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
Is the federated internet gonna be the equivalent of hippie communes for Gen Y & Gen Z?
yes. Pass the bong.
Welcome! We all take shifts working in the hemp garden out back. Namaste.
oh this sounds glorious, I always knew my destiny was to be part of a scapegoated counterculture movement.
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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.
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'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.
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.
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 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. You can't stop the signal Mal
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.
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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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 has a long way to go but even Reddit was a small niche website (everyone was on Digg!) at one point.
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 was interested in hosting my own Lemmy server, but how would it work for getting a few thousand users?
- how would they discover it? I just picked a server that seemed popular, and I'm already wondering about defederation/etc. I don't feel like I'd want to make more than a few different accounts, and I'd probably only actively use one or two, tops
- would I be responsible for moderating my users? What if they post spam/worse to other instances? What if they're just nasty to others? I wouldn't want my instance to be de-federated. (Though maybe as you get more users, more of them are willing to be moderators)
Besides those issues though, it's awesome to hear that normal people's servers could support a few thousand users. I'm sure there's a person interested in self-hosting among every few thousand people.
Apologies if this is a basic federation question. I considered hosting a matrix instance once, but then I heard it consumed a ton of hard drive space* as you join popular rooms. And I wasn't sure how it would work if I shared it with some friends, they shared it with some friends, and so-on, and then someone did something bad.
*RE hard drive space, this won't be a problem when I host something at home, but right now I'm just paying $10/year for a KVM server that I'm using to share hobby web projects with some friends. It has limited storage space.
Step 1 is to run an instance, step 2 is to engage across multiple instances using your instance account, step 3 partner with other servers, post on groups, basically advertise, step 4 SEO things.
Also, every chance I get i advocate for people to find smaller instances they like and not to overload whats popular or big as there is little advantage to it.
I expect growth to be similar to every other forum ive ever run, so far federation has made it a bit easier i think to get noticed.
Thanks for the response. I didn’t even think about having to advertise and SEO… I enjoy technical challenges, but having to self-promote is quite draining to me. It might be nice if there was some automatic way to recommend a new instance when new users are looking to create an account, even just based on capacity, but also based on common interests (e.g. people who live in , people interested in , etc). It seems like join-lemmy.org tries to distribute new users somewhat, but it might be nice if it offered to narrow down the list for you based on some information you could choose to provide.
RE self hosting, I was more concerned about legal problems, like this post in !selfhosted@lemmy.world: "If I self host a Lemmy instance for just myself and maybe a few friends are there any risks?”. But more generally, if you let randoms make accounts on your instance, with the goal of taking some load off of the more popular instances.
TL;DR: I enjoy debugging technical issues for a few hours, but I have no interest in having to moderate heavily.
depends on where you are, if you are in the US you are still generally protected from prosecution (check your laws or talk to a lawyer). You do need to have a process for removing bad content (just deleting it) and be prepared to ban and purge content if you receive any legal notices.
also something to note, your server does not copy everything on the fediverse, just what users on your instance have subscribed to. Im looking forward to being able to block communities as an admin rather than simply defederating.
re: moderation load. I like topical servers, I run one around AI. I've always felt specific topic verticals are easier to moderate as its usually more expected to just shutdown anything not related to the core topic. You still deal with stuff from time to time but its never been a huge deal.
Running stuff here, my server is SFW so I have rarely seen anything terrible, I usually just ban and purge a user i see posting like that it only takes a couple seconds. If you are only subbing to safe, respectful communities its easy. If you want to walk lines, it can get hard.
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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.
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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 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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