Does it still seem difficult to understand, use, etc? did you come across anything positive?
I am fueled by my deep, loathing hatred for the snoo site. Plus I found a really great local instance where people are pretty chill.
I’m still very sceptical. While I love the idea of the fediverse, I honestly don’t think it will ever be more than a niche platform. It will probably remain active among “enthusiasts” but I can’t see it ever going mainstream.
It’s just not simple enough. If some non-tech person wants to join Twitter or Facebook or Reddit or Instagram, they just go to the site or app, sign up, and that’s it. No decisions need to be made, there is nothing to understand. My 70 year old mother could do it.
Joining lemmy is a commitment. And more importantly, it requires decisions to be made. Which server should I join? What difference will it make? Am I doing it wrong? Why are there different communities with the same name but on different servers? Why is there no ‘lemmy’ app? Etc.
Those of us who are here have made the effort to understand these things, but the general population won’t bother.
To be honest, most of these issues could be solved using abstraction, and lemmy world already does that to some extend. Giving the site the look and feel of a single website, with one simple way to join and participate will be vital. I’m not saying to remove those decisions, but rather have them on another layer so advanced users can still easily access them, while other users who are either new or don’t care too much about it can just use a common preset.
tumblr and reddit and twitter shit the bed (and it looks like youtube’s reaching for the exlax), if it was only one, i don’t think i’d have made the jump. I’ve also discovered that I don’t actually care about the difference between a handful of people and a few hundred thousand in mini-communities like these.
Twitter and Reddit got so awful I needed to leave. Lemmy is fantastic and underpopulated, but Mastodon isn’t what I would want. I can search for hastags, but there’s no other way to search beyond the instance I’m in. That’s not what I want. I want a space that I can curate AND I want a local community. I got the latter, but the former…not so much.
So in a sense, I’m still a skeptic. But what else is there?
Gab and Truth Social were always the most mentioned examples until Elon/Twitter/Mastadon. I’m still cautious of communities becoming overrun by Nazis.
Feels unlikely to me, personally. Those places were designed for shitheads, and there just aren’t that many shitheads to overrun regular places.
Our instance is currently voting to delist a an instance that the vast majority consider a nazi instance.
Client software. It’s been the turning point for me each time so far.
Ivory turned Mastodon from quirky interest/hobby-tier to something I’ll actually use.
For Lemmy https://wefwef.app has had the same effect for me.
I tried it months ago and there was no good way to have a consolidated access point, it basically required dozens of browser tabs to use it for anything and the interface was still bad. The development and client apps have changed everything, it’s a unified and seamless experience now where it just wasn’t before.
Honestly, the loss of Reddit is Fun. I’d say that roughly ~95% of the time I spent on reddit was through mobile, I hardly ever used it on the computer anymore (although funnily enough, years ago it was the opposite, I almost exclusively accessed it via computer). Opening up RIF repeatedly on the day it died, just from muscle memory, is what made me finally decide to look up how to join Lemmy. I had been considering it for awhile, but sticking with Reddit was juuuust easy enough to keep me from doing it, even with the drastic quality drop in reddit over the years. But by blocking RIF/etc, they removed that “easy enough” part, which meant nothing was really keeping me from deciding to finally make the jump.
Still can’t say I fully understand the fediverse, I definitely don’t. But I do understand it slightly more than I did before, and certainly enough to at least try to interact and comment!
Sir, ma’am, I have no idea what I’m doing. Everything was fine and now both reddit and twitter are dead and I’m just trying to keep up with cat pics. Don’t really care to learn about the intricacies of whatever a federated social media is.
Exactly this. I went on to Lemmy because it was recommended as a Reddit alternative. I needed to pick a server so went for the one that looked like it had the most activity (world in this case) signed up and started looking for communities I liked.
I feel like people are making it more of a big deal than it is? Or maybe I’m missing something I don’t know.
But the many apps that have followed from the death of Reddit 3P’s is crazy. I’ve got 3 installed so far and I’m quite enjoying testing them all.
