ARTICLE of Techwireasia
Why does everyone keep thinking fedi needs to be the next “big thing.”
It’s great as it is. It doesn’t need to be easier, or more widely adopted.
The internet used to be difficult to use and that acted as a filter to keep the brainless masses away. It’s fine. It was BETTER back then.
People want the Fediverse to grow because we can see how much damage corporate walled gardens have done to our society, and we care about others who are still trapped in a cycle of corporate abuse. We dream of a better world and see the massive potential benefits a decentralized global communications protocol hold for humanities future.
Does anyone have a home remedy for the darkness within that is slowly overcoming your will to live?
I tried apple cider vinegar
I need the ability to save comments in Memmy for well written comments just like this
Yeah I get that but any big tech company can just buy the entire fediverse if they want to. They can offer instance owners money to sell their instance. They can put Lemmy developers on the payroll with 500k salaries, or replace them. They can add things like allowing people to make money by posting stuff. Suddenly we have influencers, and while they may not appeal to you, they will appeal to the millions of people who like them on Instagram.
I may not be right about the details but I’m just painting a picture here. You are letting your dreams about a better world totally cloud your judgment here. Corporations can take this place over easily and they will be really interested in that if the active user count becomes big.
People say “then we just move to another platform”. Yeah, like the one we have now? And try to get it big? So we can end up again having to move away from it…
The only way to win is to stay smallish and under the radar. Be a fringe interest for a couple of million active users.
You’re 100% wrong on the details.
A few things:
- Lemmy runs on an open protocol which cannot be “bought”, known as ActivityPub. All platforms that use ActivityPub can theoretically interact and federate with Lemmy. This means that if something like lemmy.world was bought, we don’t have to “move away from it”, we just spin up another instance and then federate with it while the other instance doesn’t have to deal with corporate things like ads.
- Lemmy is Free and Open Source Software licensed under a version of the GPL. This means that it can never be fully restricted, and if corporate interests were to theoretically “buy” the current maintainers, it can be forked to a version without corporate meddling, which can then federate and interact with all the current instances anyway, due to how ActivityPub works.
- There’s a lot of instances. You can’t buy the entire fediverse as you will have people with principles.
Now don’t get me wrong, they can absolutely meddle, but not purely through money or hostile takeovers, due to the decentralised nature of the Fediverse. No matter what, the Fediverse will always exist as it is, all the huge platforms can do is try to make it so people don’t want to use the Fediverse and move to their platforms instead.
To try and give an analogy, it would be like a company trying to “buy the web” - they literally cannot. Of course, we do have some huge players who control a lot of the web and attempt to dictate standards for everyone else, but there is no one iron fist that rules over everything, and there’s many small players and communities all over the place.
“any big tech company can just buy the entire fediverse if they want to”
They literally can’t.
Yeah I get that but any big tech company can just buy the entire fediverse if they want to. They can offer instance owners money to sell their instance.
…and they can turn around and create another instance
They can put Lemmy developers on the payroll with 500k salaries, or replace them.
Lemmy devs don’t really “own” the code, since it is free software. It can be forked at any time by anyone.
They can add things like allowing people to make money by posting stuff.
…and existing fediverse instances can just not federate with instances that push that bullshit
I’m sick of people acting like they’re superior and only they deserve the Internet because they think they’re intelligent. The “brainless masses” have just as much right to use the internet as you do. Stop trying to gatekeep the Internet.
More mildly put, people are diverse, which is a great resource.
I want to follow communities about a wide variety of topics. Some appeal to intellectual, tech-savvy people, others don’t.
If the platform is deterring to the later group, my experience suffers because I lack content in these areas.
People can use their brains in many more ways than understanding technology. Just because a person is not good in navigating technology does not mean they have no brain.
For example, I’d love to see more going on in communities about performative arts, philosophy, activism, regional cultural events. Occasionally, I like to peek into bubbles which are completely different from my own.
With power comes responsibility. I see it as the responsibility of people who understand technology to make it accessible to those who don’t.
id rather not use a platform loaded with greasy snobs saying “brainless masses” too
I would even go further and say that I also want to interact with people who just want to be silly or want to share their bizarre views about things. Variety is the spice of life. As long as these communities can remain separate (like how the fediverse has communities), then the more the merrier.
I honestly don’t think something having a higher barrier to entry is gatekeeping. Ofcourse you shouldn’t try to make things actively more difficult but I don’t think lemmy is doing that anyways.
Let’s go further! Computers should not come with an operating system installed.
Exactly. We need people here. The strength of Reddit at this point is that, for any interest you might have, no matter how niche, there will be a sizeable community on Reddit that knows a lot about it and is yearning to talk about it. Outside of tech and science adjacent topics, that’s simply not really the case here.
Sure, sometimes I want to talk about new developments in tech. And other times, I want to talk about Carly Rae Jepsen’s upcoming album, The Loveliest Time, and how I’m fucking stoked to see her in less than a month.
I think we pretty much have all the answers needed somewhere on the rest of the internet. It might just take some extra effort to find what you need.
