Add it all up, and the social web is changing in three crucial ways: It’s going from public to private; it’s shifting from growth and engagement, which broadly involves building good products that people like, to increasing revenue no matter the tradeoff; and it’s turning into an entertainment business. It turns out there’s no money in connecting people to each other, but there’s a fortune in putting ads between vertically scrolling videos that lots of people watch. So the “social media” era is giving way to the “media with a comments section” era, and everything is an entertainment platform now. Or, I guess, trying to do payments. Sometimes both. It gets weird.
As far as how humans connect to one another, what’s next appears to be group chats and private messaging and forums, returning back to a time when we mostly just talked to the people we know. Maybe that’s a better, less problematic way to live life. Maybe feed and algorithms and the “global town square” were a bad idea. But I find myself desperately looking for new places that feel like everyone’s there. The place where I can simultaneously hear about NBA rumors and cool new AI apps, where I can chat with my friends and coworkers and Nicki Minaj. For a while, there were a few platforms that felt like they had everybody together, hanging out in a single space. Now there are none.
I’d love to follow that up with, “and here’s the new thing coming next!” But I’m not sure there is one. There’s simply no place left on the internet that feels like a good, healthy, worthwhile place to hang out. It’s not just that there’s no sufficiently popular place; I actually think enough people are looking for a new home on the internet that engineering the network effects wouldn’t be that hard. It’s just that the platform doesn’t exist. It’s not LinkedIn or Tumblr, it’s not upstarts like Post or Vero or Spoutable or Hive Social. It’s definitely not Clubhouse or BeReal. It doesn’t exist.
Long-term, I’m bullish on “fediverse” apps like Mastodon and Bluesky, because I absolutely believe in the possibility of the social web, a decentralized universe powered by ActivityPub and other open protocols that bring us together without forcing us to live inside some company’s business model. Done right, these tools can be the right mix of “everybody’s here” and “you’re still in control.”
But the fediverse isn’t ready. Not by a long shot. The growth that Mastodon has seen thanks to a Twitter exodus has only exposed how hard it is to join the platform, and more importantly how hard it is to find anyone and anything else once you’re there. Lemmy, the go-to decentralized Reddit alternative, has been around since 2019 but has some big gaps in its feature offering and its privacy policies — the platform is absolutely not ready for an influx of angry Redditors. Neither is Kbin, which doesn’t even have mobile apps and cautions new users that it is “very early beta” software. Flipboard and Mozilla and Tumblr are all working on interesting stuff in this space, but without much to show so far. The upcoming Threads app from Instagram should immediately be the biggest and most powerful thing in this space, but I’m not exactly confident in Meta’s long-term interest in building a better social platform.
Tell me you never experienced Usenet or the internet before Facebook and friends fucked it up, without telling me. We literally used to have all the things he’s talking about, with much less of the drawbacks, before the internet became commercialized. Now the commercial web’s unsuitability has finally reached the point of undeniability, and we’re trying to figure out how to get back to that.
Yeah, and the author all but freely admits that. But they’re apparently willing to throw all that away to have it “feel like everyone’s there.”
Maybe this is me being uncharitable, but to be blunt it sounds like he just wants to feel like he’s sitting at the cool kids’ table.
I think they mostly just want to be able to have parasocial relationships with celebrities and influencers. Arnold Schwarzenegger would give advice occasionally on the bodybuilding subreddit, IIRC. Having your favorite YouTuber dip into the comments section for a quick moment just to say a thing or two was something Reddit/Twitter had that was really cool.
The fediverse kind of has that. Shout-out to Technology Connections, who is on Mastodon - @TechConnectify - as well as Not Just Bikes, who is @notjustbikes on Mastodon but is considering moving to Bluesky. (If you’re on Kbin, you can follow them from Kbin at https://kbin.social/u/@TechConnectify@mas.to and https://kbin.social/u/@notjustbikes@notjustbikes.com respectively.) But most influencers aren’t on the fediverse, outside of huge nerds.
