The Fediverse will exist henceforth as the place people go who are "fed up" with wherever they were.
I have zero worries about Lemmy or Mastodon over the long term, but I have no hope whatsoever in their popularity. We will always be one of the smaller, peanut-galleries of the internet, and that's ok.
Fediverse still has linux and github vibes. Which is good in terms of functioning and free and made in the spirit of comraderie. And bad in terms intuitive and easy usability.
Programmers either don't understand that "nice to look at and use" is actually a really important aspect of an app/program, or it's a lot harder to do that well than it seems from the outside. I really don't know. When it's just one person making the whole thing, it makes sense that they split their work where they can.
But when you're dealing with a serious contender for a major platform, it's not optional anymore, and it's not a normie thing.
Programmers either don’t understand that “nice to look at and use” is actually a really important aspect of an app/program, or it’s a lot harder to do that well than it seems from the outside. I really don’t know. When it’s just one person making the whole thing, it makes sense that they split their work where they can.
It could be both. I guess the former is widespread amongst Linux-based hobby coders who use a minimalist window manager or even a terminal multiplexer instead of a full-blown desktop environment. They don't see the appeal in good UIs.
But they may also fall victim to the latter because they see good UIs so rarely that they simply don't know what good UIs look like. That, and most hobby FLOSS coders are backend devs above all. Even if you assemble 20 hobby coders for a project, you may have to appoint one who'll begrudgingly have to make a UI without actually knowing how.
At least, some Fediverse server applications can not only be themed, but you can replace the entire Web UI. And there are capable UI designers in the Fediverse, just not so many as capable full-stack devs. Granted, they may not be on the same level as frontend devs with Apple paychecks, but still.
For example, Pleroma and Akkoma have gotten to a point where, I guess, Pleroma-FE and Akkoma-FE only see so much use because not everybody has heard of stuff like Mangane yet. But people who have gotten a taste of Mangane usually don't want to go back.
Friendica, Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte are so extensively themeable that a user-selectable theme is very close to an all-new frontend. In practice, Hubzilla's themeability fell victim to the effort of keeping Hubzilla's monstrous backend maintained, and so it's down to one theme whose name is not the only hint at it being stuck in 2012. Well, enter people who make new third-party themes to stop Hubzilla being as unuseable as it's being made out to be.
What does Loona from Helluva Boss have to do with this?
Yay! I'm part of the problem!
Honestly it's fine. Keep fedi niche, it's why it continues to be comfy.
That’s cause the Twitter format is not for people who want the open source experience.
Twitter format is about self promotion, it’s not a place to discuss ideas anonymously.
Gonna put this out there: the fediverse is vastly depressing and not very fun. Lacks creative-types, too.
I see why people would choose the alternative.
And full of propaganda, especially from Lemmy.ml
Not surprising to me that its faltering, but very disappointing
Like Twitter and Meta aren't
Twitter and Meta are corporate social media, but the Fediverse has a chance to be something entirely different
And organizations, state and private, will attack it because of that chance.
Yeah. They'll also use it to spread their disinformation/marketing etc.
The combined annual budget of all Fediverse instances for addressing the problem isn't enough to buy a pack of gum
Hey. Cmon man, every instance has its agendas and bad apples. Some spread pro-US and anti-Russia/China rhetoric, others are flipped.
Yes, a minority of the mods are fucked in some of their values and beliefs but that's true of any instance, and most of the time it's not an issue.
We all harbour our strange 1% ideas that's separate us from the norm, but that's the beauty of the lemmyverse that you can find a server where that's better represented.
Too much? Go to an instance where it's not and chill there for a bit.
I’ll miss you when you’re gone… hope you find a comfortable place that tailors to your specific wants.
Something that could be fixed if creative types and fun people would just flood the place already. The place is being held hostage by social misers and digital HOA Karens.
They will not come here because there's an absolute fuckton of hostility.
My favorite woman-centric community went dark due to lack of moderation. Mods left because it was so damn hostile.
The t×nkie problem is also pretty bad.
Federated spaces will forever be niche spaces, because of all of this. Say "good" all you want, but it'd be great to have mass adoption.
They could outnumber and shout down the existing user base in a day. The number of active users in the fediverse is quite small. A tiny number of toxic people have killed the open social web for the next decade.
Unfortunately the loud obnoxious ones ruin it for everyone else.
The t×nkie problem is also pretty bad.
Aren't you okay on sopuli.xyz? I now use lemmy.cafe as my main, they block ml, hexbear and grad
I am! But I left 4-5 other instances before finally settling. Blahaj especially actually welcomed HB at one point because "trans solidarity", which opened the door to mass harassment. ......again. I was so absolutely disappointed because I was like "hey..don't" and was basically told off.
