Fediverse

No. And that’s fine. I don’t expect underground music to replace top 40. And there’s a place for both.

"do you think the fediverse could replace popular social media"

Already has for me

No, marketing rules the world. In tech, it seems to me that the average person does not give much thought to their software at all. They will use defaults or the products they know about the most (Chrome).

I do not think replacing centralized social media should be our goal though. I believe the Fediverse needs more diversity of content. Right now, I see a lot of people from the FOSS community. People should be able to see a good variety of subjects being discussed or shared. FOSS is great but it should not be the only thing we see.

Would be cool and technically possible, but I doubt it will happen.

Big Tech throwing millions into marketing and vendor lock-ins vs OpenSource projects that are decentralised and often running on donations and goodwill. That's a very touch battle to win, especially when most people care more about ease of use and amount of possible followers than about privacy and decentralisation.

Mastodon grew, but only took a tiny slice of Twitter and half of Mastodon are bots or people who crosspost to both. I expect the same to happen to Lemmy/Reddit, and any other SNS that goes this direction.

I'm content with a stable and active niche group of SNSs. Hopefully the open source and decentralisation aspects can prevent it from dying and going to the next SNS as the big ones tend to do. Which cóúld be as people can make newer applications that work with the old ones as long as it all runs on ActivityPup. I feel it's the most realistic way of thinking.

But maybe I'm just too pessimistic. Even the biggest people in tech stuggle to predict the future of it. So who knows.

@Bicyclejohn I hope fediverse helps us return to small blogs and forums that we had before facebook and twitter took over. no more monopolies

Before we had the fediverse - long before it - we had Usenet: people conversing globally in email-shaped units. It was shared and synched.

It was awesome. Questions answered, points debated, everything you wanted.

I don't think the fediverse is a magical solution, but it does have a familiar feel to it. Not as good when it comes to spelling, but "it's just the web," so the rules are maybe different.

This is fine.

Not in its current form. Anyone who's tried to start a tech company knows you have to make your solution simple to use. Making software easy to use is actually surprisingly hard, involving experts in user interfaces, a lot of thought on user onboarding and training.

Lemmy as it currently stands is relatively new-user hostile for non-technical users. Content discovery isn't very clear, people are confused about how to find communities to follow, and the mobile apps are barebones.

That's not to say it can't get there, but until you never need to mention that the system is federated, I think a lot of people will be turned off from the complexity of using Lemmy. The community right now is motivated to use Lemmy and I would imagine a little more on the technical side, but getting your parents to use Lemmy or Mastadon would be a challenge currently.

I think it could, and I also think it won’t and that it will stay in the relative niche. But that’s a good thing. So it replaces all social media for me but doesn’t bring the general public. Win-win situation

Long term, the Fediverse is the way forward, but social media has staying power even if it dimishes from what it was. It will ages before the Fediverse replaces centralized social media, but I think it will slowly happen.

The various people who work on the fediverse are all doing it for fundamentally different goals, solving different problems, and building different things for different people. It just so happens that, more often than not, a lot of our stuff works together now thanks to the hard efforts put forward by people who cared about interoperability.

I personally believe that the fediverse will kill traditional social media platforms. Because if you can just communicate around a walled garden, what's the point or value in staying in one?

I think we still have a long way to go in terms of usability and design. Those things, along with marketing, remain pretty steep barriers to adoption by people who are unfamiliar with it. There are also a lot of capital-H Hard problems that need to be sorted out down the road, like better filtering and moderation tools, and more robust controls for privacy. I have a feeling we'll get there, but only through hard work and collaboration.

I guess a different way of understanding things is that, the fediverse might not kill the competition outright, but it has the potential to outlast them as something better. And hopefully someday, it'll be as ubiquitous and ordinary as email.

No it turns the problem from your account being owned by a company looking to turn a profit to random people on the internet. If we had a way of downloading our accounts and transferring instances then maybe.

In the sense that it would take over facebook or instagram? No, not a chance.

No I don't think it will. I would be shocked if Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, Reddit, LinkedIn, etc etc ever truly went away. If people remain dedicated to improving and promoting the fediverse it could carve out it's own space in the social media landscape. And once that happens you never know what the future holds. But I'd be surprised if it took over everything in the space

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I expect good and insightful conversations to be moved here.

Reddit is about to become like twitter and facebook where it's ad-ridden, toxicity cesspool.

People will leave to keep having the actual forum experience and will eventually move here as it looks like a very good alternative.

@Bicyclejohn

It depends on what you mean by "replace".

The Fediverse may cause centralized social-media networks to join the Fediverse.

There are some hints of that happening now.

Facebook / Meta has created a new social-media network that is part of the Fediverse.

Tumblr and Flickr are said to be joining the Fediverse.

So, some "popular social media" may become one with the Fediverse.

I don’t want it to. I enjoyed reddit the most when it was mainly a techier and generally thoughtful crowd, large enough to always be interesting but not so big as to be a gluttonous mass of nonsense. The ever-so-slightly higher barrier to entry to the Fediverse compared to other platforms (which spooks mainstream users even though it’s really not that hard) gives me hope that the Fediverse will keep its character for a good while.

For the general user, I don't really think so. Not unless a couple big companies run their own instances and search engines bring up specific instances to join. The barrier to entry is relatively complex compared to something that just "works"

Probably not replace, but certainly it could be a viable and thriving part of the picture. I don't think there's anything wrong with having options.

IMHO these are fundamentally different concepts. Popular social media is made popular by pushing curated 'engaging' content, rather than organic content, to monetize gullible users. It has become an entertainment venue, giving their audience a steady stream of what they want them to see, even if by force. Popular "Social Media" has rapidly devolved into a real-life MST3K. Users feel betrayed that the sites no longer feel like the social experience/experiment they wanted.... but are users really wanting to leave, or just switch to voice outrage?

Alternatively, the fediverse doesn't appeal to those wanting force fed entertainment, or seeking viral fame amongst family/friends, and outraged users will complain it doesn't function like so-and-so site, or work 'their way'. It is more technical and takes more proactive actions to engage with others, which is a positive thing.

Users think they can switch from Coke to Pepsi, but the fediverse is more of a mixed drink with some extra bourbon.

Could it / should it replace popular social media? Probably not, unless more mindsets change over what a social media experience should be... but it can fill a growing gap as this happens (which will in-turn improve features & development).

No. Fediverse is great by design, but is too complicated at the moment (maybe it's just how platforms are set up at the moment).

The design is not too intuitive in looking at other posts from different instances/servers.

For example going to this post:

• Clicking [[email protected]](/c/[email protected])
  in the sidebar directs me to
  lemmy.fmhy.ml/c/freemediaheckyeah
  (different instance)
• Clicking [email protected]
  at the top of the post directs me to
  lemmy.ml/c/[email protected]
  (same instance)

@Bicyclejohn yes

I think its going to split and fracture, at least for the forseeable future. Just like how people who want too be free from corporate influence moved permanently from twitter to mastodon, so to will users who want to be free from corporate influence be drawn here. Those who don't care, or who buy into corporate propaganda will stay until and unless they can't tolerate it anymore, and even then they may just move to a different corporate platform.

Yes.

It looks like they're going to merge

https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/8/23754304/instagram-meta-twitter-competitor-threads-activitypub