The fediverse won’t succeed just because it’s better. It will succeed if and only if people choose it.
Part of that is making it monetizable. Influencers can build huge followings (and make some cash) because existing platforms recommend their content to other users.
Mastodon devs have chosen not to provide recommendations and quote posts. That’s reasonable, but it reduces the utility of the platform, and it cedes space to Twitter & co.
To my knowledge, the only creator that’s exclusive to Lemmy is the unix surrealism author. Until it’s easy to monetize content, we’re gonna have a hard time attracting creators, and a hard time attracting users.
I feel like this is comparing the mall to the park.
They both attract people, but not always the same people, or for the same reasons. And that’s OK.
I get what you’re saying though, because I’ve felt this way when trying to come up with reasons for people (sole proprietors) to get with the fedi, but maybe this place is just not for influencers - not like the corp platforms, anyway. I think the fediverse will attract more and more people with its network effects, but probably never all of the people all of the time.
My modest hope is that the fedi bleeds the big platforms just enough to put them in their place and keep from enshittifying to infinity.
maybe this place is just not for influencers - not like the corp platforms, anyway
The things people need to build a livelihood on a platform are quality of life features. In a lot of cases, I think it’s small stuff: being able to reward patrons with a tag on a specific community; automatically highlighting popular posts; making it easy to find a user’s monetization page; etc.
I think the fediverse will attract more and more people with its network effects, but probably never all of the people all of the time.
At the moment, Lemmy is an ad-free version of Reddit missing some community and notification features. There are good political reasons to be here, but that hasn’t driven a sustained increase in users.
So we won’t get critical mass for network effects by being a better Reddit.
One to make the platform self-sustaining (or grow) is to give creators a reason to use the platform, which will give people a reason to come and stay.
It’s not just ad-free, it’s actively anti-corporate, anti-advertising, even anti-monetization. I would go so far as to say even anti-content in some ways. That’s a cultural disconnect that goes beyond tooling.
There are a million and one great reasons to be here on Lemmy, but using it to get cash from fellow users wallets is not one of them.
I think we should be realistic. Content costs money because it requires a lot of effort. It’s naïve to think that content would just be created because people feel like posting something. If the Fediverse is to compete with companies like meta, this is only possible if there are opportunities for content creators to earn money. That should be self-evident, but it obviously isn’t here.
I’m not saying it’s necessary, but it is if the Fediverse is to have mainstream appeal.
Simply because the absolute majority of people are out and about where everyone is. And that’s where the content is. That’s the point: if you want good content, it costs money. It’s not just corporations that make a living from it.
What I want to say is this: The Fediverse could provide fairer conditions for the people who produce content. That makes sense and is necessary because the Internet lives from that.
I just don’t understand why people here don’t want to realize that work has to be paid for. That’s really strange.
Things need to be paid for, but why does that mechanism need to be baked into the platform?
Imagine I’m the best, most engaging poster and commenter on Lemmy. Everyone loves my posts and comments, shares them, quotes them, and responds to them endlessly. (Maybe in this scenario everyone has brain damage for some reason, and this allowed me to become the top Lemmy user.)
If I’m in that position, what’s stopping me from just putting a little blurb at the bottom of each comment saying, “this post is brought to you by Carls Jr.” or whoever wants to sponsor my comments. If people for some reason loved my posts and comments enough, I could find sponsors and just put those sponsorships right in whatever comment or post I make. Lemmy doesn’t need to be involved. They don’t need to go out of their way to recommend my posts either. If they’re good enough, then they can be spread naturally by people sharing and engaging with them.
It makes sense for platforms to provider revenue to creators, but only if the platform has substantial ad revenue. YouTube pays its creators, but it also brings in billions of ad revenue. I don’t think most Lemmy servers even have ads.
I hate the idea that everything should be monetised, that only gives us loong videos with laughing heads and so on “to keep you engaged”.
We’re here without all that crap and well the fediverse is definitely less active but it’s content made by people because they like it, they believe in it. Not to shake the money tree.
It’s an interesting take though because a lot of good content requires funding too, as well as hosting etc.
So how can we solve that in a reasonable way that doesn’t lead to all the bullshit?
