I think this decentralization and federation is what web3 is all about, without all the corporations calling everything to do with monkey pixel art that costs a million dollars “web3”
Hah, web 2.0 was all about the explosion of user-generated content. Corps and cryptonerds wanted to make web 3.0 about making money, but the web has always been about the content, not its monetization. In trying to monetize the content, they’re alienating people and forcing them off the platforms they defaulted to.
Humans like to create and share content, no matter how easy or difficult it is to monetize. If the people who want to monetize humanity’s collective output make it harder to create, then hopefully the result is that people move off the ad-supported platforms and replace them with something that doesn’t rely on centralization with lots of capital to stay afloat.
If nothing else, the way that youtube has made it impossible for segments of the creative community to monetize their content and forced them rely on platforms such as patreon has made it more and more clear that ad-generated revenue is a dead end. You can’t force people to view advertising unless you hold their content hostage, and for the first time in history, they can’t buy out the means of production.
I was resistant to the federverses, but these corpos just think they can get away with anything…
Fuck them I won’t do what they tell me!
It will be fun to watch this place grow, it feels like the start of a new story!
based
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No, you’re amazing
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federverses
I’m more a fan of the nadalverses, but to each their own.
Ok apparently my gif did not work
replace them with something that doesn’t rely on centralization with lots of capital to stay afloat
There’s absolutely no conceivable reason that reddit shouldn’t be profitable right now with the market saturation they have unless the majority of people who’ve been making money off of the site up untilo now have been minimal effort contributors now trying to get their piece of the money pie. 99% of the work is done by “unpaid” (by reddit) mods yet somehow they still have 2k people on the payroll and still need to centralize more and more capital to cover the overhead, it’s hard to imagine most of their current expenses are going to anything but dumb tech company money sinks that are going out of style and have little to show for the last decade of spending lol
I mean that’s maybe the only good thing: If they are a public traded company, they have to file public revenue reports. Would love to see where those morons burn their money…
2k people in expensive San Francisco office space. Willing to bet that the % of them dedicated to improving user experience was quite low in comparison to those trying to figure out how to squeeze money out of it.
Every single platform that has claimed “Web 3.0” has been revealed to be a crypto scam, and generally not even a sneaky one. Pop over to minds.com if you’d like a free taste of exactly what that ends up looking like. It’s disgusting.
Good God, minds.com is a cesspool.
Very much aware of that.
Honestly I’m not even sure what the term web3 means but Lemmy does feel… less commercial, which is really refreshing! And I’m noticing alot less criticizism which is excellent. I’m certainly going to be staying here and trying to help it grow in a positive and mindful way.
I get what others are saying about it feeling like how the internet used to be… I’m really excited to see where Lemmy goes. Hopefully it doesn’t just end up the way its predecessors have gone! Feels like I’m part of a movement to fight the oppression!! Power to the people woo!
That’s what I’m enjoying about it so far too. Content is sparse but that’s okay. I’m so tired of being marketed to, of being a product. These open source federated apps are janky and quieter, but they feel more real. These aren’t algorithms pushing engagement and outrage or ads every 10 seconds.
Plus on Reddit, corporation makes money from content users create while here everything is open, free and fun.
Let’s just hope we can keep it that way! 🙂
Right? It’s way calmer here. I felt hesitant about that at first, but it’s only because we’ve gotten so used to an endless stream of (often inconsequential and low-effort) content. More isn’t always necessary or better.
Kid-me used to have days off and he’d hop onto Warcraft 3 or various message boards only to realize no one was online because everyone had jobs or was at school. It had a rhythm to it which was really cool. It wouldn’t surprise me if the “always-on” content spam of the modern internet has given people unhealthy ideas about what life is supposed to feel like.
I don’t mind the lack of an endless stream of content so much, however it would be nice if it was easier to not see the same content again and again after already reading it. Maybe some sort of read flag would be good for posts, possibly with a configurable number of new comments after which it is shown again.
