The VC money is drying up and the current social media funding paradigm is breaking because of it.
It's a bit like witnessing the Dot Com bubble burst again tbh.
It's about time we moved on to a better way of doing things anyway, I'm pretty good with moving away from the old ad-based, exploit your community for profit model, personally.
It'll be interesting if any of these "owned by the people" platforms will establish themselves the same way the private social media companies have in the past. Mastodon is probably most successful when it comes to a decentralized platform but it's not the there for me at the moment when it comes to the user base.
You can argue that it's not supposed to be Twitter or whatever but you can't deny the usefulness of everyone being an user under the same address or the wealth of information that comes with being giant. Decentralized platforms have an inherent handicap since there will always be moderation that's up to the admin so every instance will differ in some way (and let's not get to the technical problems that at least here are prevalent). It's harder for companies, countries and other official sources to establish themselves because they subject themselves to moderation of a private third party and jumping from instance to instance, forgoing the extra work it is, is just disruptive and confusing to their audience. They could always start their own instance but that's also a lot of work compared to just creating a Twitter account. There might be some business angle here though but it all just seems too convoluted at least for now.
Maybe internet will be just different and less-centralized in the future. At least it's good that the profit seeking private companies have less power.
The internet used to be more decentralised. There were lots of smaller websites, blogs, forums etc, which people discovered via word of mouth, search engines, and forgotten things like webrings. It's only recently that big monolithic social media platforms took hold.
Tech is often cyclical, we could now be swinging back to a more decentralised web, but with the benefit of newer technologies. Right now it's almost a new "wild west" as new platforms appear and new ideas like federation are experimented with. Some will rise, some will fall, some will go off in the corner and do their own thing. While all that happens it's going to be a bit messy, much like it was in the 90s with the initial rise of the web.
I hope you're right, sounds quite exciting!
Could you describe what "webrings" were? I've read about them in a similar thread, but couldn't find any info on them.
I’ve been online since circa 1993 and for the first decade or so, discoverability was a challenge due to the lack of efficient search engines like Altavista or (later) Google.
Webrings consisted in individual website owners (e.g., on Geocities) placing one or more banners at the bottom of their webpage linking to other like-minded sites, typically in quid-pro-quo manner (I link to you, you link back to me), or to a manually-curated directory of like-minded sites.
This was when “surfing the web” meant exactly that - you would surf from one site to another using hyperlinking within web communities. Bookmarking was then how you kept track of the most interesting sites you came across.
Now there is hardly a need for hyperlinking and bookmarking, since much of the content is centralized on a few platforms, and search engines take care of the discoverability of niche content.
Phew I feel old remembering webrings lol. Crazy to think how much the internet has changed since those early days thirty years ago.
Anyone else remember Infoseek? It was my favorite search engine because you could select to search within results to refine your search down to a single page of relevant results.
Thanks. I now realized, how I came to that conclusion: Last time this was discussed the person called it "link ring" and that didn't not yield any reasonable results.
Edit: And because notifications for comment replies are deactivated by default I didn't even notice the person has corrected their wording. Still learning how to kbin :).
Also all the people who think Usenet is just an obscure piracy mechanism.
Usenet was the greatest medium for discussion back in the early Internet days, and I'm excited that it's finally being recreated in the form of this Fediverse thing.
So back when search engines were in their infancy, webrings were kinda a big deal. Essentially, they were collections of topic-related websites that agreed to mutually link to each other so that people could find content related to the pages that they were visiting. They kinda died out after Yahoo bought webring.org (where most webrings were controlled) and replaced all the webring control pages hosted there with Yahoo pages, and by the time they let go of the domain contemporary search engines had mostly rendered webrings obselete.
However, there are definitely still webrings around. The official site of maia arson crimew (the hacktivist who made the news for leaking the no-fly list to select journalists) belongs to two webrings, for example. I can definitely see them making more of a comeback among computer enthusiasts if search engines enshittify themselves more.
Yeah, I was thinking the same thing while writing that comment. But I can't shake how cool it is to have every hobby, no matter how small or big, under the same roof, one click away. Someone should to make a search engine that serves this purpose and works well...
Reddit has been pretty good at not walling off content, but think of all the forums that died and went to hell, being tortured in the afterlife as a facebook group, where all the knowledge people spend time writing down, all the questions being answered, are trapped in the facebook ecosystem, where it's close to impossible to find. This is by design too I believe. I used to be a mod on a hardware forum and we had rules that you needed to search before asking. The opponents to this rule said, that if people just searched, then the forum would die out (it didn't) and I'm quite certain that information on facebook is hidden away, to keep engagement going, by having the same shit being asked and answered over and over in perpetuity.
I like the idea of going back to forums, but with the added benefits of federation. It's the best of both worlds in my opinion.
I miss the phpBB days. I was on some great forums and content was curated by people who were passionate about the topics. There were serious spaces, silly spaces, helpful spaces, and malevolent spaces. Google still did a decent job of surfacing real, user-generated content back then. You could always refine your search further to find niche information and that just doesn't work anymore. Everything is brand names and every company is trying to make their brand a verb.
This recent rebellion between platforms and communities has been interesting to watch. Communities are not locations in cyberspace, they're still people. Now, with the fediverse, thanks to open-source developers and the kind souls who coughed up some dough for server costs, we now have more choices of where we congregate online. I love threaded topic-based conversations so something like this place is exactly where I want to be. I think this unrest may level out in our favor, but if there's a potential for evil, some arrogant jackass will take it, so I don't expect it'll be an easy journey. Enjoying the wild west feel you pointed out, very 90s!
On the other hand, I think Fediverse is perfect for companies that want to be closer to their customers, as rare as that may be.