My take is that hosting is no longer expensive, I have a 30€/month fiber link with 700Mb/s up and could theoretically host my videos for hundreds or even thousands of interested people. At 40€ I can have a 10Gb/s up if needed. That’s a lot of videos served daily.
Now, I also think that the monymaker needing to serve millions of people can go and do that elsewhere.
So what’s missing is a sort of search engine so that when I want to check out fly fishing or knitting I can check out the exquisite videos from the respective community.
Something along those lines.
If people are interested I’ll host their videos, and it shouldn’t be that hard to make them searchable, but for sure, I can’t do it all by myself. What do you think?
I’d rather have one unix surrealism than a thousand influencers with lots of followers. These days, I want to be among people who interact as equals, who share ideas, who cooperate in a genuine way. If we try a shortcut to more users through money, what is the point?
I want to be among people who interact as equals, who share ideas, who cooperate in a genuine way.
I think online journalism might be a good example of influencers and users interacting as equals. Users provide extra information, ask questions, reify, and help highlight where the journalist can focus. The journalist does the leg work to produce novel news.
If we try a shortcut to more users through money, what is the point?
To build an interesting, self sustaining network, where people can express themselves fully, and understand each other.
The features I’m suggesting would benefit everyone: a decent view of trending topics/posts/tags; mod-controlled tags; stuff like that. Most users would find them helpful, but a few could use it to build a livelihood that others value.
If the money is freely given as a donation, then I’m with you. If lack of money is what is stopping someone from making things that others are willing to pay to see more of, then sure. But if the only way to do it is to have ads or selling our data etc, then I don’t want that.
The journalist does the leg work to produce novel news.
Just to add that in addition to novelty, journalists provide valuable services, like
- holding up a mirror to the present culture
- documenting and disseminating happenings
- packaging up events into narratives
Not to say that you weren’t including these in “novel news,” but just to make it explicit.
I hated forums. I was part of one which got take over by right wing mods since the owner was pro religion+nationalism. All the good people left and it is dead now. I love reddit because it is not personal, I don’t know anyone unlike in a forum with 50 active users, you become a regular and before you know it, people make it their personal agenda to attack you because you are a libtard as they used to call me.
I have to disagree with you there, small niche communities for your interests free of outside influences are always nice as a safe harbor. Sure occasionally it gets taken over by assholes, but you can always find another. Reddit being a central area for communication leaves it way to open for abuse by power hungry people or people pushing a political / social agenda no matter what side of the spectrum they’re on.
I grew up in the age of Internet forums, in the ancient days of the late '90s-early-00’s before the (Eternal September) Smartphone dumped every human being onto the landscape.
Having small communities is so much better. I often hear people complain that Lemmy isn’t big because there are not communities with 3 million people like there are some subreddits. Much of the reason that Reddit is shit is because of how big it is.
On the old Internet, you could know the people who were part of the community. I have old friends, that I’ve known for 20+ years, that I met playing MUDs on BBSs. Now, I couldn’t tell you the name of a single person that I’ve ever interacted with on social media in the past year.
Digg and Reddit came on the scene and pulled a huge crowd because we didn’t have The Algorithm to recommend content and these link aggregation sites were the first time people got a taste of that kind of ‘See all of the newest things from every corner of the Internet in a single place, curated by a process that produces good quality results’ that we now just expect from recommendation algorithms.
The old communities were essentially starved of population. Nobody wants to take the social effort required to become part of a community when they can just scroll Reddit mindlessly.
There’s very few people that even had a chance to experience the magic of spontaneous communities full of people working together.
If you still want a taste, check out the Something Awful forums.
The barrier to entry is higher: you have to learn the rules (read the rules), the social norms and there is a $10 one-time fee (so getting banned has some sting to it, read the rules).
In exchange you get an actual community of people. Many of the people posting there (or, in the various Discords now because that’s a thing) have been on SA since they were edgy teenagers and are now professionals with careers. That isn’t to say that there are not trolls and assholes, those exist in any community, but there’s a much higher ratio of good to bad posters.
One of the interesting decisions that they do is that rulebreaking posts are rarely ever deleted. If a person is probated (temp ban) or banned, their comment stays up with a “(User was Probated/Banned for this post)” edited into the post so you can see, and hopefully learn, from the bad behavior. In addition, there’s a ‘Wall of Shame’ section where you can see everyone who’s been actioned against, who the moderator was and the moderation reason.
