i am a new user on the fediverse but what is the thing that in Big Social
but the fediverse is not prepared to replace
My nudes.
Sharing audio clips. You can post photos and videos anywhere, there’s always a button for those. Audio? Go make a separate account somewhere else.
ai bots
Yeah, they’ve left us alone so far because we’re small potatoes. It’s only a matter of time.
assuming if there is a exodus from reddit, the instances are not prepared for a large influx of people. cue the last big instance, there wasnt enough people maintaing the instance. its not likely going to happen since people will be scattered to different sites anyways,.
Success.
With success come the bots, trolls, and buyouts. All the big platforms started as places people liked to be. The enshittification always came after the success.
It’s not ready to really replace what it’s meant to replace.
I mean, people are told all of the time to make instances and make servers if the things they’re not seeing aren’t there. But there’s a problem, they’re only one person. It takes numerous people to make a community. The users we have on paper, would say that we have more than a capable amount to make these things possible.
But in practice and in activity, that’s not what we’re seeing. We can’t estimate how long exactly things will pick up as we are nearing 4 years into the fediverse. But we just know that how long it’s taking, we can expect that it’ll be quite a time before the fediverse even sniffs a quarter of activity the big social networks have.
Fedi was built on the same premise that makes all tech products fail:
The idea that people will behave themselves and act in good faith.
They won’t, and they don’t. And it only takes a handful of bad actors to ruin it for everyone else.
The main thing the fediverse offered is a way to avoid any single admin from taking over the whole thing. One instance gets too dictatory, users can move to another instance and still have at least some of what they left behind. And because of that, it will limit the amount of money that capitalists are willing to spend on it because their purchase itself would turn the asset toxic.
But it’s otherwise still people running, moderating, participating, lurking, and automating here, and they cover the whole spectrum.
Idk, the moderation distribution helps, I think. I agree that it will become a problem for very large fedi servers, but that’s just an argument for increasing the number of small and medium servers
mods are people. people are corruptible.
Sure, and instances are defederatable if it becomes a problem.
sorry but i dont think so because since so does corporate social media has its own moderation issues
“Success” by which I mean a massive influx of millions of users: IMO it’s kind of in a sweet spot because it’s not as easy to use as most social media, so a lot of the dumber people just don’t come here because they can’t figure it out (for example, they think there’s nothing here because they don’t understand the filter/how instances work).
If things are made too easy, they’ll start showing up in droves and they’ll bring tons of reddit’s bullshit over here. More bots, spammers, scammers, malicious hackers, and trolls pretty much everywhere and the mod tools on Lemmy aren’t terribly advanced, which is one of the main forum platforms in the Fediverse.
Doesn’t that just mean it will attract a certain type of user, where FOSS and tech are huge parts of identity? I’m not mocking that type of user at all, but honestly my primary use case for Reddit was shitposting in /r/cricket threads. There’s never going to be that sort of community, because frankly anyone not into tech would find this platform completely incomprehensible.
There are so many shitposting communities here, I find your take a little confusing. What am I missing? Do you mean because it’s cricket?
Yeah unfortunately this happens with a lot of fun, cool projects as they gain in popularity. Linux is getting more “user friendly” to appeal to the lowest common denominator, for example.
That one I’m a lot less concerned about because there will always be more complex distros aimed at enthusiasts. Nothing wrong with using Mint, but there are lots of choices out there for everybody. Having something like Ubuntu exist doesn’t mean that stuff like Arch or Gentoo can’t be used anymore. Plus, it helps mitigate Microsoft’s monopoly on operating systems.
The more dangerous monopoly is Android/iOS. They use ‘hardware attestation’ to ensure that you don’t switch by using bank apps, ID apps and video streaming to lock you in.
All monopolies are dangerous.
Yes, but this one seems to be accepted, even supported, by a lot of people.
I’ll second this, after distro hopping a bit at the beginning I ended up choosing Mint, it works and with i3 its like 500mb of idle ram, so far I haven’t found any reason to switch to a less user friendly distro, I don’t know what the advantages would be in using a more complicated/prone to breaking distro instead of mint. I’m open to switching though if I find something I like more, but Mint is amazing as a gateway drug distro, made coming over to linux SO much better, now I’m slowly infecting my family computers with mint aswell, gotta spread the virus
I’ve been using various distros off and on since the late 90s: Linux has come a very long way and Mint is a great example of it if you ask me.
I feel this is a good thing, kinda like linux, I got into it and I love it, at the beginning I wanted for linux to grow and grow in popularity to become huge and widely used, but then i realized this would also mean being on the sights of the big corporations controlling the market right now and goverments, and it may start to get regulated more or some bullshit they will cook up to hurt it and the people who use it to gain back the market share lost. I do want both linux and lemmy to grow more, but up to a point so they stay safe.
While i don’t disagree, large corporations have been large Linux contributors for quite a while now. FOSS means some oversight, but i worry some “control” could slip in there in ways people don’t notice.
“The Fediverse, Assemble”
Moderation of bad actors. Not just people who are assholes, or people who post spam, but I mean astroturfing and vote manipulation schemes that cross instances.
I’ve been followed around by a set of accounts who never post and never comment but downvote everything I comment. I have zero ways to report them directly. They were consistently downvoting a set of accounts including me and upvoting a different set of accounts. I DM’d 3 admins but the only attention I got was from a dedicated comm mod who could only ban them from a few comms and they talked to their admin on my behalf.
https://lemvotes.org/ paints a picture of a vote manipulation ring but all I could do was manually message people who couldn’t be bothered. I couldn’t care less they were downvoting me, I have nothing important to say, but the fake engagement around who they were boosting didn’t sit right with me.
