We gotta see this as the victory it was.

We made a real impact on a landscape dominated by companies with more cash on hand than entire countries with almost zero budget and the equivalent of maybeeee 100 semi-full time developers, imagine what we can do with more resources and more development time behind the fediverse?

The truth is corporations have zero ability to push social networks into the future where they desperately need to go without violating their basic profit model, everything they are promising right now is either hot air or simply trying to get out in front of regulatory bodies like the EU.

We have no such limitations on our ability to craft the future and thus any speed we grow and innovate at is infinitely faster than Silicon Valley can on a medium term scale.

Though I hope Revolt succeeds because Discord has way too big of a monopoly.

I don’t understand why everyone thought moving everything to discord was a good idea that wouldn’t backfire for a million reasons.

The wisdom of moving slowly and fixing things

I believe one of the (many) reasons that the summer protests failed was its lack of focus.

Did the protests enact meaningful material change? No, and by that metric they failed. However I don’t think they failed at changing the status quo in terms of what people think is possible and what they will try as an alternative to corporate social media.

I am not trying to take away from your point but I won’t let us bash ourselves for failing here when I consider it a massive victory that is going to lead to many more victories.

However, do play the boardgame Bonfire if you like nerdy board games and are a fan of Stephan Feld (Castles Of Burgundy).

Exactly but people on Metafilter do generally enjoy the fediverse, I believe there is an instance on the fediverse run by a Metafilter person. I don’t know if Metafilter users want the world of their site to directly intersect the fediverse but it doesn’t have to for there to be a healthy exchange of ideas and people from one to the other and back.

To be very specific about what I mean here, people getting in the habit of using Metafilter as a social and community place outside the context of giant corporate social networks are training their minds to do the most important thing necessary for a greater context of people to use the fediverse, which is thinking of the possibility of digital social and community spaces as possible and desirable outside the context of venture capital, massive corporations, capitalism and profit. Metafilter doesn’t need to connect to the fediverse to have a positive synergy with it necessarily. Beehaw can be seen in a similar way.

Besides, we are many people in many different contexts, people shitposting in one context might be extremely well spoken on a technical subject in another. It matters which version of people we invite in and it matters that we let there be places for those different versions of people.

A walled garden is a suffocating structure when you are trapped in it with nowhere to go, but at the edge of the busy city of the fediverse, a walled garden is sometimes exactly what is needed. The walls of the garden no longer dictate the edge of the possible space of internet communities but rather the transition space between a niche community purposefully separated from the broader network and the broader network.

We are stronger together and a vital feature of the fediverse is federation, but we are better together when “together” means a tangled knot of interrelationships and boundaries, not a giant unified monolith. We are trying to make a city and this is the nature of them.

Tell that to metafilter, or hackernews? Or a multitude of other smaller niche communities that chug along perfectly happy (Yes there are less now than there used to be but that is mainly because of the insanely aggressive way Discord is being pushed on communities all over the internet and destroying their foundations). Sometimes a nice little garden with a wall to help transport you away from the hustle and bustle of life is exactly what you need.

We shouldn’t aim to build the Fediverse into a walled garden but there is nothing wrong with small walled gardens interspersed along the periphery of the Fediverse. It is a good thing. Let them be their own place!

It’s not unreasonable though that they have wanted to make sure their system of federation etc works well before they open it up, and that that has taken some time.

Yeah it must take a ton of work to make function properly but at the same time, I also think it isn’t unreasonable to doubt that a for-profit entity is ever going to willingly open up their system.

Why wouldn’t they just keep coming up with excuses for why it hasn’t been implemented yet? There is no real genuine promise here like there would be if the federation system was implemented from the start (even if it was janky) and every day that goes by the likelihood that federation/decentralization will ever happen on Bluesky becomes less and less likely.

This reminds me of an early access game selling itself on a vision of what the game will become while clearly having very little intention of ever getting there. They spend a lot of time talking about all the great features they will add like NPCs and quests but are they actually ever going to tackle the tough problems of implementing those features? Or are they just going to focus on selling character and weapon skins through loot boxes?

VW is still trying to figure out how to cheat emissions tests when there are no emissions, it really has their engineers stumped.

Very scary.

Yeah and it is easy to think of Lemmy as a shadow of Reddit because it is so much smaller, but even if for the foreseeable future that is highly unlikely to change, now is the first time the form of messageboard popularized by Reddit can finally grow and evolve beyond whatever limited vision the company that owns Reddit has and that is huge. We are in a new era of social media. Now anybody can experiment with tweaking the Reddit form by adding this, taking away that, changing how upvotes or downvotes work… who knows?