I agree wholeheartedly. I think what all of us who care about these alternative underground social networks need to do is try to provide the best content we can, because that will attract other people here, which will benefit us in turn through the content they make!
There might be a case for a more sparse content feed. Sure you can subscribe to hundreds of communities across a hundred different servers but you are more in control of the feed. every post is going to be more relevant and you will have more incentive to take part in conversations instead of just refreshing and having a whole new page of crap.
There are some ease of use improvements to be made of course, this is the most users and fastest growth lemmy has ever seen, so there is some learning to be done as it scales.
You nailed it: It feels like a movement. And movements, especially nascent ones, require buy-in and work from their members. I guess that explains why I feel obligated to participate more than I did at Reddit.
I’ve only been on Lemmy for a day, but it’s already clear no one is gonna build this out for us.
Same here, I think I lebt more comments here today than on reddit the last month
Right? I’m thinking about trying to start my beginner guitar sub (do I still call it sub?). I tried on reddit, posted a few times and it fizzled out. Maybe it would be more successful here. Just a sub dedicated to helping people begin their guitar playing journey. Playing guitar has made such a positive impact on my life, I’d like to share that with others you know?
Web3 became a marketing term, doesn’t even really have a clear meaning, but it’s used as a catch-all word for blockchain-related things like NFTs, cryptocurrency projects, etc. But most of those are not truly decentralized, whereas Lemmy and other fediverse projects are.
I kind of like the idea of rebranding it around a more honest and inclusive definition of decentralization. Though getting past bad marketing is so hard it might not be worth it.
What is sort of bothering me is how as it becomes more popular, I’ve already seen a few people asking about adding advertising to lemmy instances. I hope advertisers are not looking at diminished revenue with the reddit blackouts and trying to move to Lemmy already. I just can’t stand ads.
I suppose the benefit to lemmy is that you could always migrate to another instance if yours starts pulling that shit
As far as I know, while account migration is technically possible it isnt implemented yet, so if a server decicdes to shut up shop due to lack of funds your account there is lost and only federated content on other instances will be saved.
So once migration of user accounts and communities is implemented we should be able to easily survive waves of server closures.
I do worry that it will eventually coalesce into a couple of ultra-large servers and lose a lot of it’s decentralisation though. gotta spread out!
I mean, I suppose creating alts on multiple instances might work as an alternative in the meantime. I don’t know if that’s frowned upon though.
Completely agree on the last point, though. It is crucial that we spread out!
I’ve made about 10 alts so far, just making sure to secure my username in case I do need to migrate somewhere
I don’t believe it’s frowned upon. I have one here on infosec.pub and another on fedia.io. I primarily use infosec.pub though
True enough. And I know I’m just a drop in the bucket, but I will do exactly that if it ever happens.
Technically it should already be possible for a company to advertise here, no? Not in the “there are little video boxes you can’t get rid of (barring adblocker extensions)” but in the sense that one could have their employees create accounts and make comments and posts to promote their products. They’d probably have to do it subtly and sneakily, because they’d likely get banned or if they had their own instance, defederated, but they could. Wouldn’t even need to pay anything beyond employee salaries to make it.
I feel like “proper” ads would be more difficult to implement, because even if the software were updated to include the ability to add them, people could and likely would make forks of it that just didn’t display those from federated servers, or clients that don’t on any server, and because the software is open source there would be no stopping it. An instance could defederate instances using such an ad-blocking fork, but that would risk ending up themselves isolated and therefore lose much of their traffic and viability as a platform.
I think it might be ok if some instances decide to run ads. Someone has to pay for the server costs, and ads are an option.
The great thing about the Fediverse is you can move to a different instance if you don’t like it :)
It’s pretty dope. Been following the fediverse for a while, but I’ve never used twitter so mastodon felt kinda useless to me. I’ve never used facebook, so friendica felt kinda useless to me.