This sort of sums up my experience: https://lemmy.zip/comment/29353636 and it’s corresponding https://lemvotes.org/comment/lemmy.zip/comment/29353636
This is why I just disable downvotes entirely. When the choice is between upvote or nothing, there’s less ability to be manipulative.
Mainstream popularity.
If lemmy becomes big enough to have a user base that is a substantial slice of the population as a whole, corpo will try to ruin it as it ruined the internet as a whole.
So far the attention has mostly been a couple of content bots from news sites, and big socials spinning up their own instances only to get defenerated immediately. Once more effort is seen as profitable, that’s when there will be a real problem with bots, ads camouflaged as content, astroturfing, and everything else that follows.
that’s what thread’s is doing literally mastodon needs to defederate from threads (i mean threats just joking)
we havent solved the ‘new user’ -> instance’ problem
its hard to explain to people the concept that the server you login to is just the home base of an entire network. explaining the dance of instance interoperability immediately tunes out potential new users.
the fediverse isnt really open to newcomers… they tend to land on the big ones like .world and then slowly warm up to the idea theyre communicating with many remote servers… if they stick around
I’m on .zip just because the voyager iOS app puts it at the top of the list when you sign up 😂
It was simple to sign up but I think maybe the waiting period between sign up and account creation might put off younger users who haven’t experienced it on forums etc. before, also.
Or that simply joining certain instances means you can’t interact with some communities.
Also, have a backup for downtimes and closures.
I’m on my fifth account and not bc I’m choosy but bc every instance I’ve joined has shuttered.
I’m on my fifth account and not bc I’m choosy but bc every instance I’ve joined has shuttered.
theres another big problem… funding and administration. anyone can throw a federating server up… it takes some work to make it (and keep it) reliable
For real. Hosting is work, not necessarily a huge amount but it’s continuous work. I would probably technically be able to get an instance off the ground and usable, but I don’t have the time to do maintenance or user management or the hundred other little things that come with hosting public resources. If you “succeed” and establish a userbase, congratulations, you now have a (optional, but with an implied understanding with your users that you will continue to do it) job that pays anywhere from a little bit to negative a lot.
This is kind of a problem I’m dealing with. I get the federation and the different servers, that’s just using gmail to message Yahoo. However, I picked lemmy.world when I bailed out of reddit because I wasn’t keen on losing my account if a smaller server closed. Now I don’t know where to move because half the verse has a block on world.
yeah, not sure what to tell you… theres just no warning when your instance is run by shit heads.
you could go check https://fedidb.com/servers for places to test.
theres some open servers minimal on de-federation that have been around for awhile… i would call these ‘on-ramp’ servers… they host little locally-created content, but users can interface with the rest of the verse freely… mine is one of those.
cept im not using lemmy. lemmy is kinda fugly imho. i wanted a more contemporary old.reddit
As a casual user, having your server (picked due to larger size) blocked by others due to poor moderating (assuming this is the problem with .world), will likely lead to simple abandonment of the platform. At least by those who are generally well meaning, but not engaged enough to learn more quickly.
I imagine the attrition rate from this alone will keep adoption low.
I’m willing to put in a bit more effort, but I’m in the same boat… Just chilling on .world, probably missing out on things I don’t even know about, and I’m not likely to put in the time to change that soon, I have other problems lol.
If the general trend is to wall up when in disagreement, and larger servers collapse too easily under the weight of to many casual users vs dedicated mods (as selection pressure would tend to move more dedicated people to smaller more controlled servers)… Well hopefully the smaller communities can grow at a sustainable pace, while us casuals try to find the right one/s.
Not many instances defed .world, I don’t think it’s anything to worry about unless there’s specific ones you know you want
PieFed has added features that reduce the need for defederation, and hopefully Lemmy will copy them
Also you don’t really need to leave .world, you can use 2 accounts, the 3rd party apps all handle this nicely
maybe mastodon and lemmy could have a tutorial button/mode that is a “Learn As You Go” if you click on a user profile it explains federation or others like when you click on a community it teachs you the chronological algorithm
i think its a bit kiddish but maybe
Spammers and other nefarious actors.
There’s a lot of trust built into federation.
To be fair, I encounter way more spammers and bots on corporate social media.
It’s hard to sell to communists, anarchists, and tech hoarders
Reddit used to be the most toxic site to advertisers on the web.
I had a friend who took out ads that were akin to “just testing” with even selling spots to company and he got hate mail.
Later I worked for a company and a manager asked about astroturfing on Reddit many many years ago. We convinced them not to with numerous examples of companies getting eviscerated for it.
Nowadays Reddit is a cesspit. It’s just reaction memes on engagement bait (Petahh what is this obvious porn screencap?!?!) and threads with 12 joke comments. The news I e already read a week ago from a primary source, and it’s been watered down into complete misinformation. Then there’s the obvious hate propaganda political subs.
from what i heard the Twitter platform had issues with moderation
Spam and bots.
Dealing with the avalanche of bot accounts.
Seen around the mod chat that instances with signup approvals are getting slammed with marketing people vometing llm bots everywhere.- there’s no way to know your admins aren’t compromised in some way
- there’s not much to defend against an influx of LLM user accounts
- eventually someone will post something or do something serious that gets the attention of law enforcement/intelligence agencies and they go after the entire federation instead of the problem users or servers
- identity verification laws