Another possible use case if Fediverse become popular enough is potential for companies like Nintendo setting up their own instance as the new Miiverse or something.
I wouldn't count on big companies ever going that route, to be honest. The decision-making people there will likely never trust Lemmy or similar software enough because it's not like them - not proprietary, not closed source, so they'll keep wasting money on making their own shitty websites with their own shitty forums if they ever want to give their communities an official place to hang out.
I can see it but there needs to be a big player first to set an example. Maybe it's Facebook or influencers suddenly flocking in. It won't be fast though.
Don't think of Mastodon like 1000 separate social media sites. Think of Mastodon, think of the Fediverse, like email. Lots of email goes through gmail, and maybe gmail works better with gmail. But email is more than gmail. But despite AOL's best efforts, despite google's best efforts, email is also yahoo, and outlook, and Proton, and MailChimp, and your college email address, and whatever mail server your company spun up, and if you feel like it whatever mail server you setup in your basement. And yes, email has had more complications over the years as google tries to strangle it. But it's the real open platform, and the Fediverse can join it.
I agree that investors requiring demonstrable returns has played a role in this cycle. Steve Huffman is desperate to show profits ahead of Reddit’s IPO, and Musk is desperate to recoup his $44B investment in the blue bird.
However, I believe that there’s also another consideration. Many of today’s platforms started out with a somewhat idealistic intent. Jack Dorsey wanted Twitter to be an open protocol, though never quite achieved his vision. Aaron Swartz contributed to the open design of early-days Reddit. Facebook was meant as a non-profit university community builder. Google had (and abandoned) a “do no evil” motto. Etc.
The original user-first approach of these platforms created organic growth and encouraged ambassadorship by motivated users who became frequent contributors, unpaid moderators, etc.
Over time, however, people moved on (Dorsey, or very sadly Swartz) or got greedy from success (Huffman, Zuckerberg). The focus shifted from user-first to advertiser-first. Platforms like Reddit still used a loss-leader approach of losing investor money on frills such as API because it helped sustain growth for a while longer.
But once critical mass was reached, there was no longer a need to coddle the most enthusiastic and long-time users. They had exhausted their usefulness. The platforms could finally embrace the advertiser-first model in which the user, not the content, becomes the product.
So here we are with the worst of both worlds. Reddit could have offered a reasonable paid API plan that would have allowed the thriving third-party ecosystem to retain the power users and contributors. Instead, it went all-in with a walled-garden approach buoyed only by advertising money, even if it means that the content quality dwindles. Twitter also went “private” in the sense that an account is now required to even view the content, and aggressively promotes its paid plan to users –who are still subject to interstitial ads and promoted content– even for basic hygiene features such as 2FA.
As for why Reddit, Twitter, and Discord shit the bed at almost the same time, part of it has to do with VC pressure (as mentioned by the parent), and part of it is they are the same generation (more or less) of social networks and are reaching an equivalent stage where buyout (Twitter) or IPO (Reddit) is the next logical step.
The writing is on the wall that a paradigm shift is in order. The pendulum has considerable momentum, though, and will allow the centralized, walled-garden web to thrive for a while longer, just like Facebook survives catering to mostly an audience of unsavvy boomers. But the swing back will gradually enable alternative models to grow that are based on open platforms and federated content. We’re just very, very early in this cycle.
Oh, and sorry for the long-ass essay, I got a bit carried away.
Yeah this. We're all boarding the ship before it sails out for new lands. It'll be a bit before we finally depart... but it's nice to get a cozy seat here while the city we've been living in begins it's chaotic descent into what MySpace became lol.
It's about time we moved on to a better way of doing things anyway, I'm pretty good with moving away from the old ad-based, exploit your community for profit model, personally.
Yes, you're exactly right with that. Even if Reddit at the moment lacks a major competitor which actually threatens to take its place but rather, numerous smaller competitors, I guess the resultant peace that comes with everyone being divided after fleeing the website is something that I can't deny I have been real happy with. I have found this peace through coming to Kbin. If it stays small, I will continue to enjoy this peace, and if it actually overtakes Reddit, then let us be known as the veterans of Kbin/Lemmy.
That used to be true until they made the insane move of self-hosting all of the images and videos using i.reddit and v.reddit rather than continuing the previous practice of everyone posting all of the media to imgur and youtube, etc.
They just had to own everything themselves, even if it meant giving themselves running costs that would inevitably climb to youtube-like expenses because of all of the media streaming.
The money Reddit got from TenCent is starting to run out and TenCent is wanting a return on their investment. So Reddit will tighten the screws and monetize harder because the board demands it.
While you're correct, it's just a clunky term. I think some other way to refer to the whole thing will probably come along soon, and in a few years, people will regard saying fediverse the same way we look back on people talking about "surfing the information superhighway" or whatever.
“Internet” is closer to a lot of existing English words than “fediverse,” though. “Fediverse” might get familiar over time, and it might make more sense to non-English-speakers, but I think it’s a more exotic construction than “internet.”
Yeah, but we used to call it the information superhighway and the worldwide web. Internet IS the good term. It may well be that fediverse sticks around so long that we all get used to it, but at the moment, eh. I think if someone somewhere suggests a good alternative, we'll all likely jump on it.
Dang I totally forgot all about that term. Been awhile. Well it eventually reduced to "surfing the net".
The thing about the internet, is it was the thing to make it only one net. Previously there were weird systems like bitnet, VMSnet, where you had to juggle email address encoding standards to get balkanized college campus networks to talk back and forth to each other.
"The web" became the subset of the net, that worked with web browsers. Only one thing.
Was there a "The Facebook" period? Or was that just a movie name?
