What the title says. I think there is still a long way for that to happen but i’ve been hopeful. What do you think?
It’s possible. I think the biggest obstacle is that the corporations feeding on people’s data are not going to just stand by while it happens.
Another big obstacle is the general UX of these platforms. Major companies have teams of user experience analysis and researchers that, while not always “winning” as compared to product or business driven decisions, absolutely have a (generally positive) impact on the product. Onboarding, retention, etc.
The fediverse has all the standard frictions of most OSS, like talking about itself, it’s technology, etc when the fact is 99% of users dgaf.
I might go so far as to argue the perceived complexity is a bigger barrier than the risk of sabotage from other businesses. I am optimistic the growing list of third party apps will help solve some of these issues, as long as they take things like the sign up process and server selection into their scope.
I don’t think UX will be that big of a problem, in the past the unofficial reddit apps were all better than the official one. Major companies design by committee and the UX is meant too maximize profit and engagement statistics for advertising, rather than be “good”. A lot of open source UIs are better than their paid counterparts. I think PopOS is far nicer than windows 11.
Nah, most open source UIs are really pretty bad. Most devs are horrendous designers.
Your comment about profitability is true when it comes to social media companies specifically but definitely not true for the industry as a whole. UX is a huge selling point for enterprise software and the goal there isn’t to drive clicks or views, because that’s not how those companies make money.
UX won’t be a problem as long as the maintainers are open to feedback and not stubborn about their current approach. And even if they are, an alternate front end could be introduced separate from the default one.
That and the servers are under such stress that it makes for a stuttery beginning for any new usrrs. Even just trying to upvote you and comment was a process. First this page wouldn’t load properly, then then the upvote didn’t show, then the screen jumped around when I tried to reply.
This site and any other will only replace Reddit etc if it’s got people. It only gets people if new users can use the platform. We’re not quite there yet. The people here now are willing to put up with growing pains but if it doesn’t improve soon people will move on
The problem is that everyone has consolidated on one gargantuan server. The whole point of the fediverse is to spread out so no one server is carrying the entire load. I’m currently using lemm.ee and have experienced none of the issues being discussed here.
But yes, I agree that it could be a potential turn off for newcomers.
At the time of this writing, I have accounts on two servers. One on the big server, and one on a tiny server.
Obviously, the gargantuan server’s biggest issue is performance. That will probably improve with time, but with its size comes some noticeable benefits, which I will touch on shortly.
The tiny server, which I actually joined first, is blazing fast, but I’ve run into constant issues trying to find communities and posts that the bigger server can find no problem. Initiating a federation request is not intuitive at all, and your average user is going to wonder why the hell so much stuff isn’t showing up when they click All on a smaller server.
I tried manually copying my subscription list from the gargantuan server to the tiny one. It was quite a chore, even though it got better in 0.18. Most of the communities returned a “not found” error. Having to retry a search several times or manually input the URL and reload the page several times until the server can find the community on the remote server is not something the average user is going to want to deal with, so they’ll end up on the huge servers that already know about the communities on the other large servers, if they don’t give up.
Hopefully this gets better, but that’s my best guess as to why everybody ended up on the gargantuan servers.
Spreading out would help the performance of the servers but would still expose inefficiencies in the backend systems that they use to talk to each other. The page might load, but the content will be all kinds of fucked.
It’s a huge turn off. And federation itself adds to the problem when the servers don’t match up properly.
Create an account off of lemmy.world and see if you have the same issues. A smaller instance can handle things easier. It have 2 but use the one that was most up-to-date and responsive.
See that’s part of the problem. You shouldnt need to have to create a bunch of accounts just to use a site. People aren’t going to stick around to find time their social media. They want it to just work.
I don’t disagree that it’s a weakness. But that just is how it is for now. I’d guess that it will settle down to a few dozen “strong” instances that are all federated together, with hundreds more smaller instances available, but right now there are like 5 super-packed instances (lemmy.world, sh.itjust.works, kbin.social, etc) which are getting killed with a double-whammy: all the users and all the communities are on them.
We’re still very early on. It’s not going to be a digg to Reddit style thing. But Reddit will keep making bad decisions and people will trickle over here over time and with each influx, things will have improved. I’ve been here a couple weeks and it seems like every day it gets better.
