So where are we all supposed to go now? (www.theverge.com)

submitted 1 year ago by misk@lemm.ee to c/technology@beehaw.org

75 comments fedilink hide all child comments

But fediverse isn’t ready to take over yet

But the fediverse isn’t ready. Not by a long shot. The growth that Mastodon has seen thanks to a Twitter exodus has only exposed how hard it is to join the platform, and more importantly how hard it is to find anyone and anything else once you’re there. Lemmy, the go-to decentralized Reddit alternative, has been around since 2019 but has some big gaps in its feature offering and its privacy policies — the platform is absolutely not ready for an influx of angry Redditors. Neither is Kbin, which doesn’t even have mobile apps and cautions new users that it is “very early beta” software. Flipboard and Mozilla and Tumblr are all working on interesting stuff in this space, but without much to show so far. The upcoming Threads app from Instagram should immediately be the biggest and most powerful thing in this space, but I’m not exactly confident in Meta’s long-term interest in building a better social platform.

top 50 comments

sorted by: hot top controversial new old

[-] admin@beehaw.org 17 points 1 year ago

But the fediverse isn’t ready. Not by a long shot.

I, really, do not believe in the strength of this statement. There has been a huge injection of people into the Fediverse and this will continue. This wave has brought in an enormous amount of highly qualified programmers, sysadmins and the like. And these people are contributing to Lemmy and a bunch of mobile apps for the Fediverse.

I am excited to participate and watch as the Fediverse explodes.

[-] batcheck@beehaw.org 9 points 1 year ago

I don’t know why people look for feature parity between Lemmy/kbin and Reddit. With a bigger audience, its bound to happen that Lemmy/kbin will catch on features. People waited years and years for reddit to become what it “was”. The fediverse isn’t a stop gap. It’s the next potential platform once foss devs see the potential and have an audience to satisfy.

These articles always feel like the push us towards looking for a commercial option when we already have the right option under our nose. Just give it a few dev cycles.

[-] UnanimousStargazer@feddit.nl 3 points 1 year ago

Or to put it in other words: what features are lacking?

Do people seriously miss 'awards' and other not very interesting functions.

[-] Cube6392@beehaw.org 3 points 1 year ago

Moderation tools and bug stability are the things I want to see

[-] admin@beehaw.org 1 points 1 year ago

Those are being worked on right now.

load more comments (2 replies)

[-] PenguinTD@lemmy.ca 1 points 1 year ago

Fediverse is not ready yet, that's for sure, BUT we don't need it to be "ready" to take on big tech giant backend to be usable user dispersion. IMO, smaller but high quality user that cross critical amount to sustain the community is good enough. I don't need to engage with another 20k people, I just need to engage with maybe 1~2000 high quality post/comment(not lurkers) in different domains that I am interested in. All the rest can have their own thing and we never really cross each other and that is fine.

What I think Fediverse currently lacking is the following:

subscription can be abused, I don't know the underlying detail, but if one user from small instance sub to another instance that have really big traffic, I guess it won't deal well with that. There should be ways to tier or tag posts/comments so good informative one can be kept longer, but shitpots, meme, etc can expire quicker and not even archived. We really don't need to keep all the stuff like tech giants do. (heck, even email provider starts to trim your old emails if your account exceed certain amount of storage(cause 80% is spam/notification mail that no longer serve any purpose.)
easier way discover existing community. I really don't like to checking "All", search community function is updated to a bit reddit like so it's really mixed up with post/comment and actual community. And low traffic community can be buried really far down the list. ie. I created Rocket League on lemmy.ca, and periodically searching for another to see if there are better ones. Then I found out there is none and my community link keeps "sinking" in the result list. There needs to have better filter for searching.
there should have a say, a common bestof or community of this week community. Which helps with discovery as well. (up to instance admins decision of course.)
the web interface can still be improved. One thing that's very hard to keep track of even on reddit is how the branching thread and responses can be all over the place. It's still kind like that here on lemmy(but less user make it more bearable. I am not smart and do not have a better alternative, I hope someone can come up with a better more readable one.

load more comments (2 replies)

[-] misk@lemm.ee 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I knew this part would ruffle some feathers since whomever is reading it here is probably on board with Lemmy/Kbin.

I do think that for many it's too early but there's now significant interest into making everything a bit more stable and streamlined. I think Mastodon is already there but it is suffering from bad rep from their own waves of migration. I'm a bit worried it'll be the same for Lemmy.

