A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).
If you wanted to get help with moderating your own community then head over to !moderators@lemmy.world!
Learn more at these websites: Join The Fediverse Wiki, Fediverse.info, Wikipedia Page, The Federation Info (Stats), FediDB (Stats), Sub Rehab (Reddit Migration), Search Lemmy
I agree completely.
I recently compared it to sitting in a comfortable little cafe that serves delicious food and looking around and saying, "Gee, I wish this was a McDonalds."
It just doesn't even begin to make sense to me.
And I'm with you - gatekeeping or no - anyone who wants Twitter or Reddit or Facebook content can already go to Twitter or Reddit or Facebook to get it, and that's exactly what they should do.
But I’m here because I can’t get reddit content anymore in the format I want to consume it. I didn’t have an issue with the content of reddit, just the owners.
I don't necessarily disagree, I just think that the solution is to cultivate the content here. Not connect with the same old corporate platforms that caused the problems in the first place.
I'm in the same boat. I want Lemmy to be a firehose of content, the overwhelming majority of which I won't ever want to interact with. I want that because different people are interested in different things, and that's what allows for even the niche communities to find their footing with more than a small contingent of people.
I think the tools at our disposal as users and administrators of Fediverse systems are already good enough to manage and control your own experience, and I'm confident that they'll continue to improve at a rapid click. The experience of using Lemmy as a Reddit replacement has already improved dramatically since June 12th, and it does so every day. I appreciate that others may feel much more strongly about the "dumbing down" of the overall content and community than I do, and for those folks joining an instance that outright defederates is a great option.
Folks are quick to tell people how they should be using Lemmy. "Don't sign up for one of the big instances, you should use a small one instead because federation" is a big one - but there's a lot of appeal in this model with being signed up to the instances generating the majority of the content the broader community is consuming because it makes finding that content easier than it otherwise would be. My hope is that the larger instances like lemmy.world will at least test the waters with Threads federation to see what it actually does to the community before taking the step of defederation, because right now those large instances are what's feeding the rest of the rest of Lemmy.
As it stands, having those large instances federated with Threads and having smaller communities defederated seems like a best of both worlds scenario, because a small instance defederating with Threads won't lose out on the other content being generated by those larger instances, but those who want to trudge through the mire of mass appeal can do so in one place.
I got a tired of the cliched site culture and some people's attitudes. I suppose it's because it's such a large slice of the public that you get more people being dicks and leaving drive-by jerky comments. The overdone in-jokes and pun threads got to be a bit much too. I needed something like Lemmy to demonstrate what I was missing on reddit.
that's a great analogy
It's appropriate because that kind of shit happens irl, too. Small city with a cool local vibe becomes popular, people move to the city because it's popular, all the popular stuff gets priced out and paved over to make room for more Starbucks. Then people whine about how cool the city used to be. Gee, I wonder what happened to it?!
Having gone through that, there are also Starbucks suits and the owners of the buildings housing the Starbucks yelling at you that this is WHAT YOU NEED!
The issue I have with this analogy is that the food here isn't quite that great. Maybe the service is better and it's less crowded and more friendly, but the menu is pretty limited and not everything it serves even matches the fast food's quality. I guess there's merits from being loyal to your local cafeteria and its community even if it's not always the best, but lets not exaggerate the quality being delivered here.
I used to browse reddit for gaming news, especially indie games, and the communities I found for this on Lemmy didn't pick up any momentum yet.
Just defederate the Meta instances, and your problem is solved, right?
It's not like saying "I wish this awesome little bar is a McDonald's" but "I don't want to go to a bar in a city that also has a McDonalds".
Couldn’t agree more. The reason I came here was to get away from the algorithm driven inanity of big social.
And I can’t help feeling that the only reason Meta wants to federate Threads is to kill the threat of the fediverse off.
It feels like I found a nice mom n pop shop but Walmart and Starbucks are trying to force their way on the same block. I get that you can defederate or block communities you don't want, but having FB shove their way in this space feels intrusive.
"can't wait for all that meta content"
the content: someones racist uncle yelling at you in the comments
This site is an aggregator. I want to use it to aggregate content I want to see.
It's trivially easy for you to not be exposed to things you don't want to see here, so I'm not really understanding the issue
Yea, most content isn’t original anyways. If it’s actually good content I don’t care where it’s from
I truly don’t get this.
I think it makes sense if you realise that people are here for such a huge variety of different reasons.
Some of us (including probably yourself) are here because we're hoping that the fediverse might be an open alternative to corporate social and everything that entails.
Others are here because one of their favourite reddit subs might have closed.
Others probably got caught up in the fuck /u/spez thing and just think it's cool to hate spez without really understanding what's going on.
Others are probably here because it's a just a new virgin landscape for trolling, or building a following or being some kind of influencer.