So then we passed through a period of brands. Reddit is a brand. It is not altogether surprising that people would refer to the fediverse in terms of brands. Lemmy, kbin, beehaw, whatever.
Email and the web had/have specific protocols associated with them. The fediverse has multiple protocols. We're using ActivityPub, which seems to have won as a standard. It isn't exactly catchy or smooth flowing off the tongue.
Ok, if we try to brain crunch all these previous trends, here's what it's going to be called, if it hasn't been already:
THE VERSE
The difference between the fediverse and the universe will be forgotten. Linguistically, people will not keep up with that detail. Only old timers / early adopters will notice that linguistic change.
Possibly, 'verse' will come to be seen as short for multiverse.
Exactly this. Looking at the top response it details it's hard due to a ton of costs like operating costs and hosting costs and stuff, but with federation these costs can be spread around so that it's more manageable for each individual instance (as content doesn't need to be viewed from the original instance but gets spread around).
The mass-scale casual interaction producing flashes of surprising relevance can't happen when the conditions aren't pulling in so many people that the 1 in 300 million person with the answer doesn't casually happen across the question that only he/she can answer. That's the unique content from Reddit.
Link aggregation, message boarding, messaging, all that stuff is merely tech that lots of other places have. Reddit's moat is the user presence which other platforms can't just replicate. Reddit needs to die first so that 1 in 300 person stops going there and goes to other places and somehow runs into the question there, hopefully in a way that they turn up in Google search.
Is the fediverse where that happens? Seriously asking because I'm no expert on it. It doesn't seem like the concept can scale distribution at that level. There will be pockets of interaction, but not everything is shared everywhere.
They're not redundant functions. They're... Mixed up on kbin right now, because things were originally built with the up button boosting content, but that's incongruent with how Lemmy does it, so it was changed.
But boosting isn't really about sorting at all. It's about republishing content, so that it can be sent out to instances that have started following a group after the content was originally posted.
Perhaps more importantly why would one retweet a comment? Rather than a post?
The way content propagation works here is that someone using Website A follows a remote content source (either a user, or a group -- aka a "community" or a "magazine"), and the remote hosting website (let's call it Website B) sends all subsequent content from that source to Website A, where the requesting user can then view it. If someone from Website A was already following that content source, then they get to see all of the content that Website A had already received, and benefit from earlier users efforts. But if that person was the first from Website A to subscribe to that content source, then they only get future content.
It's very similar to a, well, a magazine subscription in that way. NatGeo isn't sending you their 150 years worth of back catalogue when you subscribe in 2023 (not that you should bother subscribing to NatGeo in 2023).
The 'boost' button republishes content, though. Posts, comments, whatever. Hitting 'boost' on a comment republishes it, and once republished the group actor (the little bot-like construct that functionally is the group) sees it as new content, and pushes it out to everyone following it. This means it will reach websites that started subscribing to the group after the comment was originally posted.
Boosting is how older content (where older basically means "from anytime before literally right now") spreads through the fediverse.
So this is one of those things like git, where you can't explain how it works on the surface to a normal person because it barely even makes sense if you don't know about the underlying plumbing. :\
Not awesome, but I guess that's what you get when you graft a reddit-like experience onto a fediverse that was more or less invented for microblogging.
Yea, i'm working on my own Fedi software and i'm struggling with the point of boosting in the link aggregator context. It's an odd overlap with Reddit-style reposting to appropriate subs, but based on the user.
It makes sense in the Twitter UX, but i struggle to find it's place in the Reddit UX.
I think boosts have potential to be used for crossposts, and the current implementation are just crossposts to your profile. Though they're likely here right now just because Kbin is a mix between thread and microblog software
Boosting is super important in all contexts in the Fediverse.
When am instance subscribes to a content source - be that a user actor or a group actor - on behalf of a user, it only requests future content. Back catalogues are not fetched by default. Boosting re-publishes the content, so that it is received by new followers.
With a group actor, the boost triggers the actor to reboot the content itself, sending it out to new subscribers to the group, and filling in that back catalogue.
Users who use the website that the community is hosted on have access to the full library of it. They need to boost stuff. And people who subscribe from remote sites need to boost older content that they've seen.
but relevant users cant see it, its never fetched for them to see it. Sure users on the home instance can see it, but they're on the home instance, it's already fetched for them. Ive run into this problem on here, where there is a lot of content on other instances that isnt visible from kbin. I have the option of visiting the home instance to see it, but it takes me completely off of kbin, I cant boost it from that page.
Someone just needs to follow. The community owner either needs to seed the community to big instances using accounts on them, or people who find the community via other instances need to subscribe and know that fresh content will come. Then they can boost older content from the hosting site.
Things take some conscious effort here. That isn't necessarily a bad thing.
"Then they can boost older content from the hosting site." No that's the problem. Like you yourself said back catalogues arent fetched. They can't see the older content to be able to boost it, they'll only see new content.
If my instance follows a community at time t = T, and your instance starts following it at time t = T+10, I can boost content posted between T and T+9 so that you can see it.
Meanwhile, if people on the hosting instance boost things posted from times earlier than T, we both get to see them. Then, once they're visible to us, we can continue to boost them for new instances to see.
If boosting is meant to be a solution to the back catalogue problem, then it's a horrible way to do it. You'd have to go through and boost every single post from before the hosting instance was followed, and then it'd only show up the user page of the guy who went to all of that effort? (or, realistically, bot).
If what I'm saying is accurate (and I'm still not sure because this is admittedly a bit too complicated for me) then it doesn't sound very useful since individual profiles aren't nearly as important in a forum context when compared to something like twitter, and especially when you can just upvote something and have that show on your profile. Unless I'm mistaken and anything you've upvoted doesn't propagate to another automatically instance while boosts do... but I don't think that's a big enough distinction to have two different buttons? You could just have an upvote also do that.
