Fediverse

People complain about Lemmy having limited content and engagement. Not in this article so much. I’m sure there were fewer posts in the past too. But what I found is that there are real people on here and you don’t have to wade through bots and shills which makes this community feel much more whole to me.

I really would like to somehow convince more people to adopt the idea that, like, Facebook and friends are run by bad people and you can choose not to use their products. Just stop. Find another way. Be uncomfortable for a little while.

But people aren't up to the challenge.

See I had forgotten the one golden rule of capitalism. To thrive in capitalism one must be amoral. Now you can be wildly sickeningly successful with morals but you cannot reach that absolute zenith of shareholder value. Either you accept a lower share price and don’t commit atrocities or you become evil. There is no third option.

Spot on.

Even better.

Most instances have human moderation, gating for bots, and yes, and you actually have to take 5-10 minutes to figure out how it all works, so the stupid people are automatically excluded by sheer complexity.

I fucking love Mastodon.

It's also one of the most nitpicky whiny places you can visit. A new open source software/update just got released and it does something cool! "Well it's not {x} compliant so it's trash." Or "If a solo developer or a team decides to use 'AI' then their entire project is AI slop."

There are so many moments where I'm like "just shut the fuck up and enjoy the software/news/updates these strangers are providing for free."

This was a great read to start my day, thank you!

The Australian Subreddits got overrun by extremist right wing people who tend to be 20x louder than anyone else, and exaggerate everything.

One even reported me for being racist (successfully) despite the fact that the entire time I was fighting back against the racism

Even worse, you now need to log in to even see it at all in a mobile browser. So f that

FYI, I'm doing it to build a brand.

the only problem is the lack of niche from like in some reddit subs, not main subs, and people there are unlikely to migrate here. plus the bots therer drum all the engagement to get people interested. when an instance vanishes it takes the content with them and i dint see the last one recover from it.

I’m having a blast here.

Not only because it gives you the content that you choose. And there’s no shorts, no ads, …no superfluous bs (god I hate fb, I fucking loathe it).

But also, everything is within reach. The options are within the options. Done.

People talk a lot about the protocols that power Bluesky vs. ActivityPub, because we're nerds and we believe deep in our hearts that the superior protocol will win. This is adorable. It flies in the face of literally all of human history, where the more convenient thing always wins regardless of technical merit. VHS beat Betamax. USB-C took twenty years.

Hopefully, unlike betamax and laserdisc, the fediverse will trudge on despite the megacorporate protocols

i love lemmy for what it is now. it sadly doesn’t have some communities as active here as reddit may, like stuff for soccer in particular for me, but it’s solid for everything else

I learnt something new today, cheers

And it has not enough users. If the fediverse ever became popular enough to hold significant marketshare, we'd see similar issues. The upside to the fediverse is that you can defederate from misinformation peddlers.

@ekZepp funny, I thought this is what Google search is nowadays:
"Threads was worthless because it’s the most boring social media website ever imagined. It’s a social media network designed by brands for brands, like if someone made a cable channel that was just advertisements and meta commentary about the advertisements you just saw. Billions of dollars at their disposal and Meta made a hot new social media network with the appeal of junk mail." @matdevdug

So here is a stupid question

What exactly is the fediverse? What's included in it? I've hear much about fediverse and Lemmy, but is Lemmy part of it or not? Are other systems like Blue sky a part of it or not? Do I transparently see posts from all those different systems?

Good read, but I think the author touched on something that is way more troubling. Sure, you can get reliable information from regular people who are living in other parts of the world, but spreading that information with any kind of veracity is almost impossible due to the collapse in public trust of mainstream media.

If I say something with any degree of authority or confidence, someone in the comments will inevitably chant the ancestral magic spell "Source?!" and suddenly my evidence of a conversation with a stranger on the internet is reduced to merely anecdotal at best. Able to be dismissed outright without thought or care.

However, if I post a link to some legacy media rag, existing in the modern day as a mere husk being puppeteered by corporate oligarchs, wearing the skin of a legitimate and trustworthy news source, the credibility of the information is then called into question by anybody reasonable - knowing full well that right-wing governments have managed to capture most of the remaining independent reporting, or at least have threatened them with who-knows-what in an attempt to influence their press releases that would otherwise paint the government or any of their cronies in a negative light. If someone decides that the provided source doesn't line up with their narrative, it's hilariously easy to attack the reporting itself as being "fake news".

The brain shuts off, and information gets siloed. Objective reality is no longer shared. We are still living in a state of simply believing whatever we want to believe and the few people who are able to break out of that are not going to be influential enough to have an effect on anything. We can pat ourselves on the back for not being a group of people concerned with being brand-builders, I guess, but in the end it's a meaningless victory.