rglullis @ rglullis @communick.news

Posts

39

Comments

1,808

Joined

2 yr. ago

Sorry, I’m thinking strictly in terms of Reddit vs. Lemmy/Piefed/adjacent networks because they are essentially Reddit alternatives that function the same. I don’t really know much about Mastodon or other alternative networks, nor can I speak on their health - but the lemmyverse (including new piefed instances) seem to be fine overall.

From Evan, co-author of ActivityPub: The Fediverse should be more like the Facebook Platform (lots of client apps using the same social graph) rather than the Apple App Store (a bunch of one-feature apps that have to bootstrap their own social network each time).

Instead of thinking "Lemmy/Piefed vs Reddit" or "Mastodon vs Bluesky vs Twitter" or "PeerTube vs Youtube", think that the Fediverse can be so much more than a poor man's version of the proprietary networks. This mentality is still rooted in the silos created by Big Tech.

Communities can become nomadic, and that’s fine.

First, I think that community migration implementation from PieFed has very bad implications. It is literally rewriting history.

Second, if we want to make the Fediverse something really accessible, it needs to be a lot more reliable. Yeah, when we are a few thousand people it's easy to coordinate the migration of a few dozen communities. But if we are talking about millions or billions of people, we can not afford to have constant failures. People have expectations set by the corporate networks, so the whole system needs to be as reliable as them.

What advantage does a “fediverse” frontend have?

Github's dominance comes from the network effects. Everyone's on github, so if you have your project on a different repo, you won't get as many visibility. If your project is on gitlab only and someone wants to report a bug, they need to:

• Find your instance.
• Create an account.
• Deal with an unfamiliar interface
• Create the ticket
• Hope it gets seen.
• Potentially forget about it, unless they set up notifications.

A Federated forge solves all of that.

• You follow remote projects without having to create an account in the remote instance.
• You open an issue on the remote forge without having to open in an account in the remote instance, and you do it from your local server.
• If you have a PR ready, the remote instance gets notified.
• It makes a lot easier to separate CI/CD from source management.
• It makes a lot easier to separate source management from issue tracking.
• etc
• etc
• etc

Specific to the DID, I haven't published yet. But what I am doing is based on my Typescript SDK for ActivityPub, so you can follow that repo for updates.

I feel like we are talking about different things. You seem to be more focused on Reddit vs Lemmy, and I am talking about the "Closed" social networks vs the wider Fediverse.

People don’t really respond well to advertisements and influencers on Reddit either, for context.

The comparison is not to Reddit. It's Instagram/TikTok/YouTube. Maybe you heard of those: it's a place where WNBA players making $100k/year by playing can make $20k per Instagram sponsored post.

people tend to be democratic socialists/communists/anarchists”?

First, lumping together all these three ideologies as one single block is a bit handwavy. Second, I am not talking about "anti-corporate". I'm talking about anti-business. If you think that the majority of people are that extreme in their political positions, I'd guess your worldview is quite skewed.

I simply don’t believe that a paywalled system as you imagine could ever even approach Reddits numbers, or even Blueskys.

This is a strawman: I'm saying "We should not have to rely on open registration instances and hope that the admins get enough funds to keep going", which is not the same as "all instances should be paywalled".

I think if we didn't have as many open instances, we'd end up with more people self-hosting and running a server for their own friends, or we would start hearing from students asking their universities to run a server for them, or we would get hyper-localized instances where some group would pool resources to run a service for themselves, etc.

are major reddit subreddits in many cases.

Again, it's not just about reddit. Also, it's about having places where politics are not such a proeminent part of the discussion. E.g, Threads got a lot of their initial momentum by avoiding politics and getting sports journalists to post about NBA and football.

It's Fediverser. Yes, it is on github. Yes, I've posted about it, quite a bit.

I asked prolific users to join, I offered help to admins to set it up. I even offered the topic-specific instances to the wider community. None of these efforts were well received.

What’s stopping small businesses and influencers

There is nothing stopping them, but there is no one here that wants them to come:

• Scroll around for a bit on the federated timeline of your preferred Mastodon instance, tell me how long it takes for someone to display an anti-business sentiment.
• There is no one coordinated movement to get creators on YouTube and tell them "hey, if you start putting your videos on PeerTube we will contribute to your Patreon".
• Every and any effort to build a public searchable index of the Fediverse was attacked on the grounds of "I don't want my data used by marketers".
• The majority view on "how to best fund the Fediverse" is "set up donations". Whenever I bring up "I think it's more fair if everyone paid just a little bit, this is why my instance is only for paying members", I am immediately treated as an evil capitalist pig.

What reporters?

There were a number of reporters from the NYT/WSJ/CNN who set up Mastodon accounts in 2022 and were harassed on Mastodon.

Does this, by the way, not depend on the instance?

Do you think that Fediverse is a good representation of the overall political spectrum?

What “different people” is the Fediverse afraid of?