The issue is that until we have a Reddit-like service which has a plurality of Reddit users and a Twitter-like service that has a plurality of Twitter users we’re going to be in this weird state. Both Reddit and Twitter still exist. They still have people who make posts there. Some celebrities still post there. While Twitter is finally collapsing due to its dumb rate limiting, Reddit has enough bots to maintain the illusion of being an active community, and plenty of Google SEO to get new users to move there. It’s obvious that - while splintered - both those places aren’t going to magically disappear.
Then we have Bluesky (which I predict will be a monster once it comes out of invite-only mode, if only because it’s built up so much hype) and Threads. Both are targeting Twitter specifically, and I predict that one will win. Jimmy Wales (of Wikipedia) is also working on his own Twitter clone, which may be a dark horse in the race as well.
I’m not confident that the fediverse will “win” on the Twitter clone side. While I expect that Threads will get a lot of “normal” people on it who use Instagram, a lot of the fediverse is cutting Threads off ASAP to try and prevent “embrace, extend, extinguish” from leeching people from Mastodon into Threads. Bluesky seems to be a frat house at the moment (from what I’ve heard) but it may self-regulate. It’s already seen a recent spike due to Twitter’s rate limiting.
My prediction is in 2-3 years we will be back in the same game we were playing before, but with new players.
Honestly, that’s kind of even sadder, IMO.
(Especially when you consider most of those celebrities weren’t running their own accounts, they were handled by PR teams, so you weren’t actually interacting with them, either. But even if they had been-- like, guys, go make IRL friends. I know that’s agonizingly hard, I struggle with it too, but this shit ain’t healthy.)
I don’t think you’re being uncharitable. The author sounds like they can’t cope with anything that isn’t slick, polished, and already popular. Frankly, Lemmy doesn’t need people who can’t deal with growing pains.
Over the past decade or so, gamers have been psychologically conditioned to accept lootboxes and microtransactions as a standard part of the gaming experience (especially younger people who don’t even remember a time before lootboxes).
Similarly, I think the “corporate internet” era has also forcefully conditioned FOMO onto the majority of people. So many people coming over to Lemmy/Kbin have literally said something along the lines of, “I don’t like the fragmentation, if I’m not subscribed to every single instance then I feel like I’m missing out.”
The missing out part is a real frustration of this format. I’m finding it difficult to find those niche communities full of passionate discussion like people keep saying exist. I’ve seen several communities of the same name, none of which are very active, but which would be active if there was just one of them.
The individualized instances and communities have their benefits, but they come at the cost of discoverability and activity-per-community.
Spam was a serious issue for Usenet.
But you gotta admit Usenet was super niche and was never ever on its way to becoming a thing usable by people from all walks of life. This is why AOL became a thing…and folks like us similarly criticized it as a commercial walled garden!
While that was true about AOL and also true about the web today, going back to clunky services only techies can use isn’t the answer, and the current state of the fediverse is pretty clunky. But I have high hopes for how this space will evolve.
It’s funny you use AOL and Usenet as the examples… in March 1994, AOL started offering Usenet access to all its users, and regardless of anyone’s personal opinion on that, there followed many years when the slick corporate offering existed as a gateway to the community-operated federated network, and technologically it all worked fine. The only reason that model got replaced with “Facebook user <-> Facebook app <-> Facebook protocol and network <-> Facebook advertising and business model” was because any company with the financial ability to make it happen also had the financial motivation to create its own little walled garden for its users to exist in instead.
They actually might have looked at what happened to AOL (had a walled garden and were wildly profitable, chose to add to it something compelling that anyone else could also provide, then got out-competed on that offering from all sides and reduced to a footnote) as an example of why they needed to create their own little walled garden from the beginning.
What do you mean? Usenet was insanely popular back in the day, and not reserved to techies at all. All you needed was an email client, it was way easier than the fediverse, and a million times more polished.
Most of my family have to this day never even heard of Usenet, but they all have Instagram and Facebook accounts. The scale of Usenet “popularity” isn’t even remotely in the ballpark of the modern social web/apps. There are more people on meta apps than people who even had access to the internet when Usenet was relevant.
I don’t understand. Of course your normie family hasn’t heard of the big social app of 30 years ago, how is that even relevant ?