This is just the VERY beginning of exploring the space of social network structures like Reddit and it is going to be awesome. People don’t get excited for new social networks anymore (corporations have made them so repulsive and unhealthy) but this is a super exciting time of innovation and evolution in the different ways we bring humans together in conversations online.

I mean, fuck all those other corners then

Right and when you step back and think about it, why create a conversation system that demands so much admin for moderators? A reddit-like system obviously still desperately needs good human moderation but the moment to moment guidance of conversation focus doesn’t require a human mod to always interject to refocus things, just an engaged and genuine audience.

To be honest even for small communities I just find discord an extremely difficult format to follow., especially because search of previous conversations is an afterthought (???).

I think it is easy to miss how powerful the reddit type thread structure is among the noise of how toxic and shitty reddit itself can be. I love lemmy because I think the reddit type thread structure is in most ways a direct upgrade to message boards/forums. The problem with message boards was that as a thread gets longer the probability increases steadily to 100% that the thread will be utterly derailed by people arguing over the most trivial detail of the conversation. This seems like a weird thing to empathize, but consistently I would find a thread on a message board that felt like a goldmine of interesting information and ALWAYS I would find to my consternation that the last three pages to the thread were people arguing over some stupid fact one of the commenters used incorrectly early on in the thread to make some ancillary side point.

The Reddit structure smoothly siphons off these side conversations and allows the wisdom of the crowd to direct the focus of the conversation through upvotes and downvotes. Does the Reddit structure get petty, toxic and judgemental? Yes, but I think it still qualifies as a near direct improvement on messageboards if the objective of the messageboard is to be a curated source of expert/niche conversations. Lemmy is awesome, you can learn so much just from reading quality comments sections.

Yeah, I hate discord for many reasons but the primary reason is that I just think it is a terrible place to have a conversation. All the channels I see are always dominated by really low quality effort interaction, interesting conversations just get drowned out and lost by someone sharing another meme or responding to someone else’s low effort meme.

As someone with pretty intense ADHD, Discord is just so fragmented with so many channels each with their own conversations all fracturing out in different directions with no capacity to keep a handle on it. I hate it.

Fuck Discord

I don’t have proof of why discord is getting shoved down our throats everywhere but I think it is probably in large part because there is a fuckton of investor money behind trying to make discord swallow up every online community it can and they have kept costs to customers/shitty behavior dialed back until they establish an unassailable dominance over the market. Everyone just thinks it is great and it doesn’t cost much money so what could possibly go wrong??

What is yikes about hanging around with furries?

Because I don’t see a strong argument for piracy coming at a direct, immutable cost to artists. I also don’t see a strong argument that piracy reduces the chance fans will pay for art when the art is made decently easy to purchase and is being sold at a reasonable price. Of course there are complexities to this discussion but ultimately when you compare it to massive corporations wholesale stealing massive amounts of works of art with the specific intention of undercutting and destroying the value of said art by attempting to commodify it I think the difference is pretty clear. One of these things is a morally arguable choice by one individual, the other is class warfare by the rich.

Joe shmo torrents an album from a band they like, maybe they buy the album in the future or go to a band concert and buy merch. Joe shmo hasn’t mined some economic gain out of a band and then moved on, Joe shmo has become more of a committed fan because they love the album. Meta steals from a band so that they can create an algorithm that produces knockoff versions of the band’s music that Meta can sell to say a company making a commercial who wants music in that style but would prefer not to pay an actual human artist an actual fair price for the music. These are not the same.

(AI doesn’t create convincing fake songs yet necessarily, but you get my point as it applies to other art that AI can create convincing examples of, books and writing being a prime example)

I didn’t realize at first, my bad. I realize that makes a lot of my post redundant but I think my point still stands.

So much hypocrisy that a massive corporation can actually steal like this and it is more socially acceptable than torrenting.

What a bunch of losers, thinking they are making the future…… by stealing from as many artists as they can? How do you convince yourself you are doing the right thing when what you are doing is scaling up the theft of art from small artists to a tech company sized operation?

And how much oxygen has been wasted over the years by music companies pushing the narrative that “stealing” from artists with torrenting is wrong? This is so much worse than stealing (and a million times worse than torrenting) though because the point of the theft is to destroy the livelihood of the artist who was stolen from and turn their art into a cheap commodity that can be sold as a service with the artist seeing none of the monetary or cultural reward for their work.