this post was submitted on 14 Jun 2023
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The fediverse is the way. I’m not smart enough to say if it’s the best option, but it’s a hell of a lot better than a profit driven monolith run by out of touch investors. Reddit won’t implode but it won’t be the same as it was even a week ago. This decentralized structure is what the internet wants to be.
The fediverse has one thing going for it that any other alternative lacks: a credible approach to dealing with the network effect. In isolation, it is very difficult to start an independent social media website. This becomes much, much easier when you have neighboring sites that you can interact with. Federation serves as a catalyst. I've been longing for the proliferation of open source social media for over 15 years. Nothing has changed the state of affairs more thoroughly than the introduction of federation.
It's either fediverse or nostr. But nostr is more twitter-like than reddit-like and is filled with cryptobros so no thanks no
Ah, so it’s terrible.
What?
??? It's just a euphemism
One way I'm looking at this opportunity is like email, anyone can set up an email server thanks to how it got established. So if this pans out and eventually we get funded hosts in the vein of Gmail and Hotmail, who spend money writing fancy UIs and on marketing, we still have a fundamental base where we can shuffle away from the big players and go set up our own servers.
I do hope to see some funded options come into this space, they can control/own their interface into the data, but they can't control/own the data.
as long as we are vigilant for the microsoft method of embrace, extend, extingush/enshittify we will be good.
I look forward to the day of Lemmy IE6 with custom activex features.
How would that realistically happen on Lemmy?
Server costs, lawyers, management will add up eventually. Ads or other financial incentives will take part in this at some point. The biggest instance, which will have the most funding, could monopolize by defederating others. Though with future account portability it could be made impossible. As in if reddit was the instance, most communities and users would seamlessly move over to others. But right now the risk is real.
Beehaw just defederated lemmy.world and users have to either move with the bigger fediverse of lemmy.world or stay confined to their isolated instance.
Why did beehaw defederate?
Too few moderators, poor modding tools, no backchannel to original instance, overwhelming amount of users from big instance.
There's also a non-zero chance this is astroturfing by Reddit itself as part of Damage Control SOP.
(For that matter, this instance would seem more along the lines of a weaponized "backdraft", IMHO. A rather simple way to turn the subs against their mods to crank up the heat, eh?)