Another day and another nail in another awesome online community that has terrible leadership. Where will the communities move to? What new areas of the Internet will be created?
There were 2 posts in the last 24 hours. It's not thriving by any measure.
In fact, you can even interact with communities hosted on a Lemmy instance from a Mastodon instance, or Misskey. Heck, probably Pixelfed, though I haven't checked. Such is the beauty of the fediverse and protocols over platforms.
I quite like the term 'Threadiverse' that's been going around lately.
Content on instances can disappear at a moment's notice if it goes down. My favorite part about reddit is the amount of information it has that is well-indexed by google.
These Lemmy and kbin alternatives might fulfill the moment-to-moment chatter, but it worries me that there's no guarantee of continuity for information. The best you can do is be discerning about the instance you pick. If there was a mechanism for distributing information across instances so it's saved, or some other assurance it'd make me happier about it.
Until identity transcends instances (shared identity databases between all the fediverse), communities are portable, and data peered across mirrors/nodes, it won’t work in a way that promotes longevity.
The fediverse in its current incarnation benefits those that use social media more like a chat room than a wiki. But losing your account to the entire fediverse when an instance goes down seems way worse than an unused community disappearing. It’s like taking an email address from an email host that spun up yesterday for fun, and hoping you’ll keep access to it.
Who knows, maybe there will be an easy way to get stuff published out to the proper web. Things like community FAQs or guides that would be broadly of use. I think the loss of the conversations about minutiae will just be a fact though if that migration happens.
I bet that a considerable fraction of Reddit users became users by googling something and finding an interesting Reddit discussion about the topic in the first results of Google.
I do wish discord were federated. That's my main gripe with discord, it's not federated and I can't bring my own client like I could on IRC. Oh well, with luck the enshittification will happen soon to put people into the mood for trying something new. Advocating for something like Matrix to discord users now is hopeless, just pissing into the wind. I've tried it, but nobody cares about problems they might have with discord in the future when it's working fine today.
Other social media platforms are largely about the individual, the personality. The content, while present, seems to be secondary. Influencers run amok and are an advertisers wet dream.
Squabbles, self-admittedly [0], tries to combine these approaches.
When I look at their home page, as well as a few communities, the only thing that really stands out on each post is the "title bar" with someone's name and a follow link. There's no quick way to see what the content is about (unless it's an image), without actually diving into the meat of the content. I can't make a quick judgement call of whether I want to read the content or not, unless I base it on the person's name.
For some, that may be great. For me, it misses the mark and falls too far on the Twitter side of the hybrid approach.
If people find it a useful format, then I hope the site thrives. But I don't think it's the right fit for the niche that made reddit great.
If there was ever a time to promote Mastadon, it's now.
make sure you spell it correctly if you do, though
https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/groups-implementation/...
There are groups on Mastodon that you can join and follow.
Neither Mastodon nor ActivityPup are a real replacement for the use case of Reddit. They serve very different purposes.
Great startup opportunity btw, but hopefully whatever the new platform is will be foss and federated, ideally like email so you can keep in touch after the platform dies
I heard some people suggest rss based tech as the glue to bind people together
Here's an example community:
I think it is really cool that people are trying new businesses models, ad driven social media has all sorts of awful incentives, hopefully one of you folks can win the next round.
Question 1 is can they find cooperative mods who will not betray them.
Question 2 is will they steer the community in the same way as the previous mods? Mods, for better or for worse, dictate the culture of a community.
Q2) No. The communities are already failing just because the exodus of power users is causing a lack of self-moderation via up/down votes. Add to that random tyrants who haven't built the community, and there is no way for them to survive.
You also won't have any new features that you actually want, because they haven't listened from the get go and have never been responsive because you are the product not the client.