Use distributed, federated services like Lemmy, mastodon etc.
Support the hosts with our own funds.
Moderate our own communities.
The second point is the most important. Reddit happened because they are a corporate entity seeking profit. Let's own our social media platforms by actively contributing funds to them.
Honestly never liked Twitter so mastodon was like meh. But as dorky as it sounds Reddit was fun, even went to some of the meetups back in the day when it was smaller, etc. I’m now seeing the light on the federated / dWeb scene more clearly now.
Totally agree we need a new grassroots web. The classic internet is way too centralized now and is about to become a pit of GPT-generated nonsense clogging up search engines. Stoked to jump in and support these new communities!
It doesn't seem like an issue yet, but I'm interested to see how the fediverse combats the inevitable GPT spam it'll start receiving as it grows and misinformation/advertising becomes more attractive on these platforms. It's not an easy problem to solve (though handling it better than Elon should be pretty easy lmao).
True any text based thing is vulnerable I suppose. I suppose the SEO/content farming stuff tho is more what I was referring to. It was already happening with scrapers ripping off real content to get ad impressions or rein affiliate links. thats a big part of why Wikipedia and Reddit got some priority (either algo or humans adding “Reddit” to a search).
But hopefully stuff like the fediverse makes it a bit more grassroots in that a shitposting bot has less of a direct financial incentive in the way the web does.
Since you mentioned Twitter and GPT, I'm also not very much of a Twitter guy, but I open it sometimes just because.
Jesus Christ, EVERY POST is filled with lots of people just quoting the GPT bots to "answer" for them some ironic shit. People can't even be bothered to even interact with a post of their interest anymore.
As someone who never got to experience the web as so many remember it (before it became centralized and primarily monetized), I'm quite excited at the prospect of Lemmy and the Fediverse in general. Maybe my generation and those to come can come to know a better internet.
Is that really true? I navigated to the Reddit page just a minute ago and there is a ton of activity in the subs I was using before I deleted my account. There are new communities on here that were created to mimic subs over there and it's pretty telling: Little to no activity on the communities over here but a lot of activity on the Reddit subs that are being mimicked. I'm asking myself if the people that are leaving Reddit are mostly tech people, that either work in an industry related to technology or are super enthusiastic about tech. My go-to subs were humanities related on Reddit. Those are still super active over there.
I support Lemmy but people saying Reddit is dead as of today and everyone is moving over is just way to hopeful or straight up delusional. If Lemmy does take off it will be years before it reaches anywhere near the amount of users Reddit has. Most of the people who said they will leave Reddit also won't commit.
Yes. I’m one of the many who kept using Reddit throughout the blackout, but once third party apps were killed, I would have to go out of my way to download the official Reddit app and relearn all the muscle memory browsing habits anyway, so why even bother? WefWef is great and I kinda despise the shit a Reddit pulled with their abrupt price hike.
My daily browsing on Reddit went from probably 1-2 hours of day to … well it’s not been long enough to tell but so far I’ve only viewed the site once from my laptop. My mobile use is now completely Lemmy.
I think there is a lot of hype going on here about migrations tbh. Lemmy is cool and all but reddit is certainly still generating/aggregating way more content and its where most lemmy content is originating at this moment. I think for now the tech folks are here setting up, a few of us are bumbling around discovering this, and everyone else is still on reddit. I am not a very techy person myself and lemmy is a weird system to wrap your mind around coming from reddit and I can see how people may not bother, especially this early. Just choosing an instance and then finding communities is like an absolute mindmelter if you're used to reddit and its' easy to see why people on reddit would not be keen to move away.
Got it. Yea i think the migration is really for the people that use third-party apps and the people that support them. reddit is fine its just how they act toward people who are litterally moderating and giving to the community by using third-party apps. i modded my sub from rif and apollo early on. We realized that u/spez was in total control and realized we couldn't do anything about it. we tried to protest but of course we are little fish. now we got lemmy and kbin. witch is actually better cause you arne't jus stuck to one platoform. yes people are mimicking reddit cause thats all we know. but give it time and we will stop talking about it. i say about 1 month or so. you will still see the people talk about reddit burning in hell lol and stuff but that's about it. the blackout brought out I think the real techies and then after the api yesterday and today closed the reset that used third-party apps and everyone that dosen't like where reddit is going are coming over now. #fediverse is huge and we didn't know about!
