I’ve been using Lemmy and learning the ropes of the Fediverse and I’m really impressed - especially using wefwef which has replicated my Apollo experience very well.
There are posts and everything, just a lack of comments to read for hours on end is the only issue I have, but I believe that with more users this really could be the replacement.
Are you guys thinking the same thing? Is there evidence yet that Reddit is slowly failing and power users are migrating?
I’m going to copy my post from elsewhere here:
Not only did we let them monopolize niche knowledge we also let them completely supplant forums and other methods for discussion on the web while letting them slowly poison the quality of discussion overall through the wide spread use of bot manipulation. Imagine an internet with reasonable, easy to access, informative and kind discussion. That is where we will trend without highly corporatized outrage driven content algorithms and it’s not just a completely different internet, but a completely different world.
Yea the internet definitely has taken that trend to the extreme in recent years, especially with businesses which don’t make their own websites anymore and host their social media on platforms like Facebook; of course along with individual communities slowly being herded into the corporate mega forum that is Reddit. Definitely not healthy to have all our human interaction/information controlled by these entities especially as we move into the age of artificial intelligence.
Amen
I don’t know about power users or whatever, but social media as we know it is literally imploding. It’s kind of stunning, and I think it’s the perfect opportunity for federation to take off.
Oh it’s imploding alright, just like that billionaire submarine
Too soon?
Well ok, Twitter and reddit are down for a round, but we still have Instagram, TikTok and ugh… Facebook.
But could lead to users realizing that these aren’t public service institutions to take for granted, but companies that can fold and take your network with them.
Facebook/Instagram (Meta) is one I am not sure how to get a read on. They are branching out a lot, but I have no idea what they’re doing to remain profitable. It seems like they’re in “Throw everything at the wall and see what sticks” mode, hoping that they find a new niche before their sizable warchest from the 2010’s runs dry.
They severely downsized once this year already and I have a feeling that won’t be the end of the story. Wouldn’t surprise me if they sell off/shut down Oculus in the near future.
Tiktok, meanwhile…well it’s already undergoing enshittification (it is the subject of that original essay) and old people are starting to use it, so I feel like it’s only a matter of time before it’s no longer cool with kids and they lose a sizable chunk of their revenue stream and content.
Didn’t they spend insane amounts trying to convert literally everything to run in VR - like the whole of Office 365 for example. I can’t imagine them getting any return from that investment - why would someone at work want to wear a heavy headset instead of looking at a screen?
Pretty sure they are playing the long game with VR/AR. While the headsets are bulky and heavy now they are trying to build a software ecosystem for when the technology catches up and headsets are nearer the size of a pair of glasses.
Apple have obviously also seen where the tech is heading too and want in the game early enough as well. The price of their first offering is obviously ludicrous but in time the price and form factor is going to diminish. The first laptops and mobile phones were ridiculously large and look where we are now.
Zuckerberg said to his shareholders when he bought Oculus that they shouldn’t expect it to turn a profit for a minimum of 10 years and possibly longer. He also warned to shareholders they would be pumping a lot of money in long before they see a profit.
Time will tell if it pays off for them.
I don’t know if I’m ready to believe, but I hope decentralization is the next shape of the internet, as it was before.
For years I’ve watched smaller businesses give up on having websites in favor of just a Facebook page, or businesses built entirely on YouTube, Instagram or Facebook, with the very real risk of having the rug arbitrarily pulled out from under then for some dumb reason. It’s totally unsustainable to rely on the whims of these platforms to house your canonical home or as a base for your income stream.
Sure it’s nice to reach a wide audience by publishing to platforms with many users, but companies still need to be in control of their identity, so if some platform goes south, it’s not a catastrophe.
I hope so too. It’s frustrating when I look up a local business while I’m out, find only their Facebook page, and then it asks me to log in just to read it. I can’t/won’t do that. I’ve not been on Facebook for years, I’m not faffing about with that rubbish.
That’s losing money for these small businesses, because I can’t even check their opening hours or if there’s food I can eat. Meanwhile Big Chain Restaurant has everything on their own site. The small companies could be doing so much more, but they need to give up using Facebook as their sole website publishing service.
I know I’m getting off topic here but, that made me think of what’s going on with Etsy right now. A lot of small businesses just have Etsy pages and not their own website. I’ve been hearing from a lot of people that Etsy isn’t paying them or, holding their money for months before releasing funds.
All of that plus this really makes you think about being in control of your own things.
The problem is people will still just use Etsy rather than going direct to the business, even if going direct is significantly cheaper, because it’s easier.
You see it with fast food deliveries as well. People would rather just order through just eat or deliveroo rather than ringing the place up and saving quite a decent amount on their order for both themselves and the local restaurant.
Unfortunately people just want convenience these days.
I was skeptical of lemmy at first but it’s definitely growing on me. As apps and features mature I’m sure it’s going to be even better.
Was a chronic lurker on Reddit but hoping to contribute to communities here to help it grow!
Eventually the fediverse will grow. Maybe now or in 5-10 years when the rest of the internet users get fed up with the ads and subscription fees etc. on commercial sites. It seems like an inevitable evolution.
I don’t think reddit will necessarily fail big time, but it has changed into something that I don’t want or need to participate in, so it doesn’t really matter to me. I actually don’t want them to fail, because the users there who enjoy it for what it is now should be able to use it for …that.
In the last couple of years it grew too big for my taste anyway. The “Eternal September” phenomena hit it pretty badly. I didn’t enjoy the constant noise and immature arguing over semantics. It’s a different demographic than Facebook, but it’s about the same reason I don’t use that either.