The scale of Usenet popularity was enormous for the time, roughly 15% of internet users were on usenet. In terms of today’s internet population that would be around 800M. That’s not niche, and that’s definitely in the ballpark of modern social media (double the size of reddit). There were a million different groups on a million different subjects, it was not for techies only you had active groups about gardening, ancient greek philosophy, writing, etc…
But most of all it was not clunky or difficult to use. The reason AOL “won” is because they shipped a quadrillion of those CD-Roms with free internet hours around the world, prompting people to try the internet out and those new users could discover chatrooms in one click. I’ll agree with you that the fediverse in its current state is clunky but usenet back in the day was far from it. It had fewer functionalities but was very straightforward to use.
They took so long to see how companies have been turning Internet to a place of communication and sharing into a cable TV with comment section. And to be honest, after seeing what happens when you put everyone in the same place, at the same time, with the same tools, I think I prefer there’s some effort to be taken to join a community, and keep those communities small. Makes trolling harder, if you have to take your time to join a community, you aren’t going to burn your account so easily. Moderation is way easier if the community is small (there’s absolute horror stories and sh*tshows about this in the social media companies) and yes… I’d rather have a place that is run by volunteers and the community itself, lest we have another Spez telling us what we can or we can’t do with our community.
I don’t know, I’ve never given a f⁺ck about talking with a celebrity (and when you “could” it was an illusion most of the time, community managers are a thing, you know, and in 20.000 messages, yours not gonna stand out, my sweet summer child) and the company run Internet lately sounds more and more like a giant ad gallery, where everyone wants to sell you something and maybe, you get something worth paying attention to.
And of course, The Verge isn’t going to give the Fediverse a good bump and a wink, no, they are going to bash it because for them, it is better that another company takes on the place Twitter, Reddit and the rest is leaving now… the other option is Communism, Satan or something!
I have the IQ of a seedless grape, and I managed to sign up for both Lemmy and kbin.
I don’t want a duplicate of Reddit here. Sure, I hope the niche/hyper-local subreddits will create communities here, but this feels new, fresh, full of opportunity. Growing pains are a good sign and temporary. I really like that karma is gone (kbin does have the boost).
Things change over time – nothing lasts forever. Something something improvise, adapt, overcome.
I’ve been going outside, the library, and engaging with my kids. Lemmy and Discord do scratch a social itch but they aren’t the time sink reddit and Twitter were
Ah yes, this outside I’ve heard so much about
There’s even grass to touch!
All very true. Lemmy is the closest thing to a Reddit alternative that I’ve found so far. But the signup process was kinda hard, and the user experience of the apps (I’m using mlem now) needs work. It’s confusing and clunky.
I’m genuinely confused - I made my Lemmy account a few weeks ago but wasn’t the sign up just “email”, “password”, captcha, click email link, done? Isn’t that the exact sign up of reddit and most websites?
Sure - some instances have gated signups and require some questions / prompts - but a bunch don’t ? What am I missing? I’ve seen the “confusing sign up” comment a few times
Just echoing what you said here. It’s incredibly simple. Some don’t even require an email.
Check out this new beautiful thing: https://lemmy.bolha.one/lemmy.world/
source code: https://github.com/rystaf/mlmym
edit: added link to the source code
Oh. Oh wow wow. Seems to work on different instances as well? This I tried for VLemmy.net :
Now we just need a Lemmy Enhancement Suite browser extension for FireFox.
True, almost all parts are there, but thise need to be better integrated.
The harder it is to get started, the more like “original Reddit” it will be.
It was fun when Reddit was obscure. It got less fun when everyone and their cousin was on Reddit, it turned into other social media.
Lemmy may be more resistant to that. Hear me out… With Reddit (and Digg, and Facebook, and Twitter, and every dead or dying platform you can think of), you’ve got a single company owning everything on that platform. When short-term profit ultimately dictates they shittify the platform, it takes a tremendous amount of willpower and forethought to resist.
Willpower and forethought the various platform owners clearly lacked.
But Lemmy is an open source project, and anyone can spin up a Lemmy platform, then join the fediverse. If one platform’s owners decide to shittify, it doesn’t affect the rest, and everyone can easily migrate to another with minimal fuss.
My impression is that this makes Lemmy much better situated to avoid ever becoming a late-stage Reddit.
