[nullityrofl]

Federated services will never become mainstream. This is just the reality that people need to come to accept. I find them heavily talked about in circles with my colleagues and in my profession but the attraction of decentralized services just isn't there for the vast majority of people.

I find Lemmy frustrating to use and it isn't just growing pains: it's the same reason I find Mastodon frustrating. Do I care if [e-mail] matters? Do I care if I use lemmy.world or do I have to find some server? Which server?

Centralization works. It's convenient. It doesn't require a user guide. It's approachable for laypersons.

This is just the reality. I wish people would focus on building services that meet peoples needs and not just as an expression of their idealogies.

[redundantly]

> Federated services will never become mainstream

That's kind of the point

Mastadon, Lemmy, Etc, they're not replacements for Reddit or Facebook. They're an alternative.

A social network doesn't require millions of users to be useful. It's okay that they're not for everyone.

> Centralization works. It's convenient. It doesn't require a user guide. It's approachable for laypersons.

For a technically inclined person on a largely technology focused forum, you sound an awful lot like a luddite.

There used to be a high barrier to entry for accessing the internet and making use of it. That changed over time. The same will likely happen for these types of non-centralised services.

[nullityrofl]

> you sound an awful lot like a luddite.

I'm not sure if this is meant to be some kind of childish insult or gotcha but no: I'm talking in representation of luddites.

> A social network doesn't require millions of users to be useful. It's okay that they're not for everyone.

That might be true if you only ever want to read technical things with a technical audience in a technical forum. But that's not why Reddit is valuable or popular. Lemmy is an alternative to Reddit like water is an alternative to beer. Sure, they exist in the same kind of universe, but no sane person would tell you to switch from water to beer because they don't meet the same needs.

Reddit is popular because I can read /r/netsec one day and /r/lawncare the next. Because when I wanted to learn to make my own coffee at home I knew I could just go to /r/espresso and get a 101. When my 3D printer broke, I knew I could go to /r/bambulab and ask for help. When the historic winter we just had in NorCal ripped shingles off my roof, I knew I could go to /r/roofing to ask for advice.

Sure, you might want to live in a world where you only talk to software engineers about software and maybe Lemmy is a good fit for that.

That wasn't my point, though.

[redundantly]

> I'm not sure if this is meant to be some kind of childish insult or gotcha but no: I'm talking in representation of luddites.

No, it's an observation.

You're insisting things have to work a certain way in order for them to have value and be usable. Things don't have to operate in a specific, fixed way.

Saying decentralisation will never catch on because it doesn't fit your description of accessibility is like saying someone won't be able to operate in society without knowing how to read or write cursive.

Things change. How people learn about stuff, how they use technologies, how they think about them, it all changes. It was once a widely shared opinion that computers would never catch on. Or that the internet wouldn't catch on. Or any other number of things wouldn't catch on. And they did, despite anyone's objections that it would.

As people's mindsets change, as technology advances, so will how it's used. And you don't seem to be open to that idea. Hence the luddite comparison.

[nullityrofl]

> You're insisting things have to work a certain way in order for them to have value and be usable. Things don't have to operate in a specific, fixed way.

No, I'm not. I'm staying on the topic of the thread you're posting in: Reddit's future and where people may or may not migrate to. You're doing exactly what I accused the creators of Fediverse technologies are doing: fixating on the ideology and taking an opportunity to preach.

I see the value of the Fediverse. I see the intent. I understand it. It's not complex.

But it isn't a replacement for Reddit. I don't even think you're arguing that. I think you're trying to get me to debate some strawman. I never said the Fediverse has no value. I said it has no mainstream appeal so long as people prioritize the ideology of the technology over the use case.

> Things change. How people learn about stuff, how they use technologies, how they think about them, it all changes. It was once a widely shared opinion that computers would never catch on. Or that the internet wouldn't catch on. Or any other number of things wouldn't catch on. And they did, despite anyone's objections that it would.