[-] themizarkshow@lemm.ee 4 points 1 year ago

The only way the Fediverse gets ready is by going thru the growing pains that Reddit had to when we all fled from Digg. It also wasn’t ready then but the community stepped up and became mods and built apps and made it awesome. We will do it again… and this time it’ll be distributed and much harder for one person to screw over all of us

load more comments (3 replies)

[-] DJDarren@beehaw.org 2 points 1 year ago

I keep seeing articles posted on Mastodon about how Mastodon is doomed. Meanwhile, I only follow around 300 people, but my feed is constant.

If it's failing, then someone forgot to tell it. Unless of course, by failing they mean "isn't making money for rich people".

load more comments (1 replies)

[-] sarchar@programming.dev 2 points 1 year ago

Paid fear mongering. You go to lemmy.world (or any other instance) and sign up. Done. It's not difficult at all. It's rich assholes trying to keep you on reddit.

load more comments (1 replies)

[-] mim@lemmy.sdf.org 10 points 1 year ago

I really don't want to sound snobbish, but people are really entitled these days.

"Omg you have to pick a server?! I'm going to have to spend more that 30s figuring out how this works? There is no alternative!"

When did everyone become a spoiled toddler? Just calm down, take some time to figure things out, and be patient.

/rant

[-] arcticpiecitylights@beehaw.org 2 points 1 year ago

Well we went from an era where only a small portion of the population congregated online in forums and chats, which basically required you to either be a kid or a techie of some kind, to a world where your grandma was on Facebook because FB made it hella easy to signup and adductive as hell to stay. The Grandma (or even Parent) on Facebook types have never interacted with the internet in the ways we (rightly) romanticize

[-] Swallowtail@beehaw.org 2 points 1 year ago

I'm honestly starting to feel like it might be a net benefit for the barrier to entry to be higher. Since I switched to the Fediverse I have found that post quality is higher here than on Reddit, there's less flaming, fewer low-effort overdone joke comment chains etc. Also it reminds me that there is better shit to do with my life than spend 3 hours a day reading a bunch of hyper-specific subforums that I'm subscribed to.

[-] ragnarokonline@vlemmy.net 8 points 1 year ago

The Fediverse has this really organic, underground feel to it that I don’t think I want to lose.

If people want to leave Reddit/Twitter/Facebook/whatever and come to Fedi, I don’t mind there being a 1-hour learning curve to read an intro, find an instance, and sign up.

Peeps who aren’t willing to do that are probably better off on other social media.

Is there a reason to want to compete with Mainstream Social Media?

[-] araquen@beehaw.org 7 points 1 year ago

All this pearl-clutching makes me want to punch a wall.

I initially rejected Mastodon, being overwhelmed by its decentralization. I even proclaimed it “too complicated.”

Not even 8 months later and I’m fine. It’s all fine. My hysteria was sound and fury, signifying nothing. This hysteria is also pointless.

Is the fediverse the exact same experience Twitter and Reddit were? No. Do they need to be? No.

No one pearl-clutched when Facebook wasn’t exactly like LiveJournal or MySpace. No one pitched a fit when texting replaced IM. Folks organically flowed from one platform to the next as need and want allowed.

Technology solutions change and evolve. No platform rules forever.

The conspiracy theorist in me leans towards this being manufactured “concern” because the monetization solution to decentralized architecture isn’t ready for prime time, and “Late Stage Capitalism” is trying to herd the sheep into a temporary enclosure of fear until their new “farm” is ready. This explains why all the financial and corporate entities are singing the praises for Bluesky, and casting doubt on Mastodon. Last I saw, there is no word on how Bluesky is going to be supported, but it has a Board of Directors, which tells me it will be ad and subscription based, which means it needs a lot of people.

Having a Board also means that Bluesky can go public and can be sold to yet another nitwit.

So if long term stability means I am going to have to wake up and do a bit more to shape a fediverse solution to my needs, it’s worth more to me to do that than to go all in on a platform that is going to force ads on me and wind up being sold to the next billionaire imbecile.

[-] Master@beehaw.org 3 points 1 year ago

I think that is disingenuous. People did complain (and pearl clutch) about reddit as it's tree comment structure was vastly different than what people were used to and the upvote / downvote didnt make any sense. But people adapted quickly just like they always do. This move to lemmy is exactly like how the digg -> reddit move went.

load more comments (1 replies)

load more comments (2 replies)

[-] HerbErtlinger@vlemmy.net 4 points 1 year ago

“Mastodon isn’t ready,” I read every day, posted on Mastodon.

[-] noogie@lemmy.fmhy.ml 3 points 1 year ago

The fediverse is ready, if you build it they will come!