Anonymous strangers posting links and having discussions? Now that’s more my jam.
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My favourite part was AMAs by scientists and authors or even ppl like Gov Schwarzenegger. I hope fediverse develops to that point one day.
I remember when AMAs were organic and people actually answered questions. Before prepared questions and answers became a thing.
I loved seeing those IAMAs too. Schwarzenegger, Obama, NASA scientists and Woody Harrelson (can we talk about Rampart?)! Unfortunately I think the web is worse now, far too much focus on monetization, bots, propaganda> and astroturfing.
I’m hoping that Lemmy flies under the radar in the sweet spot of enough subscribers but not too many.
OTOH, they can use whatever corporate or government instance they want and everyone everywhere can access it.
OTOH, they can use whatever corporate or government instance they want and everyone everywhere can access it…
The only bot issue I heard of is following people, which one would only get notified if they use new reddit or official app. What were the other bot problems? What’s to stop the bots on this site?
My thoughts exactly
Same here, neither of those are my thing, but lemmy scratches my needs. Of course without reddit fucking up, I would never have checked it out, but now I’m really hoping this gets big, without losing it’s core
Web 1.0, users form communities on bulletin boards, internet forums and newsgroups. It’s the birth of Web 2.0, investors and advertisers see potential in large user bases. This leads to social media and mobile apps as fronts for tracking users and big data collection. Smart home and wearables become a plot to bring tracking hardware into your life even when you aren’t actively engaging on the internet. The tech billionaire is born at the cost of the privacy and wallet of the user. Web 3.0, a federated Web 1.0 where users take back control of the internet. Tech billionaires live in homeless shelters and eat ramen noodles.
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F
I’d buy that for a dollar
I understand that reference
I’d patreon to see that
It’s nice to have this space to retreat to. Even if it doesn’t outcompete the corporate web anytime soon, the existence of another option will constrain how bad they can get a bit, and will create a place for refugees to go after each new outrage. And it’s not like the core functionality of any of the corporate sites was that complicated underneath all the bloat, after people have been on here working out the kinks for a while there’s no reason it should be any less convenient of an experience.
agreed, i can’t remember the last time reddit added an actual useful feature.
The only thing they did do relatively recently that I liked was adding the option for subs to not archive posts that are older than 6 months. But I guess when you think about it, that’s more of just taking a restriction away, and less of adding something new. Other than that, though, it’s either just useless stuff or stuff that actively made things worse.
Holy shit, is that why I got a random influx of trolls commenting on 5 year old comments?
To be fair about the archiving thing you have to consider that being able to make old data read only allows you to optimize a lot of things. With good engineering the allowance for archival should make the whole site faster and more stable. So sort of a soft feature.
I get that, and it could make sense to archive things at some point, but I do think it was nice for certain communities, aside from things like sports, news, etc., to be able to still comment on old posts. Especially help posts or things like that, because they could still be relevant months or even years later.
There should be a way to unarchive something if that’s the case, which works better than a new post which references the previous one with small addendums or questions. This is especially useful when people are searching for information on certain topics and everything is contained within one post rather than 5 posts because the earlier ones were archived. Many people will never continue searching and see all of the newer information once they have found the old now incomplete posts.
word is they’ve got 300 full time devs in the april fools experiment department
The multi-image post, but only worked on new reddit.
Seeing your post my first thought was that multi-image albums always worked on old.Reddit. But actually I was thinking of a Reddit Enhancement Suite feature. Which is another open-source toolkit that was provided by the community to Reddit.
Happy to see that the Open Source came up with something top-to-bottom like Lemmy and the Fediverse!
I meant actually making a post with multiple images. Old reddit only allowed one, whereas new reddit, you can upload multiple to one and it creates a gallery.
Yes, RES would let you see all the images afaik. I can’t remember the last time I browsed on my desktop without RES.
