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?)

  • Emotional_Series7814
    4•1 year ago

    I was always annoyed by the “LMAO everyone pathetic nerd stereotype” thing they did on Reddit, only partially because it assumed everyone was a man desperate for sex from a woman. Is this comment an attempt at a joke or a genuine assessment?

    I may be a nerd and it is probably fair to say most Fediverse users are. But I’m not a basement-dweller stereotype and I’m not sure where that comes from aside from the tired old Reddit joke about all its users being that exact stereotype.

    Also, again, network effects. Go where advice exists on a nice wiki, not where it’s a new community and maybe 1 person will answer your comment if you are lucky—a lot of people just want an answer and don’t want to deal with the nonresponse and tumbleweeds from a totally new community. It is emotionally easier to toss a post about gaming into the void than it is to approach with an actual problem you have in a relationship or with your finances you need help with, then to check in daily in hope someone answered only to get crickets back, and then repost in another community (or even another site, where you might have to rewrite that post so that you can’t just look it up and find out FediverseUser83 posted the same thing as RedditUser92 and is thus probably the same person’s two accounts). So these become “why waste the effort and time when you could just go to Reddit and get a quicker response?” to an even higher level than other communities—nonresponse probably hurts more.

    For relationship advice specifically, I recall that subreddit being called unrealistic so often that I understand why people might be wary to start a new one here.

    I’m actually pretty image-conscious and a lot of this manifests in putting effort into how I dress. I am also incredibly uncomfortable putting pictures of myself (yes, you can talk about fashion without selfies, but the typical “does this look good on me” post requires you post yourself. “Look at this outfit I put together” is easiest to do with your own human body, not searching online for images of each piece of clothing you put on and putting them in one image, especially because some older pieces may not have a perfectly matching online image) on social media like Reddit, let alone the Fediverse which duplicates your post to tons of servers who may or may not respect post deletions. I’d imagine this frustrates the growth of fashion, makeup, and hair communities.

    • @[email protected]OPEnglish
      -1•1 year ago

      Hello,

      Thank you for your comment!

      I’m actually pretty image-conscious and a lot of this manifests in putting effort into how I dress. I am also incredibly uncomfortable putting pictures of myself (yes, you can talk about fashion without selfies, but the typical “does this look good on me” post requires you post yourself. “Look at this outfit I put together” is easiest to do with your own human body, not searching online for images of each piece of clothing you put on and putting them in one image, especially because some older pieces may not have a perfectly matching online image) on social media like Reddit, let alone the Fediverse which duplicates your post to tons of servers who may or may not respect post deletions. I’d imagine this frustrates the growth of fashion, makeup, and hair communities.

      I was thinking more about general advice, like “what to wear for this kind of settings”, “what is the best value for money in term of brands”, “where to get your basics”, etc.

      I posted a few days ago on [email protected] about a product I had tried. No need to put any additional personal information.