I’ve always hated the fact that comments on Reddit just disappear. You can never see what a mod removed and there is no reason why it is removed. This allows all kinds of bad and manipulative behaviors to be done by people with moderation access.
I’m also from that era of the Internet and you’re so right about smaller communities being better. One great example was Wil Wheaton’s phpBB forum. Probably a hundred active users including Wil and we all got along and more or less policed ourselves.
(Plus I helped him out with some car trouble. Let me repeat that: I helped Wesley Crusher with an engineering problem. One of my proudest moments.)
One of the interesting decisions that they do is that rulebreaking posts are rarely ever deleted. If a person is probated (temp ban) or banned, their comment stays up with a “(User was Probated/Banned for this post)” edited into the post so you can see, and hopefully learn, from the bad behavior. In addition, there’s a ‘Wall of Shame’ section where you can see everyone who’s been actioned against, who the moderator was and the moderation reason.
That’s a really great feature.
I avoided forums growing up because from what I’ve witnessed there was a lot of verbal abuse and so on, but I was into “communities” (basically closed social network long before I heard of myspace or facebook).
For example, I listened to a lot of hip-hop as a teenager. there was no meta algorithm feeding me garbage, but there was a hip hop community website :) It felt more intimate or homegrown if you will.
I also grew up with forums, but I always hated them tbh. Small communities aren’t inherently better, back in the day there were so many horrible forums for smaller stuff. Every forum had a different culture and most of them were frankly disgusting. Absolutely rampant racism, sexism and homophobia that would put even the worst subreddits (or even fucking 4chan) to shame. Also mods and admins who wouldn’t allow any views opposing their own, to a degree much, much worse than on reddit seen today.
Smaller subforums on one big platform are the solution imo. A sub with millions of people is gonna suck, an isolated forum with ten thousand people is also gonna suck, while a sub with that number could be an amazing place on a website with millions of users. That’s how it is on reddit right now. There are plenty, they’re just drowned out by all the garbage.
Personally, I also don’t want that “community” feel you speak so highly of. I just want to be informed about the things I like and discuss it openly while remaining anonymous. I have communities irl if I want to connect with people, I don’t need or want that online.
It’s the social media equivalent of supporting a bunch of Mom and Pop shops (or opening your own!) vs some hyper-sanitized, corporate monstrosity like Wal-Mart.
There are a lot of people who prioritize convenience above all else. Why go shop at a butcher, baker, green grocer, and a liquor store when you can go to one place and get it all? Doesn’t matter that the separate entities are specialized and therefore more knowledgeable about the product vs. Walmart where asking an employee is the most useless thing ever.
Same with social media or things like Google. People are lazy. Why shop around when Facebook gives you everything? Why learn how to use the address bar when Google will do the work for you.
So the fediverse goes against that in that it asks users to actually think for a moment about things and requires them to shop around… which, that’s just too much work for the average person.
Not one mention to moderation. The strength and focus of our “small isles” is on taking control of moderating the contents. We can stop fascists posts, and we can share alternative narratives (e.g. solarpunk) to Sillicon Valley. Plus, spoiler alerts as content warnings, etc. I think mastodon with their covenant is the greatest example of this ethos.
on taking control of moderating the contents. We can stop fascists posts
.ml tankies and right-wingers: “Wouldn’t that be…CeNsOrsHiP”
I love the user level control. block urls, instances, communities, users. I really would love like trust cafe where you can rank things from 0-100 where 0 is block and 100 is subscribe and your feed will prioritize posts from things you rank higher for the in between values.
The closest I’ve seen to that is PieFed, which offers something like multi-Reddits (categories of communities aka Topic areas), and word filtering where you can limit posts with the likes of “Trump” or “Musk” by either a little bit or all/none. So if you feel like avoiding news and politics (for ten fucking minutes!:-P) then you can go to e.g. Arts & Crafts, or for longer set one of those filters, yet return to seeing them later anytime you want.
Mind you, in some small ways PieFed is not as polished as Lemmy - e.g. there’s a preview feature for posts but not for comments - while in other ways it’s already more advanced, and being written in Python rather than Rust, will continue to move forward with new features much more quickly.:-)