Also, the technical barriers aren’t as scary to people make it out to be. Yeah we won’t get all the boomers, which is very sad. But I’ve got some very tech illiterate friends who have started using memmy with no problems.
And do we even want to get as big as Reddit? Reddit was great 15 years ago. Then teenagers got smart phones and the olds spread out past Facebook and it’s been on decline ever since. I’d be perfectly happy if it got to like 20% the size of Reddit. Maybe not even that big.
Yeah we won’t get all the boomers, which is very sad.
I hope boomer is a state of mind, because otherwise you might be disappointed to learn how old some of us are.
I fundamentally disagree with the idea we will see a continuous trickle of users here as reddit makes more bad decisions. It will be waves, not a constant trickle. And each decision after the API changes will be incrementally smaller, driving fewer users away.
Right now we will also have a retention problem. People came here as an alternative to reddit, a d if the site is too slow, too hard to use because it is slow, then they won’t stay. Theyll fall back into old habits and go back to reddit, because it’s easier and familiar.
Edit: case and point: I’m using Jerboa. I just posted this comment, but when I did it took about 30 seconds, then I got a network error, and it didn’t seem to post but it had, in fact, posted. This is pretty normal on this app right now. I understand stuff like this will get ironed out, but for new users who aren’t fully committed it’s a BIG turnoff.
I’ve only been on lemmy.one and I’m reading through this thread thinking what technical problems? Seriously people need to try a different instance because apparently they run much better.
I’m testing out Mlem on iOS and so far it is a much cleaner experience than even the desktop version of Lemmy’s webapp. Lots of nice QoL features.
Yeah, the apps have been spotty for me, but at least the layout is cleaner.
Not a good sign when you need an app to properly use your website though.
We’ve been using reddit for years…
And? I don’t remember Reddit being difficult to use when I signed up a decade ago
I imagine reddit felt little different than this at launch in 2005. New services are never going to be perfect from the start and it’s obvious there is a community of devoted devs working on this project.
Why are you even here?
The mobile site for Lemmy is at least usable, without a huge banner telling you to download the app. That’s more than I can say for Reddit.
As long as people don’t sign up to lemmy.world for a while we should be fine
Decentralized nature of Lemmy is also going to be confusing for the average Joe. When they to go to web site of Lemmy and see a list of instances to choose from, with communities spread all over them they are just going to nope out.
yeah, lemmy’s current web app is very much in the “made for nerds by nerds” category as far as i see. lots of cool tools to express yourself and not many useless limitations, but on the other hand it’s kinda confusing if you’re not that techy. it’s absolutely learnable but it would do very poorly on a hallway usability test.
and it’s understandable why that is so, lemmy itself is being developed by two people who have their hands full putting out a thousand other fires, as well as sorting through the community’s contributions. but there’s still a lot that will have to improve in the future – although I’m completely sure that when it does, it will be way better than what a corporate alternative would be like. those tend to do well with attracting new users but they also tend to be out of touch and suffer from stupid one-off decisions by middle managers trying to get promoted.
If only those expert researchers were more focused on a great user experience instead of dark patterns to sell more ad eyeballs. There’s definitely good expertise to crowdsource, give it time.
Even a healthy competitor, niche, or mainstream would be so nice. Lemmy already hits with some solid weight imo.
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And do what? Make a better product? The beauty of Capitalism is that consumers really are the final say on whether your product succeeds. You can make an app with as many addictive hooks as possible, but that doesn’t make those users permanent. And any sabbotage by Reddit will only dig in our heels at this point.
If the fediverse starts gaining traction, you can bet the mega-corps will use every dirty trick they have to co-opt it or, if that fails, undermine it.
Threads is already expected to be that answer. Mindless instagram folks won’t have a clue.
Threads is only slealing twitter’s user space, which i can totally get behind. Fuck elon musk. Even if it benefits the lizardman.
Yeah I mean I HATE Facebook…. But I hate what musk did to Twitter and crypto more…
Threads is already expected to be that answer. Mindless instagram folks won’t have a clue.
I hear what you’re saying, but Lemmy was created to oppose the capitalist exploitation cycle. With Lemmy, we aren’t consumers or a product. Lemmy is actually firmly rooted in anti-capitalism and arose because capitalism destroys choice.
