Warning: This is a rant.
I don’t really know how to describe it but the content isn’t quite where reddit had been for me. Also the comments are kind of weird at times, like they type of person here doesn’t quite seem as ‘normal’ as what I’m used to from reddit.
There’s a lot more open source and privacy focused people and conversations. A lot of people seem to hate on big tech and big companies in a sort of toxic-ish feeling way to me (not to say the other relationship isn’t toxic… just saying). Random conversations go into: “omg your privacy is lost cause you used a Google service.” Then we have the ‘if we don’t defederate with Meta the world ends’ conversations. I personally would like to see what Meta does in the fediverse… maybe it will make it more normalized…idk. Then the: “if your app isn’t open source its awful and terrible for the world” people.
Like that stuff is all fine, but it just isn’t quite my cup of tea.
These things remind me of that one person in my comp sci classes in college who I just couldn’t stand talking to. He would try to make you feel like an idiot by trying to sound all self righteous and smart. (Honestly he would fail and would generally look like a dingus).
The bulk of the content that gets comments seem to be mostly meme atm. At least on all (7/10 of the current top for me are memes). I like my memes, but would like some more breadth/depth.
Like I hope Lemmy continues to grow and hope it gets better, but it leaves me missing reddit at the moment.
In a perfect world I wish reddit corp wasn’t such assholes and this whole thing didn’t happen the way it did.
I’m completely skipping the UI and stuff not being as familiar and the various outages/bugs/etc since that’s to be expected with something at this stage.
Please don’t hate me :) Just sharing my unpopular opinion. Though I genuinely wonder if others feel the same way.
/Rant
It’s mostly the technically adept people here, we’re naturally more aware of security/privacy issues present in tech spaces and are angry that the masses are so oblivious or uncaring of the problem. Especially when that problem keeps ruining our online spaces or putting us at real world risk by letting apps use their cameras/mics/locations all the god damn time
Privacy is always a trade off. You have to find a sweet spot that fits your convenience and willingness to share.
A good example is home automation. I can get a camera from someone like Nest and it’s cheap, feature packed and simple to use. But it’s going to harvest all your data and videos.
Instead I could go with Logitech and Apple. Now the price is 4x higher but the videos only exist on my Apple cloud. This is more secure but still could have security concerns, and increased costs and effort.
Lastly I could go with something like ubiquity. Another drastic increase in cost, with less features for remote access. But you host your videos locally and are in complete control. This option is by far the most complex to set up as well.
None of these are inherently bad if you understand the trade off. I am accomplished in tech and I choose the middle option because it best fit my lifestyle even though I could have went with the last option.
Not everyone that is technically adept agree with your statements.
True. Not everyone agrees. Since I’m just me, I can only speak for myself.
With this in mind, I would like to hear reasons why you or others don’t agree. I ask in good faith.
Having an opinion is as natural as being human. I see the world through my eyes, think about in my brain, color it by my life experiences. So there’s always the possibility that I might be missing something important. Perhaps you were persuaded by some strong and much valid point or points.
If that’s the case, and if you’re willing, can you please share why you disagree?
To start with, I don’t think privacy is that important. I think that most open source end-products aren’t good and they are only made better when money gets involved.
To start with, I don’t think privacy is that important.
It makes more sense when we start talking about privacy in concrete forms. It’s about not giving any entity more information than it really needs in order to perform the service they claim to provide. For example, imagine how much better credit cards would be if the number was randomly generated, only valid for a single purchase and only the credit card company knew your name and address. Credit card scams would mostly be dead in the water and card readers would be rendered useless.
Not everyone but probably most people that are technically adept, and even more so those that have switched from reddit to lemmy
Asshole about open source anti big tech here. Point taken. You can choose your communities you see on your home feed. Seriously, use the block user feature too. Block me if you want. It is not personal. I have a half dozen people blocked just because they have been negative and I don’t want to see it any more. With around 150k people here rn the total communities are still developing. There are several I miss but don’t want to mod or churn content by myself to get started. This is still mostly unsettled early adopters. Everyone here is going through the same series of breakup withdraw emotions, and everyone is a weird asshole user to someone. Most of us mean well. You are able to steer the conversation too. Post, and help making the conversation you want to participate in.
I will reply as someone who in 2015 had 340,000 followers overall in the big social media of the time (tumblr, insta, fb, flickr etc). I was the world’s most popular collage artist at the time (not an exaggeration). I even got selected by NYTimes for having among the “best book covers of the year” in 2016, among other works for many magazines etc.