This is an argument that things _can_ change not that things _will_ change. Plenty of things never caught on. On that note, Diaspora existed as a widely available alternative to Digg when Digg died.

But people ended up on Reddit anyway.

[redundantly]

> Federated services will never become mainstream

> Centralization works... It's approachable for laypersons.

You are arguing that things will not change because it doesn't work in a very specific way. I'm replying to what you said. This isn't a straw man argument.

There doesn't need to be a direct replacement for Reddit. Things don't have to continue to work like that. Your assumption of what's difficult to do isn't an absolute. People have shown they're able to adopt new ideas, new ways of doing things.

> I'm talking in representation of luddites.

You're not giving enough credit to society. They're not cattle. They don't just sit in a field and chew cud.

Mindsets and ideologies change. How technology is used changes. Your insistence that there has to be a direct, fully equivalent replacement for Reddit to be successful is incorrect.

[nullityrofl]

I'd take a wager that we'll see Digg 3.0/Reddit 2.0 before we'll see widespread adoption of the Fediverse.

I don't think people are cattle and I think that is a deliberate attempt to misrepresent my position. I don't think people are cattle. I think they are anything but: I think they have made a conscious decision about what they want and value.

What I think is that people have become accustomed to having a wide array of information on a wide array of topics easily indexed and accessible. What I think is that people value that accessibility of information. And I think that products like Lemmy don't meet that requirement and so something like Reddit will always exist, regardless of the centralized corporate ownership.

[jangxx]

>There used to be a high barrier to entry for accessing the internet and making use of it.

While this was a bit before my time, I can definitely relate to spending hours or days to get something to work that I want to use. I think the difference is just that all the fediverse services don't really seem all that useful. If I open the frontpage of any "reddit alternative" right now, the top posts have a few hundred votes and a few dozen comments at most. There is simply too little activity here (that I care about) that would make it worth it for me to really get into it. I browsed reddit for entertainment and discussions and right now, none of the fediverse services I've looked at actually provide that.

[moffkalast]

> A social network doesn't require millions of users to be useful.

Well unless you want to cover some only some very specific niches, yes it very much does.

[chongli]

Centralization works. It's convenient. It doesn't require a user guide. It's approachable for laypersons.

It works until it doesn’t: when the host of a centralized community decides to make enemies with its users. This is an old story for many people who went through the Digg to Reddit migration.

Now people have had enough. Our communities are too important to leave in the hands of one company. It’s time for all the people who create 100% of the value on Reddit to have control over their own community’s future.

[nullityrofl]

> It works until it doesn’t: when the host of a centralized community decides to make enemies with its users.

And yet in spite of this very thing happening, Lemmy and Mastodon remain largely unadopted.

Diaspora* existed during the Digg implosion and where did people flock to? No, not the decentralized Fediverse, but to another centralized service. Because it meets their needs. Their needs from a product _aren't_ that it be decentralized. Their needs are that it is easily accessible, that information is easily indexed and searchable, that interacting with users is obvious and transparent, etc.

These are all needs that Fediverse products have not met well because they're too focused on their agenda and their ideology, not their product.

[anigbrowl]

I'm with you 100% on the goal here, what fediverse skeptics like me keep trying to point out is that it's not going to work if you first require every user to learn nerd stuff. Most people are part of multiple communities, some which overlap and some which do not. The whole process of choosing an instance in order to figure out the fediverse is broken, because it assumes people one-dimensional, and forces them into making a fundamentally meaningless choice as their first user experience.

It's based on a metaphor of the body in a physical place, that doesn't really work online. As I mentioned in another comment, this is like offering to give someone a ticket to an exciting foreign city, but before they can get the ticket they have to choose where they're going to eat lunch when they arrive. This alienates people because they have no context for choosing between instances so forcing this choice on them as a condition of signing up is good way to maximize your bounce rate.

[goatlover]

Some people have had enough. People are still using Reddit despite the blackouts. We'll see how much mass migration there is. Even if Reddit goes the route of Digg, how do you know another centralized site won't take it's place?

