Sometimes I struggle to convey what continues to fascinate me about dezentraly organized social media - its like explaining to someone who never played Go why its awesome who never played it.
And what I would usually recommend is (in the case of Go): watch hikaru no go (popular Go anime). I could teach them the rules, but to capture the spirit of it, I would also need to spend hours playing it with them. So instead, I give them an awesome series, which conveys the drama, fights, frustrations through story.
Would that also work for the fediverse? Sometimes I tend to get lost in technical details and how it tries to solve problems about moderation without conveing any of the daily drama and excitement I have - so what would be a good series/film/anime/book/comic that could convey this? Or do we need to create it?
Well, there is drama, like in any human community, it’s just that this community has half a million computer nerds.
It’s a bunch of people that have been leading the technological revolution of the past decades, all experimenting with something called the Fediverse.
While everything is new and there are a lot of changes, some things are more common than others.
- Privacy matters.
- Freedom of speech matters.
- The internet should be built by the people, and for the people, not big corps.
PS Not everyone here is a computer nerd, though that’s something to take pride in IMO, but most of us kinda area.
I don’t see the drama. I’ve been on Usenet, Reddit, single sited forums etc. for a long time, and now Lemmy. Lemmy is actually underwhelming for now, though hopefully it will keep expanding.
Federation itself is no big deal. In fact it’s annoying because you can’t easily search across the entire fediverse with a single query, the way you can search Reddit. Plus the burbles we get over defederation tell me that federation (as currently implemented) is a misfeature. There should be cleaner separation of back ends (instances) and clients (web UI’s and local apps), and federation should happen in the client. That way you can view any instances and communities you want to in a single interface, instead of leaving it up to server admins.
I don’t think it has more or less drama compared to other social networks, I think it’s more so that it’s just easier to pick up on drama that normally gets lost throughout all the noise on bigger platforms. r/subredditdrama and r/drama are GIANT and really difficult to keep up with. There reaches a point where all the drama on a social media site it just blends into all the noise most of the time unless it affects the entire site. It takes alot to truly fuck shit up, like poor business decisions (ahem…) or major inter community strife.
Alongside that in comparison to centralized social media, if an instance is a hot bed for drama and toxicity? It might be time to move to a different one.
I honestly don’t get what there is to say. Anyone trying to tell me about the dramas of any social network, be it the Fediverse, Twitter, Pinterest or Facebook will have an uphill battle.
The content itself can be interesting, but the platform itself rarely is.
It’s a network of social media, all using the same protocols, and each tends to have some focus: Canada, Australia, art, communism, and large numbers of members, for example.
I didn’t find federated social media to he hard to understand after the first hour or so. Is that weird?
