I didn’t knew about Bridgy Fed but isn’t that kind of creating a bot and duplicating profiles? I guess is better than nothing but it reminds me a bit of the app Surf which connects the fediverse with youtube and other stuff and while sounds good in practice I wonder if it makes people less willing to switch to the Fediverse because you don’t need to anymore.
Aah I didn’t knew this issue from Lemmy, really interesting. Creating a decentralized platform raises many new challenges that are hard to solve!
Now I get why piefed approaches moderation in a different manner and tries to be more resource friendly.
Thanks for the info! Really interesting stuff :)
Yeah one has to be careful with statistics and I couldn’t find the whole Lemmy in one place so it’s also not representative of the whole Lemmy.
I thought ActivityPub did scale well and was ATProto (Bluesky) which had a lot more issues. I mean I can comment on Peertube using my Mastodon account meaning the whole Fediverse is properly connected and we are 1M MAU so I would say it already scaled good.
I don’t know how to check for the whole lemmy but seems it’s growing a bit but the MAU dropped a bit probably because of august: https://fedidb.com/servers/lemmy.world
But the fediverse in general doesn’t grow too much except when a scandal happens.
Yup indeed!
I think talking openly about the issues to people and explaining there are better ways that exist is the way to go. If they are in with the idea entering the Fediverse is a no brainer.
For me it’s crazy how many public institutions are on private social medias and not open ones where they can set their own server and rules. It’s also crazy how social norms have been decided by the top private companies in the world, if that’s not a distopian I don’t know what is it.
There’s no easy or hard way, if they are willing to join they will.
Why are you in Lemmy? Explain your reasons to them and why you decided to join and hopefully they understand and join too, that’s all you can do. Forcing people into the Fediverse won’t make them use it of they don’t believe in it.
If you follow a generic hashtag it quickly becomes too much, what I do is follow people and very niche hashtags that I know it won’t bring that much content into the feed but that I’m interested in.
If you really don’t care that much just go to Mastodon and leave bluesky as there is a better decentralized place already. If everyone on bluesky went to Mastodon instead the Fediverse would get a lot more attention and get better too.
Specially seeing you in Lemmy, why did you leave reddit then (I’m assuming you did sorry if it’s not the case)? For me was precisely to not give that much power to a single company and this applies to lots of things not just twitter. Centralizing power is bad and bluesky is exactly that at the end.
I want to support people that really tries to solve this issues and not just people who takes this as an opportunity to be the next Elon Musk, ups I mean twitter.
First of all, as long as it doesn’t replace search I’m fine with more options, I don’t like when a company forces me stuff, that’s it. I just think this is pointing to a future where search disappears and I don’t quite like that.
You might dislike a direct answer but young people don’t. The design of the applications can encourage certain types of behaviors, can spread misinformation and promote racism as we have seen in many social media now.
Things like Instagram and TikTok stress me out by the speed they show content and I could conclude no one will use those but then you see the new generations and how they even listen to music there, just the chorus of a song and go to the next one. This way of consuming information is being promoted by how the apps are designed; it is no coincidence that depression is increasing among young people.
You can say that in principle people can use more responsibly this types of social media, but that’s not the reality when we have algorithms trying to maximize the time we spend on the phone. Also, how do you know that companies don’t add biases to LLMs? Turns out Gorg (the LLM on twitter) they have added to the prompt to not criticize Elon or Trump. That’s the current problems of LLMs is that we don’t have context and even if there is context, if you have to put effort into it people won’t do it. This happens to scientific articles where people never check the sources, imagine with other stuff…
I honestly like LLMs and I think they are fascinating and very useful in a lot of situations! And efforts like Perplexity gives me a bit more faith than google just throwing an LLM that suggests to eat rocks. And while you might see that eating rocks shouldn’t be done, there’s this bias that can be build behind any LLM that affects in a way that will be hard to avoid or notice. Same way current algorithms affects us more than we think they do and polarizes opinions.
I mean will see where this goes, I just want companies to take the matter seriously.
I think it’s simply that getting a direct answer is easier than reading different forums with different views and come up with your idea. That doesn’t mean people want google search to stop searching. We have gemini, if I want to use gemini I can go to gemini. I don’t get why everything has to be AI. We can have multiple tools, not everything out there is a nail.
They are still testing it and it’s not open source yet so no, no one can open instances. You can join the queue: https://loops.video/ but the android app has to be side loaded.
