It feels like this is how social media and the Internet should have been all along. Truly run for the interest and good of humanity, and out of the hands of corporate control and profiteering. People, out of their own generosity and goodwill, host their own instances and let others use it for free. It’s such an awesome example of humans helping each other and working to create abundance for everyone to enjoy.
I believe that everyone putting their time, money, and effort into building up the Fediverse - the developers, server owners, mods, and everyone else who keeps it alive and interesting - is helping to make the Internet (and by extension, the world) a better place. You all are awesome. Keep up the amazing work.
Also hi, I’m new here. I found out about Lemmy today, and I was so intrigued that I spent all day learning about it lol.
At some point, when instances get big enough, the large costs may require running ads for upkeep. But ideally it should stop at “just covering the costs” and not needing to do the capitalism thing to keep making more and more money every quarter
I agree with the community aspect, and I’m also happy about the open source part. I saw your post in my RSS reader as I was going through my other news and interests. It feels so good to not have the stuff I see decided by some big corporation intending to maximize my engagement at the expense of everything else.
If anyone is interested in RSS, let me know. I highly recommend it, it’s so refreshing to be able to follow most of what you’re interested in, in one app. Also a small app, ~10 MB vs many news sites’ apps that are ~150 MB. Also no ads, ability to dismiss read articles.
(Also yes I realize that Reddit supports RSS too, but I heard that they would have taken it away long ago if it their internal tools didn’t heavily depend on it. The API changes make this seem likely)
It really does feel a bit like the old days tm (IRC and random PHP boards for me) and it gives me a bit of hope that some of the spirit of the old Wild West Internet is still here. To be honest I engaged more with lemmy in the last few days, then with anything in the last 5 Years.
Unfortunately, I think the feediverse in its unpolished, unoptimised and non-compliant state will run into some legal trouble as soon as it hits a certain popularity threshold.
*Looking at you EU and your relentless drive towards censorship >.>
In the worst case, we will have to rebuild a feediverse in the darker corners of the net.
Ha Yeah the EU and Canada aren’t going to like their citizens having access to such an open and free method of communication, I personally think it’s more likely that the technology resistant elements in government get displaced than progress gets halted.
Even China hasn’t managed to stop online communities where people express themselves freely
I want to see it grow just to prove the concept works at scale. I genuinely believe it will and I’m a cynical bastard.
Isn’t Mastodon already proving that, with 13M users?
It does (along with many better apps), but for the microblogging (like twitter), not for link aggregators (like lemmy or reddit)
Interesting, is there some significant difference in the scalability challenges between the two? As someone who knows virtually nothing about either (I never could get into mastodon), they seem similar enough to me.
Imo scaling challenges are more in the user side than software side.
One big difference is that the Twitter model is driven by individual users, whereas the reddit model is driven by communities, and a community driven model benefits significantly more from a greater centralization. For example, on reddit, subreddit names are one and done. Once someone makes r/leagueoflegends, for instance, that name is taken, and has the benefit of name recognition for new users. But on lemmy, people could make c/leagueoflegends on as many instances as there are. And given the increased visibility on local and the widespread defederation among major instances, the community ends up a lot more fragmented.
I’m very curious how this type of platform might perform under mass adoption. If it started getting anywhere close to reddit level traffic I’m sceptical how well the more popular instances would scale, and how the people that can currently afford to run them would be able to afford the infrastructure needed to keep up with millions of users.
there will be updates to help with scaling, but also in general we should be trending to smaller home instances and working to integrate meta-community features IMO. Its generally easy and affordable to run a server for oneself and a couple thousand users. Its when you grow well beyond these scales that things become an issue.
There is not a ton of value to being on a large instance, esp as the federation code gets smoothed out.
Part of the problem will be how to make new users understand this, though. Lots of people will be coming from something like reddit where they’ll just want to sign up through a popular instance and likely won’t fully understand what that means.
More advanced users will understand this, but it’s not then I would be worried about.
Yeah I think that’s an important task for us users, communicating how we use the fediverse and which tools we find helpfull.
We also need to be making tools and filling lists, helping people discover and learn about the platform isn’t something we can leave upto a corporate advertising department, it’s upto us.
It feels like the early Internet: it’s still being actively improved, it’s noncommercial, people are weirder, people are passionate, fewer bots, it’s kind of exciting.
I have no idea if it will succeed, but it’s a nice feeling.
Is the federated internet gonna be the equivalent of hippie communes for Gen Y & Gen Z?
Go look at the solar punk instance, it’s certainly looking that way 😀
I think it’s great that more people are realising what’s possible, open source isn’t just going up change the internet into what it should have been but it can change everything from printers requiring proprietary ink to the major excesses of the political machine.
The working people have ALWAYS done the work and when we get together and do it for ourselves, and each other, we can build a world that exists for people not profits.