I see it as similar to the "save" function on Reddit, except it's public. I've started using it on things that I think I might like to read again later (and so by extension anyone who's "like me" would probably want to read it too).
i disagree, it's a great functionality that people should learn.. and here's the simple point.. you can BOOST a comment you disagree with, so that your argument AGAINST the comment will get more visibility.. reddit is dysfunctional, and this mechanism can help fix one of the problems reddit cannot get rid of.. this mechanism can help discussion, and fight against things like brigading..
think about it a minute.. someone makes a really TERRIBLE point that you can dismantle easily.. tear it down, and BOOST the hell out of it.. reddit cannot accommodate that.. keeping those two functions separate is critical..
this will help keep every thread from becoming a popularity contest that is entirely predictable, once people figure it out
edit to add: i've only been using this platform for a few days.. but i promise you, it works the way it's supposed to.. try it out..
Also, the Kbin dev expressly stated he isn't ready for a massive migration, and the current influx has caused him no end of stress. We want to keep him around and not drive him insane.
I appreciate the concern, and it seems to me that kbin is no longer just one person ;) Currently, kbin is a team of wonderful people who handle development work, devops, project management, and more. Additionally, Piotr helps me with administering kbin.social. There will be significant changes here soon, things are happening quickly. But to be honest, I wasn't fully prepared for such substantial growth, and it will probably take some time before everything stabilizes. But... this is just the beginning ;) What's important is that the snowball starts rolling, regardless of whether kbin, Lemmy, or Mastodon gains the most users. We all win in this situation.
Kbin is PHP/Symfony, but people are writing tools in various languages, not to mention clients. I haven't looked at the client repositories, but I assume that some, if not all, of the codebases for them are Java.
The thing that helps Kbin the most is that it is, by far, the easiest to understand. Googling "Lemmy fediverse" gives a bunch of various links to other Lemmy instances, which are presented in a way as if they are separated from one another. Kbin appears as one site, one location for content aggregation. Although that "goes against the idea" of decentralization, most users are currently looking for their "one home to replace their old one home". The more users flock to one area and learn how it works, the more things will begin to take their proper shape, so to speak.
A feature we'll definitely want to have with kbin in the future is the ability to migrate accounts to other instances. That would mean that even though we're centralizing on kbin.social right now, people could move to other instances and spread the load across the fediverse without losing their history
I'm still learning the ins and outs of this place and the others, but part of me thought that was the feature of being federated. User accounts could seamlessly transfer from one instance to another.
Looking further into it, it looks like that feature exists for content, but not so much for accounts.
Kbin doesn't have the ability to sort comments by top. To me, that is the #1 most important feature, and not having it when it's easy to do shows some real ignorance. The reason I come to these sites is to see the best comments on news of the day.
12 years ago reddit would crash all the time. To make it worse they always told me I was the one who broke reddit personally by putting a message on my screen. My bad yall.
Yeah, I always thought it was a little unfair when it popped up telling me that "Briguy24 broke reddit!". But I never held it against you, don't worry :)
To each their own but sometimes it's nice to just scroll through comments and see the varied replies instead of just fed the top/earliest on some posts. Imo it increases user engagement.
Brother, acting like a douche to people who are working and paying for you to be here shows some real arrogance. You're not a customer here. There's no ad revenue, no data collection, no money. If you want it so bad then do it yourself. Beauty of the fediverse is you can go make your own instance that does what you want it to do.
Even with the donations I doubt there's that much of a profit to being made. Servers are expensive, and there's no way that servers are the only overhead that ernest is dealing with.
His own knowledge, skills, abilities, and time are almost certainly worth more than he is receiving in donations. Dudes a skilled programmer/developer and is putting serious work into this. If he was putting his time and effort into freelance work instead he'd be building a heck of a nest egg.
This is from the various services trying to talk to each other in ways they weren't originally designed to do, really. Our "upvote" is a mastodon "favorite" (like) while our "boost" is functionally a retweet/reblog. Kbin tries to bridge the gap between threaded content and microblogging, and it gets about 90% of the way there; all it really needs to do is change it so that upvotes are the ones that contribute to reputation instead of boosts, which are functionally useless outside a fully microblog-style environment.
From what I can see the upvote / downvote both work as you'd expect now (as in upvoting curates content). There was apparently a period of time where 'boost' was the upvote mechanic but that's been changed
There's definitely room for improvement, but I like what I see so far and don't have a problem learning a new paradigm. I'm sure that as the platform matures things will become more consistent.
Boost is like retweeting something, you can have followers in the fediverse. Boosting makes something more visible to everyone, so you upvote/downvote things you personally like/dislike and boost things you think your followers/everyone would like
Think of this place as a cross between email, Twitter and reddit. All communities can interact with each other and are independent
I did, actually. My instance has a saved copy of the post, I replied to it there, it forwarded the information to Kbin.
OPs point is dumb. Lemmy and Kbin are separate platforms that happen to be interoperable because of the backend protocol they’ve decided to use (which Kbin added relatively recently in the grand scheme). The Fediverse is made up of many of these platforms that are doing the same thing. There is nothing wrong with referring to the platform one is using.
Well said. If you want to mean all the things connected to ActivityPub, you say Fediverse. If it’s restricted to lemmy, use lemmy. Absolutely nothing wrong with that. OP saying it borders on ignorance may have to think about it.
I use lemmy. I don’t really care for nor use other Fediverse services like Mastodon.
