I think a significant issue here is that Reddit is not built for fostering communities, and things that mimic Reddit will not foster them, either. The whole model is built around an endless number of very large, single subject discussion spaces with functionally no globally consistent moderation or oversight.

This is a model of content categorization and filtering for individual consumption, not community building. Lemmy “communities” are just content tags, they’re not real community spaces. They’re never going to encourage the kind of tight knit spaces with idiosyncratic customs, rituals, and rules that actual vommunities have. They’re never going to let you get to know others because “off topic” discussions are meant to be had in entirely different spaces.

Reddit and reddit-like services are about content creation and delivery, noy community. Thatms baked into the form.

The point of federation is to publicly share what you want to publicly share, not to have unfettered access to whatever you want to consume.

Now why am I on Lemmy? Because in my opinion, it’s the first step towards a mainstream Fedivers! Mastodon … [isn’t] very widespread, but when you see the number of people active in Lemmy communities, it’s really impressive!

🤨

Mastodon has an order of magnitude more active users than Lemmy - and the whole rest of the Fediverse - if not two orders of magnitude.

Lemmy’s a great platform, but Reddit is already the niche social media site among the mainstream, and the kind if niche interest forums that ultimately built Reddit just haven’t reached critical mass here yet, and that means Reddit remains very sticky. Pile on people being kind of uncomfortable with the local namespaces for both users and communities, and I don’t know that Lemmy’s really the killer platform for the 'verse.

Fediverse adotion is going to be a collective effort. Loops has a good chance of attracting people. It would be nice if Mastodon would actually use a standard ActivityPub implementation so it played nicer with neighbours. And microblogger discovering something other than Mastodon would be nice.

But it’s not going to be just one platform. If it is, then the fediverse idea has totally failed.

Cool. You… don’t have to use it, or any sites that leverage it. But the Fediverse is an open network, and to that extent it should be able to support everyone’s needs. But if we want the Fediverse to be anything other than an internet enthusiast circlejerk, rather than a backbone technology for the internet, then supporting a wide variety of use cases is necessary.

Yeah, if we want to get people off of centralized, private social media sites, we really need Patreon integration for a range of fedi services. It’s one of the significant pipelines for Discord adoption.

Lemmy/*bin, PeerTube, Matrix, what have you all have immediate drop-in replacement value. Other services, like Mastodon, don’t have the same level of potential segmentation and exclusivity inherent in how they’re built, but it’d be a way to set up paid access servers.

These kinds of gateways are important for actually making the fediverse seem like a viable alternative. Right now, the incentives are driving people toward closed gardens and destroying the open internet.

It’s an accidental misspelling of Kichea, and was my Eve Online character’s first name. The misspelling made it unique for many years, until a kitchen sink company came along and started using it

Discourse has ActivityPub support coming via a plugin, IIRC, so it should be an option for Fedizens soon enough.

@julian@community.nodebb.org is also in the process of adding AcitivtyPub support to nodeBB, and it’s really, really cool seeing a traditional forum UX with distributed users on https://community.nodebb.org.

The simple fact of the matter is, the Fediverse is public. It’s a space specifically built on sharing. Finding your posts is trivial, and that’s by design. Blocking another account from viewing your posts is an incredibly weak hurdle for someone to overcome, and it informs them that you have blocked them.

If anything, doing so risks the possibility of escalating or accelerating harassment.

It’s the whole concept, friend! Welcome to the social we, where independent social media sites cross-communicate

The community belongs to a website, yes. You’re just subscribing to it remotely.

Lemmy is decentealized in the same way the web is decentealized. You can’t get articles from Blog 13705 if blog13795.net goes offline. That doesn’t make the web not decentealized.

At the end of the day, the whole fediverse is a bunch of independent websites hosting copies of other websites’ content. They’re not cloud communities, they’re mirrors.

But that also means we don’t have enough users or content yet.

This may very well be the case currently, but it isn’t necessarily the indicator for such. A critical mass of people using the fediverse can still result in smaller communities due to the local-first nature of the space. If we had 10 million users interested in a given subject, but they’re spread among 2000 communities called ‘interest’ spanning 2000 servers, that’s not actually a problem. That’s a situation where the global ecosystem is rich and lively, but people are still seeing the same names over and over again in their little interest pocket.

I mean, I wasn’t here a decadeo ago or so when the groundwork of the Fediverse was being laid, so I don’t know how it was originally “marketed”, but people make things without understanding the true implications of their decisions all of the time. And the current crop of leading products in the fediverse are a generation or three removed from the original designers.

People build on top of stuff with goals that are off-target of the original goals of tech. Building a bunch of square pegs and ramming them through round holes just, ultimately, results in those pegs either not slipping through, or having their corners cut off.

But that goes against the original point of the fediverse IMO, which was to make a resilient social media platform where it doesn’t really matter what instance you join, you’ll get the same content.

If that was truly the original point of the Fediverse, it failed at the design phase. The way content is hosted and passed around has meant it was always going to be a constellation of independent nodes, each doing their own things. There’s nothing in the fundamental design of how these networks work that points to them being a networked simulation of centralized social media. And the repeated attempts to make it work, or at least look like it works, that way has resulted in exactly what should expected from trying to jam that square peg into this round hole: A poor and messy simulacra of centralized social media.

It has always been – and this is necessary by design – a weekly interconnected network of social media and networking sites. That’s the true, fundamental nature of the space, based on the engine powering it. Trying to pretend otherwise is just adding complexity on top of it, not removing it.

I don’t think it’s about the term, “server” and “instance” both make sense to me. The issue is that the fediverse itself is pretty confusing.

Personally, I’ve been using the words “site” or “website”, because I think highlighting the fact that each instance is its own independent website clarifies the issue to a large degree.

But you’re 100% right. It just doesn’t alleviate the sense of overwhelm people feel. And I don’t know that anything really will, except for repeated and continued exposure, because networks of quasi-independent actors are complicated things, and the world is now full of people who have experienced the internet as little more than 5 insulated websites. The mental model that people have for social media is just “everyone’s reliably using the same website as me”. The idea that different social media websites are communicating with each other, and also that those social media websites don’t have a billion accounts – and don’t need a billion accounts in order to be viable – is just… alien. To the point where even those of us who are engaging in the experiment kind of sweep the essence of the space under the rug, you know? Everyone treats “Mastodon” as a singular location. This here is “Lemmy”. “kbin” is over there, at a particular URL. If we treated the rest of the internet with this level of abstraction, I’d have to tell you that I was “On Firefox” right now, or telling my wife about this meme I saw “On macOS”, or “at my desk”.

And like, sure, some of us have a deeper internal understanding of federated social media. We heavily used IRC in the past, or get grok how email works, or whatever, but the fact that we still all kind of collectively brush aside the heterogeneous and quasi-independent nature of the network when actually using it in practice I think speaks to just how heady it all really is. And I’m not sure there’s a linguistic solution to it. It’s just an incredibly messy space in a world where people crave simplicity.

Honestly, scaled ranking and user-level server bans are huge deals. This is really exciting.