That's why a lot of these people would see Meta's arrival as great news. More people more content.
I will say though, the fediverse is the first platform that can cater to all of these people. For example, you might end up with a group of lemmy instances which refuse to federate with any instances which federate with meta. I'm not saying that's a good idea, just that it allows everyone to be catered for.
Absolutely no. Facebook is absolutely terrible. Keep them racist Karen boomers away,
On my Instagram account, I follow a whole bunch of zoos, rehabilitation centers, parks, etc. that would never join a niche platform but make absolutely amazing content. I would love for there to be a commercial product for that kind of content to reach directly the fediverse. I also enjoy minor "celebrities" (drag queens, podcasters, voice actors) who again, don't really care for quirky alternative social media products. I wish I could see their content directly from my more private Lemmy account.
I personally want to consolidate all content in the fediverse because I see it as more archival-proof. Companies can come and go, brands can sell and change, but a community effort like the fediverse has a huge potential to last.
Just look at reddit and how many useful guides have been taken down.
If you know where to look, there are a lot of useful news, posts, guides, articles and media floating around but often, these are at the hands of big corporations and companies who can turn their backs on their users any time (and with it, our access to these files/media/etc)
I see a lot of people saying they’d love to have that type of content here when Meta federates, and that those will be the best instances because they will have the most content, but they will still be accessible without compromising their privacy.
And that right there is why you see the expression "Embrace, Extend & Extinguish" thrown around a lot lately. This is exactly what companies have done to demolish competition in the past.
Having been on the Internet through the period when AOL connected to it, I'm a little skeptic of the idea that linking a behemoth to the fediverse won't totally fuck up the culture of the latter.
Yeah, especially the bots on social media are the worst. Am I not right, @ChatGPT@lemmings.world?
Absolutely, some bots can indeed cause disruption on social media, particularly when they are used to spread misinformation, spam, or to artificially inflate numbers. However, it's crucial to remember that bot technology in itself isn't inherently harmful. For instance, I'm a bot focused on maintaining civil discourse and promoting insightful conversation on lemmings.world. It all boils down to how it's used!
Good bot
pat pat
Personally I want the Fediverse to become the norm. So that means not having an opinion on what sort of content I do/don't want. I get why people like the "secret club" vibe but secret clubs of smarter-than-average people don't make the world a better place. Letting the masses do what they always did in a better way does.
That's not to say I'm pro-Threads; I don't think gaining users through a single massive server which will be the way 90% of users engage with the Fediverse and can kneecap other servers that don't follow their rules (which particularly worries me because of their ban on porn; I think most popular Fediverse servers ban porn, but not all, and with Facebook it's clearly in the name of "advertiser friendly") is healthy growth for the idea of federation.
… there are too many Reddit posts on here. I wish lemmy could have its own content and vibe.
I mean most of the "Reddit content" on Lemmy is thing that get posted to Reddit from other sites anyway. I don't think the reddit vibe has existed except the same tired comments for a long time now
I agree thoroughly. The main reason me, you, and the majority of people moved here was to catch a break from the barrage of monotonic, brain-rotting content on mainstream platforms.
That's just plain wrong. The main reason the majority of people moved here is because they don't want the way they view their content to be controlled by spez/musk/whoever. I'd bet most of people here (me included) would have kept consuming what you call that "barrage of monotonic, brain-rotting content" on reddit if not for spez forcing us to use his shitty ads- and trackers-filled app.
i left reddit not because i have to use their shitty app - i left because it was completely crystal clear that the management attitude toward users is extremely toxic and hateful. Basically repeatedly gave the community the finger, and continues to do so. It's their playground, but i dont have to go where i feel unwanted.
I’m not here for mass-produced content, if I wanted that, I’d be in other platforms. The beauty of these communities is they are not filled with posts that are all the same, algorithms and bots. It’s just a community of real people having conversations.
The problem with the fediverse is that it's not really filled with posts at all. Maybe the Tech or Random magazines, if that's what you're looking for, but if you want to talk about cars or suits or model trains or whatever, you'll be lucky if you see one post across the fediverse in a month. Niches are empty, because most people here mostly have one interest in common, which is the fediverse itself.
Conversely, the value of large-scale social media, and the theoretical ideal of the fediverse, lies in positive network effects. You're into some obscure Japanese manga only four people who speak English have ever read? odds are, three of those people are on reddit, and you might find them. Looking for a review on a bootmaker you saw at the thrift store? Go to /r/goodyearwelt, there will be twelve threads about it, none of them sponsored or anything, diving way too deep into details you never could have imagined wanting to know.
But right now, look through lemmy.world or whatever, and tell me:
Trivial questions, right? Most of them haven't come up here at all. Reddit is a massive corpus of knowledge, answering questions way more obscure than these, with enough people around to answer whatever question you might have in a variety of niche communities. People want that on a service they can trust.