Capitalism isn’t necessary for innovation. It is just the private ownership of things. Spez didn’t make Reddit great, for example. Other people did. Spez is just a do-nothing owner who is now the mouth piece for bigger do-nothing owners looking to wring out maximum profit from unpaid laborers.
I’d argue that capitalism stifles innovation, which is why everyone agrees that you need competition. A market economy. And broad anti-trust regulations, since capitalism is inherently authoritarian since it is a top-down hierarchical structure. A free-ish market is what allowed us to innovate so quickly.
But Lemmy is outside of that since it isn’t driven by profit.
People use “capitalism” in different ways. The person you responded to probably meant it as “free marked system”, which Lemmy absolutely fits into. Often “capitalism” is used to mean “profit seeking system”, which Lemmy doesn’t fit into.
Both of these uses are common.
Capitalism provides an incentive to make money. It allows you to buy things or donthings. However sometimes the thing we want to do is socialise. So people code to make that happen. People run instances to make that happen. The incentive is community instead of money.
Capitalism still provides incentive for innovation. So does our need for interaction. I’m hoping that the decentralised nature and federisariinnmakeanthay possible for other projects. We could all start having our own foss servers in our homes that hold our photos, our social media, email and news. With no ads and no snooping. This could be the next phase of our internet connected lives.
I don’t think you need to have the largest following to have great value, even lemmy as it is right now feels great. I’ll actually want to dive into comment sections compared to the endless scrolling on reddit.
As long as there’s enough people using a platform for a variety of ideas and experience in topics, I think that’s good enough for me.
Personally, I don’t even want Lemmy/kbin to become Reddit 2.0.
Reddit from 10 years ago is the goal for me. Reddit has become far, far too bloated for its own good, and that line was crossed a long time ago IMO. Let’s just enjoy what we have. Let all the normies stay on Reddit, the people I wanna vibe with are here already.
The problem is that nitch communities won’t get populated unless a lot of people join. The league of legends sub is the largest video game sub on Reddit, and here it’s barely active at all.
I want it to be Reddit 2.0 in the sense that I can find active communities for specific or niche interests. Before July 1, the smallest subs that I participated in to have similar communities here were ones that had ~400k subscribers on Reddit.
The value of Reddit was never in the 1M+ communities, any content there was usually present elsewhere, and the discussions rapidly became dumpster fires. It was in the smaller dedicated subs for topics that might not have another human-centric discussion forum.
As a normie, I’d still like to vibe with you.
I agree. A vast majority of the userbase don’t mind the countless ads on Reddit or Twitter, on even FB. I think people are leaving FB because it’s not cool anymore, not because the UE has gotten worse.
I’m just glad that there now are smaller, more tailored for my preferences alternatives like Lemmy
I think you meant
UXasUser eXperience.
Big true! I’m actually spending most of my time on Lemmy down in the comment section 😁
Yes I think about Hacker News, which isn’t technically sophisticated nor does it have a massive userbase (a little less than 1 million registered accounts).
It manages to have a steady stream of content and an active commenting base
A big part of it is probably having full time paid moderators to manage their community well.
Not everyone who left Digg went to reddit, and not everyone who left Myspace went to Facebook. “Replacing” reddit should never be the goal, it should be “be better than reddit”.
If this is ever to go mainstream, what we should be concerned about is making good, high quality original content. If people see us having fun and being nice here, they’ll want to join in too.
+1 for doing your part to build a nice community!
Quick plug for my own communities:
- [email protected] for my take on ELI5
- [email protected] for my take on nosleep
now why did you pop off with nowlemmyexplain. the creativity jumped out with the name
Great point about the high-quality original content. I remember before Reddit was popular, that’s where much of the original content was generated, and it would eventually be reposted on Digg. Reddit had the reputation of being tomorrow’s Digg homepage today.
Likewise, I think the way we know we’ve made it is when the reddit reposts here stop, and Lemmy posts are reposted on reddit instead.
Right, I don’t want forwards from Reddit, I want our own ecosystem.
