty easy to self-host.
Discord is a likely contender, but I think it’s likely to be Instagram. It’s got a very dissatisfied userbase, and there’s already a few reasonably active pixelfed servers
I just hope this is the start of an internet renaissance with less corporate control.
It’ll be hard to get people to not only detach from something they’re accustomed to, but also then attach to something unfamiliar.
I tried and am trying again with Mastodon, but a lack of users I wish to follow, a more confusing premise at times, and just overall more enjoyment overall (if that) with twitter as a platform makes it a challenge.
Lemmy however has checked all the boxes. It literally feels exactly like Reddit, and honestly like a fresh start to avoid the various decisions both Reddit admins and the community itself made along the way. I’m hoping more for the latter experience than forming when diving into the fediverse, but my above statement is most likely applicable for a wide sample of people out there.
I’ve been having trouble getting going with Mastodon. But I’ve also had issues with Twitter as well. Lemmys been great so far.
I hear that YouTube and Twitch are in the process of enshittifying, so probably them. Would also like to see Discord get replaced by something like Matrix, but I think the UX isn’t ready for that yet. On the plus side, the Matrix protocol supports bridging to other chat platforms, so that’s cool.
Matrix’s client UX is improving a lot, there is the Cinny client that mirrors Discord’s layout perfectly. The issue with Matrix is its protocol, which faces scaling issues because each instance joining the network is supposed to replicate the entire Matrix network, which will make it difficult for small hobbyists to add instances without crumbling under the load when the network gets too big. There is another Discord-like alternative, Revolt which is self-hostable and uses its own protocol but doesn’t have federation yet.
This is not true. Data will only be sent to your homeserver if a user on your homeserver joins a room on another server. And only the data for that room is sent, not the whole network. The room data only contains all state changes, and a small amount of recent messages. The amount of state changes is the biggest problem.
Matrix protocol does have a giant problem regarding spam joins though, which make a complete instance basically unusable. Last time I talked with people related to the protocol they didn’t want to or know how to fix it, because the need to verify all room state changes.
Thanks for the information. I set up a Matrix instance with a friend before and noticed it had significantly more resource usage than expected of a little chat client, then someone else explained that Matrix was trying to discover all of the other nodes on the network so I assumed it was true. What causes so many state changes to be generated?
There’s a page explaining it in more detail, but basically, all servers need to verify the complete chain of state events in order to trust data and messages about the room. This is because otherwise malicious servers could make bogus state events and messages that are not valid, like scam messages and unauthorized room setting changes.
In matrix, when you create a new room, or edit room settings, a state event is made. The same is true for changes in user permissions like who is admin, and for settings related to who can join the room.
The last one is key, because this means that in order for servers to trust other servers’ messages, they need to verify if the user that sent the message joined the room in a legit way.
In order to do this, when a user joins a room it must cause a state event. However, this makes it easy for people to abuse, by joining a room with a ton of accounts, it spams state events to all connected servers, which bogs them all down because they are required to process all state events in order for chain of trust to function.
Even for rooms with non-malicious usage, servers can still be bogged down if the room is very big, which might be what happened with you or your friend joining a big public room.
Basically, in my opinion, Matrix cannot be used with public rooms as it stands today.
That sounds a lot like how blockchains work, do you know whether it is the same principle with hashing a state and then simply chaining them?
I don’t really understand what actually takes up bandwidth. Is it the multiple clients querying the matrix server, about previous states, at once?
If you don’t mind me asking
Sorry for the late reply, Beehaw is blocking my phone’s ip cus of vpn.
Basically like blockchain yeah, where the state points to the previous state. I think it’s a combination of having to download all state events for the room (bandwidth), but also your server having to verify each and every event (cpu). It has to do all of this before you can really start using the room.
So if a user on your server joins a big room, it can put strain on the server until it got everything downloaded and verified.
Also, if for some reason (like someone spam joining the room) a lot of state events get generated, your server (and all other servers that connect to the room) have to download and verify each one of those state events.
For me, I only have my own user account on my server, and I only join private rooms. It’s a shame, cus the idea of Matrix is neat, but currently there’s no way to avoid getting DoS-ed if you join public rooms.
