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I would say it’s better this way for society as a whole. A splintered populace is harder to control. And I’m not just talking about some “guv’ment out to get us” thing, because they’re trying to kill encryption and other dumb stuff like that already. But it’s a lot harder for other people to spread misinformation if the majority of the population isn’t centered around 3 websites.
Of course, there are negatives to this whole thing, too. But I think the net positive will be greater.
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.
Many online companies have been training this generation of users into accepting beta products under the guise of “early/ beta access” and delivering half baked semi working platforms for 2 decades. Especially the games industry.
I think users are more able to accept shortcomings than the writer thinks.
The platform is absolutely not ready for an influx of angry Redditors.
If anything, the number of instances exploded, and large instance admins like Ruud are working with lemmy devs on tracking and resolving issues.
I also noticed a lot of users active on the githubs. More pull requests. Custom scripts for browsers, new themes. So this wave seem to bring: Knowledgable server admins, Uservolume to stresstest and new enthusiastic contributors.
Edit: example of what I mean: https://lemmy.world/post/1061471
Yes, if anything the huge influx of users has been absorbed in a surprisingly painless way, all things considered. We haven’t had any huge outages or downtimes, lemmy.world is still holding at almost 90k users and the memory leak was if not permanently solved then at least temporarily patched within what, 24 hours of its discovery?
Indeed, I am also very impressed with the way it is going. And maybe even more with the way some of the power users/mods/admins/Devs deal with the new reality.
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For me, the “unfinishedness” of the fediverse mentioned in the article also makes up a lot of its charm - but I can see how this can be an issue for people who want their services to Just Work
I was just lamenting with a friend about how the NEW internet doesn’t feel like the OLD internet of the late 90s / early 2000s. See, in the early days your entire web presence was on 1-2 forums sites, or maybe some IRC chat room. You went there as a whole person. Yes, maybe it was a Sim City 2000 forum, but it had a number of Off Topic boards to discuss cycling or movies or recipes or whatever fit that community of people.
Nowadays we try to only interact with smaller and smaller slices of people in the interest of getting more people using a site. Reddit is the obvious example but it happens on Facebook and Twitter and everything else too. You want to post about your typewriter hobby? Ugh, get out of here, go post in /r/typewriters. Oh your post is actually about fixing a typewriter, my mistake, post in /r/typewriter_repair… oh wait this typewriter was made after 2002? You want /r/neo_typewriter_repair, which has 6 members.
Maybe your local community instead? Join a club?
That was a good read. It pretty poignantly sums up the last few years and the next few years of social media in a few paragraphs
