It feels like the early Internet: it's still being actively improved, it's noncommercial, people are weirder, people are passionate, fewer bots, it's kind of exciting.
I have no idea if it will succeed, but it's a nice feeling.
this post was submitted on 02 Jul 2023
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Yeah, it's not a sterile, bland, corporate-feeling experience like most mainstream sites. I've missed the charm and wild variability of the old internet, and this feels pretty close to it again.
I think that phrases quite well how I feel about it. Old internet..
You're making me feel nostalgic now, in a good way.
Hey would you be willing to help me out? I’m a prince who needs help moving his money to the US of A.
Of course! You know, you're the 4th prince I've helped this month - would ya believe it?!
Are Google play gift cards the currency in your country also?
No we only take circuit city gift cards
LMAO
people are weirder
If I didn't already love Lemmy, I do now.
I feel the same way. The federated aspect is brilliant and more social platforms should follow it.
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I want to see it grow just to prove the concept works at scale. I genuinely believe it will and I'm a cynical bastard.
Isn't Mastodon already proving that, with 13M users?
It does (along with many better apps), but for the microblogging (like twitter), not for link aggregators (like lemmy or reddit)
Interesting, is there some significant difference in the scalability challenges between the two? As someone who knows virtually nothing about either (I never could get into mastodon), they seem similar enough to me.
I'd say they're comparable and have similar problems experienced in different ways.
On mastodon, a big name becomes the stress on the server. It's like people showing up to a small coffee shop to hear a politician speak about something. If the politician becomes more renowned / popular, eventually they have rallies. Eventually those rallies are broadcasted and licestreamed... All that means more infra and more $
Lemmy has the problem of communities. Communities sometimes gather in small places like a person's house or a bar. If that community grows large, maybe they need to have a conference / convention (like an anime or tech community). That means the instance that hosts that community has to has a conference sized instance, to host all the lads/lasses/etc of the fediverse.
More eyeballs / more discussion = more demand. Simple as that.
edit: I will add that there is one difference. You might have your own little small fragmented community, here on sh.itjust ... like for skateboards. More intimate discussion, etc. This would potentially prevent c/skateboards on an instance from growing too large....
But there is only one @gargron that most people will follow.
Depends on the platform, some are scalable enough (pleroma/akkoma for example). Also, they still work with other fediverse software, so you can comment on lemmy from a misskey account, or talk with an mastodon user with an pleroma account.
Imo scaling challenges are more in the user side than software side.
One big difference is that the Twitter model is driven by individual users, whereas the reddit model is driven by communities, and a community driven model benefits significantly more from a greater centralization. For example, on reddit, subreddit names are one and done. Once someone makes r/leagueoflegends, for instance, that name is taken, and has the benefit of name recognition for new users. But on lemmy, people could make c/leagueoflegends on as many instances as there are. And given the increased visibility on local and the widespread defederation among major instances, the community ends up a lot more fragmented.
Thanks for the response. After reading your comment and @Kazaii@sh.itjust.works's, I'm wondering if it would be good to have "bundles" of communities that new users could subscribe to, so that they don't have to go hunting for communities they are interested in across many different instances.
Or really, even just a big directory of communities spanning many different instances. I'm sure many exist, but ideally it would be something that would show up when you're first making an account, so you can quickly find communities you're interested in, without having to put in too much effort unless you want to.
I'm somewhat used to federation because I've been using matrix for a year or two now, but I haven't really explored many lemmy instances yet. Even on matrix, I haven't really explored much beyond matrix.org.
I don't much about mastodon. But if you say it preforms well then I believe this model works.
I agree with the community aspect, and I’m also happy about the open source part. I saw your post in my RSS reader as I was going through my other news and interests. It feels so good to not have the stuff I see decided by some big corporation intending to maximize my engagement at the expense of everything else.
If anyone is interested in RSS, let me know. I highly recommend it, it’s so refreshing to be able to follow most of what you’re interested in, in one app. Also a small app, ~10 MB vs many news sites’ apps that are ~150 MB. Also no ads, ability to dismiss read articles.
(Also yes I realize that Reddit supports RSS too, but I heard that they would have taken it away long ago if it their internal tools didn’t heavily depend on it. The API changes make this seem likely)
I am also following a specific community here on RSS. Nice to go through my articles and see someone asking for technical help / advice -- or simply sharing something cool.