Same.. I think as the Lemmy apps mature and if Reddit quality decreases, then we could see more of an exodus. My hope is that apps might make it more accessible. It’s the Wild West.
The ratio of users that I remember Redditors often passed around was ten percent of users were active contributors that created new content and were active everywhere in all the subs. Every sub has a core group of people that create most of the content and drive conversations and connections. The rest of the 90 percent are lurking in the background and most just read and watch, several may take part and generally just repeat and repost content that was already created by someone else.
Once enough of those core dedicated Redditors leave, it will severely affect content. But even so, there is so much content on the site already that users can just repost old stuff endlessly and still drive traffic .... hell they could even just get the bots to just regularly bring up old popular content that users would see as new.
If Reddit does change for the worse, it will take time and it won't happen fast .... it will take months but probably a year or two to see any significant change.
With the initial blackout, there was at least some vague hope they would listen. But then we got to July 1st with them quadrupling down and here we are.
This needs to be the way forward. The community needs to own itself, support itself, etc. The alternative is what just happened where the community is abused for someone else's gain.
I agree to a point, but this is also how you get communities that are REALLY easy to squash. Because they're fragile and incoherent. Bad actors can easily overwhelm them, astroturf, go after hosting....etc and small self funded communities won't have the manpower, tools, or resources to combat it.
You want to build a strong community that lasts, and is resilient.
So how do we make our communities more resilient, well resourced, less fragmented, and also accessable for member growth?
I don't see how that is possible in the fediverse.
Let's say I like fishing and a fishing community exists in five instances... That fragmentation you can't avoid... In the other hand it helps with the resilient part I guess. The more fragmented it is the harder it will be to take a community down.
Having multiple communities under the same subject in different instances will soon become normal, for better or for worse.
I have read some comments in github discussing possible ways to develop something akin to "mutireddits" (or more recently custom feeds) so people can group communities like this across different instances.
Let's see how all this plays out. Interesting times ahead in the fediverse.
One of my biggest concerns about Lemmy is the seeming inability to prevent astroturfing by various groups. I also wonder how it will survive when (not if) they receive GDPR fines, legal holds from law enforcement organizations, and a variety of other legal and regulatory topics that Lemmy (or at least the instance owner) is subject to even if the user base doesn’t believe that to be the case.
Hopefully the donation model will allow enough funding to address the realities of running a popular service.
Karma is an inherently destructive thing for many reasons. For people, it is a representation of other people's approval of you, so they'll do anything to boost that number as highly as possible, even going so far as to make fake karma farming accounts, create botnets to upvote themselves and downvote opponents in arguments, and post garbage content instead of engaging in meaningful conversation with other people. For corporations, it's a marketing tool they can exploit to manipulate public opinion, by creating or buying high-karma accounts to convince people to buy shit, or to mass downvote people who point out flaws in their arguments or products, or figure out what they're planning and try to call them on it. They can use karma to discredit opponents, astroturf, and even sway elections indirectly. It's one of the reasons why civil and political discourse have completely collapsed in the USA.
It works for wikipedia, and that's a big, monolithic organization. The distributed nature of Lemmy makes it more possible to run off donations, because individual instances are smaller and require less exotic hardware. They don't have to store the entire corpus of Lemmy content, etc, etc. Smaller instances means less human resources and attendant management. I think most of these instances are still run by volunteers as passion projects.
I don't think that will work as instances start getting to the million user mark. 10M... I'm interested to see 1) if Lemmy actually gets that big and 2) if users condense on one or a handful of super-instances or some other form of organization develops.
I can imagine, for example, Electronic Arts starting their own instance for arms-length game sites that might attract a large swath of people, or Nikon sponsoring an instance that specializes in photography and imaging-related communities.
When you say karma, do you mean having visible post/comment scores or visible total user scores - or both?
I can see the argument against visible post scores as it can lead to dogpiling, but I do think it can provide a valuable indication for what the community consensus is around that post.
