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Fediverse @lemmy.world
cm0002 @lemmy.world

The Fediverse Isn’t the Future. It’s the Present We’ve Been Denied.

117 comments

  • I grew up in the age of Internet forums, in the ancient days of the late '90s-early-00's before the (Eternal September) Smartphone dumped every human being onto the landscape.

    Having small communities is so much better. I often hear people complain that Lemmy isn't big because there are not communities with 3 million people like there are some subreddits. Much of the reason that Reddit is shit is because of how big it is.

    On the old Internet, you could know the people who were part of the community. I have old friends, that I've known for 20+ years, that I met playing MUDs on BBSs. Now, I couldn't tell you the name of a single person that I've ever interacted with on social media in the past year.

    Digg and Reddit came on the scene and pulled a huge crowd because we didn't have The Algorithm to recommend content and these link aggregation sites were the first time people got a taste of that kind of 'See all of the newest things from every corner of the Internet in a single place, curated by a process that produces good quality results' that we now just expect from recommendation algorithms.

    The old communities were essentially starved of population. Nobody wants to take the social effort required to become part of a community when they can just scroll Reddit mindlessly.

    There's very few people that even had a chance to experience the magic of spontaneous communities full of people working together.

    If you still want a taste, check out the Something Awful forums.

    The barrier to entry is higher: you have to learn the rules (read the rules), the social norms and there is a $10 one-time fee (so getting banned has some sting to it, read the rules).

    In exchange you get an actual community of people. Many of the people posting there (or, in the various Discords now because that's a thing) have been on SA since they were edgy teenagers and are now professionals with careers. That isn't to say that there are not trolls and assholes, those exist in any community, but there's a much higher ratio of good to bad posters.

    One of the interesting decisions that they do is that rulebreaking posts are rarely ever deleted. If a person is probated (temp ban) or banned, their comment stays up with a "(User was Probated/Banned for this post)" edited into the post so you can see, and hopefully learn, from the bad behavior. In addition, there's a 'Wall of Shame' section where you can see everyone who's been actioned against, who the moderator was and the moderation reason.

    I've always hated the fact that comments on Reddit just disappear. You can never see what a mod removed and there is no reason why it is removed. This allows all kinds of bad and manipulative behaviors to be done by people with moderation access.

    • I avoided forums growing up because from what I've witnessed there was a lot of verbal abuse and so on, but I was into "communities" (basically closed social network long before I heard of myspace or facebook).

      For example, I listened to a lot of hip-hop as a teenager. there was no meta algorithm feeding me garbage, but there was a hip hop community website :) It felt more intimate or homegrown if you will.

    • I'm also from that era of the Internet and you're so right about smaller communities being better. One great example was Wil Wheaton's phpBB forum. Probably a hundred active users including Wil and we all got along and more or less policed ourselves.

      (Plus I helped him out with some car trouble. Let me repeat that: I helped Wesley Crusher with an engineering problem. One of my proudest moments.)

      One of the interesting decisions that they do is that rulebreaking posts are rarely ever deleted. If a person is probated (temp ban) or banned, their comment stays up with a “(User was Probated/Banned for this post)” edited into the post so you can see, and hopefully learn, from the bad behavior. In addition, there’s a ‘Wall of Shame’ section where you can see everyone who’s been actioned against, who the moderator was and the moderation reason.

      That's a really great feature.

    • I also grew up with forums, but I always hated them tbh. Small communities aren't inherently better, back in the day there were so many horrible forums for smaller stuff. Every forum had a different culture and most of them were frankly disgusting. Absolutely rampant racism, sexism and homophobia that would put even the worst subreddits (or even fucking 4chan) to shame. Also mods and admins who wouldn't allow any views opposing their own, to a degree much, much worse than on reddit seen today.
      Smaller subforums on one big platform are the solution imo. A sub with millions of people is gonna suck, an isolated forum with ten thousand people is also gonna suck, while a sub with that number could be an amazing place on a website with millions of users. That's how it is on reddit right now. There are plenty, they're just drowned out by all the garbage.
      Personally, I also don't want that "community" feel you speak so highly of. I just want to be informed about the things I like and discuss it openly while remaining anonymous. I have communities irl if I want to connect with people, I don't need or want that online.

  • Where moving from one service to another doesn’t mean losing everything you’ve built and everything you’ve ever said.

    I generally agree with this post, but this isn't true. It would require portable identities.

    • "Portable identities" is a major feature of Mastodon and ActivityPub platforms in general. It'll be on Lemmy one day too.

    • This is the most often cited reason that celebrities, reporters etc. say that keeps them from using Mastodon.

      People ignore the needs of the vast majority of the userbase to the peril of us all. Mastodon could have worked to reach out to those content creators to give them what they demanded as a deal breaker, but instead now we've lost them to Bluesky and will in all likelihood have to wait for enshittification of that platform to ever have another chance at that.

      Likewise the Threadiverse works for us who use Arch Linux btw, and to have conversations with internet randos (we are downright kind here, or at least we can be, although that's virtually gone over on Reddit, outside of tiny niche subs with barely any content, much as we have here:-), but I don't know how we can attract the content creators, especially when the audience for their content is not enough for them to bother with (AND it's "too complex to use" - I mean it's not, except... isn't it though? Like where's the modmail? or a notification if your comment gets removed/locked? why does viewing it from different instances show different sets of comments, and also different upvotes/downvotes?!? why does join-lemmy website want to send me to Lemmy.ml, and why oh why didn't someone tell me that I can't criticize Russia, China, or North Korea there!? It would have been nice if that had been WRITTEN DOWN SOMEWHERE!?!? maybe the side-bar would have been a good place to put it, like the "Rules" section?!?).

      The experience on Lemmy (unlike Linux, no /s here) is objectively terrible, it's just that we here prioritize different factors and are willing to put up with its many (Many MANY) inconveniences in order to use a FOSS platform. But others have their own priorities, and that's okay - everyone should be free to use what they want. The downside to that is that outside of Linux and generic content like memes and news, there is very little content available here, especially for niche interests. Hence why the content creators remain on Reddit bc that's where their audience is (except the ones who simply unplugged from social media entirely). i.e. fuck spez, but... also, he was right. He really can treat his users poorly, and enough of them will remain to keep it afloat, rather than come here where it's "difficult to use", and Lemmy moves very slowly to address those needs (e.g. to allow for account migration, where e.g. messages sent to the old place will be forwarded to the new).

    • Your past comments are still available even if you switch to a new account

117 comments