I’ve thought about it a bit and the Fediverse has been around for a while now. There are some really cool applications being made to replace the mainstream ones, but they just aren’t taking off.

Why do you guys think that might be? Ease of use? Addiction to the mainstream platforms? Lack of marketing?

  • @0x1C3B00DA
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    3 years ago

    I think one of the issues is the tech angle. Everybody uses the federation aspect as a selling point, but:

    • most people don’t care about that
    • it doesn’t work seamlessly in practice

    If it worked seamlessly, I think the benefits would be obvious, even to those people who don’t care. But you still need a separate account on every one of these platforms to interact fully.

    Some of the things that don’t work seamlessly:

    • The microblogs (pleroma, mastodon, etc) don’t show lemmy posts and can’t comment on them (I know this is possible and on the roadmap, but it doesn’t work now so new users don’t care); see how the blog platforms (write.as, plume) allow following and commenting from a microblog account
    • A microblog acct can follow a pixelfed acct, but as far as I can tell, there’s no way to discover those accts. Pixelfed doesn’t allow viewing posts from its web interface without signing in. (I’m also not sure of the point of Pixelfed, since it’s just a microblog can only post photos. It seems like it was made to just be an Instagram clone. In my mind, it could have just been a client for the existing microblogging servers)
    • When a new project is started, they try to federate with mastodon first. So everything is oriented around mastodon and its quirks. (WebFinger is required, their signatures are apparently out of date, etc). Some projects just don’t work with pleroma and others.

    To sum up, every fediverse project is basically a clone of an existing big name company, but doesn’t do anything better. And since they’re all small, open source projects, they have less resources and develop features slower. There’s also the culture/personality issue, but that’s also a huge topic and this post is long enough

    • @Soaku
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      63 years ago

      Can’t exactly agree with the seamlessness because federation as is is still more seamless than centralized services. I can’t post on Twitter and Instagram when I only have a Reddit account, it doesn’t seem like an option at all. Federation? Anything is possible.

      • @0x1C3B00DA
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        3 years ago

        I agree, anything is possible, but the fediverse has never actually lived up to that. The only good example is posts showing up in microblog timelines and commenting on them, but that’s limited to blogs, videos, and Pixelfed. And on Pleroma, I still don’t see videos showing up in my feed, despite following peertube accts. Federation has a lot of potential, but it’s never been fully expressed, and isn’t enough to overcome the missing features that each platform has.

        EDIT: Here’s an example of what I’m talking about. All of these services “federate”, but it’s hard to understand how they all interoperate. Everybody is looking at them as individual platforms, but to me, the grand idea is that the fediverse could be a single platform and each of these services is just a set of additional features I can use.

    • @roastpotatothief
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      13 years ago

      What feature could lemmy get that would draw people away from reddit?

      • @0x1C3B00DA
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        43 years ago

        I think real, full federation is the only thing that would actually make the fediverse competitive with the centralized platforms, but most fediverse projects aren’t big enough to support that or just don’t have any interest in it.

        Other than that, I think only exclusive communities will work, like it did with Mastodon.

        • @roastpotatothief
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          33 years ago

          I was thinking that. Like if all the reddit clones just became lemmy instances. Some will choose not to federate, but the ones that do will help each other gain critical mass. Then people can escape their filter bubbles onto different instances/cultures.

          The other one is proper native support for languages like wikipedia has. So speakers of language X never have to interact with English language content if they don’t want to. There is a huge body of users who IMO would flock to a reddit-like site that has that.

      • @leanleft
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        3 years ago

        for lemmy: a large diverse community of active commenters.
        both mastodon and lemmy are often seen as yet another sprawling commercial platform by ordinary people.
        simple signup helps to make it easy for people to join. keeping people interested might need to highlight some impressive quick benefits to be seen instantly.
        maybe if you could backup your multireddits to lemmy alternatives. or analyze your comments to suggest similar conversations where the user can contribute.
        the speed/responsiveness/weight of both sites are faster than their competitors.
        people who are internet people (opposed to normies) will generally join these sites. it just takes time. growth happens linearly not exponentially. but more people will form a bigger base for more potential invites.
        i always tell people that if they don’t want to try a site then they can tell a friend who might like to try it.
        i didn’t find mastodon signup process very easy at all. lemmy and diaspora were much easier i think.
        i would love to see an android app for lemmy if it doesn’t already exist somewhere. lemmy doesn’t render well on my mobile device last time i checked.