Wouldn't every viewed copy anywhere then be a saved copy of the original post? Does that distinction even mean anything when it's still posting specifically to the original instance?
If I reply in a Lemmy.world thread, I'm still posting on Lemmy.world even if I'm viewing from Kbin.social.
As a comparative example to old and dying social media, it would be like finding a link to a celebrity's Twitter comment on Reddit and you saying you saw the person saying that on Reddit, which would be extremely misleading to anyone listening, thinking that the celebrity had posted it on Reddit.
It’s not posting comments specifically to the original instance. If the instances defederate I can continue to post comments, and people on my instance can see and interact with them.
Once somebody subscribes to a community (or magazine if you’re on the rifle site), ActivityPub acts like dynamic, synchronizing RSS. Everybody interacts with local data, an instance isn’t simply acting as a proxy when interacting with a different instance.
No, you're posting on kbin.social. You're never ever doing anything directly on a remote site. You view on k-so, you vote on k-so, you post on k-soc, and you comment on k-soc. Your actions are then, at some later point (which may be microseconds, or it may be hours, depending on traffic levels on both k-soc and the remote website), relayed to the remote website so the two copies of the community can be synchronised.
This is the second time I've seen something on kbin trying to dress the reddit migration to the Fediverse up as some hugely patriotic thing.
We don't need that, we don't benefit from it. This is how you create demagogues. Don't infuse nationalism into the Fediverse. That is super problematic and I think you're going to be in for a rude awakening when you see how much more European the Fediverse is than reddit was.
Usenet arose during a time when the people using computers actually understood how they worked and how to use them. Asking someone to download and install a Usenet client then set it up to connect to a server of their choice and then subscribing to newsgroups is way above and beyond what most people are willing to do in 2023, sadly.
If it's not on a touchscreen, and not able to be done with 2 or 3 taps, then it ain't happening.
Expanding on this, I'm worried a technological education gap is forming among the youth. Old people didnt grow up with computers, they have an excuse. Middle aged people had to deal with the computers of the 80s and 90s, and because of that, understand computing pretty well. Young people were born into a world of instant gratification and super simplified touchscreen GUI interfaces, and from talking with them, it's clear most of them know how to get on the internet and do their thing on social media, but most of them have no clue how the nuts and bolts of it all work.
Asking someone to download and install a Usenet client then set it up to connect to a server of their choice and then subscribing to newsgroups is way above and beyond what most people are willing to do in 2023, sadly.
This is not true at all. People download phone clients all the time. And there were also Usenet web clients. Subscribing to newsgroups is exactly the same as subscribing to subreddets or kbin magazines. And you have to pick a server for Fedverse also, but the the Usenet server doesn't matter at all like a Fedverse server does.
The only reason people don't use Usenet is because the free servers disappeared and ISPs no longer provided it with your internet service.
I agree with your points about ease of use, but even back when ISPs provided Usenet access, it was still pretty niche. Most people weren't even aware that it existed. It was covered in the old "Internet for Dummies" sorts of books back in the 90s, but I've never met anyone IRL who used it, not even back when I worked at a university.
Yeah, I got into it from the TalkOrigin.org website, and 1) I'd never have gotten into it otherwise, no question, and 2) I think it took years and many, many attempts to go from "huh they refer to a talk.origins 'newsgroup' where all this fun discussion comes from, oh the link does something weird nvm" to "OH HEY I MANAGED TO SIGN UP THIS THING IS REAL WHODATHUNK".
I said that in another comment but I think discoverability is huge. The way people find things out on the internet is by going to their usual internet places or asking questions of a search engine. I don't know how people got onto Usenet in the before times but definitely at the time I got onto it everyone was on the WWW and there were very few ways to even hear about Usenet there, let alone hear something enticing enough to want to check it out. And when you combine that with the technical barrier to entry that's pretty fatal.
That's a cute grumpy old man take but I don't think it really holds up, not as a main cause of the desertion from Usenet at least. It's true that Usenet arose during a time when people using computers actually understood how they worked and how to use them, but there were also a lot fewer people on the internet. I won't hazard a guess as to in raw numbers whether the number of people who understand computers rose or decreased, but even if it decreased the fact is that there are tons of people today who were on Usenet in the day and no longer are, even though they presumably know enough about computers to get on it. Insofar as simplicity of access matters (and oh, how it matters) I suspect it's not just about how people back then knew how to do harder things, but also that everything was harder. The differential between getting on Usenet and getting elsewhere on the internet was less large than today, where the internet overall has gotten much more user-friendly and Usenet has not.
Offhand I'd guess a more salient factor is discoverability. In order to get onto a forum you need to 1) learn that it exists, 2) be interested in checking it out, 3) check it out and 4) participate. How do people even hear about Usenet these days, let alone hear something that makes them want to check it out? When I think of it, my path to Usenet was via the TalkOrigins.org website. Even then I bounced off of actually getting onto the newsgroup for what might have been years before I finally succeeded. And that was back when ISPs supported newsgroups! How many other "portals" to Usenet newsgroups are there - I don't mean a web interface, I mean any website that a random person surfing the web might run into that would 1) let them know this newsgroup exists and 2) make them want to check it out/participate badly enough that they'll go through the many, many steps required to do so ?
Discoverability is even an issue once you are on Usenet. Here I am, a person who I think has a little bit of experience with the thing, asking on Kbin for people's recommendations because I don't have a way within Usenet to know which newsgroups are active and which are good. You have to trawl through the list, subscribe and then you find out, and the list is much too large for a layperson to trawl through usefully. I'm working with the advantage of vaguely remembering which newsgroups I liked and were humming back when I was there; I don't know how a total newcomer would manage. Maybe there are actual websites and portals out there that help, dunno if anyone has recommendations.
