Lemmy and Mastodon feel like the real web3.
Lemmy and Mastodon feel like the real web3.
I think this decentralization and federation is what web3 is all about, without all the corporations calling everything to do with monkey pixel art that costs a million dollars "web3"
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I mean I definitely agree that this feels great, but decentralization and federation is what pure Bitcoin and crypto are all about. In many ways this community reminds me of the good vibes and great minds the early days of cryptocurrency discovery encouraged. This predated some of the corruption, VCs, and crypto bros that came around in 2013 during the first boom.
I still think that early soul of empowerment and community is there in Bitcoin itself but you gotta dig a little deeper to find it. I expect Lemmy will also “commercialize” to some extent in coming years, but it’ll always be better than Reddit and other centralized platforms that want to feature gate and censor unfairly.
I think the crux of what you are saying is that decentralized is a means to create a community. Most of us here want the idea to succeed and are putting in the effort, much like early crypto. Where both Reddit and Crypto failed is when commercial interest took hold. And to your point as long as Lemmy remains commerically disinterting, it will be a true community.
But, because of the decentralized nature, even if a commercial interest takes hold, it will be on individual servers. I can see the NBA or the Olympics or niche topics having their own servers -- and I would argue that is a good thing for those interested to host. The value is that you can have both the astro turfed along side the organic with competing interests in the "why."
I like that idea. The corps and sellouts get their own place, the underground has theirs, normies, weebs, etc. Everyone actually gets a place and unlike Reddit, they can't really encroach on one another.
Yeah I definitely agree -- you summarized my feelings nicely.
I would also add that as exciting concepts/technologies grow and commercialize they tend to become more subject to noise and self-interest interfering with some of their higher order "platonic" (ideal) forms. I fundamentally think that the more federated/decentralized a service can be, the better its original purpose and perfect form can be maintained. Practically I do think it's challenging for both currency and link aggregation to be properly decentralized, but I think both Bitcoin and Lemmy are inherently beautiful implementations if you strip them down to their core.