Twitter isn't important and federated social media will replace it to a point that it won't be anything more than a footnote in twenty years, or an unfortunate hurdle that was overcome as the internet matured.
this post was submitted on 03 Jun 2023
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Mind if I ask what makes you believe that federated social media will replace the mainstream ones? Literally everyone around me, everywhere I go, have no clue about any social media besides the big ones. I tried introducing mastodon to a few, but they found it harder to use.
20 years ago this was everyone. The internet was too technical, people didn't really use search engines, an argument with a friend over who played the bad guy in a movie could go on for hours.
I feel that one day a large organisation will run a large centralised node, much the same way that Google runs Gmail. They can have a smooth onboarding process, no confusion about how to pick a server, and federation can be a footnote. They can pick up lots of non-technical users, who don't even need to understand that federation is a thing. But people on other servers can interact with them, and that's the important part. Over time people will start to meet people from other nodes and slowly be introduced to the concepts.
Remember Facebook is still mighty confusing and has it's own terminology that makes no sense to an outsider, but it's introduced slowly enough that you can get the basic concepts and slowly learn more. I feel the "pick a server first" model is what is the biggest hurdle at the moment.
Agree on the pick a server ... And then approval!
I had almost forgotten about it but I'm glad I came back.
I think maybe the ability to just join a generic starting point and then port your account when you find where you want to be might be a better model, but that will remain to be seen
yeah, account migration between instances would be quite cool to have as well
Yes, I agree. Don't make it confusing, when someone hears about Lemmy, just point them at Lemmy.ml. Then offer a one-click option to migrate to another server.
It goes against that decentralised philosophy but makes a much cleaner entry point for new users. I think for social media, content is key, so users should start on a large community with lots of content then slowly be introduced to the idea of following other nodes.
Apparently lemmy.ml is being very overloaded atm so maybe stop doing that 😅
If you plan for it, it shouldn't be an issue. The issue is that reddit made an announcement and then Lemmy servers got swarmed, they weren't prepared for it. If you were prepared, you could make sure the server had the hardware to handle it.
Being prepared and staying prepared are two different things involving vastly different financial burdens.
No one knows when to stay prepared.
Some parts too are also optimisation issues popping up that were not present before. Lot of technical minds being thrown at the issues though now which is nice.
While optimisation is likely an issue, lemmy.ml added "only" about 7,000 users in the past few days. Probably a $1,000/mo VPS would solve most of the problems - it just wouldn't scale to hundreds of thousands of users., and probably is not financially feasible.
This is also my take on the, maybe well-deserved, complaints about the "pick a server" step. I've never been handed a massive list of email providers and only one was suggested to me at a time.
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When MySpace started becoming popular, most people had no idea about it. Then there was Facebook and most people had no idea about it either. Then there was Twitter and most people had no idea about micro blogging....
It's a repeating trend that eventually ends that a saturation point is reached.
Maybe Facebook and Twitter won't immediately or ever go away (Myspace still exists in some form despite a massive data loss!) but they will be occupied only by those who cannot and will not migrate away from them.
The other side of the coin is similar to when you find a cool spot to hang out and it starts to become popular until eventually one day you visit, it's full of brash idiots, the vibe is completely different and you wish that less people knew about the place.
Be careful what you wish for!
Isn't it the same with Lemmy? After the many blunders of Reddit, many users there certainly want a good alternative. But Reddit also has not only techsavy users. Perhaps we should learn from this and offer people Lemmy "simply" as an alternative, without talking much about decentralization when introducing this idea.
I don't think that's really possible. I saw what happened when twitter users started trying Mastodon. There was a ton of confusion, and almost none of it was about terminology. The confusion was stuff like "Why doesn't search work like Twitter's" or "I can't see this person's posts". Trying to dumb it down only works when the details don't really matter.
Indeed. The user experience matters a lot.
absolutely. And especially the ease of joining. I think it is important to not overwhelm the new Users with questions about which server to join etc..
Maybe it's just because I never really "got" Twitter, but this seems like a boring tautological argument to me. A more interesting question would be whether we even care? Platforms come and go. For some reason people seem to have decided that platforms have gotten "too big to fail", but it's clearly not the case.
That's the thing. You can't turn the clock back. As fediverse alternatives pop up and the social media old guard slowly declines, there will be a lot of fragmentation.
It was just as fragmented before the monolithic platforms came and unified them though
I imagine the pareto distribution will apply to federated communities as well
Right! You have to look at context. Remember the first time you got on (Usenet/Compuserve/AOL/Friendster) or whatever your first Internet experience was? Twitter was a new thing. Now there are 20 Twitter look-alikes but none can go back to the novelty.
I agree that it had an important place, well timed between the TS9 era phones and smartphones. But on the other hand, good riddance
Social media so far has not been replaced with a like for like service when something falls out of popularity. Facebook was not just a Myspace clone. It probably won't be Bluesky or Mastodon that replace Twitter for most of their current users.
I'm guessing after all these big platforms failing we'll likely not see a unification of the communities for a long time as people are wary of it. Definitely seems like things are splintering back to how they were in the days of message boards
I prefer it splintering personally
Depends on the details of the splintering, for me. The Fediverse seems like a good way to splinter - everything's free and open, but there are shared protocols that allow for interoperability and discoverability.
Yeah, same. This is why I like Lemmy quite a bit. It's splintered in a way, but you can still access other communities in a consistent fashion. Kind of like message boards but instead of 6 types of forum software there's one UX/UI
And one place to check for new posts. I had to use an RSS reader to keep up back in those days, and password managers weren't as big of a thing so I had terrible security hygiene.
I see the fall of the Roman Empire as a loose allegory
Into the Dark Ages we go.
@gnoop @animist@lemmy.one I see the decline and fall of Rome more as an escape from the darkness tbh
The fall of Rome lead to the middle ages. That meant a fracturing of the former Roman empire, then various factions trying to recreate the former Roman empire or at least the western portion of it. Seems like some are just dropping off Reddit and moving to other smaller forums and link aggregation sites; some even mentioned visiting Slashdot and Fark. Like I said, some new sites may come along and we'll have a renaissance.
Ive been using BlueSky and it's a damn good alternative to Twitter. In fact, it captures what early Twitter felt like
Adding to no one in particular... as I've been following several potential destinations for the Twitter mass migration, they all have one thing in common: 99% of posts are in English. Twitter's age and market penetration let it reach a large worldwide audience. As Mastodon has been around for 6 or more years, it too has some international diversity, but less that Twitter I think. (Someone chime in on the language of the population if you have info?
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