Regarding total user scores, I don't see the harm at all.
Personally, I quite liked the feedback karma gave on Reddit.
Second option is difficult because there are too many instances. It is difficult to make good use of the funds as the popular instances will eventually enjoy too much profit whilst the smaller instances will be forced to shutdown due to lack of funds. This will lessen the decentralisation overtime.
The solution is a central service, something like Lemmy Fund Management or something, which regulates the funds accordingly. The managers will be selected by voting system (democracy). There are other solutions as well.
Unsure how distributed federated services prevents the reddit downfall, aside from corporate greed. Which can also be solved through legally binding agreements/foundation-controlled companies. Among many other solutions that can avoid funding, stability, and consistency issued federated services have and will continue to have.
It's all a tradeoff. To tradeoff corporate greed you now have community fragmentation and fragility risks as any instance can be taken down whenever, and any unhappy user that created communities can solely kill them off (As stated by some users threatening to do so in another thread).
What you should be talking about is how do you mitigate these tradeoffs. What should others do to make the fediverse more successful? If you want it to be successful than talking about these hard problems in a semi-flenal way is required.
#2 sounds good to say, but barely works in practice when you're talking about infrastructure costs in the tens of millions of $ per year for something at scale...
Essentially saying nice things that don't effectively translate into reality doesn't solve problems. It just perpetuates a lack of critical thinking.
OK good point but think about your tone dude! You're coming across like you think we are stupid and I'll offer the benefit of the doubt that you don't intend that side effect.
My tone is such that it addresses the nativity of posts like this. Especially when said nativity pushed for potentially counterproductive or harmful mindsets that prevent real solutions from being discovered.
Nativity must be addressed if hard problems are to be solved. It's a baseline.
A small slice of users are going to understand broader technological, community, funding, and survivability nuances. As such these should be explained so we're not simply hand waving necessary complexity away. Encouraging deeper discussion from others who would otherwise pass posts like these up because of the low quality.
It's the difference between talking about niceties, vs actually working towards solutions. These are hard problems, and should be recognized as hard otherwise they go unsolved.
The more readers know about the rest of the iceberg the better. The more knowledgeable folks you attract to a discussion by encouraging critical thinking the better.
Lol well while you're at it, if you're interested in PS2 games, and more specifically a niche gem called Kinetica why not check out my currently bugged and suffocated community? https://lemmy.world/c/kinetica 😃😂
As for how you can be sure, it is hard to tell, it really depends on each instance. Even in the case of lemmy.world, while you have some details on the expenses and revenues, it's not at the level of a company audit. But that was enough for me to donate. At some point there will always be a trust element.
also don't block other instances too much! I mean as long as they are bot servers that threaten the health of the network, then you have to get rid of them of course. but way too many people are getting their panties in a bunch about content they don't like, and immediately resort to the nuclear option of defederation, which is actually hurting the network and effectively splitting the user base. all these things should be blocked on a user level (by blocking specific communities, not whole instances!).
There are unfortunately not enough people that hold this opinion, too many are trigger happy on defederating from those they don't like.
Like you say, there can be some legitimate reasons, such as bot servers, and I would add if a big company created an instance to take it over and kill the federation.
But too many simply do it because they disagree with what the people in an instance are saying, and that hurts the federated nature of the fediverse.
I’m having trouble seeing the purpose of the federation system if not to cater what people see, to one degree or another. After seeing soft nazi rhetoric spread through years worth of complacency, the argument of “don’t get too banhappy, fellas, all ideas are worth considering” really doesn’t strike me as wise.
Ok, so, admittedly, I haven't taken much time to read up on what I can do with Lemmy.
However, by the sound of it, I can set up an instance on whatever server I desire. From that instance I can moderate the content accordingly to how I want, including automation. Users can sign up on my Lemmy instance, or I can participate in other discussions from Lemmy users on other instances.
This also means I could make an app for my specific lemmy server, and tweak it as to how I see it. Or shit, I could keep myself as the only user ok that lemmy instance if I really wanted.
I take it all the stuff for lemme is right there on Github, so When the little one has down time I'll start digging in