I think there needs to be a sensible way to crowdfund the server costs, but I can’t see any other reason why it shouldn’t succeed

[-] atheos@lemmy.atheos.org 3 points 1 year ago

Go outside

load more comments (1 replies)

[-] uzay@beehaw.org 3 points 1 year ago

That so many people think Mastodon is hard to join makes me think that there are a lot of people on the internet now who have never learned how to use the internet

[-] Melonplant@beehaw.org 4 points 1 year ago

I think there's active misinformation being shared about the difficulty of use for fediverse playforms. Yeah it's 20 clicks instead of 5 but it's not that hard.

[-] arcticpiecitylights@beehaw.org 2 points 1 year ago

As someone who works in IT, I can tell you that ive witnessed firsthand so many people who get viruses because when someone gives them a URL, they dont just go to that site. They go to www.google.com, search for the URL, and blindly click on the first result, which is almost always an ad, and which sometimes is a link to malware. Fun times.

[-] Kalashnikitty@beehaw.org 2 points 1 year ago

It's easy to forget outside of communities like this how low tech literacy actually is.

I think I don't understand probably 95% of how the internet works and I'm fairly sure that I'm above average in my general understanding.

If the Fediverse really wants to break into the mainstream, and I'm neither saying it does or it should, then these things need to become easier and straightforward.

Joining a server isn't hard, but finding content outside of the server you have chosen can be. Lemmy seems to be better than Mastodon here, but still.

People don't care about federation as such. They want their social network and they want it all, regardless of which server it sits on, and they want it easy.

load more comments (4 replies)

[-] GenderNeutralBro@lemmy.sdf.org 3 points 1 year ago

I never interacted much with Twitter and I'm not a hardcore Mastodonian either, but I don't understand why people say it's hard to join.

For me, the process was simple:

Install Mastodon app
Create account
Select a server from the list presented in-app

That was it. There was only one step (selecting the server) that is different from any other site. And it didn't require SMS verification like Facebook, Twitter, and even Google do nowadays. It was objectively easier than signing up for Twitter.

Am I missing something, or did these people just shit their pants at the server selection screen? I get that it's a little unfamiliar but...just pick one. It doesn't really matter. That's the whole point.

[-] Qiz@beehaw.org 1 points 1 year ago

I think the biggest issue is finding the content you are looking for.

Sometimes people aren’t on Mastodon and even if they are it’s not alway easy to find them if they are not on the same instance.

load more comments (4 replies)

[-] OngoGablogian@beehaw.org 3 points 1 year ago

I didn't know what the Fediverse was a week ago, and now I'm active on Lemmy and Mastodon. I think people are dramatically overstating how difficult it is to sign up. It's not hard, it's just new.

And besides, I don't think the fediverse needs to take over at all. It just needs to have active, viable, engaging communities. As Iong as enough people end up here to sustain that, it doesn't really matter if they overtake the places we're coming from.

[-] seducingcamel@beehaw.org 1 points 1 year ago

Feels like a smear campaign at this point. They're making it sound like you have to dig through instances and code your own interface or something

[-] Thrashy@beehaw.org 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I'll be honest, "dig through instances and code your own interface" is kinda where I'm at right now with Lemmy. I love Beehaw as an instance, but because of the demo it's attracted there are relatively niche topics I am interested in that it can't support an active community for. Those communities are already humming along on lemmy.world -- but I can't interact with them because of the (justifiable) decision to defederate from them due to moderation concerns.

So where does that leave me? I am trying to stand up my own instance right now... but the build directions available don't work for my homelab setup (for some reason the backend only responds to requests from localhost, which means I can't set Lemmy up to work with my existing reverse proxy?). I guess I could go rooting around in the code to change that, but at that point I'm committed to maintaining a personal fork of Lemmy just to be able to use it in a way that is analogous to how I used Reddit... which just worked out of the box.

I really wish that in addition to federation, Lemmy offered some sort of OAuth-style portable identity that would allow users to interact directly with instances off their "home" one. As it stands, the Fediverse has ended up a bit more balkanized than I think was intended or anticipated

load more comments (3 replies)

load more comments (2 replies)

[-] ndr@beehaw.org 1 points 1 year ago

I told someone about uBlock as they were getting ads left and right, and I was told "oh no, I don't wanna install anything!"

So if it's not extremely frictionless, many people won't even try...

(I agree with your second point BTW)

[-] curt@beehaw.org 1 points 1 year ago

I agree with you that it isn't that difficult. I signed up on mastodon.social months ago. It was a little confusing about picking an instance so I just arbitrarily picked one. The same was true for lemmy. Now I'm on lemme.ee and behaw.org.