But before saying to people I would wait until it launches officially.
Very clear and nice video!
With that said, I was a bit disappointed when I joined the Fediverse about the interaction between social medias. I usually used reddit and very little twitter and I was excited when I saw the Fediverse and that you could even follow from other Social media but from lemmy you cannot follow people from mastodon and from mastodon you can technically follow communities but you see all replies and the feed becomes overwhelming while in Lemmy I choose if I open the comment section for a specific entry.
So I ended up with the same number of accounts on the fediverse than in centralized platforms which is fine but I think Fediverse sells this too much. For me decentralization is a good enough point to stay.
And about the AI thingy and the feeds, I think we are just seeing the early Fediverse same as early internet but I’m sure in the future we will have apps that create a feed for you if you want to so to me that’s something that we also shouldn’t sell as a positive OR negative. I think this is something that will simply change as the Fediverse grows.
But this is not a criticism of the video! Just my personal thoughts :)
Honestly it’s a hard topic and I keep changing my mind on it. But currently this is my view:
If you point everyone to one place decentralization loses the meaning. I think people need to learn what decentralization is. It’s an important issue to be honest and people have to be on board knowing what they are doing. It will be hard for sure but otherwise if a new centralized competitor comes into town, why wouldn’t they switch if they don’t care?
At the moment twitter is the most affected social media but people has to understand that this isn’t just about twitter or reddit or whatever but about our rights to choose and decide where we want our data and who handles that. If people don’t know the system they won’t be aware of the issues.
With the Fediverse I’ve seen a lot of people worried about privacy and so on because they have to choose and suddenly they think about all the consequences. That’s a good thing that hopefully will make them think twice about joining the next new centralized system.
A language is not a topic that’s why it makes sense and rules on servers that are on your language (and probably your own country) probably will have rules more aligned with your vision too. It makes sense on a moderation point of view.
A server that is about technology or art, doesn’t say anything about how they might allow their users to behave. I just think it’s misleading and the focus of a server shouldn’t be about things you like but the way you like to be treated and how they manage your data which is at the end what they handle.
I think it’s a bad idea to have each server have one topic which I know is often how Fediverse is sold but I think it’s not good.
I don’t know you but I have more than one interest and I don’t want a server to be about one interest and that’s it. I want the server to be fair and have rules about discrimination and so on. I can choose the topics I want to follow thanks to federation that’s the whole point, the server should focus on the moderation side.
Same as before: you have to take that into consideration only if you want. Probably you never cared at all when you signed to a new app in big corporation and just gave away all your data but now that there are options suddenly everyone cares and it’s annoying.
This are important topics, it was time to take them seriously. This is precisely why federation is important - the instances and users can moderate, it’s not a single organism that has absolute control over eveything.
Referencing Matrix when he says “why do my eyes hurt” just after waking from Matrix… It’s the same here: we will all get use to have more freedom of choice, now it seems more complicated because we never had that freedom and never worried about a lot of topics that are important.
I mean it’s really depressing even being in Europe honestly but at the same time it’s a huge opportunity. It’s time to take it :) Let’s show them how decentralization AND open source can be a new standard! I’m seeing the same trend in Linux too and this is so important as well.
Also a lot of new projects to help decentralization are emerging, check https://spritely.institute/ which there’s Christine Lemmer-Webber a co-author of the ActivityPub protocol :)
I agree with the whole thing but remember that the Fediverse as it grows it will face the same challenges as any other social media does when it grows. I 100% agree that it’s important that social media has to be decentralized and away from corporations but as people join the Fediverse, corporations will pick up on that and I’m sure we will end up with private companies doing apps for the Fediverse that will contain algorithms and all that kind of stuff. (I mean you can already see threads which is federated with the Fediverse).
Having the Fediverse doesn’t guarantee that everything will be nice and good (though it’s a very important step) but the same that happens with e-mail nowadays with google that we are all almost using the same platform even though it is a decentralized system and it’s not open source.
The Fediverse is decentralized AND open source nowadays but that doesn’t mean it’s how it will always be. I hope people remembers in the future that it’s important to support the open source platforms we have in the early days and they don’t jump ships when a private company opens a new fancy app. Let’s remember the lessons we just learned and remember, we currently have a decentralized AND open source social media because we have a lot of people doing hard work on it, let’s support them and educate people about the importance of the topic.
People mention WWIII because of them. Hopefully WWIII doesn’t happen despite of them.