"Oh you can block them if you don't like it! It's up to the individual!" I'm sure that's fine if you're tough & completely mentally stable, but these people genuinely triggered my PTSD, which had not been a thing that had happened to me in years. It left me and my faith in this whole thing very very shaken.
That aside, I think sopuli only has ML unblocked because it has such large tech communities.
I really really really loved Beehaw, too, but after their talk about moving away from Lemmy, I scrambled to find another home.
An average user is not going to want to continually move around to keep themselves sane & safe.
An average user is not going to want to continually move around to keep themselves sane & safe.
Indeed, I think I'll just recommend lemmy.cafe as the safe recommendation from now on
My Lemmy experience is kinda shit, but Mastodon is alright
i've come to believe that something in reddit's design with the upvotes and the downvotes brings out the worst in people
Not the worst in people, but I agree that it incentives undesirable behavior.
I've thought and read about this a bit. I don't have the answers, but I think the lack of willingness and desire to experiment is damaging to the social experience.
People change. Communities change. Culture changes. Social systems ought to adapt as the need arises.
Yet, here we are, painting over mold and nailing pieces of a system made a decade over that was toxic then, is toxic now, and will likely be toxic tomorrow. How would that ever work? We're not special. We're just another group ready to slip in the same slopes as the previous one.
Should we disable downvotes? Instances doing this never hear the end of it. Should votes be public to all? Dev thread brigaded. C'mon, let's think together, are we actually gonna be reddit, but federated, forever? Surely that's not what you want—Oh. Ohh. Well, my bad, then.
Easy to forget we all have our own wants, needs, and priorities. I'm sure I was the bad part of someone else's experience, just doing what I thought was best. Still, I'm... getting tired, of Reddit 2. I'm not sure it's possible to make it much better. It's all too entrenched.
Hey, I'm depressive and not very fun, lack creativity too.
I'm not disagreeing, just voicing my well, fuck you too over here.
(But bring some people over, post lemmy links on that skytwatter before it turns toxic)
Oh, I don't mind depressive, not-so-fun, lacking creativity people! They're cool! I do mind pointedly depressing and hostile content.
AI art posts? Put it in the trash. Hopeless memes? No thanks. Constant politic-ing pretending to be sincere but it's actually t×nkie pushing? Nope.
Bluesky: install an app and make an account.
Mastodon: first pick a server. What does that mean? You figure it out. Ok, now select a client and install it. Doesn't matter which one, but it actually does. Then use that client app to log onto the server you made an account on. Now you just need to figure out who to follow and you're ready to participate!
The how-to-search-for-people-to-follow thing caused me trouble with Mastodon. I could handle getting a client and an account, but actually finding people not on the same instance as me was a challenge. Discoverability was pretty broken.
Bluesky doesn't seem to have that problem.
Lemmy I've stuck with because it handles that better.
The latest version of Mastodon does suggest accounts to follow. But you're absolutely right - Bluesky being fully centralized can do a lot of things easier than it is for the Mastodon network. I have high hopes that @dansup@mastodon.social will help alleviate this a lot though with the Fediverse equivalent for "starter packs":
Download "Mastodon" from an app store. Create an account. Post.
It's been a few years since you last tried, right?
It offers you a server, which is a step up, but the option to pick a different one is still very prominent which is going to make some people ask questions and lead to the usual confusion and anxiety about picking the "right" one.
Anyone who has studied UX and how users move through an app knows that every step you make someone do has a huge drop off in user completion of that process.
Unfortunately that means that centralized, simple platforms will always have a distinct UX advantage over federated platforms. We have to make up for it by being simply better. (No ads is a good start.)
install an app and make an account
Mastodon is pretty much the same now
There is an option to pick another server, but non-technical users are probably going to glance over it entirely
https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2022/04/official-apps-now-available-for-ios-and-android/
This is either outdated information, or purposeful misinformation.
Happy twitter is dying. For awhile I though modern society will take anything from fascists, but maybe there're still some lines normies won't cross.
And yea bluesky is just infant twitter, but it's like vaping: may be not great for you but hella better than smoking.
Twitter is taking punches but far from dying. 586M MonthlyActiveUsers
I couldn't tell if that was using recent data. Several statistics cited are from 2023
Fediverse is the over-engineered great solutions that most people don't understand
I tried to explain the Fediverse to the marketing department at my company and the looks of confusion just made me gave up.
"It's like email. We have our company domain and others have theirs and it all just works"
That's a great start to an explanation, but first, you are assuming that people know how email works, and second, unlike email, federated social media has discovery, feeds, and in general content that gets pushed to you. How all of that works can be complicated and if you join a small instance, you may not realize how much content you are missing because of it.
Breaking: Musk offering to buy BlueSky.
/s, but barely.
I want Mastodon to work as much as I want Lemmy to work but as long as all the people I want to follow are on/going to Bluesky I'll be on Bluesky too. At least until it gets entshitified and everyone flees again.
Memes about the Fediverse