The bigger a social platform gets, the more synergy it spawns. That’s what adds utility to a social platform.
I don’t think anyone here wants it to be ‘the next big thing’, but I do think a lot of people (myself included) want to see it become ‘one of the next big things’. As in…we want it to become big enough to be a viable alternative to the proprietary walled-garden corporate establishments that have become the current standard.
More choice = better, and for as long as this platform remains small and elitist (referring back to your 3rd sentence), it will never truly be a viable choice. There’s still a lot of engagement I’m required to use Reddit for - and I hate that - and the only reason for it is we just don’t have the community size needed (yes, it’s getting closer every day) to be that viable alternative.
You are young it sounds like. If Lemmy becomes that size, all good things about it goes away, and we get ads and corporations moving in to profit from it. That turns the entire thing into the same shit as everything else.
It happens over and over and over again in tech. It’s a pattern that all older people knows about because we have lived it.
So I hope Lemmy stays small. Bigger than now, sure, but not big enough to attract corporations.
I think the Fediverse model has a really strong advantage compared to past platforms. Corporations are always going to have a profit motive, and that will necessarily eventually make the user experience worse. With how easy it is to move things around in the Fediverse, there’s a meaningfully lower risk of that since the lock-in factor is reduced. I’m sure we will see monetized corporate instances (see, Threads), but if that experience eventually gets intolerable, it’d be relatively easy for users to jump ship without drastically changing the experience.
It’s not perfect, but we’re in a better position I think.
As toxic as Reddit is, it is a huge wealth of information if you can search and parse it. It also encourages small niche topics that wouldn’t get any attention without a huge audience to draw from. If Reddit is no longer going to feed that role, I hope SOMEPLACE becomes that kind of place in the future. If it’s the Fediverse nothing stops instances from creating smaller communities within it. Could be best of both worlds. Or it could ruin it. I guess I don’t know.
You are young it sounds like.
No. But it’s humorous to me that you immediately go there for anyone who disagrees with your take. I’m >5 decades.
If Lemmy becomes that size, all good things about it goes away, and we get ads and corporations moving in to profit from it. That turns the entire thing into the same shit as everything else.
Sounds like massive speculation. Especially for an open platform system that anyone can self-host. If you don’t like ads or paying for service, light up your own instance and self host. That is, by definition, why lemmy works the way lemmy works. I hate to accuse you of making shit up, but you are making shit up.
It happens over and over and over again in tech. It’s a pattern that all older people knows about because we have lived it.
I’ve probably lived through more of this than you have. I’ve made my career in the tech industry and have been at it since 1991. Again, you keep trying to imply that you somehow have more experience or more time in industry just because I disagree with you. That’s awfully pretentious.
So I hope Lemmy stays small. Bigger than now, sure, but not big enough to attract corporations.
That’s elitist. And it’s self-defeating. Sounds like you’d be happy just joining a few email list servers…because you aren’t going to get any more value than that out of the self-inflicted handicap of keeping community sizes tiny.
You seem to have equated what you think is superior age and experience with superior wisdom. You’re wrong on multiple counts and committing numerous logical fallacies while you’re at it. Larger platforms are more successful because they have the community sizes needed to make even niche topics relatively engaging. There’s a critical mass of users needed to make that happen. Lemmy is a few orders of magnitude too small for that yet, but that’s what it will take to be a viable alternative. I’m not suggesting that Lemmy should get so big that it causes places like Reddit to disappear…just that it gets big enough to be a viable alternative. If it’s not big enough to be a viable alternative, then what’s the point? To just be an elitist circle jerk for for a few people discussing a few popular topics somewhere outside the mainstream so they can think they are some kind of techno-hipsters? What a waste.
“The bigger a social platform gets the more synergy it spawns”
Ehhhh, small groups have plenty of synergy, no?
Is some growth good? Of course. Is becoming as big as everyone else is a good idea? You tell me: which megalithic tech company has a userbase that isn’t being poisoned or exploited? Namely: Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Reddit, etc.
Keeping a reasonable size, just like anything else in this life, is the correct option. Obsessive growth leads to greed and misery.
EDIT: Sorry for being so brain dead in my initial response
Reddit tier aggression lol. Chill out and then we’ll listen to what you have to say.
It’s not the people that got dumber, the tech did. Everyone has the capacity to become more knowledgeable of computers and the internet as a whole, but large corporations dumbed it down so they can take control of everything.
The internet used to be difficult to use and that acted as a filter to keep the brainless masses away. It’s fine. It was BETTER back then.
yeah, that September never ends
To be fair, a lot of the “before” users were just out right assholes to us kids trying to figure out how to use the internet. There was definitely a culture of superiority from the early adopters.
I really don’t like this superiority complex of calling anyone who has other priorities in life a member of the “brainless masses”.
