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ARTICLE of Techwireasia
Why does everyone keep thinking fedi needs to be the next "big thing."
It's great as it is. It doesn't need to be easier, or more widely adopted.
The internet used to be difficult to use and that acted as a filter to keep the brainless masses away. It's fine. It was BETTER back then.
People want the Fediverse to grow because we can see how much damage corporate walled gardens have done to our society, and we care about others who are still trapped in a cycle of corporate abuse. We dream of a better world and see the massive potential benefits a decentralized global communications protocol hold for humanities future.
Beautifully said.
Does anyone have a home remedy for the darkness within that is slowly overcoming your will to live?
I tried apple cider vinegar
Yeah I get that but any big tech company can just buy the entire fediverse if they want to. They can offer instance owners money to sell their instance. They can put Lemmy developers on the payroll with 500k salaries, or replace them. They can add things like allowing people to make money by posting stuff. Suddenly we have influencers, and while they may not appeal to you, they will appeal to the millions of people who like them on Instagram.
I may not be right about the details but I'm just painting a picture here. You are letting your dreams about a better world totally cloud your judgment here. Corporations can take this place over easily and they will be really interested in that if the active user count becomes big.
People say "then we just move to another platform". Yeah, like the one we have now? And try to get it big? So we can end up again having to move away from it...
The only way to win is to stay smallish and under the radar. Be a fringe interest for a couple of million active users.
You're 100% wrong on the details.
A few things:
Now don't get me wrong, they can absolutely meddle, but not purely through money or hostile takeovers, due to the decentralised nature of the Fediverse. No matter what, the Fediverse will always exist as it is, all the huge platforms can do is try to make it so people don't want to use the Fediverse and move to their platforms instead.
To try and give an analogy, it would be like a company trying to "buy the web" - they literally cannot. Of course, we do have some huge players who control a lot of the web and attempt to dictate standards for everyone else, but there is no one iron fist that rules over everything, and there's many small players and communities all over the place.
"any big tech company can just buy the entire fediverse if they want to"
They literally can't.
Yeah I get that but any big tech company can just buy the entire fediverse if they want to. They can offer instance owners money to sell their instance.
...and they can turn around and create another instance
They can put Lemmy developers on the payroll with 500k salaries, or replace them.
Lemmy devs don't really "own" the code, since it is free software. It can be forked at any time by anyone.
They can add things like allowing people to make money by posting stuff.
...and existing fediverse instances can just not federate with instances that push that bullshit
I need the ability to save comments in Memmy for well written comments just like this
I'm sick of people acting like they're superior and only they deserve the Internet because they think they're intelligent. The "brainless masses" have just as much right to use the internet as you do. Stop trying to gatekeep the Internet.
More mildly put, people are diverse, which is a great resource.
I want to follow communities about a wide variety of topics. Some appeal to intellectual, tech-savvy people, others don't.
If the platform is deterring to the later group, my experience suffers because I lack content in these areas.
People can use their brains in many more ways than understanding technology. Just because a person is not good in navigating technology does not mean they have no brain.
For example, I'd love to see more going on in communities about performative arts, philosophy, activism, regional cultural events. Occasionally, I like to peek into bubbles which are completely different from my own.
With power comes responsibility. I see it as the responsibility of people who understand technology to make it accessible to those who don't.
id rather not use a platform loaded with greasy snobs saying "brainless masses" too
I honestly don't think something having a higher barrier to entry is gatekeeping. Ofcourse you shouldn't try to make things actively more difficult but I don't think lemmy is doing that anyways.
I'm starting to lose the meaning of gatekeeping more and more. Its used so often and loosely
Let's go further! Computers should not come with an operating system installed.
Yes, they shouldn't, unironically
careful, there's a lot of Linux users here. you thought you made a good point but you only just gave them erections
better run before they tell you to start using Linux!!
I do not fully agree with this. Simply because by having a lack of users, there will not be answers to questions that require expertise
Exactly. We need people here. The strength of Reddit at this point is that, for any interest you might have, no matter how niche, there will be a sizeable community on Reddit that knows a lot about it and is yearning to talk about it. Outside of tech and science adjacent topics, that's simply not really the case here.
Sure, sometimes I want to talk about new developments in tech. And other times, I want to talk about Carly Rae Jepsen's upcoming album, The Loveliest Time, and how I'm fucking stoked to see her in less than a month.
Because I want there to be shit to do on here
Send in the clowns!
The bigger a social platform gets, the more synergy it spawns. That's what adds utility to a social platform.
I don't think anyone here wants it to be 'the next big thing', but I do think a lot of people (myself included) want to see it become 'one of the next big things'. As in...we want it to become big enough to be a viable alternative to the proprietary walled-garden corporate establishments that have become the current standard.
More choice = better, and for as long as this platform remains small and elitist (referring back to your 3rd sentence), it will never truly be a viable choice. There's still a lot of engagement I'm required to use Reddit for - and I hate that - and the only reason for it is we just don't have the community size needed (yes, it's getting closer every day) to be that viable alternative.
You are young it sounds like. If Lemmy becomes that size, all good things about it goes away, and we get ads and corporations moving in to profit from it. That turns the entire thing into the same shit as everything else.
It happens over and over and over again in tech. It's a pattern that all older people knows about because we have lived it.
So I hope Lemmy stays small. Bigger than now, sure, but not big enough to attract corporations.
