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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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).
shit, meta has no place in the fediverse. Evil bastards.
100%, and their advertisers don’t either, however do their users have a place in the Fediverse?
Of course, if they can figure out how to get past the sign in spinner buahahahaha
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
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.
Right now? Absolutely not. The platform itself is insanely buggy, normies still can’t wrap their heads around federation, and the big instances are only just beginning to stabilize and take shape.
But long term yes, I’m very bullish, and it’s for this simple fact: this is only the beginning of enshittification. All those r/NBA whiners you saw bitching on Reddit about the protests are gonna have their “leopards ate my face” moment when spez decides to start charging $14.99 a month for the privilege of subscribing to more than three subreddits at a time or some shit.
As many have said, interest rates are high and the gravy train has stopped running. This means the only way these huge platforms with massive server costs are going to survive is by making a profit, and they can’t do that without resorting to Twitter Blue-like subscriptions.
If people want to consoom and shitpost for free, at some point they will have to end up here in the fediverse, where the costs of running such a huge platform can be distributed among a bunch of large and medium-sized instances, which will probably be mainly funded by donations.
I think this is the beginning of a big transition, as big as the one from web 1.0 to 2.0. And ironically it’s gonna look a lot more like the internet of old than the era of massive social media platforms.
I like how in your point of view it appears (please correct me if I’m putting words in your mouth or misrepresenting your position) that the platform getting better would be nice but it’s actually not that relevant compared to the fact that other platforms are getting worse and will likely continue to do so as they prioritize shareholders over users.
It’s like a reverse marathon where you win by not running backwards as fast as everyone else. A leisurely stroll forwards is like moving at super speed.
What makes you so confident users won’t by and large accept the charges and boot from large social media platforms? Debatably piracy and a home media server have a lot of the same pros as Lemmy and the Fediverse. For the most part, however, people tend to cough up the 10-25 dollars for a streaming service. It’s not because of any practical reasons, at least directly. The true decider is cultural and societal attitudes towards the platforms providing a service. People practically don’t pirate because of the learning curve, but realistically don’t pirate because of their preconceived notions surrounding the practice. Maybe they think it’s wrong. Maybe they think it’s too hard. Maybe it just feels like too much work to set up. Maybe the communities feel too insular. Whatever the reason, it’s fundamentally because of some idea or feeling they have surrounding the medium. Who’s to say these big tech companies won’t successfully execute their goal, and push a larger cultural shift to make the idea of subscription social media more appealing to the average user than the idea of a clunky service using ActivityPub. Maybe the narrative of these spaces being too techbro-y gets pushed, and they garner a similar reputation in the public eye that piracy communities have. It could be seen just like streaming services and piracy. The public could be convinced of the value of familiarity and convenience. Has great work been done to fight against this corpo push lately? Absolutely. But don’t look at these “blatant missteps” that places like reddit and twitter have experienced as of late as omens of an imminent downfall of centralized, capitalist social media. Rather, look at it as a warning sign. A warning sign that heralds the first in a long, deliberate line of many who will follow in those footsteps, gradually pushing the Overton Window surrounding these prices towards their goal. Today Reddit and Twitter are the bad guys so that tomorrow Meta and others can make the same moves, with the added benefit of “it’s just not our choice, we must make these changes to remain viable in the current market.” In the eyes of many, not all, but the majority; this is an absolution. They will be able to succeed. They know this, that’s why they’re doing it and it’s happening now. The Fediverse and a free net will not survive unless the battle can be won in the public consciousness. We must overcome the significant hurdles between federated software design and mass adoption. We must take a direct, meaningful, and effective course of action to directly fight against this, it will not passively be won.
EDIT: Typo; missing word “Rather, look at it [as] a warning sign.”
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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.
As long as you all stay here, I’m happy.
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
That is, they’re here not because they love Lemmy - but because they hate Reddit.
Anyone remember the Digg exodus? This was exactly how Reddit got big.
Anyway I do think it’s a little more than just hate, though. I have poked around at Lemmy before but I’m starting to take it more seriously because I actually cannot use Reddit on my phone anymore.
In my opinion we need to make a distinction between social networks and aggregators with forum-like experiences. Reddit is easily replaceable because sharing links is like the easiest thing to do. I started using lemmy and not planning on using reddit again. So far i have abandoned all major social media. Only use whatsapp. The internet is rotten right now, however there are so many amazing things that are not social media that we are yet to discover and for those looking for information not people, the internet still has a lot to open. Social media is a cesspool.
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?
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 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
