I’ve been using Lemmy and learning the ropes of the Fediverse and I’m really impressed - especially using wefwef which has replicated my Apollo experience very well.
There are posts and everything, just a lack of comments to read for hours on end is the only issue I have, but I believe that with more users this really could be the replacement.
Are you guys thinking the same thing? Is there evidence yet that Reddit is slowly failing and power users are migrating?
Lemmy reminds me a lot of the way the internet used to be- smaller, independent communities with more real engagement and less of a content firehose. With so many instances, if you want something, you have to seek it out or start it yourself- with the added benefit of federation keeping everyone connected.
I’m really optimistic that this will get critical mass. I think the concept of federation is great, and I like to think we’re at the forefront of a whole new phase of online community.
It’s giving me strong ~2013 reddit vibes, which I always thought was around the peak of the site to be honest.
I think the community system starts to break down once the platform gets too big. As reddit grew, all of the big r/all subs lost any sort of identity and became the same amorphous community copy/pasted over and over.
The downside is that we don’t have as much niche content yet, but we’ll see how it’s looking in a year or so.
It’s the classic “Eternal September”: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
Plus everything is just a bit broken and requires some figuring out. I’m definitely pretty tech savvy, but I’m having a hard time imagining non tech savvy people figuring out how to sign up and access these communities, at least not in the current state of things.
The hardest thing about lemmy was signing up and figuring out how to access it and log my account into mlem but things are mostly smooth after that sure there are some bugs but i feel like i am learning quickly
The only big disadvantage i see in lemmy other than the sign up process is the lack of a dedicated video player but it’s understandable because they cost too much to maintain and run
I would like to see a connection to PeerTube. I’m not exactly sure how it works but it might work here
Lemmy adoption will help grow federation. Lemmy is fairly easy to conceptualize as an end-user, and aside from the bleeding-edge UI/backend bugs, it is easy to use. Common users are unlikely to prefer federation due to attachment to existing communities in non-federated social media, and the 1-more-step required to properly understand instances to get the most out of Lemmy. If certain Lemmy instances hold the majority of the weight of accounts and communities, it will lead to emergent centralization towards specific instances which isn’t good for federation. Persuading people who are used to centralized design not to immediately register for the largest Lemmy instance will be a long-standing conundrum for spreading out federation.
I’m going to copy my post from elsewhere here:
Not only did we let them monopolize niche knowledge we also let them completely supplant forums and other methods for discussion on the web while letting them slowly poison the quality of discussion overall through the wide spread use of bot manipulation. Imagine an internet with reasonable, easy to access, informative and kind discussion. That is where we will trend without highly corporatized outrage driven content algorithms and it’s not just a completely different internet, but a completely different world.
I don’t know if I’m ready to believe, but I hope decentralization is the next shape of the internet, as it was before.
For years I’ve watched smaller businesses give up on having websites in favor of just a Facebook page, or businesses built entirely on YouTube, Instagram or Facebook, with the very real risk of having the rug arbitrarily pulled out from under then for some dumb reason. It’s totally unsustainable to rely on the whims of these platforms to house your canonical home or as a base for your income stream.
Sure it’s nice to reach a wide audience by publishing to platforms with many users, but companies still need to be in control of their identity, so if some platform goes south, it’s not a catastrophe.
I hope so too. It’s frustrating when I look up a local business while I’m out, find only their Facebook page, and then it asks me to log in just to read it. I can’t/won’t do that. I’ve not been on Facebook for years, I’m not faffing about with that rubbish.
That’s losing money for these small businesses, because I can’t even check their opening hours or if there’s food I can eat. Meanwhile Big Chain Restaurant has everything on their own site. The small companies could be doing so much more, but they need to give up using Facebook as their sole website publishing service.
I know I’m getting off topic here but, that made me think of what’s going on with Etsy right now. A lot of small businesses just have Etsy pages and not their own website. I’ve been hearing from a lot of people that Etsy isn’t paying them or, holding their money for months before releasing funds.
All of that plus this really makes you think about being in control of your own things.
The problem is people will still just use Etsy rather than going direct to the business, even if going direct is significantly cheaper, because it’s easier.
You see it with fast food deliveries as well. People would rather just order through just eat or deliveroo rather than ringing the place up and saving quite a decent amount on their order for both themselves and the local restaurant.
Unfortunately people just want convenience these days.
I am cautiously hopeful that fedi will become significant in a while.
I don’t want to jinx anything but really hope this platform will continue to grow. love the atmosphere right now!
The fediverse is a return to something bigger, not something new. An influx of users will hopefully help things get to where they should be.
Email never went away, but for some reason has been the only federated protocol with real staying power so far.
It’ll come and go like all the rest. AOL, AIM, IRC, message boards, myspace, livejournal, digg, fark, slashdot, reddit, lemmy…???
For the most part I agree with you - the best I can hope for is that the fedi philosophy persists in some way, even if it’s still a little niche. I don’t even expect any of this to become 100% mainstream.
Assuming Lemmy actually takes off as a reddit replacement, it likely will. Most of the time when a new service supplants the old, they take a huge chunk of what made the previous service great and fixes the parts that made it not great. Forums made Usenet groups better, reddit made forums better (fuck forum comment formatting honestly), and Lemmy will hopefully make reddit better!
Other than the lack of an endless archive of content to browse, so far I’ve been loving Lemmy and everything else the entire Fediverse has to offer. I really do think this migration from Reddit provides a decent chance for the Fediverse and Lemmy/KBin to take off.
