What the title says. I think there is still a long way for that to happen but i’ve been hopeful. What do you think?
It’s possible. I think the biggest obstacle is that the corporations feeding on people’s data are not going to just stand by while it happens.
Another big obstacle is the general UX of these platforms. Major companies have teams of user experience analysis and researchers that, while not always “winning” as compared to product or business driven decisions, absolutely have a (generally positive) impact on the product. Onboarding, retention, etc.
The fediverse has all the standard frictions of most OSS, like talking about itself, it’s technology, etc when the fact is 99% of users dgaf.
I might go so far as to argue the perceived complexity is a bigger barrier than the risk of sabotage from other businesses. I am optimistic the growing list of third party apps will help solve some of these issues, as long as they take things like the sign up process and server selection into their scope.
I don’t think UX will be that big of a problem, in the past the unofficial reddit apps were all better than the official one. Major companies design by committee and the UX is meant too maximize profit and engagement statistics for advertising, rather than be “good”. A lot of open source UIs are better than their paid counterparts. I think PopOS is far nicer than windows 11.
And do what? Make a better product? The beauty of Capitalism is that consumers really are the final say on whether your product succeeds. You can make an app with as many addictive hooks as possible, but that doesn’t make those users permanent. And any sabbotage by Reddit will only dig in our heels at this point.
If the fediverse starts gaining traction, you can bet the mega-corps will use every dirty trick they have to co-opt it or, if that fails, undermine it.
Not everyone who left Digg went to reddit, and not everyone who left Myspace went to Facebook. “Replacing” reddit should never be the goal, it should be “be better than reddit”.
If this is ever to go mainstream, what we should be concerned about is making good, high quality original content. If people see us having fun and being nice here, they’ll want to join in too.
It doesn’t need to become mainstream. I’ll be happy to be a part of a smaller but vibrant engaged community. I hope there will be a phone app some day through
I think the idea of a federation: websites being able to talk to each other, could be mainstream. I don’t think lemmy will be mainstream, but I do think lemmy will be able to talk to mainstream websites on the federation.
What if you could use your lemmy account to buy stuff online, book a flight, pay bills, sign up for streaming services, etc.? The federation isn’t seeing its full potential.
I think this is the answer.
Lemmy and (maybe) Mastodon (I don’t know enough about it) will be the inspiration for something that goes mainstream - but I do think that they’ll be the Myspace to the next big things Facebook - Perfect for people who know how to take advantage of it and it will be a mild success because of it; but someone will come along, streamline and spruce it up and that will be the new standard
It has potential, bu I hope it will not become like those mainstream soc-med…
Fediverse is like a village where each denizen trying to self-sufficent and helping each others while mainstream soc-med is like train station or mall where users just come and go while giving money to its owner for their services…
We may need one or two mainstream soc-med to be alive to keep up with news or to socialize with normies, but we also need a place to retreat like current fediverse.
edit:typoYes I do. What I am looking for is federated/web3 replacements for Instagram, and some kind of well encrypted, decentralized messenger app
Signal is well encrypted and very much respects privacy of data, but I don’t think it’s federated. It can interface with normal texts though iirc
Yes, but not in the way you’d think.
I think lemmy won’t be easy enough to use for a vast majority of users, they’ll stick to the traditional platforms.
However, I think if the hype continues for a while, and the little kinks are ironed out soon enough, it will give rise to a new, different kind of platform.
People have this idea that lemmy will replace reddit and just become Reddit 2.0. I think lemmy is still a place similar to a phoenix burning. The new bird has yet to take it’s first breath, and it’ll be quiet different from what we imagine or what we are used to today
Only if a site like join-Lemmy.org can be promoted on every instance and actually direct you to a server that isn’t overloaded and is fully federated.
Right now, it directs you to sadly overloaded servers that are terrible choices.
If that doesn’t happen, then some big instance needs to scale up with its popularity and be well funded by someone for some reason.
After seeing several places get mainstream, the last of which being Reddit: I wouldn’t want it to. That’s when everything starts to suck. Stay niche. Stay cool.
Yeah but this is not Reddit. It is not controlled by a company. It’s a decentralized platform, so I don’t think it would be a problem even if it did become mainstream.
There will always be niche instances. Federation just solves the content problem of niche communities. Ideally you find a instance with a niche community you like and you interact with them first but if you run out of things to look at you can just move on to the infinite content of the fediverse.
I think it remains to be seen. The rapid growth of .world has been the first real production test of how the platform handles more users and content. Amazing work by the team, but there are a lot of rough edges and it is a new platform with a lot of unknowns.
The things that spring to mind for me are:
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Sign up needs to be streamlined and made more simple, and find a way to not overload individual servers without just randomly assigning people to instances.
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Live defects, bugs and things feeling rough around the edges.
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Back-end build and scaling.
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Duplicate communities across instances.
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Account migration between instances.
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Data retention past x period - how will various instances handle this with a large number of users.
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GDPR and data request compliance from individuals, governments, etc.
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Funding the costs and resources associated with rapid, large growth. How do people know what their money is going to fund? I think there needs to be real transparency, public roadmaps and backlogs and understand how / if admins are accountable.
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How the platform and users will respond to large corporations or even individual admins on instances adding adverts, using / selling user data in ways the userbase do not expect.
The biggest issue would be data retention. Reddit serves as a real world database that stores all the historical content and search engines like google make it searchable.
We’re talking about petabytes, and lemmy hardly has a few gigabytes.
Who is going to store all this data, even in a distributed environment, the bigger instances would have to store a few hundred terrabytes (per year).
Text is very light and compresses very well. While instances may risk having scaling issues with photo and video, text should be very easy to archive forever.
Personally I think its ok for instances to delete older posts to save space provided that there are means to archive threads that users find valuable. For fediverse to thrive it should be as easy as possible for people to setup and manage instances without having to think about the storage space too much.
Archival of historical content is something that I feel should be handled separately.
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