Feels like old school forums again. A little barebones compared to some of the corporate stuff, but that’s not a bad thing. Just the simple what’s needed no extra fluff.
I like it like this, but I’ve always been a minimalist. With a few QoL changes/fixes (especially for the mobile app) this will be perfect.
I agree, it’s got a really solid foundation and Lemmy’s got nowhere to go but up
So you’re saying that the real web3 was… the friends we made along the way?
web3 was within us the whole time
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Long way to go for ease of use, but the foundation is SOLID.
Decentralised without crypto-ifying everything. this is the way.
I gotta admit though, this has to be one of the first reasonable use cases for blockchain technology that I can think of - a P2P database for social forums… decentralised, but a single “instance” no matter how you access it. I imagine the blockchain sizes would get ridiculously large though, and all sorts of moderation issues. Probably not feasible, though I’m sure there’s a project on GitHub I’m not aware of…
If you were to host the entire forum on a blockchain, every node would have to hold the blockchain. So not scaling horizontally, but instead copying the “database” a bunch of times. Think of hosting all of the data in reddit on a thousand nodes. Sure you could access it from any node, but the database would be just as big as before, just copied around a bunch of times.
In a way this thing is already much more decentralized than a blockchain could ever be, in that every server doesn’t hold all of the data at once. Much better use of resources IMO.
Yeah that’s a good point. But this way we can’t mine LemmyCoin. Won’t someone think of the shitcoins!?
For sure if reddit can have moons, then a blockchain forum should have their own shitcoin. How else would the founder of the decentralized platform make some bank? Get donations from from the general public for the volunteer work they do on the project? No way :)
A much better use of resources, but you shard the data amongst potentially untrusted hosts (ie, anybody can stand up a lemmy instance and start hosting posts/comments, and then get sick of hosting it and delete their instance and all the uploaded data).
Federation only allows access to the network of servers, it doesn’t protect the data at all, which means at any moment an entire community of useful historical information could just be wiped away (especially since there’s currently no monetary incentive to continue hosting, its only being done out of desire to be part of the network).
I guess I’d rather see the blockchain (or simpler caching/mirroring) approach, something like the torrent network, so that no single person has access to delete content. We can all choose to not view or not mirror content we don’t agree with, but nobody can single-handedly own or modify the data
Unless each node holds all the data, it is not guaranteed to stay available. Mirroring content across 2, 3, or even 10 servers wouldn’t guarantee that it will remain eg. after 10 years. Even torrents die after they are no longer popular and people stop seeding them.
I still hold my opinion that using an actual blockchain to hold the conversations is not scalable solution at all. Only unique thing it would enable is for unwanted content to remain permanently in the system.
This is what reddit felt like ten years ago … now it’s just a matter of growing the community and making it bigger and better.
I felt bad leaving my old communities at reddit … but in a funny way, I feel like I’ve stepped into a time warp and jumped back ten years … now I’m looking forward to the next ten on Lemmy and Mastadon
What we’re seeing here seems more like a restoration of the architecture of pre-web Internet services, like SMTP, NNTP, or IRC.
The protocols are built on top of HTTPS and JSON as a session layer, rather than on lines of ASCII as in those classic protocols … but the architecture looks a lot more like “a bunch of servers under independent administration, that agree to share messages with each other in a network” than like anything with the stink of blockchains on it.
Sorry but I had to do it
Blockchain is well suited for storing authentication and provenance information. The Fediverse could benefit from blockchain stored instance, user, and community metadata.
@TinfoilBeanieTech
Interesting idea. So blockchain could make communication between instances more efficient
@kiriakos @fubo One thing I think a platform like #Peertube needs to solve, which #LBRY does (because it uses a blockchain) is the financial incentive for content creators without ads because right now you can’t really make money on Peertube. On LBRY you can because it features its own currency and on #Youtube of course but this is using ads. This is one of the advantages to using a blockchain. However LBRY’s torrent like protocol for sharing video data is very slow and buggy which incentives the centralisation around odysee. The idea behind the project is great but not that well in practice if they don’t make the protocol faster.