Usenet suffers from two problems: 1. Network effects and 2. Paywall.
Usenet used to be where it was at for conversation on the Internet. Then it moved. Getting people to go back to Usenet is probably going to be as hard as spinning up a Facebook competitor. You want to go where people are.
Secondly, Usenet used to be bundled into your internet package along with some basic email hosting and maybe some website hosting. But then the binaries groups exploded and a lot of the ISPs dropped support. So you have to go out and buy a separate package for access now.
Usenet used to be where it was at for conversation on the Internet. Then it moved. Getting people to go back to Usenet is probably going to be as hard as spinning up a Facebook competitor.
It is purely a matter of free public servers. Right now, the free public servers are almost all Fedverse. But they could just as easily be Usenet servers. If the free Fedverse servers close like free Usenet servers did, then Fedverse will also decline. But Usenet actually has some superior features that Fedverse lacks (e.g. automatic merging of groups), so if free Usenet servers pop back up, it would take off again.
There is https://www.eternal-september.org. For me the biggest hurdle tbh was finding an email provider that was 1) anonymous (including not requiring my credit card obvi) so that I could have a specific identity for Usenet 2) had IMAP/POP3 support so I could use it with Thunderbird and 3) wasn't gmail, yahoo or outlook/hotmail because I already have accounts with those and don't want to keep switching. I actually failed, I ended up having to pay the email provider I'd picked for IMAP support.
Yes. plenty of articles coming out about how many in gen z are technology illiterate. I am started to see it at my workplace since we hire a lot of fresh college grads. getting more support calls for completely inane stuff that shows the person has zero basic technological knowledge, like the type of stuff that my you see from boomers. and often it's the issue is simple the user doing things wrong and refusing to understand or learn to do them correctly, like a boomer.
it's wild to think a 22yo is incompetent at basic computer skills, but like you said, all they do is social media crap on their phones. they have no idea how to actually work with PC/Mac applications, let alone solve basic problems or change settings.
This is why I try to involve my 5 year old god daughter in whatever tech project I'm working on whenever she's over. I also have a bunch of edutainment games running on my Windows 98 PC that she plays. She knows how to use a keyboard and mouse, which puts her well ahead of her peers from what I understand.
I've only exposed my 4 year-old to Minecraft and Kerbal Space Project so far for reasons (now he understands "minecraft" to be an adjective meaning "that pixellated 90s video game retro aesthetic", it's adorable), but I taught in a preschool some years ago where I showed the kids Treasure Mountain and Midnight Rescue (some lucky kid might also have gotten Outnumbered but I was teaching preschool/elementary-school English, not elementary-school arithmetic). Huge hits.
Maybe it's time to get my own kid on SST[Edit - Treasure Mountain. That might have been too obscure] come to think of it, he is of age
You are missing the point that while you are free to do as you please, others also enjoy that same freedom. I don't WANT to make posts about fashion, cooking, politics, or non-techie things, but if you do, then by all means, please do that? Be the change that you would like to see in the world, and all that? I hope you find your bliss.
While I am at it though, "nobody talks about anything else" is objectively false - it is a "feels like" statement that falls prey to the hyperbolic fallacy that your POV is the only one that matters. In point of fact though, there are TONS of such discussions happening, right now, all across the Fediverse! Granted, probably not at the frequency that you want, or perhaps not as easily discoverable as you wanted. Have you considered that Reddit or Twitter or Facebook etc. may legit serve your needs better at the moment, and that's okay too?
And now we both are breaking your rule: discussing things about the fediverse. This place is for those with an early-adopter mindset: we don't have daddy spez over here "taking care of us", so we must build our own things. Thus, we often resort to talking about actions that involve that process - which I for one don't think is a bad thing? It makes us better, to have these civil conversations about how to make things better moving forward! Although I think your post is poorly written, using inflationary emotional language that misses several points. Even so, I am absolutely LOVING how the comment section here isn't full of harassers saying things like "U SUK", but instead people offering constructive feedback, both positive and negative. To me, THAT is the difference between this place vs. Reddit that makes me enjoy being here more than there. Even though, admittedly yes, it does have FAR less content, and it is all of a biased nature (towards the topics that we here enjoy posting about).
Some folks really don't understand they can absolutely get what they want out of the fediverse, they're that accustomed to the limits of the more mainstream options. It's whatever they want it to be. If you're tired of not seeing enough of something, there's nothing stopping you from creating your own instance or a community within a pre-existing instance and rallying others to engage. You're always bound to find someone with a few similar interests around.
It will never grow or change if nobody is willing to directly participate in what they wish to see grow or change.
I don't WANT to make posts about fashion, cooking, politics, or non-techie things, but if you do, then by all means, please do that?
I didn't ask you to do those things, specifically. What kinds of hobbies do you have? Talk about those. If your topics are all tech-focused, that's fine, keep talking about those, but I'm really hoping I see people here talk more about pomeranians and nail polish, even though I'm not into either, because those topics will engage people who are into those things.
And now we both are breaking your rule: discussing things about the fediverse.
I think you misread my post. I did not say people should not talk about the fediverse, I just think we should post about other things, too. Especially if we want to see the fediverse succeed, we need more than just the meta-conversation.
is a direct quote from your post. We ARE talking about other things, just again, perhaps not at the frequency that you would like, or it being as discoverable as you would like.
I did not like how you worded your post, as if we were not, when we ARE - and I gave examples of that happening, thousands and thousands and thousands of times all across the fediverse.