To be honest I’m still skeptical of the Fediverse as a long term endeavor, but I’m going to give it a fair shake in the meantime.
That said, I was never much of a heavy user of twitter or reddit anyway, so watching the Fediverse explode while various corporate entities implode is just popcorn entertainment.
watching the Fediverse explode while various corporate entities implode is just popcorn entertainment.
Agree
To be honest I’m still skeptical of the Fediverse
The first time I heard about the fediverse I thought it was something different, I thought it was decentralized in the sense that users act as servers in a torrent-like system. This federation thing seemed strange to me at first but I think it’s still better than the usual platform controlled by a few people.
The only thing I see problematic to integrate into a reddit-like site is the presence of multiple communities with the same name belonging to different instances. Right now this is probably not helping lemmy’s image.
The only thing I see problematic to integrate into a reddit-like site is the presence of multiple communities with the same name belonging to different instances.
That’s what makes it better than reddit. It can’t so easily be controlled by just a few people, because if one community/magazine on one instance gets overrun with toxicity, you can start a mag/comm with the same name on another instance.
That’s what makes it better than reddit. It can’t so easily be controlled by just a few people, because if one community/magazine on one instance gets overrun with toxicity, you can start a mag/comm with the same name on another instance.
absolutely, I am not against this kind of decentralization.
What I meant is that something could be done to collect the communities posts under one collection to make it easier for the user to join/see the communities content.
For example, if you subscribe to c/Technology you are subscribed to all the c/Technology communities (optional) in the federation. But this brings with it the problem of duplicates and I don’t think there is an easy way to avoid it, and obviously different communities may have different rules.
Put simply: being able to subscribe to collections.
I say this because it seemed to me, at least initially, that for new users this presence of multiple communities with the same name was annoying and confusing.
Honestly the torrent like idea you propose sounds better to me, but I have heard it’s almost technologically impossible… at least not without train loads of money dumped into solving the problem… hopefully future advances make whatever the hurdles are easier.
Some time ago there was Zeronet (abandoned) that worked like this. The problem was that the speed of the site depends on how many users share the data and for heavy things like videos it was a catastrophe. On zeronet there was even a social network similar to facebook/twitter called ZeroMe: https://zeronet.io/docs/it/img/zerome.png
It was a really cool project, it’s a shame it’s not being developed anymore.
I was skeptical of Lemmy and Mastodon thinking they will never become mainstream. It’s like able to run your own phpBB forum does not mean there will be a community. Businesses are wary of obscure software that are hard for customers to understand.
That was before the recent Reddit protest. Seeing how Reddit handles the protest, I have a feeling that this will work, especially when
u/spezsaid he follows Elon footsteps.In the last week, I started to see communities forming and I’m now sure there’s no going back for Reddit and Twitter.
I was only a skeptic because the UI of Lemmy is hot garbage when you first get here, and they are crippled by the fundamental point of the infrastructure: That there’s no single “correct” place to go. Lemmy the software can’t really endorse a single instance.
But it seems like lemmy.world is that one. They should honestly just self promote as if they “are” Lemmy, and let people figure out the rest after they’re here.
For me, I just really wanted to stop using Reddit and forced myself to figure it out. It hasn’t been an awesome experience, but it feels like the right thing to do. Getting Liftoff on my android phone has helped. I’m still skeptical. And would happily ditch Lemmy if something better came along.
I’m still a skeptic. But Reddit is dead as far as I’m concerned
So anyways here I am I guess
Agreed. In fact, it kinda died awhile ago. I have no idea what I’m doing but I also know I’m not alone. Good luck to everyone trying to figure this shit out.
Which part are you not getting? Maybe someone can help you with it.
For me it was confusing just getting a login on jerboa. Had to Google search that I needed to click on the anonymous hidden tab to get to the login in screen. Every other button just yelled at my to login instead of taking me to the login screen. Also didn’t know I needed to set up an account at lemmy world first and subscribe to my instances. Just new stuff that were all working through.