People like free sites, but I can see popular instances dying without some form of way to make money. I don’t think all Lemmy communities can run on donations alone.
No clue about the power users, but I left reddit due to the API changes. I never posted and only lurked and am really excited to be on a place that might be up and coming compared to feeling like I got throw in the deep end.
Same here. Mostly a lurker or commenter. Probably posted like 3 things ever.
Same — after seeing how similar it could be to Apollo (thanks wefwef), I got very excited to be a part of a greater movement towards a defederated platform, especially as I learned more about it.
It’s like being a part of a giant email server that large corporations don’t have minute detail controlled to maximize profit.
I’m doing MY part.
I mod a 21 thousand member sub on Reddit and opened a similar one here. I put several relevant posts to get things started and let people on the sub know we are here with a tutorial on how to sign up and explanation on why it is good to have an alternate.
I now have about 20 members, a few coming each day. However no one has posted or replied at all.
Another community I created has a similar result.
I know there is a threshold of activity that stimulates more activity, but so far its not happening. I’ve started many active subreddits, including one in the 1% with half a million subscribers. I’m not new to community building. I’m honestly concerned.
I want to encourage everyone to post and comment in the little communities you have joined. You will be contributing to this whole project when you do.
I feel like there is a higher barrier to entry for lemmy, it needs to be lower friction in the sign-up process, people don’t want to have to work out what instance they should sing up to to make an account!
I don’t think it’s the start, but I think something’s happening. The internet has just been through an incredibly stable period for 10 years or so, but I that finally came to an end a year or 2 back. There have been lots of smaller social media platforms popping up for a while now, and I think the landscape is finally becoming less stable and more dynamic again.
I think just like with encyclopediae & Wikipedia, users are beginning to understand why trusting a private company with safeguarding human knowledge and access to free public debate is a very bad idea. If non-profits take care of the larger instances here I believe the Fediverse will triumph over Reddit and other centralized forums. People migrating to Lemmy right now is literally a Wikipedia moment for link aggregator forums.
I don’t know that this will get as huge as reddit was, but the number of comments I’ve seen here has doubled/tripled in the past few weeks, to the point where if Lemmy doesn’t ever grow much more than this, I think this is a sustainable mass of people right now to keep a good network effect going
I’ve just been using it a few days but it really feels like the reddit third party users are moving over. I use the wefwef app and I’m really enjoying it more than the reddit app.
I am cautiously hopeful that fedi will become significant in a while.
I think lemmy has a lot of potential, we are just lacking the flood of content that Reddit has. But as this the API changes just went into effect, I feel like new users are still learning the ropes of lemmy and it will be some time until we have that endless stream of content. So it is important for us all to be as active as possible to help reach that goal faster
Piggybacking your comment here to say we need to be active as well as donate to our instances. It ain’t free, after all.
I don’t think it’s the content — there’s already Reddit reposting bots available. It’s the lack of comments which makes Lemmy feel more lonely/less active. I wonder what the average non-bot comment count is for most posts on r/all
I kind of like the lower comment count. It sucks when there are literally no comments, but for me, I’m much more inclined to leave a comment when there aren’t too many already. Plus I found most comments were really low effort jokes. For every well thought out comment, there were a million ‘this’ type comments.
I don’t want to jinx anything but really hope this platform will continue to grow. love the atmosphere right now!
Lemmy reminds me a lot of the way the internet used to be- smaller, independent communities with more real engagement and less of a content firehose. With so many instances, if you want something, you have to seek it out or start it yourself- with the added benefit of federation keeping everyone connected.
I’m really optimistic that this will get critical mass. I think the concept of federation is great, and I like to think we’re at the forefront of a whole new phase of online community.
Plus everything is just a bit broken and requires some figuring out. I’m definitely pretty tech savvy, but I’m having a hard time imagining non tech savvy people figuring out how to sign up and access these communities, at least not in the current state of things.
The hardest thing about lemmy was signing up and figuring out how to access it and log my account into mlem but things are mostly smooth after that sure there are some bugs but i feel like i am learning quickly
The only big disadvantage i see in lemmy other than the sign up process is the lack of a dedicated video player but it’s understandable because they cost too much to maintain and run
I would like to see a connection to PeerTube. I’m not exactly sure how it works but it might work here
Agreed. But Reddit, along with most of the internet, was like that in the early days too. In the days pre-Digg migration, I feel like Reddit was down more than up. After the migration though, there was enough critical mass to encourage bug fixing and improvement.
I’m sure there will be growing pains though no matter the outcome.
Yep that’s exactly what I was trying to convey. It does feel like the early internet days when everything was just a bit broken and streamlined UX was not at the forefront of tech. The primary users were the geeks that could figure this stuff out.
It’s giving me strong ~2013 reddit vibes, which I always thought was around the peak of the site to be honest.
I think the community system starts to break down once the platform gets too big. As reddit grew, all of the big r/all subs lost any sort of identity and became the same amorphous community copy/pasted over and over.
The downside is that we don’t have as much niche content yet, but we’ll see how it’s looking in a year or so.
It’s the classic “Eternal September”: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
No, this is going to be its own niche. And that’s fine.
The great thing about Reddit is that a lot of people are there.
The worst thing about Reddit is that a lot of people are there.
I don’t think the fediverse is ever going to be massive, but that’s okay! Smaller communities usually lead to better interactions. I’ve only been here a day, but the thing that jumps out at me is this place doesn’t seem hostile.
Early days on social services have always been my favorite. In a weird way, I’m glad Reddit led me here.