“The bigger a social platform gets the more synergy it spawns”
Ehhhh, small groups have plenty of synergy, no?
Is some growth good? Of course. Is becoming as big as everyone else is a good idea? You tell me: which megalithic tech company has a userbase that isn’t being poisoned or exploited? Namely: Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Reddit, etc.
Keeping a reasonable size, just like anything else in this life, is the correct option. Obsessive growth leads to greed and misery.
EDIT: Sorry for being so brain dead in my initial response
Reddit tier aggression lol. Chill out and then we'll listen to what you have to say.
The internet is fit ME and OTHER SMART PEOPLE that I LIKE and not DOODOOHEADS.
Son, you gotta share your toys - or no ice cream after dinner.
It's not the people that got dumber, the tech did. Everyone has the capacity to become more knowledgeable of computers and the internet as a whole, but large corporations dumbed it down so they can take control of everything.
The internet used to be difficult to use and that acted as a filter to keep the brainless masses away. It’s fine. It was BETTER back then.
yeah, that September never ends
To be fair, a lot of the "before" users were just out right assholes to us kids trying to figure out how to use the internet. There was definitely a culture of superiority from the early adopters.
Which is clearly very much present here lol, looking at these comments.
I really don't like this superiority complex of calling anyone who has other priorities in life a member of the "brainless masses".
I get that it's nice to have in-depth conversations with smart people about things you find interesting. I'm here precisely for that reason myself, but I'd much prefer to do so in a community of people that doesn't derive its sense of identity from how superior they feel to everyone else. I agree that the Fediverse doesn't need to be the next big thing, but that doesn't mean we have to actively be asses to everyone we think is beneath us because they're not worthy of the truly great privilege that is speaking to us.
I'd much rather the platform itself simply be deeply robust, very accessible and easy to use, and most importantly, extremely conducive to allowing individual communities to form and enforce their own rules and norms. There is no reason at all why one community can't have extremely strict standards and require all comments to be made by credentialed users who cite all sources while having discussions about, say, physics, while another might be devoted to the Kardashians or logistics for the Taylor Swift Eras Tour or whatever else pop culture has decided is the topic du jour. These are not necessarily in contradiction, and particularly with different instances, nothing stops you from primarily participating in an instance that focuses more on nerdy things and bans memes and pop culture, or that has any other focus that suits you. If you find yourself getting content from more general interest instances that you're not liking, you can block them. This level of flexibility is the exact point of the Fediverse in the first place. There's no need to gatekeep the entire Fediverse because you want your own fun nerd space; the Fediverse already easily facilitates that level of independent community creation.
Lest you think I be one of the brainless rabble, rest assured I'm speaking as someone who studied computer science at Harvard, works in cybersecurity, and knows Latin, Greek, French, and Arabic - since apparently people aren't worthy of speaking to you unless they pass some kind of intelligence test.
This post has the energy of a treehouse with a "no girls allowed sign" on the door.
The gatekeeping just makes some people feel like they're special because they are the ones doing the gatekeeping rather than the ones being excluded by it. And it usually involves defending flaws in the community that drive most people away because they serve the same purpose.
Right? We aren't enlightened sages just because the platform we use is a little bit harder to understand. We need more than just people with technical skills, and if there's this many people agreeing with calling others the "brainless masses", seems like people skills are on short supply.
I just want big tech social media to fail. It gives too much power to Musk, Zuck, Spez, et al.
brainless masses
You sound like a lovely, humble person who never screams at their loved ones
Speaking personally, I'm trying to replace that "Frontpage of the internet" that Reddit used to be. Lemmy is great. I'm actually really liking the communities here. But there aren't enough posts because there aren't enough users yet, IMO. Maybe what I actually need is to stop using a single place for all of my news/pop culture watching, but... that's where I'm at.
Indeed. The masses would ruin this place, 100%.
It feels like September is finally ending. Somebody wake up Billie Joe Armstrong.
Because social media exists to connect people. This is not a forum for a single niche topic, why would we ever just call it enough and be done with it? There are many communities that I'd like to follow that are still struggling to get off the ground.
I don't know what you are here for, but to me the Fediverse is not great as it is. It has potential to be but it's still largely tiny and niche, I can't find a fraction of what I'd like to. That may make it more manageable so far, but it's also pretty empty.
Let me be real, one thing that definitely won't help this place no matter the size is this sense of superiority that we are better without the "brainless masses". Over the years it has become very clear that whether people are technologically adept and whether they are good contributors and members of a community are two completely unrelated things. It's just unfounded elitism.
What we do need to watch out for is for corporate control, advertiser influence and algorithms which prioritize profit or clickthrough at any costs. A lot of internet media has devolved not because of "the masses", but because they prefer the eyeballs that outrage bring over cultivating a harmonious community.
Finally, an actual controversial post!
Oh no! Not concerns! If only there was an open source, decentralized platform that had an active community that could address said concerns if they become an issue.
Weird, it's like you only read the title. The article names several things. Data breaches. Unremovable content. And then some stuff that's sort of solved by defederation but still kind of an issue, like moderation.
This is the internet. Data breaches, and unremovable content have been here from the start, including with big tech companies. Also, how is moderation more of a problem here then on dumpster fires like Reddit and Twitter? I don't buy these criticisms of the Fediverse, sorry.
Whatever shall we do without our corporate overlords?
