This has come to mind because all the chatter about Meta federating.
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.
I truly don’t get this.
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.
If you want mass-produced trendy content, please, consume it elsewhere, and when you are inevitably fed up, then come here and enjoy the slow-paced, real community.
PD: I hope this doesn’t come across as wall-keeping (or however it’s said lol), It’s my honest opinion.
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 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)
Data has a self life.
We can take it all in, keep it in a living system that keeps it accessible, keep it intact (all modern storage degrades in 2-10 years max, so it needs to be redundant and living storage)…
And still, no one cares after about 5 years. How many throwbacks memes or posts have you seen about the digg migration to Reddit? I haven’t seen any, even though it’d be topical and interesting
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 wouldn’t mind if someone stole and curated the top posts from certain subreddits I’m interested in.
I really don’t dislike reddit for their communities but for their CEO and corporate greed. The content is great.
I’m not there because I don’t want to give them money after they mistreated their users.
Same. Ideally, Lemmy would be a Reddit replacement for me.
But it can be a replacement with original content. Even if they have the same topics, it’s beneficial to let each community grow their own culture.
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.
Also, I don’t think that the way to deal with “there is content on a platform that I don’t like” is to run from it. It’s to make better filtering systems to choose what I want. Two reasons:
-
First, some people like different things. They shouldn’t have to use different platforms just for that.
-
Second, stuff like spam will show up anywhere that has decent size anyway eventually, once there are enough eyeballs for it.
I think that the goal should be to have plenty of content of all sorts on the Threadiverse, and then just have good filtering tools that are hard to subvert.
Reddit didn’t let people build the filtering tools they wanted in and in some cases – like when it came to their own ads – were actively opposed to that. The Threadiverse solves that problem for me.
-
I thought I didn’t until I came here and realized how nasty Reddit has become. You can go days on Lemmy without encountering an angry asshole.
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.
Mm… you do have a point, but I would argue that the content is generally better at the very least to the degree that it’s actual people sincerely posting things rather than bots, shills and karma farmers spamming and/or astroturfing.
And yes - niche communities are extremely underpopulated here.
I don’t think the solution to that though is to aim for more generic “content” with the hope that it’ll lead to broad growth and that a byproduct of that will be to bring more people who happen to share your interests. The solution IMO is to get on the communities you want to see grow and start contributing stuff, right now. Even if you’re just posting to one person, keep at it, and pretty soon it’ll be two, then three, then…
But, I think part of the issue is that communities that folks are interested in being a part of, about certain topics/etc, just aren’t active enough here yet. I’m glad to see some are growing, and my personal experience is improving over time, but I keep finding communities that look like something I’d love but have zero activity ir content in them. So I do understand folks wanting to fill parts of this with content in general, even if it’s content similar to what they would’ve gotten on Reddit, because content and activity is what will help build those cool communities over time.
I only wish I had interesting or important things to contribute to the communities I’m interested in, I never know what to say or do to help build a community that’s nonexistent or essentially so. 😥 so far I’ve just been commenting wherever I can, for the most part, hoping that helps.
I hear you! You and me both, I’ve always been more of a lurker on almost every social media. However here I feel more comfortable posting than anywhere else because I know people aren’t here just to troll, gain followers through controversy or self-promote, so it feels way better.
You’ll get comfortable soon enough
I appreciate your comment and points you made. Hope you keep at it too!
For sure if they want that content they can just go there. Lets not turn our cozy little café into a McDonalds as you say.
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!
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”.
aa
More like a small town that used to have real restaurants that got driven out of business when McDonalds came to town selling shit on a plate so cheap it was impossible to be price competitive with food suitable for humans.
The mere existence of McDonalds dramatically hurt the options available.
Well… yes and no.
I’m not talking about any effect I think it might have on me, because yes - I can just avoid the instances favored by morons.
To belabor the analogy a bit more, it’s not quite accurate to say that they want this neat little cafe to be McDonalds - they want the entire town to be McDonalds. They want to be able to open up their door snd see nothing but McDonalds, stretching to the horizon in all directions.
That that literally can’t happen - that the decentralized nature of the ActivityPub means that the most anyone can ever do is turn instances into empty wastelands of brain-dead “content” one at a time - doesn’t make their viewpoint any less perplexing to me.
