Tl:dr: Remember the human, even if the project doesn’t work, it wasn’t as useless as it may seem, resources consumption may be concerning
Also disclaimer: I have no involvement in the Fediverser project other than following it from afar and discussing with the creator in a few comments.
Hello everyone,
As the other thread is already quite active and I guess my comment would probably be drown there, I open this new to bring an alternative perspective on the project.
Remember the human
First of all, could we please try to limit the hostility against the project creator? It’s fine to disagree, to block, to defederate, but wording such as “hate”, “screw the person” don’t seem to align with “remember you will be interacting with actual, real people” and “Be respectful of others.”
Now that this is out of the way, a few considerations to take into account:
The Network Effect - the issue that Fediverser is trying to solve
As most of you probably know, the network effect prevents most of the users of an existing platform to switch to another one. “Why would I go there where there will be no one, when all the people I want to interact with are here?”
It was the case for Mastodon until Twitter started to really become mediocre, and Signal still hasn’t convinced most of the Whatsapp userbase to make the switch. Matrix is struggling to be a full Discord replacement, but has the benefits of having bridges with most of communication platforms (https://matrix.org/ecosystem/bridges/)
Those bridges can ease potential reluctant users to at least try out Matrix, as they can still access their previous network.
That was the whole idea behind Fediverser. I remember the initial plan being a two-ways bridge between Lemmy and Reddit, allowing people to see content from Reddit from Lemmy, interact with it, and having people on Reddit seeing responses too.
Added with all the Lemmy pros that we know (third-party clients, alternative front-ends, etc.), it could be a huge helper into bringing more people into Lemmy. Which brings us to the next question.
Do we need more users?
I know this is highly debatable, but I will try to bring some perspective on this.
I have been an active user on Lemmy for a few months now. I like it here, great apps, nice people, interesting discussions.
But still, I still to go Reddit too.
Why? Network effect. As much as Reddit sucks today, there is still content that is only posted there, and sometimes I just want to read that content. And I’m not talking about niche topics like obscure fandoms. Parenting, personal finance, relationship advice, fashion advice are topics that aren’t very popular on Lemmy. And probably won’t become anytime soon due to the network effect. Which is fine for me.
But the issue I see is that overtime, the migration might never really happen. We might be in a “next year is the year of the Linux Desktop” or a “Chrome vs Firefox” situation rather than a “Digg to Reddit migration”. And I’m taking examples where the alternative is still widely used. Lemmy could actually become Diaspora, as over time, more and more people just think that the convenience of a Revanced third-party client is better than having to browse two platforms.
But to be fair, the future doesn’t even matter that much. What I wanted to say here was that I understand why the Fediverser creator wanted to avoid that scenario, and tried to accelerate the process.
Resources consumption
The list of instances part of the Fediverse project can be found here: https://communick.news/c/communick_news_network. I had a look at two, https://level-up.zone/ which replicated a gaming sub, and https://selfhosted.forum/. While they are quite active, they don’t seem to be that active (most of the threads have less than 5 comments, there are a few that high the hundreds, but they are quite rare).
I have seen several admins complaining about the system resources consumed by alien.top instances, “as much as the largest instances”. Does that mean that if tomorrow reddit.old dies, we double or triple the number of users on Lemmy, instances would have to be shutdown? Can we afford a growth this large? The scalability issues have been mentioned since June, and it seemed that things had improved on that side, but should we be worried that Lemmy will hit a scalability ceiling at some point?
However, to be fair, I guess this point is mainly assessed as a “low return on investment” for the resource consumption. Which brings us to the previous point “What what Fediverser trying to solve”.
As a conclusion, I hope this perspective might help people see why this project was made, and that maybe it does not deserve all the hostile reactions from the other thread.
That’s it, thank you if you made it to the end. Looking forward having a discussion in the comments.
Have a good day.
Edit: I noticed I didn’t mention the copyright issues in the comments, but to be fair I’m far from being knowledgeable on the question. It might however have a Streisand effect of having Reddit sue a single person over comments that are made for free by Reddit users. Is that worth being sued by them, I don’t know (also, what about alternative front-ends like LibReddit, or archive websites?)
I simply don’t understand what this fediverser thing is supposed to accomplish.
So apparently it is “eventually” supposed to let Reddit and Lemmy users interact with each other. And this will somehow cause people to join Lemmy? If someone is a reddit user, posting in Reddit where 99% of the community is, and they happen to see a comment from Lemmy, why would they even care? Why would they leave their community with 99% of the people to move to a smaller inactive community that only has any action at all due to copying content from the site that they are already on? It doesn’t make any sense!
And if that sad state of affairs is the eventual goal for the project, what is it accomplishing right now, other than annoying people with bot spam? If you want to read Reddit threads, go read Reddit. There is no reason to spam your personal reddit rss feed to the world. And what is even the purpose for it creating user accounts, which is basically impersonating people?
I think it basically boils down to 1 question. Is it currently accomplishing its goal of bringing actual new users to Lemmy, in any measurable way. If that answer is anything other than “yes”, then why is it enabled in the first place? If that answer is “yes”, then there are still a whole host of reasons why that might not be a good thing.
Because of all the recent drama with reddit and its continued enshitification. Apps that users/moderators relied on are gone, the mobile site is shit, etc. For a lot of users, there are enough pain points that mirroring the content somewhere else is enough to get them to switch.
It’s already working as a prototype, as mentioned here: https://communick.news/comment/1229610
Here is the example: https://old.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1857wsg/question_instead_of_nextcloud_why_not_use_a_ftps/kb0ozc5/
Because then they would be interested in using the third party Lemmy apps and not the abomination that the Reddit one is.
And still Mastodon set-up a lot of repost bots when it started to attract people to the platform, by showing them they wouldn’t miss the content they wanted to see.
It also required Twitter going to crap, but Reddit seems to be following that trend.
It is: https://lemmy.ca/comment/5397535
But if you want a data report with all the migrations successfully done thanks to the tool, that’s probably too much to ask now