I get that it’s nice to have in-depth conversations with smart people about things you find interesting. I’m here precisely for that reason myself, but I’d much prefer to do so in a community of people that doesn’t derive its sense of identity from how superior they feel to everyone else. I agree that the Fediverse doesn’t need to be the next big thing, but that doesn’t mean we have to actively be asses to everyone we think is beneath us because they’re not worthy of the truly great privilege that is speaking to us.
I’d much rather the platform itself simply be deeply robust, very accessible and easy to use, and most importantly, extremely conducive to allowing individual communities to form and enforce their own rules and norms. There is no reason at all why one community can’t have extremely strict standards and require all comments to be made by credentialed users who cite all sources while having discussions about, say, physics, while another might be devoted to the Kardashians or logistics for the Taylor Swift Eras Tour or whatever else pop culture has decided is the topic du jour. These are not necessarily in contradiction, and particularly with different instances, nothing stops you from primarily participating in an instance that focuses more on nerdy things and bans memes and pop culture, or that has any other focus that suits you. If you find yourself getting content from more general interest instances that you’re not liking, you can block them. This level of flexibility is the exact point of the Fediverse in the first place. There’s no need to gatekeep the entire Fediverse because you want your own fun nerd space; the Fediverse already easily facilitates that level of independent community creation.
Lest you think I be one of the brainless rabble, rest assured I’m speaking as someone who studied computer science at Harvard, works in cybersecurity, and knows Latin, Greek, French, and Arabic - since apparently people aren’t worthy of speaking to you unless they pass some kind of intelligence test.
oh I assure you, I can be just as much a dumbass as the best of them.
But seriously speaking, I really don’t like this tendency in some more geek-oriented circles of thinking that being interested in tech and science, or even being smart, makes you inherently better or more worthy of dignity than anyone else. I used to very much be that kind of person (not quite the /r/atheism ‘I am enlightened by my own intelligence’ level of edgelord, but not terribly far off), and it’s an attitude I’ve come to really dislike.
This post has the energy of a treehouse with a “no girls allowed sign” on the door.
The gatekeeping just makes some people feel like they’re special because they are the ones doing the gatekeeping rather than the ones being excluded by it. And it usually involves defending flaws in the community that drive most people away because they serve the same purpose.
Right? We aren’t enlightened sages just because the platform we use is a little bit harder to understand. We need more than just people with technical skills, and if there’s this many people agreeing with calling others the “brainless masses”, seems like people skills are on short supply.
seems like people skills are on short supply.
Not horrendously uncommon in these kinds of spaces, for one reason or another. The Fediverse definitely isn’t at this point, but there is a point at which it’s not that ‘normies’ don’t understand you or are too dumb to talk about the things you’re interested in, but rather, that they understand you perfectly, and think that you’re an asshole.
brainless masses
You sound like a lovely, humble person who never screams at their loved ones
I think their overall point is that there can be some sites that are more niche and serving certain communities/groups of people, that not everything needs to be the biggest thing ever with millions of users. Where everyone is shouting over each other and the original idea or spirit of the place ends up lost.
I would never say the masses shouldn’t have access to the internet, but if the comment is coming from a place where an alternative to Reddit doesn’t need to have as many users or be as mainstream I can get behind that. Sometimes when the floodgates are opened a place just isn’t the same anymore and loses sight of what made it great.
Because social media exists to connect people. This is not a forum for a single niche topic, why would we ever just call it enough and be done with it? There are many communities that I’d like to follow that are still struggling to get off the ground.
I don’t know what you are here for, but to me the Fediverse is not great as it is. It has potential to be but it’s still largely tiny and niche, I can’t find a fraction of what I’d like to. That may make it more manageable so far, but it’s also pretty empty.
Let me be real, one thing that definitely won’t help this place no matter the size is this sense of superiority that we are better without the “brainless masses”. Over the years it has become very clear that whether people are technologically adept and whether they are good contributors and members of a community are two completely unrelated things. It’s just unfounded elitism.
What we do need to watch out for is for corporate control, advertiser influence and algorithms which prioritize profit or clickthrough at any costs. A lot of internet media has devolved not because of “the masses”, but because they prefer the eyeballs that outrage bring over cultivating a harmonious community.
because everything needs to grow, or die.
homeostatic states are not a thing that exist in western society.
Not everything needs to grow forever though. Lots of things are fine stopping at “big enough”.
This. Instagram was probably amazing back when it only had people who looked good in pics and/or were good at taking pics, and only posted stuff if it was particularly interesting. Rather than the whole world being sorta forced to put random pics on there.
It’s even worse now. I have an insta account for my business, and overnight likes on pics plummeted. Now, since they presumably want to compete with TikTok, you only populate on peoples feeds with videos, and posting CONSTANTLY. If you stop for a day or two, you basically start back over. I don’t want to spend time on there, I don’t want to post multiple times daily, but to stay “relevant” you don’t have a choice.
I love that without bots to downvote what should be considered problematic speech you find that the VAST majority agree with you, it’s almost like bots were created to manufacture consensus within communities by making opinions of the minority look like they were the majority, I expect we will see those bots if lemmy really takes off.