[2pEXgD0fZ5cF]

> I wish people would focus on building services that meet peoples needs

No what you are presenting is an argument for services that meet the needs of dumbest assumable users and centralization. It's the same unreflected argument as has been repeated over and over when it comes to Mastodon and it boils down to "everyone needs to be there or else it's a failure". Services like that obviously are fine too, but there is more than enough people that don't need or want that.

It speaks for a certain narrow mindedness that everything needs to be Silicon Valley's next big thing that will someday rock the stock market.

In reality Mastodon does not have the size of Twitter, and you might find it too difficult to use. However not everyone is that way, and it has over the last months proven to be a good alternative for users. It's potentially the same with Lemmy: It only needs to povide a cool alternative and enough users for meaningful interaction.

It does not need the popularity of reddit to be valid. And it does not need to be designed explicitly for the layperson. (not an excuse for a bad UI, but with new Reddit the bar is incredibly low there, and Lemmy seems fine)

> I find Lemmy frustrating to use

Well others don't, and that is fine. For me personally: not everyone needs to migrate to Lemmy (or another federated alternative), only the communities I care about. And the same can be true for other people as well.

[nullityrofl]

It's ironic that I posted "federated services are difficult to engage with because the people designing and advocating for them are more interested in ramming an ideology down your throat and condescending you than they are providing a service" and a bunch of people responded by ramming their ideology down my throat and condescending me.

Yes, I acknowledge that not every service needs to be a mega service that everyone flocks to. Yes, I acknowledge that multiple products can exist than when combined replace a prior, larger service. Yes, I acknowledge that Lemmy, Mastodon, Diaspora or whatever else you like is great and fine for you and I'm happy for you and that's OK.

No, I don't think any of these services will realistically replace Reddit and I think that if Reddit dies then Digg 3.0 will spring up in it's place.

> It does not need the popularity of reddit to be valid.

I never said it was invalid. This isn't an attack on the technology. It's OK. You can calm down. It's my opinion that it isn't a drop-in replacement for Reddit and unlikely to see widespread adoption or prevent another Reddit from appearing.

It's like talking to Web3 zealots. I'm not attacking you, I promise.

> And it does not need to be designed explicitly for the layperson.

It does if it wants to be as useful as Reddit is today and Digg was before it or achieve the same popularity. You argue that we don't need a single service to be popular and that's OK but I live in reality.

You're comparing apples and oranges. You acknowledge that Lemmy does not attempt to be everything Reddit is today. I'm suggesting that that leaves a gap and people are interested in that gap.

People have become accustumed to having a single location to visit to obtain a depth of knowledge on a wide breadth of topics. I don't think, and I think you acknowledge, that Lemmy attempts to fill that need. And thus something like Reddit 2.0/Digg 3.0 will always exist.

[yadingus]

It works for what?

Take a step back. What is social media achieving in its current state. If you only look at the shiny cat videos and dances and memes, that's not the purpose. The purpose is the mass collection of data.

If your only standard of "is working" is "it's what the majority uses", then yes, "it works". But do you really want that to be your standard? Just number of users, at any cost?

If you're competing against algorithms fine tuned to make people pretty much addicted, do you really want to play the same game? And is this mindset not fueled by ideology as well?

[nullityrofl]

If you think Reddit is social media in the same sense that Facebook is then I think we're coming at this from very difficult angles.

Reddit is more akin to Wikipedia than it is to Facebook at this point for many people. Yes, much of the popularity comes from interacting with others but it's also become a hive of up-to-date information and opinions for hobbies, for trades, etc.

If I start a new hobby I don't need to go find the 10 year old abandoned page or the SEO manipulated AI generated summary. I just go to /r/hobby. New espresso machine? /r/espresso. I want to know what 3d printer to buy? /r/3dprinters. Damage to my roof? /r/roofing. I don't know how to do some maintenance on my house? /r/homeowners. I need to buy a new car but I don't know how to get a good deal? /r/askcarsales.