Just tried wefwef and it’s actually quite good. Extra impressive when you realize it’s just a webapp
I found it to be buggy and missing basic features at first, but it keeps updating almost every other day and now it’s how I use lemmy!
It’s better to bask in this island of growth and engagement than to sink down a rabbit hole of revenue that yields nothing. It’s such a satisfying feeling to talk to people you know and respect instead of diving into a karmic spiral full of bots flooding the place with toxicity. When the author says, “There’s simply no place left on the internet that feels like a good, healthy, worthwhile place to hang out,” I think that somehow this is a good place. For the first time in a long while I feel compelled to join the discussion and share my thoughts. It’s true that “the Fediverse isn’t there yet,” but that’s what we’re here for. Just the thought that some things are still halfway in the oven, or haven’t even found their way in yet, makes the whole experience much more rewarding. And remember, there are no ads. Every day I miss Reddit and Twitter less (I had closed my account there a long time ago). I believe Lemmy has a bright future ahead of it, the success of which I believe depends on preventing uncontrolled growth. Time will tell.
TLDR - Reddits success was not in its variety but in its ease of use. We need a central place to simple make accounts and login to that is always up and stable and we need a unified front end for searching for communities.
Lemmy needs a front page and centralized signup, login and search spot. It is a waste of time and effort to explain the mechanics of how it operates to new users. If someone can easily signup, login and search communities (and create them) then the mechanics of how the system works can be explained at a later date.
The biggest issues for Lemmy right now and in the medium term are going to be scale, finding communities and signups.
There is so many people from Reddit and other sites that the current mega communities get bogged down and start being unusable which only adds to the confusion on signing up.
There are some ways around this but none are easy or obvious. A new user will know less popular servers to make an account on if the main ones are inaccessible. Also the log in at one server and you can sue the rest is not something that is quickly explainable.
Finding communities is also a challenge though it’s getting better with various sights and apps starting to pop up and we still need a lot of the main ones from Reddit created here but even a medium sized Reddit community would render a Lemmy server unstable.
Gotta wonder how Ernest feels, having kbin go from his niche side project to being name-checked in The Verge (even if it’s in the context of pointing out it’s not ready for prime time) in the space of like two weeks.
I would argue that Mastodon and friends are a “good, healthy, worthwhile place to hang out”, at least it really feels that way to me. It seems to have attracted a really wholesome crowd that really delights me considering I’m used to it being less of a crowd but just a handful of techie people hanging out in an obscure clubhouse. All the same people I have followed there are still there yet I now have a buffet of variety to chat with.
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I haven’t found Lemmy confusing to use at all. And I found that to be a big surprise. I expected more hurdles to have to jump to get started like Mastodon.
The one big issue so far has been the lag, upvotes not being sent, comments/communities not loading, etc. But the reasons for that are pretty understandable in my opinion.
Yeah, Lemmy was comparitively pretty easy to get going with. Honestly, I still haven’t really figured out Mastodon. I get how to use it, but discovering people I want to follow has proven go be a big problem.
I think the “Fediverse is hard to join” thing is a myth corporate are pushing. I signed up for Mastodon and it took me 1 minute (mostly because I had to open up my email to verify it); same for lemmy.
This. Is it really that hard to join Mastodon or Lemmy? Isn’t the only difference that you have to select a server. Kinda like World of Warcraft. I don’t think I heard anyone saying that WoW was tough to join. Tough to play maybe lol.
The fediverse can be tricky to sign up to and once you are there it is hard to find communities/interest to subscribe to. But I am learning how. And it is working for me. Another fediverse user gave me a webpage that helped me find more communities to join. Lemmy Explorer you can select the Home icon at the top to set your home federated server. Kbin.socal for me.
I even found a Baldur’s Gate community and a Calvin and Hobbes community.
Maybe it’s different on Lemmy, but signing up to the fediverse via kbin couldn’t have been easier. Pretty much the same as signing up for any other web site and the federated servers just show up automatically in the search. Once you’re subscribed local and federated communities look pretty much identical.
Why do these articles always mention how hard it is to join Mastodon? It’s not. Creating an account takes less than a minute.
Granted, I don’t understand how the fediverse works, but I hadn’t even heard the word “fediverse” when I made my account.
