I think, maybe we could meaningfully rebrand Lemmy to Feddit? And change the direction accordingly (away from politics/tankie views, and towards general-purpose, meme content)? Maybe that would be a solid and sound approach to social media.
It’ll possibly be something built on the AT protocol. There’s likely a lot of people beavering away behind closed Doors to make “that but on AT”. TikTok and Instagram are the big targets but forums/Reddit have to be in someone’s sights.
Of course, I see all of them as a half-way house to the Fediverse. The cost of running relays is sufficiently high there may only ever be one or two for any service and down that road enshittification lies. If that happens, then we’ll see a lot more people jump ship again.
So AT, but not necessarily to Bluesky itself per se (or rather, not “just” to it), as opposed to ActivityPub?
I think if people writing open source software e.g. underpinning Mastodon would simply listen to potential users, then people would actually join it. Nobody likes to be ignored - e.g. celebrities who know that there are no guarantees that someone else won’t simply steal their name and impersonate them, which imho is a valid concern that they have. And ofc the onboarding experience leaves much to be desired, especially for people who haven’t created an account yet and just want to see an example of what it might look like if they did (which Bluesky does an EXCELLENT 👌 job at that!).
Here on Lemmy, that would mean defederating from troll instances like Hexbear - at least for the instances promoted to the “normie” crowd - and reducing the overall heavy tones of authoritian control. e.g. we have a modlog but no modmail, and the modlogs used to say more but now simply say “mod”, which let’s be honest, makes us Reddit 2.0, just now with slightly less spez, yet you know all those users banned from Reddit bc they were so toxic that even Reddit couldn’t handle them? Yeah, they came HERE - join us why don’t you?
Obviously you can/must spend tens of hours of your life blocking all of this if you don’t want it… oh and also a large portion of the software does not work, e.g. deleted posts don’t say “deleted post” so much as “internal server error, check back later”. (or instead of any of that, they could simply remain on Reddit? hence they do just that)
So AT, but not necessarily to Bluesky itself per se (or rather, not “just” to it), as opposed to ActivityPub?
Yeah, there are apps launching that filter BS for images (Instagram) or videos (TikTok) but they are quick and easy to deploy - BS could build those filters in itself.
The killer services will be standalone ones running on the AT Protocol. They’ll get a tonne of buzz and will see similar numbers of users switching to them from the Big Web but, without safeguards, they will be indistinguishable from the older Big Web services and have the potential to enshittify.
I think if people writing open source software e.g. underpinning Mastodon would simply listen to potential users, then people would actually join it.
The problem is, BS has millions of VC capital (including from blockchain bros) and, at some point, they’ll want paying. If the Fediverse had a fraction of that a lot of wrinkles would be ironed out.
Perhaps dansup’s successful Kickstarter and the rocketing success of his Pixelfed show we can push projects on to bigger things. However, we’ll always lag behind.
It would help Loops even more if the code was released:-). Although the code is released for PieFed, Lemmy, and Mbin, and that only helps so much there. As you say, it’s hard to compete against millions of dollars worth of investment. And the vast majority of users seem to care only about the usability of the tool, not purist reasons that it uses Arch btw, aka that it’s open source.
Bluesky has a lot of momentum and no one cares about mastodon. So I do think bluesky will likely remain a fixture. But I don’t think it’s the thing that replaces reddit. It’s the thing that replaces twitter.
Wherever it is probably doesn’t exist yet. But there will always be a next thing. If there were any viable outlet for average redditors to move to currently, they would’ve done it during the protests. I also think the average person just does not give a shit about federation and getting away from centralized control. They just want to be where people are.
I don’t know what the next thing after Reddit would be, but if anything fediverse wants to be that thing it needs to be prepared in advance of the next exodus.
That means developers need to work on smoother onboarding, from account creation to in-app guidance to help users find what they’re interested with as little effort as possible. On the backend, we need the ability to handle a huge influx of users. I don’t know shit about either of these things, but it’s what tech startups ALWAYS focus on to build their user base, to my knowledge.
PieFed is working on that, e.g. the Categories of Communities and Topics onboarding someone by a wizard asking what their interests are and then subscribing them to those communities, and also hashtag support helping to discover new content across Topic areas. It’s pretty neat!:-) 😎
There will, some day, be a mass exodus away from reddit. But it’s not gonna be to lemmy.
