I'm a long time Mastodon user, and I've observed multiple cycles of user influxes (usually caused by some unpopular decision at Twitter) followed by slow but steady decline as these new users got frustrated, disappointed, attacked or something similar. Each wave however did leave a portion that stuck around. I can't tell you whether Mastodon or Lemmy will "succeed", but it's clear by now that both their respective user bases couldn't even agree on the definition of success.
This might sound like a negative, but if you look at corporate social media which has a pretty clear vision of what its own success looks like (is this fair?), it might also be partly positive. Also, while success might be hard to define and agree on in the Fediverse, I think that these networks are more resilient to total failure than traditional social media (though again, this statement hides some implicit assumptions).
Ultimately, I've learned to stop worrying about this. People will talk about what they want to talk about, and this will continue to change and evolve. Lemmy needs better moderation tools (as demonstrated by the recent CSAM attack), but I believe it will get them in time. If you want to talk about something different on Lemmy: do! Just post it, or create a community. It might not explode over night, but it might catch on.
Mastodon and now Lemmy are the only social media I actively use now (permanently deleted my Twitter account on the day the Tate interview was published "exclusively", but was less active there for years) , and I feel the better for it. I've observed tremendous progress in the Fediverse during the past six years and it's very encouraging in the long term.
Awesome article. Funny, serious, smart and insightful at the same time. It cracked me up and worried me all at once.
"And how to unleash a house-building frenzy without protective bureaucrats when any rush to mass construction clearly requires adult supervision, as Ontario Premier Doug Ford so dangerously discovered in his greenbelt housing debacle."
I agree, that's what I'm saying. I used "this" ambiguously, I just realized. I edited "this" to "this comment", and added another clarifying sentence before the quote.
Here's an excerpt from the older article which isn't paywalled, that I linked in my comment (before the edit):
"Constructed more than 20 years ago, the turbines at the small Keyenberg wind park are less powerful than modern equivalents, with each producing about 1MW of energy per hour at a wind speed of 15 metres per second, roughly a sixth of the output of a more efficient state of the art turbine.
Since windfarms in Germany are no longer eligible for subsidies after 20 years in operation, the park would probably have been “repowered” with new technology or wound down even if it were not for the nearby mine.
Nonetheless, North-Rhine Westphalia’s ministry for economic and energy affairs on Monday urged RWE to abort its plans to dismantle the windfarm.
“In the current situation, all potential for the use of renewable energy should be exhausted as much as possible and existing turbines should be in operation for as long as possible,” a spokesperson said."
The title, paired with an expensive paywall and the fact that the quote below is the only part visible for free would certainly suggest that this comment is true.
Here's the un-paywalled article intro:
"German energy giant RWE has begun dismantling a wind farm to make way for a further expansion of an open-pit lignite coal mine in the western region of North Rhine Westphalia.
One wind turbine has already been dismantled, with a further seven scheduled for removal to excavate an additional 15m to 20m tonnes of so-called 'brown' coal, the most polluting energy source."
I think desperation of devs, admins and users is exactly the sentiment the trolls were trying to elicit. Lemmy is a young project, and this is one of many hurdles it'll need to overcome on its path.
I like the idea of removal flags propagating through the network, at least as an additional signal. Forcing removal everywhere on a single removal signal on a single instance would probably be too jumpy (e.g. a sfw instance might prevent any instance from hosting nsfw content), but some configurable rules and thresholds paired with removal reason context might significantly automate the process.
The reason I especially like this suggestion is because smaller instances can benefit from any automation that is affordable by larger ones.
I hate Roblox. Their Android game somehow goes around Google account settings and allows kids to buy "Robux" for real money without authentication for payments (and, of course, makes this easy to do by accident). Furthermore, this real money can go into a temp account without an email address, so if you delete the app without creating a proper account, your money is unrecoverable. Their "customer support" is very unhelpful. We try to be liberal yet sane when it comes to technology for kids, but Roblox is prohibited for our children.
I hear you 😁. For whatever reason I stuck with the Vim tutorial and did it a few times over the years. Now I'm using the IdeaVIM extension in IntelliJ - that mode system is just sooo powerful. It has a horrible learning curve, yes, but if you manage to stick with it, it pays huge dividends. I probably know, like, 18% of all commands, and it completely changed how I edit files (mostly for coding, but also text).
My path was the same - there was a time when FF was messing up badly trying to keep up with Chrome, and that's when I switched to Chrome. FF then cleaned up their act, but the damage was done. Or it might simply have been that Chrome was so much slicker (and not evil) at the time. I went back to FF around the time Google merged all accounts with Chrome accounts, and I much prefer it to Chrome now. I'm sad to see it not being able to regain its past glory and serious traction. I blame it mostly on convenience, inertia and "normies" generally not carrying about the same things as some "techies".
It takes time. Twitter (or whatever it wants to be called) has an algorithm expressly aimed at keeping you "engaged", whereas Mastodon is just a stream of toots which you see based on the time you decide to visit. Should you stick with it, eventually two things will happen:
You will find accounts and topic to follow which will fill your timeline with content that is relevant and interesting to you, and, perhaps more importantly
Your mind will give up the habit of being hooked on a social media stream (apologies if I'm implying something that isn't true for you - it certainly was for me).
In the end, maybe you decide it's not for you, but I've been using it for years (since 2017), and over time it's completely replaced Twitter for me. I'm keeping three accounts for different interests (and one on Pixelfed), logged into all of them using Fedilab. I actually deleted my Twitter account the day the Tucker/Tate interview hit the light of day, but I stopped actively visiting it years earlier. My mental state improved a lot over time since I moved on.
Proton for gaming on Linux has come a long way. You still cannot get to 100% parity with all games and programs, and if you absolutely need something that isn't supported on Linux, you are out of luck, but chances are that most people would actually be able to use everything they need. I understand there's also the learning curve and not everyone has time or inclination, but for those that do, in 2023 it's absolutely worth a try.
This... is actually true. I'll concede that even as recently as 4, 5 years ago it might have not been entirely true, but now it is - Linux has become so accessible (look at Mint, Pop_OS) while Windows has (somehow) become even more hostile to its user base to the point that an average user would actually have an easier time switching than staying in the long term. I didn't think I'd be able to write this with a straight face, but I honestly think this is now true.
We should. Yes please.