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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • I don’t think it’s inevitable Threads will have a better user experience than non-corporate apps. Meta has different goals and will optimize the user experience to drive profits. Look at how they continuously make Facebook and Instagram worse to drive engagement.

    Also, see Reddit. Apollo was one dude’s project that blows the official app out of the water. And all the other apps scrambling to support Lemmy benefit from apps like Apollo and Reddit is Fun lessons in UX. It’s early days but we’re already seeing Lemmy apps with a lot of potential.

    Linux is another example. Technical issues for new users aside, there’s a lot of beautiful, easy to use desktops that blow windows 10/11 out of the water. And other less new user friendly options for power users are available as well.

    The community driven approach has been demonstrated to work because it’s only goal is to give the community a good experience.



  • This has always been true of course but we used to have much faster turnover in social media sites. The current players have been around so long they seem like they can’t fail. But it’s not a coincidence that we’ve been riding a wave of cheap capital since about the time the current players started to dominate. Now that the free money tap is shut off, everyone’s scrambling to be profitable. The grow as fast as possible and never care about making money paradigm is over.

    We’re basically in the ??? phase of “steal underpants, ???, profit” underpants gnome economic model.

    I think we’re also seeing the ad model start to break down. It was always a Ponzi scheme. Everyone hates ads and goes out of their way to avoid them. If less and less people engage with ads, no one is going to pay as much because it’s not worth it. This forces companies to be more and more invasive in their data collection and ad targeting which erodes trust in the companies and degraded the user experience.

    We’re seeing both these things converge and it’s shaking up the entire internet order.







  • We’re still very early on. It’s not going to be a digg to Reddit style thing. But Reddit will keep making bad decisions and people will trickle over here over time and with each influx, things will have improved. I’ve been here a couple weeks and it seems like every day it gets better.

    Also, the technical barriers aren’t as scary to people make it out to be. Yeah we won’t get all the boomers, which is very sad. But I’ve got some very tech illiterate friends who have started using memmy with no problems.

    And do we even want to get as big as Reddit? Reddit was great 15 years ago. Then teenagers got smart phones and the olds spread out past Facebook and it’s been on decline ever since. I’d be perfectly happy if it got to like 20% the size of Reddit. Maybe not even that big.