It reminds me a little of the old internet. I like how relatively small it feels, and that people post content for the sake of the content, not to promote themselves. I haven’t found my usual corners yet, the ones I used to hang out in on older platforms, but I figure that’s just a matter of time. I’m not super nostalgic for the old internet or anything, but it’s nice to find at least a hint of something human-centered somewhere.
I hope it doesn’t fall apart and that it keeps growing.
I was skeptical when I switched to Linux, but then I ditched Windows on my dual boot for good. It was a hugely positive experience, and it really felt like freedom. I’m hoping this will be the same.
And don’t be mad at me if I act totally clueless here sometimes 'cause all that is new to me.
Welcome! Glad you’re liking it.
The big complaints that people tend to have are that federation is a bit confusing, and that it’s no where near as big as Reddit. They’re both valid, and probably won’t change any time soon.
But I think sometimes people overlook the positive aspects of federation and smaller communities. Reddit is damn near unusable these days, and it’s full of bots, slop, reposters, ads, and power tripping admins/mods. The Fediverse has been around for quite a few years now and still feels like a place for actual human beings with a lot of freedom to take things in different directions.
I kind of wish I could remember what it was like to find federation confusing so I could explain it better to newbies.
It’s usually just confusion at the idea that things live on other websites. The most common mental model people seem to have for decentralized systems is… centralization. Just, centralized somewhere else.
I remember when the Twitter users flooded Mastodon. Everyone seemed to have this sense that “Mastodon” was a place “over there”, and that the website they were using – if they even recognized that they were using a website, thanks to the appification of everything – was just a dumb terminal. Like, instead of using Twitter, they were using a secondary website that itself ws using Twitter. So, people got really confused about why content was missing, why they couldn’t see the post history of some users, etc. They felt like they were being arbitrarily blocked from seeing parts of “Mastodon”, rather than understanding that they’d just signed up for the equivalent of a magazine subscription and would not be getting the back catalogue for free.
I’ve tried to explain it as being able to request content from Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, Instagram, and Bluesky from an account on MySpace. Only there’s 500 Facebooks, 2000 Reddits, 10,000 Twitters, 300 Instagrams, and 1500 Blueskies. And also, 1000 other MySpaces. You can request content from those other websites, but because you are not viewing those websites, just requesting that they send some of their content to you you only get the small parts that you specifically asked for. Otherwise, your MySpace would get overwhelmed and burn down around you.
I’m still workshopping this, though. It has not been as effective as I hoped for.
I am still interested in explaining it too just because I think it’s cool. The best luck I’ve had was to to point out a username belonging to a different server and then opening up that server in a browser and explaining that “so when they go on lemmy they visit lemmy.world, and here’s their home feed, but I visit lemmy.ca, with this home feed. though we can still see [mostly] the same posts in the all feed, and talk to eachother like {insert email example}.”
Something about pointing out the server’s url helps. Like if there was only lemmy.world in the whole world it would still function, but the all feed would be the same as the home feed.
Yeah I feel like it’s not going to get through to people until it’s more common.
Also tbh people don’t really need to know all the details to make full use of the fediverse. Like most people probably have vastly simplified or wrong ideas about how email works, or how websites themselves work, but they know enough for their purposes.
I actually worry for when Reddit fully implodes, because the ensuing migration wave to Lemmy will bring the same problems and solutions with them.
Yes, i miss some aspects of Reddit, but I’m aware of the hypocrisy that comes with that statement as well
Probably what’ll happen is lemmy.world will become the new reddit and we’ll all have to decide if we want to stay federated with them.
I welcome the schism if it ever occurs. I think it would be really interesting to see how a fully “scaled up” but non-corporate social media handles a challenge like that.
Even if we have almost exactly all the same problems reddit has, but without being a monolithic corporate platform, I think it would be an improvement.