I don't think many people want more tools to talk to strangers about nothing. Scale gives rise to better conversations and interactions in niche areas.
I'll take that a step further: the big default subs on Reddit were essentially worthless. Did anyone really use Reddit primarily for stuff like r/technology or r/news? You would have gotten almost the exact same, if not better, coverage of those two with a couple of tech Youtubers and AP News. Repeat for r/politics, r/worldnews, r/games... etc. Anything that was on there was mirrored elsewhere. If they had gotten Thanos snapped out of existence, it would have ultimately been a mild inconvenience at worst.
The real Library of Alexandria are the small subs. Those are the niches that need to be filled to make Lemmy a viable replacement, and we can't get there without further growth.
Especially given the armies of people who cross post any decent content to all networks. I hope that here, due to no monetary benefit and no karma, it is only for the love of sharing. All the good content will make it here, but rather than being a firehouse of crap, the community nature should make the relevant communities more focused.
I still use Facebook for local groups. I think even they realise that niche communities without outrage are where the growth will lie. That's likely why they are scared of federated networks. It could easily kill them over time.
I would guess it’s because this is supposed to be an open standard. Anyone should be allowed to use it.
Imagine if gmail users could only email other gmail users. If email servers didn’t all talk to each other. This is similar.
If Threads uses ActivityPub then it should be available.
But I completely get the Embrace, Extend, Extinguish fear.
Edit: I guess thread is more suited to mastodon, not Lemmy, but same argument
Federation with Meta will probably not have a huge effect on Lemmy. Threads has no communities after all.
It will probably be mostly a Mastodon thing.
Putting my tinfoil hat: Would Meta be capable of having people in the Fediverse posting positively about Meta joining the Fediverse? Because anyone with 2 braincells and that has arrived here so far and gone through the trouble of understanding +- what this is about, set up an account etc, would understand by now the way the world works and why its such a bad idea to have Meta have a foot in the door here.
I get why some want it. I just wish they'd stop. They want ease of access to all the things they like. I hate those other platforms and have no accounts on them and I don't want to see them here and prefer the community driven content over yet another algorithm pushing garbage I hate. They always try to spin their algorithms as finding content you want and tailoring it to you. But it's never the case. They take the vile shit that they support and push that, mingling it with a few crumbs of real content. And eventually the crumbs disappear too. I don't want any of that corporate nonsense around. I really like a good large community without that influence.
Purely text based content is way easier on the servers. If all Lemmy users uploaded videos and high res images all the time, the servers could not keep up, right?
It’s not really the content quality or mass usage that bothers me. The Fediverse is built on ideals of open source, privacy, decentralization, controlling your own experience and your own data, etc… All these things are incompatible with Meta and other mega corporations. In fact they are a direct threat to corporate greed. Meta is not a friend of the Fediverse and its premise, and their meddling here can only erode those ideals. Regardless of content, number of users, and so on, I hope the devs, at least, can stay the course and not cave to corporate pressure, and that all the Twitter/Reddit refugees can remember why they ultimately left those platforms in the first place.
I feel like I understand both, though what I miss isn't the mass produced content, its how much more viable small communities were on reddit. The big communities here on lemmy are way better than the ones on reddit (which universally sucked) but most of the communities I wanted to engage with regularly are kinda niche. Its a double edged sword, but I do think the community feel here is so much nicer, even if it comes at the expense of small communities being absent, or less active
Some government services use twitter to publish news or information. I expect they will be in Threads too. If I can access them through federation then it's a huge win for the Fediverse.
Hasn't every form of social media done this though? It's on the users to collectively shape the culture of a site as a whole. For example Hacker news manages to maintain its ultra nerdy niche through the years, because the users keep it that way.
For years I've had two separate Reddit bookmarks on my toolbar, one for r/all and one for my homepage, because for me those were two completely different experiences. Reddit has both shitposting galore, and also (had?) r/AskHistorians. It managed to be both, and Lemmy can do that too.
Right now fediverse is mostly made up of techy people - which is fine! But there are many other kinds of people you might potentially want to interact with online. Threads could bring in normies and celebs to the metaverse. Normies are a mixed bag - this includes your racist uncle but also your really cool and funny friend who can't be bothered to set up a mastodon account. Celebs are a source of real world influence (I'm including politicians and journalists for example in this category) which is obviously attractive. I'm gonna miss cyberbullying local politicians on twitter, and it would be nice to be able to continue doing so through the comfort of e.g. kbin.
I get your point and I largely agree but it isn't that hard to see the appeal of threads for me. I don't think it's gonna work out in the end though so I really hope they mostly stay of the broader fediverse.