That’s what had me confused at first when people were leaving Reddit but going “bRiNg ReDdIt CoNtEnT oVeR aNd DeLeTe ReDdIt!” and using the whole “we need content” as a reason.
Like, if y’all want content from social media platforms… use those social media platforms. In my mind’s eye, I see the Fediverse as more of an old-school forum where people can make any forum for specific communities, not as a content-vomiting platform.
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.
For example, you might end up with a group of lemmy instances which refuse to federate with any instances which federate with meta.
Oh how much I hate this mentality.
My morals are so superior that not only will I not be friends with you if you disagree with them, but I won’t be friends with you if you dare associate with anyone that disagrees with my morals either.
As far as I am concerned the fediverse will become the next reddit or facebook as soon as a large enough group starts defederating with instances that refuse to follow its defederation brigades.
Sorry man, we can’t be friends because your friend John doesn’t boycott WorstCompanyEver™. They are fascists and if John supports fascists you must be a fascist too.
It’s not about friends and morals though, it’s about data, open standards, and what you want the net to be.
If John’s fascist friends have very strong views about the way they want the friends of their friends to interact, and the vast resources to influence John into the trajectory that aligns with their desires, then perhaps a refusal to interact with John is the only option for someone with no resources. It’s the paradox of tolerance.
Take for example Google Chrome, at one time it was a plucky little open source competitor to the established browsers interacting with open standards. Now they’re killing ad-blocking. This wouldn’t have happened if no one had switched to Chrome. I personally can’t control what browser everyone else uses, but I can choose which browser I support.
What I’m wondering is go fat would that go. You could have an instance that defederates from an instance because it’s federated with another instance that is federated with Meta. And so on and so forth. To me that will just create a group of instances that aren’t federated with anything else…
I will defederate with anyone who dares associate with Kevin Bacon
As reasonable of a stance as I have ever heard.
More people also = more problems, exactly the reason those places turned to shit too.
More people, introduces different problems.
For example, not having enough people engaging in a more niche community is a HUGE problem, which can only really be fixed with more people.
A big part of the reason yes, but I think advertising has an insidious role also.
Lemmy instance admins have no financial interest in user’s time on site. There’s no outrage machine to drive engagement.
i mean if you want a social media network to grow…
Things don’t need to grow to be successful.
Right. Growth is how shit fails and ends up artificially kept alive.
very diplomatic - but yeah we cant have it all :)
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.
Oh god, the Eternal September when 90% of Usenet was people replying “me too!” to a post that said “me too!” in response to a post that said “me too!” which referenced the previous post that said “me too!”
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.
I understand why you want that, and I’m glad that decentralization/defederation allow you to keep that.
I have to ask though, why do you want to keep other people from getting that algorithmic, corporate content if they want it? Especially since this will allow them to do it without giving up so much personal info via apps. (While also allowing us to interact/evangelize the FOSS way > corporate systems)
I don’t want to keep them from it. I just prefer they go to their other platforms for it. Because by inviting it to this platform, it degrades this platform in my eyes. I don’t have another place to go to get away from that content, they do have a place they can go to for that content. I’d appreciate it if we can respect that boundary. Keep this place free from the corporations that are destroying so much of our world. At least as much as possible. Nothing good can come from opening this door, and if it opens, history will repeat itself once more because there is always a new crop of people unwilling to listen to warnings. No good comes from aligning with growth at all costs corporations. It just isn’t possible.
Emphasis on vile shit
Some automated algorithms can be good for content discovery and discovery of new creators tho
- if you are to lazy to type in your search term into a text box
- if you do not even know how to articulate the name of the content you search for in text form
These automatic suggestion algorithms are perfect for mindless scrolling in an entertainment sense … these ranking algorithms justify the massive data collection we witness today.
I wonder if there is another way of decentralized way of content creator discovery without the current drawbacks.
I really don’t think anything justifies the massive data collection that currently happens. While “feeding the algorithm” may be their superficial excuse, data harvesting is really there for the resale value.
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.
No karma? What are the little arrows for?
I think what it means is that it doesn’t add up all the little arrows across all posts and comments, by default. Although, I suppose an instance, external tool, or browser plugin could still do that.
