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.
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.
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.
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
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).
Ultimately I see corporations owning all the most popular servers, and attempting to federate with everyone else.
I think the idea of a federation: websites being able to talk to each other, could be mainstream. I don’t think lemmy will be mainstream, but I do think lemmy will be able to talk to mainstream websites on the federation.
What if you could use your lemmy account to buy stuff online, book a flight, pay bills, sign up for streaming services, etc.? The federation isn’t seeing its full potential.
I think this is the answer.
Lemmy and (maybe) Mastodon (I don’t know enough about it) will be the inspiration for something that goes mainstream - but I do think that they’ll be the Myspace to the next big things Facebook - Perfect for people who know how to take advantage of it and it will be a mild success because of it; but someone will come along, streamline and spruce it up and that will be the new standard
It has potential, bu I hope it will not become like those mainstream soc-med…
Fediverse is like a village where each denizen trying to self-sufficent and helping each others while mainstream soc-med is like train station or mall where users just come and go while giving money to its owner for their services…
We may need one or two mainstream soc-med to be alive to keep up with news or to socialize with normies, but we also need a place to retreat like current fediverse.
edit:typoYes I do. What I am looking for is federated/web3 replacements for Instagram, and some kind of well encrypted, decentralized messenger app
Signal is well encrypted and very much respects privacy of data, but I don’t think it’s federated. It can interface with normal texts though iirc
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
I’m hoping it won’t. I’ve had discussions with my friends from the earlier days of the Internet. The Internet was a much nicer place when you didn’t have everyone and their grandma on it. You actually had to be tech literate to use it. This resulted in higher quality interactions and content. You still had undesirable groups and places, but they were sectioned off to their own corner. Now, social media and its algorithms give everyone a soapbox. I’d rather they stay off my fediverse lawn.
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
I don’t really think that Lemmy or Mastodon will really replace their counterparts. At least not for now. As many have already said, the federation system is too complex for many non-technical people. It would take something like a de facto standard app, that abstracts everything federation related away and make it feel like another centralised solution.
Another point for me is the searchability of federated systems. Say you are searching for a technical problem right now, google will surely bring you to a related subreddit in just seconds. I have yet to see a Lemmy related search result.
deleted by creator
I hope not.
Places like Reddit or Twitter become progressively worse as they get more popular.
Besides, Mastodon is not a replacement of Twitter. It has the same UI and look&feel but it’s very different. Twitter is basically a place where internet celebrities post and other people comment and share. Mastodon is more like regular chaps hanging out and exchanging opinions.
That could be different. Lemmy is not corporate owned.
deleted by creator
I think it remains to be seen. The rapid growth of .world has been the first real production test of how the platform handles more users and content. Amazing work by the team, but there are a lot of rough edges and it is a new platform with a lot of unknowns.
The things that spring to mind for me are:
-
Sign up needs to be streamlined and made more simple, and find a way to not overload individual servers without just randomly assigning people to instances.
-
Live defects, bugs and things feeling rough around the edges.
-
Back-end build and scaling.
-
Duplicate communities across instances.
-
Account migration between instances.
-
Data retention past x period - how will various instances handle this with a large number of users.
-
GDPR and data request compliance from individuals, governments, etc.
-
Funding the costs and resources associated with rapid, large growth. How do people know what their money is going to fund? I think there needs to be real transparency, public roadmaps and backlogs and understand how / if admins are accountable.
-
How the platform and users will respond to large corporations or even individual admins on instances adding adverts, using / selling user data in ways the userbase do not expect.
The biggest issue would be data retention. Reddit serves as a real world database that stores all the historical content and search engines like google make it searchable.
We’re talking about petabytes, and lemmy hardly has a few gigabytes.
Who is going to store all this data, even in a distributed environment, the bigger instances would have to store a few hundred terrabytes (per year).
Personally I think its ok for instances to delete older posts to save space provided that there are means to archive threads that users find valuable. For fediverse to thrive it should be as easy as possible for people to setup and manage instances without having to think about the storage space too much.
Archival of historical content is something that I feel should be handled separately.
-
My position differs currently for Mastodon and Lemmy.
In the case of Lemmy, I’m not yet 100% sure. Lemmy’s strength may also prove to be a weakness I feel in terms of it replacing Reddit, in that the decentralised nature naturally creates a dispersion of the audience. While anyone on Reddit could create a community, having them in one place really funnelled people into logically named communities. On the other hand while subscribing to a number of communities for Lemmy, it’s not that infrequent to come across the same or similar community on multiple instances and then needing to work out where you want to go. On one hand it’s probably good to have the varying perspectives and culture this will bring, but I think it’ll also make it hard for users looking for that definitive place to go. It’s very much early days though and perhaps many of those communities will naturally assemble in mass on various instances once the dust settles.
We’ll see how that plays out I guess, and right now my Reddit use is at maybe 10-20% what it was and I’m really looking to invest my time here. I think with time that both Lemmy updates an 3rd party clients will make working across instances more transparent and in turn broaden appeal.
I’m more bullish for Mastodon in the short term. The reason for that is my usage concerns me looking to follow an individual rather than locate a community of individuals. Since people will have one account, there’s less impact caused by decentralisation as my interactions with a person I follow is very much 1:1 (unless for some reason they chose to create and maintain multiple accounts). If I want to follow Apple’s account, they’ll presumably have a single one versus there maybe being 6 viable Apple communities across Lemmy instances. I find my use of Mastodon in terms of user experience is much closer and familiar to Twitter than currently Lemmy is to Reddit. Additionally, once it’s enabled for ActivityPub, I think Meta having Threads throws significant support around that particular ecosystem, and brings it to the masses. Can’t imagine we’ll see a billion dollar company spin up a Reddit alternative that is Activity Pub integrated to give Lemmy that same boost, unfortunately.
To be clear I’m very supportive of both Lemmy and Mastodon and want both to succeed. I do think reddit being centralised has some benefits but, especially for people not looking to invest heavily in browsing across instances, and that it’s to be seen how Lemmy will evolve as it grows and if casual users will be able to sign up and easily find the communities and information they are after. The 1:1 person interaction for Mastodon I think simplifies things and Thread potentially will result in a massive boost for Mastodon. It’s early days for Lemmy and I can’t imagine in Jan or Feb that the majority of us here had even heard of it, let alone considered leaving Reddit. It’ll only continue to grow and I’m excited to watch it do so.
Fuck facebook. Nobody will federate with them except some “dumb fucks”.
The Mastodon developers and operators of mastodon.social seem pretty supportive based on what information they have so far, based on their blog post.
https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2023/07/what-to-know-about-threads/
The tone from that so far is that federation would be in the cards for them, assuming Meta implements ActivityPub properly.