• Normies.
• Small business who want to have a social media presence.
• Influencers.
• Reporters.
• Anyone who is not 100% aligned with their political mindset

My biggest frustration is that I sincerely believe that I had built like 80% of the tools needed to solve the onboarding issues:

• Onboarding by signing up via Reddit OAuth on fediverser.network, so anyone had one single place to visit and "migrate"
• A website with a curated list of recommended communities, so that they would have content available as soon as they signed up.
• 15+ topic-specific instances, so that people could become familiar with the concept of federation, without having to be overwhelmed by the initial choices and/or being forced to understand the "politics" of each instance
• The "Community Ambassador" feature, to help people to organize and source content from different places and help them bootstrap their communities.

These things are all right there. There was no single admin interested in implementing it. Everyone was just looking at their own few thousand users and never got together to think "how can we get from 50k to 5 million?"

No idea.

People went to Mastodon and faced a number of UX issues:

• onboarding was difficult
• "Selecting an instance" is a chore
• How to find content
• No algorithmic recommendations

Because getting content was hard, they were basically thrown into a whole new ecossytem and were greeted by the OG Mastodon users, who were not at all welcoming: , complaining about "their space" being invaded, had many displays of "opression olympics", made a point of being extra loud about their extremist views as an attempt to scare normies, demanded everyone to learn "proper manners" right away, put content warnings on anything, etc.

In other words, people didn't go to Mastodon in 2024 because those that tried in 2022 were shunned away and left with the impression that the Fediverse is not for them.

I don’t know how you think the fediverse is somehow afraid of growth though.

For the reasons above. It's not that they are "afraid of growth", but the general culture on the Fediverse is reactionary and averse to change. Making it more universally appealing would mean bringing different people, and this is what they are afraid of.

I’m happy to be here regardless of whether we’re growing personally. In spite of Lemmy’s challenges I enjoy it here, and that’s enough for me.

I think this is a fine attitude if you are an user who just wants to enjoy a "slow web" kind of experience, but as someone aware of all the ill effects of Big Tech and Surveillance Capitalism, I wish we were more ambituous and aimed for a bigger slice of user share.

The Bluesky surge happened after a massive global election result and a massive grievance from progressives/leftists over Musk and how Twitter has become

Why didn't they go to Mastodon? (hint: some of them did in 2022)

If Reddit fucks up, as a reaction - Lemmy would get many new users.

Or perhaps there will be some other platform that is not so afraid of growth like Lemmy is, and people will go there, just like people went to Bluesky instead of going to Mastodon?

When I say "compromise", I am not saying "sacrifice them completely". I am talking about in terms of Big Fedi vs Small Fedi, regardless on where on the scale you want to stay, there are trade-offs to be made.

Bluesky itself is also flatlining and declining anyway.

Yeah, but my point is that they were a lot more effective in capturing mindshare when it was needed, and they didn't see growth as compromise on their values like people do here.

When the next fuckup from Big Tech comes around, do you think that people will think about going to Mastodon/Lemmy/PieFed, or they will just look at Bluesky?

If you are keen on working on something like that, let me know. I've done some preliminary work to get a DID system that would work like did:plc but I got a bit stuck trying to use a decentralized database based on IPFS as the "ledger" mechanism.

But why are you comparing Bluesky's numbers with Lemmy's. A more apt comparison would be against the whole Fediverse. We had ~2 million people in early 2023, and we've gone down since then.

I guess u could have a meta id that dereferences to all ur actor ids?

Yes, that would be ATProto's did:plc system.

When do you think Bluesky started?

It was announced in 2019 as an internal Twitter project, but it became its own thing in 2021-ish. Then they spent two years reinventing a bunch of things so that they could keep Twitter's original view - i.e, a system where they could delegate all the boring/liability heavy parts to users (identity, UGC) while keeping them in control of rent-seeking toll gates (the AppView).

The people behind it were several orders of magnitude more well known.

It takes more than money and a good contact network to build something that can attract people. Jack nowadays is pushing for Nostr, but as a product it is a lot less appealing to the masses compared to Bluesky.

Me and most others

The "most others" here is a heavily self-selected group of people who don't want to compromise on any of their values and treat any effort to grow as a threat.

All of this to say, it's fine if you say "Yes, we are small and I want it that way because if it gets any bigger we will be surrounded by people who do not uphold the same values we do". The problem is that you're arguing "We are only small because of $random_reason (network effects/evil capitalists/not enough funding/etc)", as if "being small" was determined by external factors and not something that you can control.

That's the point of disagreement. I think we can control this and we can bring more people here, but it's just that you don't want to do it if means sacrificing your ideology.

It looks like we are talking past one-another.

What I am trying to say is that "getting the user to complete a login" is not the novel part that is missing. What we are missing is a way for the user to have control over their actor ID, so that they use the same id regardless of what server that id is delegated to.

So, unless I am misunderstanding you, what you are proposing is an OIDC provider which could be used to authenticate on any other service. That's good, but it doesn't solve the problem that if we had an unified OIDC provider without a DID, all of the actor ids would end up dependent on the OIDC provider.

Network effects are incredibly strong

Yet, Bluesky has grown to 35M+ active accounts, even though they started way after us

We have the advantage that we’re not growth focused

This is not an "advantage". This is an excuse we tell ourselves to cope with our failures.

The inevitable enshittification will do its job eventually,

And when it does, the majority of people will go the next shiny "free as in beer", VC-funded siloed platform and we are going to be just another "They don't know" meme.