Thank you for explaining. I was wondering about all the talk of (lack of) karma.
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.
That was my take as well but I’m also an ignorant slut so more than happy to hear reasons why I’m wrong
I’m also an ignorant slut
Just wanted to say that ya made me laugh with that phrase lol. I too enjoy using “slut” in a myriad of fashions
Your username is a hell of a reference, haha
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?
- consider that they use hardware that is run on donation (or their own) money
Do people running servers have any options for limiting the amount of pictures and video that users upload to their instance?
Having text-only communities sounds like a good way to attract the right people and be an unattractive option for people who just want max content.
I really like that idea.
It would absolutely demolish the risk of a community turning into a meme sub, or one of subs where people just post pictures of their Raspberry Pi in some retail case over and over again.
And as long as pictures are disallowed on the main post, people could still be free to post links to guides or other important content that contains pictures.
Hmm, links to pictures elsewhere seems like it would be less work for the computer running the instance.
Which would be pretty important if we want to keep monetization as unobtrusive as possible on Lemmy.
That said, I do think we need to figure out image hosting at some point.
I asked a similar question previously one of the makers of lemmy responded to me:
Open an issue on that or write a bot
… I thought sometime in the future I will make such a bot … but turns out I need to use typescript for that.
I might be willing to help with this if you want to tackle it and are interested in help. I’m newish to Lemmy but want to get my feet wet. What tech stack do you prefer? Typescript is a very short leap from Javascript if you already know it, IMO.
Write it in Rust, bro!
The instance I’m in limited pictures upload size to 265kb.
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 think that an open systems that are universal and interoperable are inherently superior to any walled garden. If people think that the fediverse can’t handle or incorporate large corporate interests then this is a failed experiment and they should just shut it down now. Superior open systems should be able to dominate a free market environments, and people either don’t believe this to be the case, or the fediverse is inferior and will never beat the centralized competitors.
I also hate Facebook but for those reasons I think that Facebook joining the fediverse would actually improve Facebook, not worsen the fediverse.
Thing is, they don’t have to pay people for that. Some people just love having the contrarian “not everything meta does is bad” opinion because they think they’re being clever
I remember when I was considered a contrarian for refusing to have a facebook account back in 2008 or twiter later on or instagram. How times have changed.
Its a mix: contrarians, Meta shills and NPCs.
I have put on that same hat already believe me
This companies are all about profit and control and monopolies and give zero shits about you, quality content or anything else. Fuck them
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.
Even better if they just create their own government instance and post them there, then others can federate or just consume as desired. I really don’t like the idea of the government making you sign up or interact with some for profit business’s infrastructure to see communications from them.
It’s better if they did that, but they are not doing that.
EU has mastodon and other social media for example: https://european-union.europa.eu/contact-eu/social-media-channels_en#/search?page=0&networks=mastodon
I believe most people just want more content than anything, but with opening it up to all of those other social media platforms, you get all of the junk that comes with it.
I personally left those platforms to get away from all of the social media drama, and I don’t mind less content as long as it quality.
I’m a Reddit refugee and I’ve been moving all the pictures and videos from my old niche subreddit to my new niche Kbin magazine. I’m afraid Reddit will collapse, and the collection of floaty things I’ve been building up will become lost media if it’s not reposted somewhere else. I like the Fediverse’s mission and I want to see how the Fediverse develops. Also, I want to have a complete and functional artsy magazine on Kbin to show the others back on Reddit that it can be done well.
For the past couple days, some of my posts have been making Fedia’s home page and apparently other instances’ home pages too. It’s good to be seen, but I’m afraid I’m getting more attention than I actually deserve. I like seeing art of fantasy worlds and interactions, and I’m not alone in that. But, I’m afraid I’m corrupting your feeds with stuff you aren’t looking for, just because I’m doing it first.
Oh snap I saw a ton of floating is fun posts and wondered what was going on lol. Didn’t really bother me even though it’s not my thing, I’m just glad to see lemmy getting posted to so much.
Keep it up!
i’ve seen quite a lot of content from tiktok, over on reddit (basically a repost?)
I refuse to go on tiktok myself
But i will gladly watch a 30 second clip if its funny or interesting, regardless of where it originally came from.
i’ve already seen older memes reposted here anyway. not like we can avoid it…
