MudMan

Cool.

But the pitch wasn’t “everything will be interoperable unless the company doesn’t mean it or wants to make money or we aren’t “morally aligned”, whatever that means”.

I don’t understand how you can be a “walled garden” and still feature interoperability with a set of open source platforms under a pre-established set protocol. This is not an ethical problem or a problem of ideology, those two things are mutually exclusive.

This also sounds a whole lot like it disproves skrlet13’s point on the heterogeneous Fedi where everything fits under different but overlapping bubbles. Seems to me you think Fedi has the one moral and ethical position on this.

Yeah, well, don’t tell them. The fields of Mastodon are still full of the debris of the Great Threads Arguments. Seemed to me everybody thought they had the correct and only Fedi.

I am more surprised than I should be at how quickly the Fedi pitch went from “we want a future where everything is interoperable everywhere” to “we don’t want any interaction with for profit companies”.

I don’t mind either way, it’s all bad and I shouldn’t be here in the first place, but… you know, it’s weird seeing social patterns develop in real time.

You’re not wrong.

The biggest caveat I’d have is that social media with a friction point is still bad. The negative effects of the whole thing are fundamental to the types of interactions it fosters. Even purely direct messaging applications can and will generate a lot of the same results.

And I would even argue there was no Web 1.0. Back in the webring days I was already in IRC and Usenet was a thing. The only reason it seems healthier from a distance is that fewer people were doing it. Get back to that tech with the same user counts we have now and you have the exact same thing. Just with more ASCII art and fewer AI filters, I guess.

Oh, man it’s been ages. I’m talking being in high school and having teachers talk to me about this. And then being in uni and having it be a thing people argued about.

I do not have any of the papers on hand or even remember the authors or names. The idea that algorithmic searches would create a bubble of self-selected media and erode a sense of shared reality isn’t new, though. We’re talking mid-90s here. People were arguing this about Altavista.

Who is “we”?

Technoactivists can’t even get people to use free software when it works and there’s like five of us over here in AP land.

Who is out there willing to create a movement to go back to navigating an page index or a webring? In what universe? Multiple governments freaked out about TikTok because the data was going to the bad spies they didn’t like and they STILL couldn’t get people off TikTok and into anywhere else.

I mean, if you have a time machine I’d happily blow up Skynet and tell 90s communication scholars that they were right about every single thing they were saying about search engines and algorithmic content, but that genie got out of the bottle, regained his freedom from the kindly street rat-turned-prince with his third wish and is halfway through Disney World by now.

Well, maybe, but if I had asked about Lemmy you wouldn’t have given me a link, you’d have said “Fedi Reddit” and accurate or not that’s all I would need to hear. I didn’t get the feeling that this thing was just Instagram, so I was still a bit confused.

That did a surprisingly incomplete job of answering the question, if I’m being honest.

You are all too afraid to admit you don’t know half of these logos even with the name list.

I am not.

The hell is a vernissage?

Cool.

So?

I mean, you are assuming “decentralized” is good, but it’s only as good as what it gets you. On paper, and until proven otherwise, I may choose less decentralized and more “capable of proper, effective moderation” instead. Especially if “less decentralized” is actually “somewhat decentralized”. I haven’t seen a case that fundamental decentralization trumps all so far.

See, but as I was saying above about the privacy stuff, the perception is supposed to be that this is somehow “the alogrithm’s fault” or caused on purpose by corporate media to boost engagement.

Even your take is letting Fedi design off the hook, IMO. The answer here isn’t “oh, well, what can you do?” it’s designing proper moderation tools.

I know people get mad when you praise Bluesky around these parts, but they have an actually good block system, compared to Masto, Lemmy and Fedi in general. It really helps cut this crap short.

Well, where are you all when the Fedi cheerleading squad keeps posting about how bad it is that this or that competitor stores this or that information and how secure and private and great it is in Fedi servers because they don’t store anything?

Because I’ve spent years chiming in to explain these things in those and it normally just gets people angry and complaining that you’re shilling for corporate social media or whatever. The image being projected, both accidentally and on purpose is that no centralized data collection means your data on Fedi is private when it is extremely not.

Well, for one thing it only works asymmetrically. It’s fine if you have a very specific source of issues that you can isolate and cut off, but it’s not really useful if what you have is hostile users across the network. And it only protects the larger space. For smaller instances it’s a choice between functioning as social media or not existing at all.

It’s extremely far from a magic bullet, it is not resilient to large scale, systemic issues and the only reason its limitations haven’t been apparent is that the AP ecosystem is too small to suffer most of the issues of larger social media.

Aaaaand it’s designed to function via the petty squabbles of FOSS developer arguments, which I hate anyway. But that’s a me thing.

Again, doesn’t matter. There’s data on logged in users and it’s also many orders of magnitude larger than Fedi.

By most independent metrics Reddit has more visits than Netflix. Than Pornhub, while we’re at it. It’s one of the top ten most visited sites on the Internet, and by most accounts it’s actually grown since the “exodus”.

I don’t use it and I do like it here, but the idea that Lemmy is somehow encroaching on it is absurd. And self-defeating, too. Lemmy and its satellites are very worthwhile for what they are… but just a gnat in the wind as a Reddit alternative. Better to measure them on their own merits.

It may or may not be.

It is definitely not inflating its numbers by the orders of magnitude it’d take to make a dent on this particular takeaway.

Sure. I mean, having a single log-in for all of that is definitely useful, as is being able to chat with others. Defederation as a moderation tool is… overrated, but it is there.

Yep. Which ends up being why old forums were such tight-knit communities. You ended up hanging out with a handful of people. I’m mostly fine with that. If anything, it requires starting something yourself for your niche interests and being fine with it being dormant most of the time.

It doesn’t really matter. For one thing, MAU and unique users are different metrics and they’re both valid, so if Lemmy is counting verified uniques they can just call it that.

For another, I looked at the data for logged in users and Fedi’s MAU is 0.125% of their daily logged in users, so the point stands regardless.

So by my math and some googling, that’s about 0.00005% of Reddit’s MAU.

On the one hand, cool, growth is growth.

On the other hand maybe it’s… healthy to stop looking at Lemmy as an “alternative” to anything and start thinking about it as this small forum you like to use sometimes. Worked for me in the 90s, works for me now.

Yeeeah, if you have to write a network of interconnected arguments in multiple languages the answer you’re transmitting may not be the one you want.

Federated apps and communities may be better off spending more effort working to be appealing and less explaining why they think they already are.