Fediverse

I‘d say I‘ve fully embraced the fediverse for over a year, running half a dozen instances for many fediverse services.

The discoverability is indeed an issue for many services but the worst on peertube. It actually has great content but nobody sees it due to it not being properly suggested.

On lemmy vs reddit I can proudly say a lot of topics have great content and its not easy to run out of it if you subscribe to varied communities. One big problem is how spoiled the users of commercial socials are. The amount of people there is of course insane compared to here so someone used to heroine (x, facebook and reddit) will always feel withdrawal on lemmy, mastodon and such.

Imo, we need to keep making strong, compelling cases for the fediverse, against the corpoverse and increase our technical arsenal. Peertube needs clients for every platform and a central discovery (for example instances.joinpeertube.org).

We also need more straightforward installation procedures so more people can host their own. Of course non tech folks will have a hard time either way but a „fire and forget“ compose file or ansible playbook, ideally next to one another like with awesome selfhosted on github.

Discoverability is an issue that I identified quickly. One reason why artists mostly stick to X may very well be the small user base, as well the fractured nature of the fediverse making it hard to gain reach

Be great to get actual instance operators and admins to chime in on this. I already feel like a single aspect of that (Lemmy) is fantastic and I'd be satisfied if it was at its zenith already in terms of what it brought to the table

I think its been interesting to watch. What has happened is that there is now a super large instance in Lemmy.world, and a handful of smaller ones with above a thousand users.

The promise of proper decentralization didn't really happen. There are hundreds of small instances but they are not self contained and completely depend on the larger ones to get content.

Defederation seems to be common since admins don't want to deal with moderating hostile conversations, which makes a lot of sense. But it also makes it a echo chamber to some degree. We see mostly memes and jokes instead of meaningful discussions. So it's great for a fun time but not so much more than that.

Still, I'm happy it's an alternative to reddit and those shitty services. I love that it's run by ordinary people and not tech companies. And no ads or tracking. All good stuff.

Re Concentration I'm not concerned that it is as of yet a problem. However I do think it is also a larger problem for Mastodon and other user-centric platforms than it is to Lemmy and other community-cetric platforms.

If a Mastodon user wants to leave their server there are migration pains. If your server makes a controversial change, you may have to migrate. As a follower if something goes wrong I have to remember that I was following Ada & Bob, but maybe Bob now goes by Bobby.

However as a Lemmy user I can just abandon my server and be done with it. If my server makes a controversial change, I can just leave. As a community follower can watch as Star Trek Memes becomes Risa, or Risa becomes Ten Forward. The names changed completely but it's easy to find my community again.

Good to have a reality check, but this is still better than what we had before

While the researcher is someone with some really solid knowledge and experience I don't think he was fair in his analysis.

I see those challenges mostly affected and still affect e-mail and the Web and survived somehow so far, they are indeed not free from them, threats return from time to time when a Big Tech get a large quota: not like my opinion is important nor an expert one but I think the decentralisation philosophy is well beyond the fediverse only and its destiny is linked to it in the same way as other things.