In their current state, definitely not. There is a real bubble effect browsing on Lemmy because it feels like 1 post out of 3 is just praising the platform, but I think they’re far from ready to become mainstream. I’d say there are for now 2 major problems:
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The global instability (a lot of bugs, many third party apps, but a poor on-boarding with the main website).
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It was made by engineers and marketed by engineers. The federated aspect should IMO be public and known, but seamless. It should be possible to just create an account and start browsing without having to do some research on how the thing works. The technical aspect of the fediverse is great, but it’s also its main drawback, I believe that hiding it for newcomers could be a way of not scaring them.
I agree about the bubble effect. I feel it, too, even though I don’t consider myself in a bubble. I truly am enjoying Lemmy and the conversations more than anything else even somewhat similar to it. The smallish nature of the community probably combined with the slightly elevated bar for joining means the riff raff isn’t here in large numbers yet.
Lemmy, today, honestly reminds me of Reddit 15 years ago.
Perhaps this is the bubble effect, but I have a high confidence level in the major third party devs being able to streamline the sign up process. It is already happening in some apps.
The stability problems are another story. I encourage people to go to the front page of their respective communities and look for donation links. Even $1/mo on Patreon can snowball into large sums as Lemmy.World shows.
Stability would be fixed if people realized they don’t have to all join the biggest two communities, which is part of the education problem we have right now for completely new users.
Although servers have really been scaling nicely regardless of those days right after the privating and then July 1st
I agree, but I’m also optimistic because the glitchiness, server performance, and user interface issues are all things that can be fixed in the future.
I feel like there should be a button of “hey you want me to handle this for you and pick an instance” I managed to figure out the basics and liked the post office example that memmy uses where I can mail a letter to my fellow lemm.ee friends down the street but can also get mail and news from across the country. Helpful admins are also good. I’m not super duper tech literate but I figured it out.
Like I said reducing barriers to entry will be helpful because I didn’t come here till Apollo kicked the bucket
It’s something reddit was actually good at. Tons of people used to find reddit way too confusing because they didn’t understand subreddits, so reddit responded by making a list of default subs for the “don’t know don’t care” crowd that makes up 90% of users in practice.
Sure, it opened a different can of worms in that it tanked the quality of those subs when most users didn’t really get the pount of subs, but it massively lowered the barrier to entry on the platform.
We have a much higher barrier to entry with instances, and I really think something should be put in place to lower it.
Agreed with the second part. I think the federated servers are a neat concept, but at the end of the day what made reddit easier was that everything was on one server. You create an account and that’s it, you can browse every subreddit.
I hope it’ll grow more, but rnow I think they should work on making the whole experience more seamless
Just my opinion but that ease of use will come in time. The more the learning curve exists the more we will get the power users that made Reddit special and the more Lemmy will stay special.
I don’t want the Reddit of today on Lemmy. I want the Reddit 10 years ago when there was a fraction of the users on it.
We are doomed to ultimately have the same struggles that read it ended up with in terms of content and users but we can keep it held off as long as possible.
I disagree with you, yes, ease of use will come for power users, but in the end it’s the diversity of people interacting with the platform that creates communities with valuable content. And to attract more people the platform needs less friction at on-boarding.
Where we disagree is that I believe the level of knowledge needed to form that community is higher than you’re giving credit but time will tell! ;)
Yep, we’ll see!
Mastodon is pretty good with federation stuff. All that is different from Twitter is that all accounts have two @ signs in their names but that’s it. Everything else is pretty seamless, at least on the phone with the official mobile app
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Replace? No. Be a valiable second option? Sure. Like in the early 2000 when you had dozens of major forums for certain topics. Something Awful, GameFAQs, Digg, Slashdot, 4chan, NeoGAF… It‘s not a natural law that there has to be one service having 95 % of the discussion market locked up.
Yes! Very much this. Imagine if lemmy would grow to just a few million users. That’s the size of Digg when the migration to Reddit happened! Not everything needs to have a billion users and there’s more engagement in small communities anyway.
Yeah. This makes me think of people who assume Tumblr is dead and unusable when everyone left, whereas in reality it has had a resurgence of creativity instead. Things like Goncharov happen because the people there still have a critical mass.
Platform don’t die. They can flounder a bit, and I’m sure that even Reddit and Lemmy will one day do so too. But they’re there.