I think, maybe we could meaningfully rebrand Lemmy to Feddit? And change the direction accordingly (away from politics/tankie views, and towards general-purpose, meme content)? Maybe that would be a solid and sound approach to social media.
Do you think it will be to Bluesky?
One day it could be to PieFed, or Sublinks, but everyone banned for Rule 1 from ML knows that it won’t be to “Lemmy”.
It’ll possibly be something built on the AT protocol. There’s likely a lot of people beavering away behind closed Doors to make “that but on AT”. TikTok and Instagram are the big targets but forums/Reddit have to be in someone’s sights.
Of course, I see all of them as a half-way house to the Fediverse. The cost of running relays is sufficiently high there may only ever be one or two for any service and down that road enshittification lies. If that happens, then we’ll see a lot more people jump ship again.
So AT, but not necessarily to Bluesky itself per se (or rather, not “just” to it), as opposed to ActivityPub?
I think if people writing open source software e.g. underpinning Mastodon would simply listen to potential users, then people would actually join it. Nobody likes to be ignored - e.g. celebrities who know that there are no guarantees that someone else won’t simply steal their name and impersonate them, which imho is a valid concern that they have. And ofc the onboarding experience leaves much to be desired, especially for people who haven’t created an account yet and just want to see an example of what it might look like if they did (which Bluesky does an EXCELLENT 👌 job at that!).
Here on Lemmy, that would mean defederating from troll instances like Hexbear - at least for the instances promoted to the “normie” crowd - and reducing the overall heavy tones of authoritian control. e.g. we have a modlog but no modmail, and the modlogs used to say more but now simply say “mod”, which let’s be honest, makes us Reddit 2.0, just now with slightly less spez, yet you know all those users banned from Reddit bc they were so toxic that even Reddit couldn’t handle them? Yeah, they came HERE - join us why don’t you?
Obviously you can/must spend tens of hours of your life blocking all of this if you don’t want it… oh and also a large portion of the software does not work, e.g. deleted posts don’t say “deleted post” so much as “internal server error, check back later”. (or instead of any of that, they could simply remain on Reddit? hence they do just that)
Yeah, there are apps launching that filter BS for images (Instagram) or videos (TikTok) but they are quick and easy to deploy - BS could build those filters in itself.
The killer services will be standalone ones running on the AT Protocol. They’ll get a tonne of buzz and will see similar numbers of users switching to them from the Big Web but, without safeguards, they will be indistinguishable from the older Big Web services and have the potential to enshittify.
The problem is, BS has millions of VC capital (including from blockchain bros) and, at some point, they’ll want paying. If the Fediverse had a fraction of that a lot of wrinkles would be ironed out.
Perhaps dansup’s successful Kickstarter and the rocketing success of his Pixelfed show we can push projects on to bigger things. However, we’ll always lag behind.
It would help Loops even more if the code was released:-). Although the code is released for PieFed, Lemmy, and Mbin, and that only helps so much there. As you say, it’s hard to compete against millions of dollars worth of investment. And the vast majority of users seem to care only about the usability of the tool, not purist reasons that it uses Arch btw, aka that it’s open source.
Bluesky has a lot of momentum and no one cares about mastodon. So I do think bluesky will likely remain a fixture. But I don’t think it’s the thing that replaces reddit. It’s the thing that replaces twitter.
That indeed makes sense. So where then will all those people go?
Wherever it is probably doesn’t exist yet. But there will always be a next thing. If there were any viable outlet for average redditors to move to currently, they would’ve done it during the protests. I also think the average person just does not give a shit about federation and getting away from centralized control. They just want to be where people are.
Sigh… ^This indeed. :-D
I don’t know what the next thing after Reddit would be, but if anything fediverse wants to be that thing it needs to be prepared in advance of the next exodus.
That means developers need to work on smoother onboarding, from account creation to in-app guidance to help users find what they’re interested with as little effort as possible. On the backend, we need the ability to handle a huge influx of users. I don’t know shit about either of these things, but it’s what tech startups ALWAYS focus on to build their user base, to my knowledge.
PieFed is working on that, e.g. the Categories of Communities and Topics onboarding someone by a wizard asking what their interests are and then subscribing them to those communities, and also hashtag support helping to discover new content across Topic areas. It’s pretty neat!:-) 😎
Neat!