It feels like the early Internet: it's still being actively improved, it's noncommercial, people are weirder, people are passionate, fewer bots, it's kind of exciting.
I have no idea if it will succeed, but it's a nice feeling.
this post was submitted on 02 Jul 2023
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Yeah, it's not a sterile, bland, corporate-feeling experience like most mainstream sites. I've missed the charm and wild variability of the old internet, and this feels pretty close to it again.
I think that phrases quite well how I feel about it. Old internet..
You're making me feel nostalgic now, in a good way.
Hey would you be willing to help me out? I’m a prince who needs help moving his money to the US of A.
Of course! You know, you're the 4th prince I've helped this month - would ya believe it?!
Are Google play gift cards the currency in your country also?
No we only take circuit city gift cards
LMAO
people are weirder
If I didn't already love Lemmy, I do now.
I feel the same way. The federated aspect is brilliant and more social platforms should follow it.
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I want to see it grow just to prove the concept works at scale. I genuinely believe it will and I'm a cynical bastard.
Isn't Mastodon already proving that, with 13M users?
It does (along with many better apps), but for the microblogging (like twitter), not for link aggregators (like lemmy or reddit)
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I don't much about mastodon. But if you say it preforms well then I believe this model works.
I agree with the community aspect, and I’m also happy about the open source part. I saw your post in my RSS reader as I was going through my other news and interests. It feels so good to not have the stuff I see decided by some big corporation intending to maximize my engagement at the expense of everything else.
If anyone is interested in RSS, let me know. I highly recommend it, it’s so refreshing to be able to follow most of what you’re interested in, in one app. Also a small app, ~10 MB vs many news sites’ apps that are ~150 MB. Also no ads, ability to dismiss read articles.
(Also yes I realize that Reddit supports RSS too, but I heard that they would have taken it away long ago if it their internal tools didn’t heavily depend on it. The API changes make this seem likely)
I am also following a specific community here on RSS. Nice to go through my articles and see someone asking for technical help / advice -- or simply sharing something cool.
I've been all-in on the fediverse since early 2021. Just like anywhere more than one person is there's disagreements and drama now and again, but it's been the sort of place I want to be and spend my time.
At some point, when instances get big enough, the large costs may require running ads for upkeep. But ideally it should stop at "just covering the costs" and not needing to do the capitalism thing to keep making more and more money every quarter
Or, with the community we were able to gather, maybe we should adopt a patronage system or a bitcoin system like the one used in "Odysee". It would feel much more honest then, because I feel that in my opinion the adds system corrupts beautiful communities like these, and the best proof to what I'm saying is the "Reddit" situation. (It starts with adds to keep the site running... then blows up into full-on capitalism)
I think it's great that more people are realising what's possible, open source isn't just going up change the internet into what it should have been but it can change everything from printers requiring proprietary ink to the major excesses of the political machine.
The working people have ALWAYS done the work and when we get together and do it for ourselves, and each other, we can build a world that exists for people not profits.
This reminds me of how Reddit was after switching from Digg. It feels smaller and more organic and a much more friendly environment. I just feel like I used Reddit for a lot of information and searches for troubleshooting or how to purposes. That vast wealth of knowledge feels like it may be lost.
Same with moving from twitter to a mastodon instance, feels like twitter when it was young.
I like to call it the reddit effect. Any serious attempt to control the free exchange of ideas on the internet leads to avenues that are freer and less controllable getting built. Don't mourn for reddit, they may have been captured by corporate greed, but they have passed the torch to a freer and less centralized community that is less susceptible to corporate invasion. You can't stop the signal Mal
i think we have seen how algorithms divide us in a lot of ways, esp when we are unaware of the way they work and how they are altering our feeds.
It really does feel a bit like the old days ^tm^ (IRC and random PHP boards for me) and it gives me a bit of hope that some of the spirit of the old Wild West Internet is still here. To be honest I engaged more with lemmy in the last few days, then with anything in the last 5 Years.
Unfortunately, I think the feediverse in its unpolished, unoptimised and non-compliant state will run into some legal trouble as soon as it hits a certain popularity threshold.
*Looking at you EU and your relentless drive towards censorship >.>
In the worst case, we will have to rebuild a feediverse in the darker corners of the net.
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It has a long way to go but even Reddit was a small niche website (everyone was on Digg!) at one point.
We all should have done this a long time ago.
The old sites were always "good enough" and building a new community was always just hard enough to prevent this from happening. It's actually a blessing in disguise that all of the internet is enshittifying itself now.
I'm very curious how this type of platform might perform under mass adoption. If it started getting anywhere close to reddit level traffic I'm sceptical how well the more popular instances would scale, and how the people that can currently afford to run them would be able to afford the infrastructure needed to keep up with millions of users.
there will be updates to help with scaling, but also in general we should be trending to smaller home instances and working to integrate meta-community features IMO. Its generally easy and affordable to run a server for oneself and a couple thousand users. Its when you grow well beyond these scales that things become an issue.
There is not a ton of value to being on a large instance, esp as the federation code gets smoothed out.
Part of the problem will be how to make new users understand this, though. Lots of people will be coming from something like reddit where they'll just want to sign up through a popular instance and likely won't fully understand what that means.
More advanced users will understand this, but it's not then I would be worried about.
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I'm bit of a noob on how this all works, but isn't it possible to ddos instance to oblivion? As everything grows, there will be conflicts, bad actors, demand of sensorship and reactions to taken actions.
Right now we are a small village with communal spirit that hardly ever needs its sheriff.
Oh, for sure. And that's on the instance owner to understand how to mitigate, and it's not cheap to do for instances with large amounts of traffic.
I'm also new here and I feel the same as you. I deleted my reddit account just before Sync died and ended up here (thanks for having me). I am still trying to figure out my way around the fediverse but I'll get there. Lemmy feels a bit rough around the edges but honestly it has a certain charm to it that way.
Yup it has the potential to let people communicate and enjoy time together without big corps in the middle.
Agree. Next up education and health care.
Feels like when IRC and e-mail was the prefered way to communicate.
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