Yes, but not in the way you’d think.
I think lemmy won’t be easy enough to use for a vast majority of users, they’ll stick to the traditional platforms.
However, I think if the hype continues for a while, and the little kinks are ironed out soon enough, it will give rise to a new, different kind of platform.
People have this idea that lemmy will replace reddit and just become Reddit 2.0. I think lemmy is still a place similar to a phoenix burning. The new bird has yet to take it’s first breath, and it’ll be quiet different from what we imagine or what we are used to today
@utg @nostupidquestions that’s a great way to put it. We are just starting to see what this new social media fediverse will look lol. It’s exciting!
So this is how it looks from mastodon? That’s pretty rad
There’s still a long journey to go through for lemmy so I’m not expecting it to be popular among people for the next 3 years. But as more and more corporate showing their stupid mindset and lash out more shenanigans, it’s not unreasonable to be optimistic that people finally find and enjoy the value of the fediverse.
Yes give me the flaming bird people. It’s on my 202X bingo card
Loving the random pheonix analogy
Being on the internet used to be not cool.
Email and www. … .com was as foreign to the mainstream as the Fediverse is to the mainstream today.
The nerds build cool shit, the corporations chase the hot new thing to milk every last dollar out of the mainstream who want the cool new toys, and the mainstream inevitably ruins the cool new toy because they don’t understand how or why it was made in the first place.
This is the way of human nature. It has played out on the internet since the start (and probably well before that) and it will probably play out again on the fefiverse (just look at Meta).
Absolutely not in their current formats.
Sign up needs to be simplified enough that your gran could do it and we need way more professional UIs. After those two things, it could happen.
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As long as you all stay here, I’m happy.
Why do they need to be replaced? Just use lemmy/mastodon and forget Reddit even exists. Not sure why people are so hung up on “replacement” when all you need to worry about is enjoying the content and interacting. Fuck Reddit and twitter, comparison is the thief of joy.
Yeah hopefully we get past the shitpost/meme stage which seems to be taking over here right now.
What got replaced already was the oligopoly on user-created content. That’s all that matters.
I use Reddit for duckduckgo searches (if they lead me there) and to look for info. I interact and post to Lemmy.
I sure as hell hope not.
To me, that’s like looking around a great little cafe with terrific food and saying, “Do you think this could ever become McDonalds?”
Why would I want that?
Lemmy has a long way to go in terms of user experience before it can effectively compete with Reddit. The majority of new accounts in the last weeks have been spite users. That is, they’re here not because they love Lemmy - but because they hate Reddit.
That’s not a bad thing, per say. It doesn’t matter how people get here. It’s more important that they have a good reason to stay.
And the average user doesn’t care if something is federated or centralized. They just want a product that works and is simple to grasp. In my opinion, app developers are going to be the gamechanger Lemmy needs Stuff like Memmy (on the iOS app store today!), Mlem, Liftoff, Thunder are pretty much better than the official Reddit app. And that’s how most people consume content these days. When there’s no enshitification ads or microtransactions - there’s clearly going to be a winning experience.
It’ll take time, but as more Federation communities build - the less Reddit is necessary. As well, it usually takes a long time before people start catching on that the tools they once loved have turned to into bots and spam.
Mastodon is in it’s 7th year, and has like 8 million active users. Twitter had 200 million users by it’s 7th year. On one hand, Mastodon is the biggest Federation app. On the other, Twitter was 25x as large. Of course, Twitter is no longer the relevant “town hall” it once was - and is hemorrhaging users and respect. So who knows. It only takes a few celebrity endorsements to get countless folks switching. Who knows
It doesn’t need to become mainstream. I’ll be happy to be a part of a smaller but vibrant engaged community. I hope there will be a phone app some day through
We are so used to the idea that a social media network has to dominate the world - ekse it’s a failure. If Lemmy, Mastodon, Pixelfed or your old fishing forum is enjoyed by some people, it’s a success.
It’s a capitalist habit. People are so used to every company having to maximize profits that they forget this is just a space to share and talk about stuff, not an entity aiming to make a profit.
This needs to be instilled into everyone’s brain. If the site grows a community it’s a success.
If anything having it not turn into the behemoth that Reddit is might make the community even better.