If you want to take responsibility for the exact words that you said that may have mislead people into thinking that you are a Karen who is telling people what they "need" to do, then I offered my feedback in case that would be helpful. Fwiw, I do think you had a point, buried in there somewhere, I just think it is hard to find b/c your post had so many objectively false statements - "feels like" wording that if I stretch out really hard I could maybe guess at what you might have meant? (but which if you are honest with yourself, I hope you can see are factually incorrect)
And mixed in along with the false statements are the extremely obvious ones like:
People use social media to either talk to their friends or talk about their hobbies and interests.
I mean... yeah?
Admittedly, yes fashion does seem to be a neglected topic, but you cannot force people to create content for your amusement? Maybe make a post on Reddit about this place, targeted to fashion enthusiasts and gently advise them that this place exists too if they would want to come here? Or start posting there yourself, every single day and maybe multiple times a day, to help attract other like-minded individuals?
Also, why pick on fashion, but then add on cooking, as if it is the same - isn't that cherry-picking your details? Also:
We need people here talking about immigration policy.
But again, WE ARE - here's an article that is not even 20 minutes old yet.
TLDR: your post came across as telling others what to do, while not wanting to lead by example and actually do any of it yourself. Why not DO IT, rather than ask for all that work to be simply done for you? Again, I have no idea what thoughts were in your head as you wrote that, I'm simply saying that this is how your words strike me. Especially the statements that are outright falsehoods.
But if you are not interested in knowing the effects of your words on others, then I am sorry to have bothered you. Fwiw, I do think you meant well.
The idea that Reddit is staging some nefarious conspiracy to "poison" fediverse spaces ... is losing the whole plot.
OP's straight up writing fanfiction trying to cast a site they just left as villains in some swashbuckling coming-of-age story. It's a nine-hour-old account, and they're already embracing the Us vs Them mentality and trying to sell it with prose.
I don't know how OP managed to pick fights within a couple hours of signing up for their account, but I'd suggest that if they left Reddit for "toxicity" only to immediately find it here too ... maybe they're carrying it around with them?
I'm 99% sure OP has made multiple accounts to try to sell their 'ex-Redditors are evil" schtick. I saw a post this morning from someone with a similar name pretty much saying the same thing.
Yeah I'm sure you've got it from my stalker, who has defenders that say he wasn't...stalking? Huh, funny how people have such a deranged difference in what means what to them.
Painting Reddit as a monolith in general is a problem, too. “Reddit is toxic?” Some subs, sure. But certainly not the ones I subscribed to. Some of them might have had bad actors here and there. But they were usually dealt with by the mods.
In the end, the only toxicity that drove me away from Reddit was the toxicity from the CEO.
Do you just love living a life, where you think you know everything and place people in some little organizer that you define people as, personally? Because you're doing exactly the same thing as you're claiming as to what I'm doing, just to make yourself look better and righteous.
That's the kind of mentality I see all around Reddit as also. Nobody is accountable for their own behavior, it's always the other person's fault and it's always the other person who is the toxic one. Somehow. Someway. Despite condemning evidence to the contrary for all to see, how it's all of the people pegging rocks at them. It's exactly how it is in school, with bullying, only it's amplified online. Does it make you feel superior? Does it make you feel better? What is the precise reason do you feel, that you have to behave this way?
I'm pretty confident it is some insecurity within you that you shroud so well, but I can see the cracks already just by your reply alone. May I advise that maybe you should take some time outdoors, instead of like, making up characters out of baseless assumptions to satisfy your pseudo intelligence?
I criticized you for jumping to conclusions and fabricating narrative to support them. And apparently you got so offended by the criticism that ... you went and did it all over again, targeting me, committing even harder to the bit.
You just wrote a bunch of wild fanfiction about me and then tried to have an argument with that imaginary version of me. Might as well just yell at ghosts in the shower if you're that desperate to feel like you've snatched some petty victory from the jaws of self-inflicted defeat that is this thread.
You're the problem with your own experience.
This response is hugely excessive for the "provocation" and yet I'm sure you'll storm off imagining that I'm the big meanie here and you were some completely reasonable and utterly justified saint of good behaviour - for absolutely going off on someone who gently mocked your very serious demands for everyone to be nicer to you and meaner to the people you dislike. And you've done that to everyone who wasn't fawningly positive towards you in this thread - that you started by being hateful and childish towards a site you just left and the userbase of the site you just joined.
Even with the tiny sample size I can see why you have so many encounters with "toxic" people. You antagonize and attack people, then pretend they were the toxic ones if they defend themselves.
It's not hard to miss that you've just happened to call me all of the things that other people have told you about yourself in this thread. Hell, this whole little speech would have been far more appropriate as something someone said to you, if they were trying to hurt your feelings; so given how off the mark it was when directed at me, it's easy to wonder if maybe you're projecting a little here.
Kbin is federated with Lemmy though, so it is sort of indirectly included…ish. I can see and interact with communities on kbin instances from Lemmy, like this one
It's federated with Lemmy, yea, but it has a completely different layout with different features. I can straight up browse and interact with Mastodon from /kbin thanks to its microblog support, but you obviously wouldn't say /kbin is included in Mastodon. I think that the same goes for Lemmy.
Also, /kbin doesn't get a mention but beehaw (a Lemmy instance) does?
Right - that's the weird part, if beehaw is being mentioned, then kbin should have as well, alongside Lemmy. Maybe someone will write to the author and complain about the imprecision:-). In the meantime, at least this gives us a glance at how people far away from the situation see it - those of us on kbin are on "Lemmy", or something. :-P
It is strange that they mention beehaw which is now largely defederated but not kbin which isnt. I suspect whoever wrote that article is less knowledgeable than I am on the subject, which is to say they know nothing at all about it - I’ve only been using Lemmy less than a month
Articles that mention kbin though are extremely few and far between. I think I've only seen it twice actually - I just posted one of them separately, and there the author does mention it while explaining basically that Lemmy is better.