In the case of Matodon, I recently discovered the Explore option. There's more than enough posts to keep me reading for hours. And most of them are interesting. Imagine reading an unfiltered Twitter feed. I don't need Mastodon to get any bigger for my needs. It may even be better if it doesn't get a huge membership. The same holds true for lemmy and kbin, bigger and better yes, but they don't have to be a Reddit replacement.

load more comments (1 replies)

[-] cstine@lemmy.uncomfortable.business 2 points 1 year ago

This feels like the same anti-FOSS FUD that was there 20 years ago against linux: 'it's not ready!' and 'who will provide support?' and 'it's too hard for people to figure out!' and 'how can you make money if it's free?' and so on.

Of course, the whole world runs on Linux now and it's eaten the lunch of every single proprietary competitor... it just took more than a week to do it, which is far too long of a cycle if you're a clickbait "journalist" on corpo-owned media.

[-] misk@lemm.ee 2 points 1 year ago

The Verge peeps are rather enthusiastic about Activity Pub based platforms, I wouldn't attribute bad intent there.

Linux is used by most of the world but it's either backend where techies take care of things or super streamlined experiences like Android etc.

[-] heartlessevil@lemmy.one 2 points 1 year ago

how hard it is to join the platform

I seriously don't belief the learned helplessness that makes it hard for people to join Mastodon or Lemmy. It's literally one signup page. People have just completely lost any semblance of tech literacy.

[-] illi@lemm.ee 2 points 1 year ago

Federation is a pretty unique concept when learning about it and can be confusing at first. Then after you understand it, you need to choose an instance from god knows how maby and you don't even know how to find what is out there. The first 2-3 days of my migration to lemmy was research. And while it is not hard with just a bit of tech literacy, it's not as easy as finding one site and register - which can be easily done by most people with little tech literacy.

People have just completely lost any semblance of tech literacy.

I think you heavily overestimate the technical literacy of most people. I'd say majority started with 0 and stayed that way, because they only ever use stuff that causes little friction so that even they can use it. It's not that people lost it, it's that the way tech evolved it allowed people with none to go in.

I agree with the general notion that it is a nice filter for the feddiverse and might keep some of the most stupid at bay - at least for a while.

[-] knobbysideup@lemm.ee 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Federation is a pretty unique concept when learning about it Not really. All of this stuff is just a rehash of nntp and IRC.

[-] leigh@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

It seems like the author is asking “why isn’t there a just-like-Reddit or just-like-Twitter site that was totally ready and waiting for this moment, and even though we’d never heard of it before now has everyone using it?”

Fediverse is different, and that’s a good thing. Because note how all of these corporate social media platforms are ending up…

[-] noodlejetski@beehaw.org 2 points 1 year ago

Neither is Kbin, which doesn’t even have mobile apps

not everything needs a mobile app, sheesh. both kbin and Lemmy have great mobile websites.

[-] seducingcamel@beehaw.org 2 points 1 year ago

They must be used to all the major social medias having absolutely butchered their mobile sites

[-] rimlogger@beehaw.org 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

My only issue with Lemmy is that it's not a true Reddit replacement, especially when places keep defederating from one another. Like I spend far less time here on Beehaw because it's defederated from some of the major instances - I understand the administrators' concerns about moderation but over time a lot of the activity will center itself around the most active instances (i.e., users may come from a diversity of instances) but only interact with content on Lemmy.world.

[-] snowbell@beehaw.org 2 points 1 year ago

Every time I visit lemmy.world I find myself coming straight back to beehaw because insufferable people make lemmy.world feel just like reddit did and I just get pissed off after 5 minutes of scrolling. Beehaw is perfect for me specifically because there are less people.

[-] hrimfaxi_work@midwest.social 1 points 1 year ago

I'd personally like it better if nothing tAkEs oVEr. I'm comfortable with the internet having more than one website.

I'm uninformed about the interesting stuff from Mozilla, Tumblr, etc. that the author mentioned, but I hope it's cool and varied.

[-] Monomate@lemm.ee 1 points 1 year ago

Lemmy taking over as a protocol would not be a bad thing, because by design it promotes the creation of multiple federated instances. At least the UI woukd be standardized, lowering the user friction in case he needs to migrate.

[-] beejjorgensen@lemmy.sdf.org 1 points 1 year ago

I don't think the Fediverse will or should "take over". It already exists in a highly-usable form. I suggest the author stick with Reddit, Twitter, and Discord.

load more comments