I've been all-in on the fediverse since early 2021. Just like anywhere more than one person is there's disagreements and drama now and again, but it's been the sort of place I want to be and spend my time.
At some point, when instances get big enough, the large costs may require running ads for upkeep. But ideally it should stop at "just covering the costs" and not needing to do the capitalism thing to keep making more and more money every quarter
Or, with the community we were able to gather, maybe we should adopt a patronage system or a bitcoin system like the one used in "Odysee". It would feel much more honest then, because I feel that in my opinion the adds system corrupts beautiful communities like these, and the best proof to what I'm saying is the "Reddit" situation. (It starts with adds to keep the site running... then blows up into full-on capitalism)
I think it's great that more people are realising what's possible, open source isn't just going up change the internet into what it should have been but it can change everything from printers requiring proprietary ink to the major excesses of the political machine.
The working people have ALWAYS done the work and when we get together and do it for ourselves, and each other, we can build a world that exists for people not profits.
I like to call it the reddit effect. Any serious attempt to control the free exchange of ideas on the internet leads to avenues that are freer and less controllable getting built. Don't mourn for reddit, they may have been captured by corporate greed, but they have passed the torch to a freer and less centralized community that is less susceptible to corporate invasion. You can't stop the signal Mal
This reminds me of how Reddit was after switching from Digg. It feels smaller and more organic and a much more friendly environment. I just feel like I used Reddit for a lot of information and searches for troubleshooting or how to purposes. That vast wealth of knowledge feels like it may be lost.
Same with moving from twitter to a mastodon instance, feels like twitter when it was young.
It really does feel a bit like the old days ^tm^ (IRC and random PHP boards for me) and it gives me a bit of hope that some of the spirit of the old Wild West Internet is still here. To be honest I engaged more with lemmy in the last few days, then with anything in the last 5 Years.
Unfortunately, I think the feediverse in its unpolished, unoptimised and non-compliant state will run into some legal trouble as soon as it hits a certain popularity threshold.
*Looking at you EU and your relentless drive towards censorship >.>
In the worst case, we will have to rebuild a feediverse in the darker corners of the net.
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i think we have seen how algorithms divide us in a lot of ways, esp when we are unaware of the way they work and how they are altering our feeds.
It has a long way to go but even Reddit was a small niche website (everyone was on Digg!) at one point.
I'm very curious how this type of platform might perform under mass adoption. If it started getting anywhere close to reddit level traffic I'm sceptical how well the more popular instances would scale, and how the people that can currently afford to run them would be able to afford the infrastructure needed to keep up with millions of users.
there will be updates to help with scaling, but also in general we should be trending to smaller home instances and working to integrate meta-community features IMO. Its generally easy and affordable to run a server for oneself and a couple thousand users. Its when you grow well beyond these scales that things become an issue.
There is not a ton of value to being on a large instance, esp as the federation code gets smoothed out.
Part of the problem will be how to make new users understand this, though. Lots of people will be coming from something like reddit where they'll just want to sign up through a popular instance and likely won't fully understand what that means.
More advanced users will understand this, but it's not then I would be worried about.
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I'm bit of a noob on how this all works, but isn't it possible to ddos instance to oblivion? As everything grows, there will be conflicts, bad actors, demand of sensorship and reactions to taken actions.
Right now we are a small village with communal spirit that hardly ever needs its sheriff.
Oh, for sure. And that's on the instance owner to understand how to mitigate, and it's not cheap to do for instances with large amounts of traffic.
We all should have done this a long time ago.
The old sites were always "good enough" and building a new community was always just hard enough to prevent this from happening. It's actually a blessing in disguise that all of the internet is enshittifying itself now.
I'm also new here and I feel the same as you. I deleted my reddit account just before Sync died and ended up here (thanks for having me). I am still trying to figure out my way around the fediverse but I'll get there. Lemmy feels a bit rough around the edges but honestly it has a certain charm to it that way.
Yup it has the potential to let people communicate and enjoy time together without big corps in the middle.
Agree. Next up education and health care.
Feels like when IRC and e-mail was the prefered way to communicate.
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