There's a lot more at play here than the stale "social media bad, algorithms manipulate society" take.

[kaba0]

I would say that reddit’s value is simply being a mostly text-based forum with a big user base, good model for discussions and good moderation (as in, it efficiently removes spam. Surely several mods are very problematic in their power grabs).

I hate facebook with a burning passion, but on “ultra niche groups” front it can actually be surprisingly good. What most big social media networks lack though is the very simple upvote-downvote mechanics, and proper comment trees. That enables reddit (and Hn also) to have truly great discussions from time to time. Facebook instead optimizes for rage by showing the shittiest possible take at front and no amount of explanation could de”platform” a low effort take under a news article for example.

While reddit is not immune to that, you will often find a great comment chain within the top 3 ones that calls out the stupid takes and actually has proper factual knowledge.

[bamfly]

Works for email. There are only a few big hosts and some larger-but-not-huge number of mid-sized ones, sure, but they all play nicely with one another. Like if you could post on Twitter from your Facebook account.

Of course, I doubt we could create email today, if it didn't already exist.

[nullityrofl]

Email works because despite it's decentralized nature, it's functionally transparent to the user and you aren't constantly forced to acknowledge that nature.

The issue with "Fediverse" technologies is not dissimilar from crypto: it's designers care more about the ideology and the concept of being in the fediverse than they do meeting an actual product need.

In spite of a _dire_ gap in the market place and a substantial marketing opportunity to pick up market share, Lemmy and Mastodon remain largely unadopted by the masses and will likely remain in a similar market place as Diaspora*.

[bamfly]

> Email works because despite it's decentralized nature, it's functionally transparent to the user and you aren't constantly forced to acknowledge that nature.

You are forced to, every time you have to write the bit after the @ in an email address, though!

> The issue with "Fediverse" technologies is not dissimilar from crypto: it's designers care more about the ideology and the concept of being in the fediverse than they do meeting an actual product need.

I think the trouble is that they're still trying to be too centralized(!) and keep too much control over content on the side of the various federated servers. Email defers to the client far more than these systems do. Gmail's not going to cut off "federation" with @microsoft.com because some of its users are sending solicited racist newsletters and MS refuses to ban them, for instance (if they become a spam farm and a huge proportion of Gmail's users complain about it? Yeah, then, maybe). Fastmail probably won't ban you because you're receiving racist newsletters. There aren't content moderators, just mostly-automated responses to user reports of abuse. The user is in control, and the servers don't try to proactively police or curate content that users want to read (they filter spam, sure).

(I mean, there's the further problem that it's nearly impossible to create a new open protocol of any kind and get any notable adoption these days, but that's not the fault of the federated model)

[EDIT] To be clear, I'm not advocating for racist newsletters in the above, that was just an unambiguous example of the kind of thing that'll draw swift and harsh moderator action on a lot of federated servers but that can (I assume—admittedly, I've not tried) get passed around via email without problems—my point is that the issues with "drama" and network-churn and such in federated networks, that may disrupt the usage patterns of ordinary users, is connected to how much control the server operators have. More fundamentally, this is connected to making the activity of these communities public on the Web by default—which I think is largely a mistake, I think it's really weird that it's become common for groups of people chatting about whatever to put everything they say on billboards in flashing lights all around the world.

[bradjohnson]

Personally, I think it's interesting to see federated services get put through the ringer as possible alternatives. Lately there's been a perfect storm of entitlement from corporations (i.e. Twitter and Reddit) over their userbase that is great to see funneled into a stress test for federated alternatives.

[neop1x]

I have the same opinion. Having to choose a server is a significant hassle. Some servers specialize in one area, while others specialize in another. They "can" federate to some extent, but it is insufficient. The only thing that would eventually work is something that behaved like a centralized service. Similar to IPFS. You have a link, and it downloads from wherever server it is located on.