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The Fediverse Isn’t the Future. It’s the Present We’ve Been Denied.
(www.joanwestenberg.com)
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this post was submitted on 07 Mar 2025
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Couldn't have said it better myself
Exactly! That’s how people usually argue against the Fediverse. People have literally been indoctrinated into believing the internet is centralised.
Personally, I prefer an intellectual barrier to entry. It’s one of the things that made the internet of the early days so much better than today.
I was speaking more to the early days of the internet. You had to be relatively smart, and determined to get on it.
I'll never forget when the AOLers started showing up.
yeah, they sure ruined newsgroups…
Eternal September
Yup. I’ll admit, I didn’t foresee AI coming along and finding a way to make the quality of discourse even worse
God I feel so bad for people even just trying to learn stuff online now.
10 to 20 years ago we had a lot less content, but when you did find a hit on your search, you could be much more confident it contained meaningful information. Rather than just the official documentation repackaged across 10 different "articles."
Yeah, no kidding! Plus, in addition to shitty results, the likely inaccurate AI summary to further confuse you.
God yeah, I'll be like half way through an article before realising it's just padding out some very surface level details about what I'm looking up. Like the top 3 interesting things about the topic, but never an actual novel, like, human take.
It told me today that Romeo and Juliet was a Romantic Comedy
Rofl, Romeo and Juliet is like the definition of a tragedy.
It would help to change the nomenclature. Joining a Facebook “group” makes sense to anybody. Change insider jargon like “instance” to seeker-friendly verbiage like “village.”
I like that, or something like that. "Server" and "instance" definitely sounds too prickly and technical to a lot of people.
I remember joining reddit when it had the old interface and thinking that it is super unintuitive and complicated compared to all other social media. This didn't stop reddit from growing and i don't think lemmy will be restricted by this in the long run. People generally are just not aware of the fediverse and how it works yet but they will get used to it.
The only additional step you have on lemmy is choosing an instance and honestly it does not even matter that much which you choose. I'm not saying it's trivial but it is nothing that is inherently more difficult.
Reddit was really strange compared to everything else a few years ago. It only appears easy now because we are familiar with the concept of subreddits now.
What I'm trying to say is that every social network has it's quirks that you just need to learn. The willingness to learn also depends on how attractive the platform is. With time i see no reason for lemmy to not grow like reddit did.
If you just google "Lemmy" one of the first results is https://join-lemmy.org/ where you are directed to an instance that suits you. Far from perfect but Lemmy is still young.
People probably don't even really need to understand federation. They just need sane defaults to get started and work from there.
PieFed closes most of those gaps. It's not quite as fully featured as Lemmy, in particular the search function (but then again, Reddit's search doesn't work either?:-P), but it's super easy to get started on the Threadiverse.
For one thing, you don't even need an account or to download anything at all to start using it immediately to browse content from all across Lemmy. And the Categories of Communities featuring topic areas, which you can customize yourself and/or share with others, provide that multi-Reddit feel that people, especially from Reddit, really crave. See e.g. Arts & Crafts, and note the subheadings beneath, such as Photography. There is simply no comparison between this and e.g. the default setting for Lemmy being to only show Local content (a setting which lemmy.ml still uses today) for those without accounts.
Then if you decide to create an account, a wizard walks you through various settings, asking the user for their preferences and automatically subscribing to multiple communities based on the answers. Multiple types of News, multiple types of Politics, how many posts do you want to see with the keywords "Trump", or "Musk" (no filtering, just a little, or block them all), etc. Or just don't bother subscribing to certain types of (high-volume or stressful) communities at all, so that it doesn't flood your Subscribed feed, yet still be able to access them immediately with the Topic Category at any time.
It's not perfect, but it's damn good:-). And for those who do want it, testing is underway for an app (Thunder).
Depending on the instance, you might have to put a little more work into it. Not that I'm saying that's a problem - in my eyes that's a feature.
To be fair it is easy, if it allowed you to comment and didnt delete them lol
No you cant, karma requirements bud, try making a new account and posting/commenting anywhere?
I don't want to have any kind of conversation with you just here to speak my mind and make you reas it
"Lemmy is an alternative to Reddit, you can visit https://phtn.app/ to have a look at the content. If you prefer an app, https://vger.app/settings/install has download links."
We could maybe ask lemm.ee admins to enable automatic email verification, but then they would need to fight the unavoidable spam bots registration waves
Lemmy can be as simple if not simpler than that:
https://lemmy.zip/post/33507041
I jumped over here a couple weeks ago at the request of another redditor and it's like a breath of fresh air.
I still check out reddit for a couple subs that just don't have enough interaction over here "yet".
I've mentioned lemmy a couple times over there and got replies like " it's just too complicated " etc. and now that I think about it they were most likely bots 🤔
Ima go back to the cesspool and investigate
Feel free to join us on !fedibridge@lemmy.dbzer0.com
Ahh cool I will copy and paste that info in the future . Trying to get some friends and family to come over here , this will help ✌️
Literally a breath fresh of air is what I can relate to. I also realized how it’s way way smaller in the size of communities and I appreciate it. My other favorite is no advertisement. I am as well trying to introduce a couple of my friends to move over the Lemmy. It is a little bit of a curve to learn, but it’s not as hard.
Seems like a lot of people will be coming from reddit.
Hopefully some of the niche communities get a little more traffic over here. Most of the subs I visited over there weren't very toxic and i actually referred to reddit over google for info on a variety of subjects. It's just hard to support the platform at this point it really went downhill since 14 ~16
I lately have a saying:
"If it's not FOSS, it's not worth your time"
Refugee here. Think I'd agree. A subconscious bias / misunderstanding we bought into
Welcome to Lemmy, here are a few pointers to help you settle in
Well said indeed
I would argue it is closer to 60 years.
I'm the type to beat my head against a wall until the wall breaks. Then through that hole, I lead my friends. Fewer and fewer of my friends follow me through such holes. Last time I did such, I brought all my friends to discord (and now I regret it). It is hard as fuck to convince normies to adopt a new platform. If they're not already invested, it will take a serious investment for them to give half a shit. I was able to get some people on discord by promising them that I was running a dnd campaign (I was at the time, but it fell apart shortly therefafter), and those people haven't been on discord since.
How do I convince them that lemmy is the future? I don't think I can. Fundamentally, lemmy is objectively better than reddit (not for features, but because lemmy won't ban you for mentioning green mario and other similar administrative bullshits). I wasn't able to convince them to use reddit back when reddit was good!