Plenty of creators have solved that already through platforms like patreon. It turns out that ad-supported content only works if advertisers want to advertise on your content, and large segments of media aren’t “advertiser friendly”.
No crypto required.
“Crypto” has meant “encryption” since the early days of PGP.
If you mean “cryptocurrency” or “blockchain”, please consider using those specific words.
Kinda being pedantic. It’s a comment on a post about web3, responding to someone talking about a blockchain currency. Frankly, unless it’s unclear enough that someone might come along and ask “what does cryptography have to do with blockchain?”, I’m not sure why you feel the need to correct my usage of the word.
@lucien
Really? Just heard someone who complained about it but maybe you’re right.
It’s not clear to me that media distribution and payment need to follow the same channels.
For instance, classic TV uses completely separate pathways for distributing media to users (via broadcast radio signals) and collecting revenues. Commercial TV stations run advertisements; US-style public TV stations attract contributors and sponsors; UK BBC-style public TV stations have government funding.
(And the BBC produces good material — not only BBC World Service, but also Doctor Who.)
Platforms such as YouTube collapse all of this into a single service for convenience. And then “YouTubers” get the mistaken impression that they’re entitled to it, and fuss when they are “demonetized”.
(“Demonetization” just means “the platform doesn’t think its advertisers want to be associated with you; and the advertisers are paying to have the platform make that decision.”)
@fubo yeah that’s true but why not improve things. making it more convenient is better IMO and we have the technologies to do it.
If someone is providing convenience as a service, they get to collect a share of revenue from it, and they get to decide whether you get to use their service at all — an opportunity for censorship.
If I were in the video business (which I’m not; so I am ignorant!) I would look to distribute video via a service similar to a streaming/dynamic version of BitTorrent; and find a way to automate placement of video ads into the stream. Major tech companies shouldn’t need to be involved at all; nothing about this should need large server or network capacity — for the same reason that torrent servers don’t.
@fubo thats where i think crypto is great such as how LBRY does it. you can earn money and no one has the power to demonetize you.
If it becomes popular, what prevents the goat porn people from spamming it and making good content undiscoverable?
Pretty much yeah.
But what’s wrong with bolckchains? That technology is good too, a bunch of lowly monetization schemes based around it shouldn’t deface the core idea and its possibilities.
The notion that any “Web” technology (i.e. user-facing publication, sharing, & discussion) needs to be coupled with a fraught¹ payment system seems like a fundamentally contentious issue, mostly introduced by people who stand to profit from the success of those payment systems regardless of benefit to Web users.
¹ Regulatory issues, cut-and-run scams, etc.
See ftx
The problem with Blockchains is most of the projects associated with them are scams until proven otherwise. It’s kind of like Western Union transfers, money orders, or iTunes gift cards, nothing wrong with the technology behind them, but when the topic comes up, I immediately think of scams.
I don’t think anything is inherently wrong with blockchain technology, but what it’s been molded into (a purely speculative profit driven ecosystem ) is a waste of it’s potential.
The future of the internet isn’t artificially scarce digital collectibles? 😲
No one tell my StarCitizen ship collection this…
are those even scarce tho
Yea, SC does this really dumb thing where they only sell some ships a few times a year and when they do sell them they sell limited batches of them… the very definition of artificial scarcity and FOMO.
But really… probably not that scarce…
watch them turn those ships into NFTs and charge you for each one of those a second time
oh no, you can’t use your old ships on the new metaverse, they’re tied to your legacy account! Here, use our convenient minter service to transfer them to your web 4.0 address, for a small small fee of $50* per ship!
*fees subject to current network conditions
SC players are crazy… some of them would just rebuy 10k worth of space ships and brag about it…
I forgot it even existed. Is it a game yet or still just a series of presentations and announcements?
