Reddit Inc. is weighing feedback from early meetings with potential investors in its initial public offering that it should consider a valuation of at least $5 billion, according to people familiar with the matter, even as it is estimated below that figure in the volatile market for shares of private companies.
Similarly with twitter and mastodon. Generally, that’s fine … smaller niche online spaces are a good thing (as many who’ve remained have discovered I suspect).
But in the end, for those who see this fediverse project as a mission to “take back the web” … so far only pretty minor movement has been made on that front. To the point that IMO I wouldn’t be surprised if Twitter etc just “win” and the whole “alternative” social media thing stays “alternative” and relatively small. If there’s a chance of this, I’d say to fediverse advocates that they should maybe rethink what the fediverse is and what it’s good and not good for, because there’s a real chance here that the fediverse kinda dropped the ball, especially mastodon which has been going strong for a while now.
I’ve never used Mastodon, but from what I’ve heard it’s an entirely different ballgame where you basically need to go where the people are. e.g. artists seeking commission work need more rather than less people, and if you want to follow a particular someone, you go to where they are not the other way around.
And if their servers have anywhere close to the level of technical glitches that we do here on Lemmy… well it is quite off-putting, especially to non technically minded people.
I’m not sure they have technical glitches in the same way lemmy does. Interestingly, the difficulties people have, I think, are because federated social media is actually a bad non-idea technology to use for a twitter clone.
So much either doesn’t work how you’d expect or involves new problems that all together they start to defeat the point for many. For example, replies to a post. The author of the post sees all of the replies. But replies aren’t actually federated unless certain conditions are met based on whether someone on your instance follows the person writing the reply. As a result the author of a post that receives many replies has to manage/tolerate a bunch of replies that have no awareness of the fact that they’re just repeating what has already been said, sometimes many times over. For people replying to a post from a small/niche instance, they basically don’t see any of the other replies, which just makes for bad content for them, but also means they constantly risking being really annoying people which in turn effectively punishes small instances. This is generally referred to as “context collapse”, and yea, it’s something kinda extraordinary when the core feature of a social media platform actively destroys the context of conversations.
Lemmy doesn’t have this problem because its based on groups where the whole premise is that the whole conversation gets federated, and for that reason I think a reddit clone or a forum or a youtube-clone (or anything based on groups, sub-reddits or channels) is a better fit on the fediverse.
The other friction mastodon has is that, as a twitter-clone or microblogging platform, its core mechanic is following people and allowing people to form their own network of connections and friendships. But once you’ve got federation and instances in the mix, where defederation happens, then you have this often completely separate dynamic (ie the relations between instances) capable of completely slicing your personal social network in many destructive ways. Often this happens without people hearing about it (as there aren’t mechanics for notifying people of defederations AFAIU), so that they have to find out after some time to realise that they hadn’t heard anything from a whole bunch of friends and were wondering what had happened. Moreover, what such people can then do to re-connect with those friends is rather non-trivial. It’s probably the major draw back of fedi-drama, that the majority of people affected by it don’t benefit from it and would prefer to just be on the big instance (mastodon.social) that no one really defederates from or just go back to twitter.
EDIT (more ranting):
The way someone I like (as a person on social media) put it, after giving mastodon a good shot, was that mastodon misunderstands what people want from social media, that mastodon puts independence over socialising when people prioritise it the other way around … the whole point is to connect and converse, not to run your own instance and make sure you’ve defederated from everyone who has it coming.
Now there’s the whole issue of making sure someone vulnerable to abuse is able to ensure their own safety and happiness from would-be assholes and abusers and even those eager to voice unwelcome, abrasive and triggering points of view which are generally tolerable because they’re the mainstream. Federation across instances can help with this … but can also make it worse because anyone can talk to you from any instance over which you have no control or information until it’s too late. In many ways, decentralisation isn’t great for these problems and creates new problems that a centralised form of social media simply doesn’t have (not least of which being that the whole thing is about copying you and your posts out to everything on the network). It’s for this reason that BIPOC left mastodon and went back to twitter, because to them, mastodon was the racist/facist place, not twitter. In light of that phenomenon, it’s worth considering the perspective that decentralised social media might be a bit of a weird idea and rightly seen as a bit of a fanatical and even a bit of a right-wing or libertarian movement.
In the case of group-based platforms like lemmy and forums however, I think it makes much more sense. Many independent forums are out there, and have been and hopefully will be for a long time. Why not contribute Open Source software for such things (such as lemmy) and enable them to connect to each other however they wish.
Yikes. It does not sound pretty. For them at least, but indeed, Lemmy is a whole other deal. It seems to mainly just need some polish? Especially easing in new people, if increasing the numbers is really the goal.
Old-Reddit’s days are numbered… so we’d best prepare for the next incoming migration.
The weird thing is that people on mastodon mostly go along happy with their feed. Those that have found the problems too much bounced or just learnt to tolerate it. One thing that may fade away is the idea of running your own personal instance. I get the feeling that some don’t find it to be entirely worth it. There are “relays” though, which are commonly used, and basically feed in content from major instances as though you’re following a bunch of people there. I don’t really know how that goes though.
With lemmy (and kbin too), yea, it certainly feels like it’s not far from being kinda “done”, at least as a version “1.0”. Scaling up to many more users is likely to surface more issues though. But we’ve got many apps and alternative front ends, a somewhat stabilising API and months now of mostly working as intended.
Yeah Lemmy got much better with v0.19, while Kbin has barely improved visibly at all it seems so I just gave up on it for now.
I still suffer the issue, on both mobile and desktop browser, that literally every time I come back, to pretty much anywhere I have to login again - I cleared cookies a few times but that didn’t seem to help. Most instances seem to have that, though I may have an odd selection of them (Kbin, Discus.Online, and StarTrek.website), and there are the occasional days where I have to attempt to make every comment at least twice for it to stick (but at least now if it doesn’t go through, you notice, unlike previously where it disappeared into the void invisibly, though I only had Kbin experience back then).
I haven’t bothered to research the apps yet - security, stability, ads vs. no, etc. - so all that I’m saying is for the vanilla browsing experience.
Also people report that the creation of new accounts from the mobile browser is barely if at all functional. I haven’t tried that myself, but it does seem like the experience varies enormously depending on which method of interface someone is using - and that’s going to be off-putting to a migration event, like if something doesn’t work it would be better to put up a sign saying “this (often?) doesn’t work on a mobile, just go to a desktop computer for this task”. Caveat: assuming the desire is to bring in more people who are less technically minded, for the sake of e.g. content creation.
And this doesn’t even begin to cover the modding concerns:-).
Re kbin, you might be interested in mbin … it’s a fork and has active development happening. They have at least one instance up that I’ve seen. Generally seems to be a positive move.
And yea plenty of rough edges. Your experiences definitely sounds worse than mine though (and I’m on web apps too).
just bookmarked this post to remember it when some nerd tries to tell me again that federation solves all our problems in the wordl 😅
Yea, I do think there’s a bit of cult-hype around federation and decentralisation and has been for a while here in the Fedi. Which is really just tech hype … the idea that some technology magically solves problems.
In reality, better social media requires more than just a technology.
I’ve been on Mastodon for over a year and I never experienced anything that could be classified as a technical glitch. From a tech / UI perspective it feels very polished to me.
I guess the only exception would be that old posts are sometimes missing on profiles from different servers.
Thank you, that’s helpful to know:-). Kbin had MANY issues and that was the closest I’d seen.
It seems to confirm that what is holding Mastodon back isn’t technical at all but just the design - i.e. like if people are on X then that’s where most other people want to be, similar to Windows where it is not technologically superior, just the default for some reason.