Barriers to entry occasionally have positive side effects. The current dynamic in and around the Fediverse reminds me of how dial-up bulletin boards self-selected for computer-literate (and typically intelligent) users. I suppose that implies that we should also expect our own Eternal September, too.
If the adoption rate continues and quality of life improvements such as efficient mobile apps keep getting made, I think it's inevitable. But I also think it can be a good thing, especially if the distributed instance culture with semi-independent communities persist. If the culture shifts so much to instances just being nodes into the larger "verse" so to speak, the general experience could shift a lot with it.
In any case, with all the different user experiences available already with Mastodon, kbin, lemmy, Calckey, Pixelfed and Peertube offering vastly different experiences into the same ecosystem, it'll be a lot more diverse I believe as everyone will find their own comfort zone.
I felt like Reddit was plagued by the mainstream user during the pandemic. I used to go on Reddit to lurk subs like r/Carding to understand how people(criminals?) steal credit card credentials and dump the balances.
By reading them I change the way I manage my own OPSEC. I could read just about anything there. Now it’s all banned or tightly moderated. Can’t say this can’t say that. Hope lemmy won’t be the same.
Definitely better. I tried getting into Lemmy about a year ago and it was kind of a miserable place. Most communities were abandoned and the website was less usable than now, the only active group were tankies (specifically CCP lovers). There just wasn't any demand for a Reddit alternative. I abandoned Lemmy and went back to Reddit not long after.
Now the website feels sooooo much livelier and is a much nicer place. The community isn't huge but it feels like the content I need to find is here, and as people settle in specific communities activity is going up! Once Lemmy fixes their bugs and Kbin fixes their federation I'm confident I won't want to go back to other websites.
I had a very similar experience, my lemmy.ml account is about a year old and I bounced off it several times because of a lack of content and engagement. But now I think it'll stick, thanks spez.
Thanks for sharing your experience. It's good to hear there wasn't a lot going on because, honestly, coming here from Reddit feels a bit like participating in some sort of digital gentrification.
Thats a big one i think. Iirc people would use an extension (or maybe a 3rd party app?) to block those users that commonly repost things and for a period of time i saw people saying their feed changed a lot on Reddit just from that. Tho Idk if thatd change much lately bc a lot of reposts I saw before coming here were from new account that were bots tryna build karma :/
this is a great idea. They could code it that if someone does post a youtube link that it just fetches the peertube equivalent or gives the person the option of what platform they prefer to watch videos on in their settings.
That will would cause load for peertube that it otherwise would have though. I'm not sure how well it will be able to scale. Hosting videos is really expensive. If something is already on YouTube it may be best to just leave it there so as to not put all our weight on a new, untested product.
PeerTube uses BitTorrent to be more resilient if a video goes viral (everyone who is watching the video shares the load). If someone is already investing the money to host a PeerTube instance, I think they wouldn't mind if people were to actually use it. Otherwise, what's the point? For example, the admin of TILvids often advertises videos from popular tech YouTubers, who mirror their content on that instance.
PS: PeerTube also introduced remote video transcoding in the last update, so now it should be even easier to distribute the load across the network.
I have been using the freetube client for years to watch videos across multiple platforms. Maybe we could incorporate their method of having youtube be a first choice but allowing the user to pick other providers if they prefer?
I used to have a lot of keys on my keychain and normally kept them clipped to a belt loop with a carabiner. To keep them from jingling too much I used to keep a hard drive magnet that I scavenged from somewhere stuck to them. Not all of my keys were magnetic but enough of them were and the magnet was strong enough that I could sandwich the non magnetic ones between the other ones and they'd all stick together.
It disappeared on me one day, probably stuck to some metal lamp post or something that I happened to brush up against.
I need to check how magnetic my current keys are to see if it could work, but I think if I ever find myself with another magnet of an appropriate size and strength, I might revisit that idea and put the magnet in a small leather fob or something to keep my keys from jingling.
This is absolutely true, and this is how the internet was back in the old days before Big tech and megaplatforms. People would set up little servers on their cable modems using spare laptops. It was experimental, it was imperfect, but it was ours. One side effect of this, was that you had to be at least a little bit smart to get yourself connected to it. Even if that just meant knowing that connecting to it was something that you wanted to do. That weeded out a lot of idiots who contribute low quality discussion. Also, because there is no giant company with a financial incentive to get everybody to use it as much as possible, things were built for raw functionality rather than trying to make them easy for people to get addicted to in 30 seconds. That naturally makes them more usable for anybody with an IQ over 90.
It didn't take long for ads to come along. Remember the 90s banners where you would punch the monkey to win $20? Or the text links that were ads? Pop ups?
Okay that's fair- I'm sure some instances will choose to advertise in some way.
TBH I'm more concerned about spam. Reddit has an army of anti-spam stuff, and that's just one site. As Lemmy grows, it will become a spam target, which will be more challenging due to its open nature (IE spammers will spin up their own instances eventually). I suspect that much like e-mail, some kind of RBL list will emerge.
So far a couple of big ones (askreddit) and an unnamed one I used to occasionally go on using teddit on my PC browser are here, but I'm hoping that garfieldminusgarfield and imsorryjohn migrate if they already haven't.
Not to pat ourselves on the back too much but right now it’s mainly the Reddit power users that are here. The normies are wondering why interesting as fuck was flooded with porn as of last night.
But that’s good, no? The power users are the minority that actually build the community. So we get the core base of Reddit without the problems you get from that site trying to become more like Facebook and TikTok
I would consider myself a normie, specifically regarding reddit, as I only spent my time lurking there and already have more comments on lemmy than on 7 years on reddit.
The current vibe and atmosphere just feels kind of special. Almost everyone is figuring stuff out, no one is down voted for asking some basic questions and I don't have the feeling that some grammar nazi is immediately around the corner to correct my many mistakes, just to get that sweet, sweet karma.
Same here. I was also predominantly a lurker on reddit, as even when i wanted to comment something it did not feel safe, for lack of better word. Here i feel much more free to comment my mind. I hope it stays that way. For someone who was too young to experience the “old internet” it feels great to have a new and improved modern analog.
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