Its a game now, buggy as hell but a game. It can be fun but not something you can sink hundreds of hours into unless you just enjoy that sort of thing. They do free fly’s every few months you can try it for free.
It better be! I spent millions on jpgs of monkeys! /s
dude you got ripped off, my monkey is a png
Please tell me they weren’t highly compressed jpegs
Well, how are they supposed to accommodate millions of monkeys in a single file then? Huh? /s
We’re going back to the real digital collectibles, short and catchy domain names.
I say let’s keep up this momentum and continue making this a space people want to be in and engage with.
We’re already off to a strong start, let’s commit and see what new corner of the internet we can define for ourselves.
It’s starting to feel like the 90’s again, but without frames ;-) I haven’t felt this engaged with the internet in years
web3 was always a cryptocurrency scam and was doomed to fail. Federation is more a return to the early web with a way to link everything together to compete and get similar services to megacorps while distributing costs.
This is what I keep thinking as well. The “kids today” don’t remember usenet, IRC, etc. All were decentralized systems capitalizing on distributed compute resources and moderation. They did have problems when it comes to direction, moderation, systems playing “nice”, fragmentation, etc. But I still feel the plusses outweigh the minuses in a federated system. Unfortunately the public does like their “benevolent (until they aren’t) dictators”…
It’s because a system where everything is controlled by one person is so commonplace that any other idea seems foreign and impossible, or more often these days not profitable.
Yeah - and it does simplify things a lot as well. A single entity can move a platform in a specific direction without needing to consult other servers, writing an RFC, etc. And the onboarding is much simpler by comparison.
I think at this point the fediverse should turn its eye towards simplifying sign-ups. If only to make the language more clear about what you are, and are not, locked into when picking an instance. But also provide people with “I don’t really care which one I use” options to round-robin them to servers to distribute the load (thinking out loud).
It’s a never ending debate on how to “onboard” new users with all the growth. Honestly I’d think it would be easier to compare it to email. like a simple look it all works together just get a account and it will federate. It doesn’t matter too much where you sign up your account it’s able to send and receive email from everyone. But, everyone gets overwhelmed by choices and not knowing the difference between servers. Something like a email app where it gives you a list to pick and a other option would be good imo.
Would be cool if there were geographic designators for individual instances so you could find one close to you. Not sure if that makes the experience better but I’d assume so.
yeah, the lack of brand presence is a convenient side effect, its refreshing, just like the iconic McCafé® blend. Crafted to perfection by expert baristas, just the way you like it. Get one today at McDonald’s®. I’m Lovin’ It!
I’m honestly very excited about Lemmy and Mastodon.
With federated and decentralized technology, I think there’s a real hope of taking the internet back from the tiny selection of corporatized, monetized, sterile silos we have now, where everyone is forced to abide by the same compromise rules and everything can be co-opted or changed at a moment’s notice without the userbase’s consent, and giving it to smaller, more fun, radical, unique, and interesting internet communities, run by volunteers who really care, for like minded people.
I think it will lead to a much more diverse and richly textured internet, maybe even a more human internet, since each place you go will be a smaller, more intentional community which policies itself and can develop its own interesting culture and set of norms, while still being connected to everything else so the rot of pure isolation doesn’t set in.
Technology — especially how it is structured — is never neutral, and I think for the first time in a long while, we’ve stumbled on technologies in federation and decentralization that actually tend towards good things. The inherent benefits of federation and decentralization to autonomy and resilience and diversity and resistance tocorporatizationn are stunning, and as long as we don’t fuck that up by assuming that those benefits are sufficient, don’t rest on our laurels thinking we don’t need to maintain a culture that is consciously and intentionally oriented around preserving the things we want to see, I think we’ll be okay!
The internet was always intended to be decentralized
I’m nostalgic for when it was. Hopefully in some form it can be again.