Long story short, for an artist to make it without a gallery (I despise the whole idea of galleries because they force you to make the same kind of art all the time), they must base their business via social media. There’s no other way. And so I did, and did well. Well, come 2017, the enshitification of these platforms started happening. Nothing was chronological anymore. And since I’m not a person who shows what they ate today, or making it all about myself (I was only posting art, not personal stuff), their new recommendation algorithms destroyed my business. I used to make thousands per year to sustain my life, because each time I’d have a sale, people would SEE my post about it and if they liked my art, they’d buy. Now, my posts are served to about 1/10th of my followers, and no new users find me, because hashtags aren’t embraced for finding new users anymore, everything’s just recommendations. Within 5 short years since the big algorithmic, I was now making only about $100/month via my art. And that was not just for me, but 95% of other artists and photographers out there too. The recommendation system of all social media (including youtube now) only promotes a few superstars in any given field, not everyone is getting their share fair of exposure based on chronology. Many online small businesses don’t work anymore because everything is not a fair field anymore. Even buying ads doesn’t make a difference.
So, I have no interest in using things like Threads, where you are literally bombarded with celebrity and brands content, but almost none of the people you follow.
Reddit has followed the same line, it’s just that we see it less, because it’s more discussion-driven. But similar changes have happened to it – in spirit. I still use reddit only for 3 sub-reddits that are too specific and don’t have enough people for here yet. I don’t use the rest of reddit.
On top of that, I’m not interested in trackers, ads, and everything that eventually lead to enshitification of these platforms. So now, I only use federated services. I have accounts with lemmy, mastodon, pixelfed, peertube, nostr, matrix, etc.
No, none of my friends are there (my husband has a mastodon account, and that’s it). And I don’t care if they aren’t. When I’m with my mom next time I’ll install a matrix client for her too, so she can call me for free (so we don’t have to use fb messenger, the only big app I still use, so I can talk to her in Greece for free). Then, I won’t need of these big social media apps.
As for my business, it will never come back (especially now with AI art). But at least, I have MORE eyes here on the fediverse than I have on the big social media. I posted a new painting on my pixelfed yesterday, and it got 17 likes, out of just 27 followers. On instagram I usually get 70 likes out of 3600 followers (that’s on my illustration account, my other, collage account, had nearly 170,000 followers in its hey day). And consider that Pixelfed only has 160,000 users (plus federated via mastodon by some instances). Given that amount of likes on the fediverse, if Instagram was still chronological and hashtags were still bearing importance as they did in the past, my posts there could have about 5,000 likes – given their 2+ bn users. Instead, with their recommendation engine, I get only 70 likes, and no new followers. So proportionally, I get more eyes on the fediverse, than I do on the big social media. So why would I want to go back to big social media? Just to be served Kim Kardashian content that I never asked for it? I won’t.
Is you are looking for a Reddit alternative and are not liking the Fediverse I suggest you try Squabbles
not to be a dick, but good riddance to anyone implying meta isn’t an unethical, monster of a corporation that is defined by it’s opportunism, serves only it’s own interests, and has forfeited any and all good faith it may once have had. trust them at your own peril, and go back to reddit.
See… this is the type of comment that cements my opinion. I don’t really care about the ‘meta’ of the platform at the moment. Most businesses tend to be this way in this world. There can be a separate conversation on that pitfalls of today’s capitalism. I just want a link aggregator with friendly people that is usable for all.
If those friendly people wind up coming from Threads or whatever, that’s ok with me. It doesn’t have to be ok with others though, I won’t push my opinion on others at least in this context.
I gave my opinion and you gave good riddance. That isn’t exactly welcoming.
Reddit wasn’t welcoming to opinions outside the hivemind either, you just didn’t notice because you were inside it.
You’re basically telling everyone to be nice and pretend these same kinds of people who killed reddit for us won’t kill the fediverse when we have every reason to believe they will, and you don’t want us to talk about it or do anything about it?
I don’t really get why you’re here in the first place. If you liked reddit and don’t hate modern social media why not just stay there? People came here to avoid what meta could do to the fediverse and avoid what reddit became. Why are you acting surprised that people are acting that way?
You’re basically telling everyone to be nice and pretend these same kinds of people who killed reddit for us won’t kill the fediverse when we have every reason to believe they will, and you don’t want us to talk about it or do anything about it?
Up to now, I’ve asked probably like 6 times in various different threads on kbin / lemmy / mastadon
Nobody has given a concrete mechanism by which federating with Meta will kill the Fediverse. At most people just parrot out the acronym “EEE” and link the singular article by Ploum and pretend like they’ve said something meaningful
Federation is like email. I’m not going to block Gmail off from my email server because there are millions of people who use Gmail. It would be a disservice to my open standard to be blocking off millions of people from communicating with me. Instance owners are not going to give them their admin passwords. The Lemmy devs aren’t going to close source Lemmy and license it to Meta.
It’s not even like federation is a permanent thing. Instance owners can federate and as soon as Meta brings negative consequences they can defederate. The main risk I see is a large influx of people… which is not a bad thing, especially once it stabilizes. It would mean more people make more subs and all sorts of niche things will start to pop up - the only really nice thing about reddit.
So tell me, what is the urgent crisis attitude for? How is this the end of the world? Why do we see post after post of people freaking out about this? Instance owners can’t even sign an NDA without getting death threats.
