Fediverse

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A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).

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founded 1 year ago

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Fediverse sustainability (lemmy.ml)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I prefer good faith discussions please. I love the Fediverse and love what it can be long term. The problem is that parts of the culture want nothing to do with financial aspect. Many are opposed to ads, memberships, sponsorships etc The “small instances” response does nothing to positively contribute to the conversation. There are already massive instances and not everyone wants to self host. People are concerned with larger companies coming to the Fedi but these beliefs will drive everyday users to those instances. People don’t like feeling disposable and when you hamstring admins who then ultimately shut down their instances that’s exactly how people end up feeling. There has to be an ethical way of going about this. So many people were too hard just to be told “too bad” “small instances” I don’t want to end up with a Fediverse ran by corporations because they can provide stability.

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

I'm guessing you are not old enough to remember how the internet used to work before Facebook? This idea that walled gardens are somewhat better is a meme that needs to die.

The web itself is the giant platform. Ease of discovery is not an inherent property of centralized networks, it's just that we haven't had built the proper tools to make this work in a decentralized manner.

To make my case: what killed RSS was not that it was difficult to discover new blogs. What killed RSS was that it couldn't be monetized by the publishers when they started using it. What made Twitter so successful was that it let those publishers to have some sense of control over the distribution. Had we properly supported content creators with actual money instead of the promise of eyeballs, the internet would be a much better and healthier place than it is today.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Geezus. I'm old enough to remember how the Internet was before the Internet. Sorry. 😅

You however completely missed the point. Social media in its nature benefits from centralized approaches. As a use case. Independent of who operates it. Users have it easier the more central it is. It doesn't need to be walled. Of course not. But it should be centralized.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

But it should be centralized.

Again, I really don't see why. Content/Peer discovery can all be made transparent for the user, addressing and distribution as well.

I see the benefit for those building the platforms which in turn make these networks more attractive to users, and I see how the overall cost of the whole system is lower if it is centralized (economies of scale and avoid redundancies), but I'm failing to see how (all else being equal) the users benefit from a centralized system over a distributed one.

The fact that you are on LW and I'm not does not stop us from doing anything on Lemmy that is possibly only on reddit. Why benefit would there be for me to join LW?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Like I said above, specifically for the "I want to socialize" use case of social media sites, there's no upside to federation. It makes discovery harder, and a giant portion of what made Reddit so amazing was the random stumbling into things.

And yes, sure, federated systems can be made to more closely emulate such a centralized approach, but that's why I said it that way: A centralized pool of social media content (for a given social media platform) is beneficial to the user, they can randomly stumble into topics and groups, and filter things down to what they desire.

In an ideal federated system, that is in turn exactly how the content would look for the user: They'd not even realize the content isn't all on whatever instance they're on, it's fully transparent. Because that's easier for the user. No matter how low the barrier to finding federated content is, there's still no upside for the user having to take that step and go hunt for federated concept. From the perspective of the user, that is.

It's not a big issue of course, but it does mean that by default, more users flock to where there are already more users.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I agree with your overall sentiment but am I crazy or is RSS more popular than ever?

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Is it? Maybe in absolute numbers it has gone up, but I remember when established newspapers and journalists would write on their blog and have full-text feeds, while nowadays everything seems to be on substack/medium and the RSS feeds just puts out a link to the gated content.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

If you include podcasts, which are delivered via RSS by definition, undoubtedly RSS is more popular than ever.

It's a little disingenuous to do that though, so in this context we probably shouldn't count it.