Kbin is like this best non-Lemmy fediverse instance that you've never heard of, for the average person:-).
There are server issues where like if more than a minute (iirc) goes by from you loading up a page - while you read the whole thing, plus comments too - then you try to reply, it will not go through. Or if you reply to one person and then try to reply to another, same thing. Most often, refreshing the page seems to solve it for me. So like you can write in an external editor, refresh the page, THEN submit the reply. Kbin/Lemmy lacks "polish", that is for sure - it is undeniable that Reddit's UX is better, even if everything else about that company can go to hell.
Or if you are using an app, that would be a whole other matter that I do not know about, but I hope this suggestion helped!:-)
Thanks! Yeah I am using Liftoff on android. I’ll be able to reply to anyone else in the same moment, but if they have a kbin name it just fails instantly. Idk it’s weird it worked for you tho. Oh well. Things will smooth out over time.
Edit: oh, I wonder if there actually might a thing about the person who originally submitted a thread, vs. others who did not? That bug might treat the OP differently.
Big brain move time. Is there a way to get only high-quality content providers while keeping out low-effort stuff? Ofc that would knock me out too - who would ever want to be a member of a club that would actually accept us? :-P
Yup. Moreover, i want clients and implementations that help summarize and reduce doomscroll behavior. Social networks have value (imo), but they also have a cost and i'm tired of paying that. Reddit built a habit in so many of us to go back to it during any downtime, doomscroll more time than we wanted or expected, become overly invested in karma, arguments, etc. Reddit also has zero incentive to fix any of this, as it was perfect for engagement. Reddit is Facebook is Twitter, and i'm tired of those applications drugging my brain.
I definitely do not want Reddit. I want the value we got from Reddit, without the cost.
Buddy, doomscrolling is your own issue. Are you old enough to remember "doomscrolling" cable television for hours at night? We're all choosing to distract ourselves from something else or we're just bored. It's nothing new.
I mean, if you're having trouble stepping away from something, it almost sounds like you're describing an addiction problem. Everyone should make it a practice to step outside themselves for a moment and assess all their habits.
You're not seriously suggesting that a platform prevent its users from using it, are you? LOL where have I seen that in the news this week?
You're not seriously suggesting that a platform prevent its users from using it, are you? LOL where have I seen that in the news this week?
Jeez, this feels quite hostile.
I'm a developer. I'm working on this problem myself. You can craft features which promote a behavior or inhibit it. For example focusing only on live oriented features, making sure that posts show up constantly and with little ability to see what previous came, i would argue, focuses behavior on addictive FOMO. Features that help summarize historical posts to leave you with less of a feeling of FOMO does the opposite. Quite difficult to get FOMO if the summary of posts only changes once every 5 hours, right? You should see the ideas here. All of which i want to explore.
Features promote behavior. Some drive engagement, some reduce engagement. I seek features which reduce engagement by way of inhibiting FOMO and promoting the feeling of being informed on what it is you were seeking.
I'm suggesting a platform which focuses on features that help users avoid what i feel are negative outcomes. Which is wholly different than saying that all platforms need to do this. Why is this controversial to you? Should i, and users like me, not be able to use a platform which tries to eradicate (as best able) FOMO? Is FOMO other people experience somehow essential to you?
You can have whatever platforms you like. Just because an option exists does not mean it is hostile to your preferences. To me your reply seems short sighted, entirely focused on your individual use case and ignorant of a wide array of methods people want to use to interact with these products.
I am focused on my slice and my pie. You can have yours too, it's okay.
This argument that a social media platform not doing evil things also exclusively means it cannot attract an audience in some other way is a false dichotomy.
Seconding everything here — hostile/destructive platform design is so normalized for users (of Reddit and in general) that designing services that don’t encourage doomscrolling/“anger-tainment”/FOMO/etc feels completely foreign to them, or even impossible. But it’s gotta happen, otherwise we’ll just repeat the worst parts of Reddit (and other platforms) all over again.
@UnshavedYak for real. It's so refreshing not having to see loads of wasted awards on the most facile, idiotic comments. Or the obnoxious avatars people made in place of their pfp. It seems so hyperbolic but it genuinely feels great not having to see all that anymore.
Just to say, I 100 percent would pull RIF up in downtime but doomscrolling is not ubiquitous; I would pop into really specific communities to read about specific interests and shit that didn't expose me to current events. I am an extremely politically plugged-in person, despite avoiding it almost entirely on reddit (unless I was in the mood), but I found shit like RIF actually allowed me to be more selective about what content I want at any given time. That kind of fine-tuned control of my information intake, of course, is completely lost on New Reddit with its barrage of random recommendations.
Yea and i don't mean to imply this is something everyone needs to see as a problem. Plenty of things are addictive for some and not for others. Even regardless of addiction, i just want (to explore) a set of features that is kind of anti-reddit. Explore anything that can help me feel like i didn't miss anything, while not needing to visit more than once a day, once a week, etc. That i felt informed but that the random stuff was filtered out. etcetc
From a developer, often these features don't scale well either. Either complex to define (if customizable) or too costly to run, but Fediverse tweaks that a bit. We have the potential to have smaller servers with less concern for scale, etc. Fediverse has potential here, for me at least
That's exactly what I was thinking. Even with federation off it feels like it's already turning into a smaller version of what we had before. Not so much with post content or comments per se, but more for the already established "power users" and recreation of the exact same garbage, popular subs. I can't believe how many people I've already blocked that I got sick of seeing on every single post.
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