Lemmy and Mastodon feel like the real web3.

Amoiridis Kyriakos@lemmy.world to Lemmy.World Announcements@lemmy.world – 308 points –

I think this decentralization and federation is what web3 is all about, without all the corporations calling everything to do with monkey pixel art that costs a million dollars "web3"

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Yes, I would call it web1. Decentralization are basic concepts of the internet and it was more decentralized in the 90s. Getting back to the roots.

Great point. Lemmy and Mastadon look more like an effort to claw back the web of open access and decentralization from VCs, grifters, and the like.

Honestly I'm not even sure what the term web3 means but Lemmy does feel... less commercial, which is really refreshing! And I'm noticing alot less criticizism which is excellent. I'm certainly going to be staying here and trying to help it grow in a positive and mindful way.

I get what others are saying about it feeling like how the internet used to be... I'm really excited to see where Lemmy goes. Hopefully it doesn't just end up the way its predecessors have gone! Feels like I'm part of a movement to fight the oppression!! Power to the people woo!

That's what I'm enjoying about it so far too. Content is sparse but that's okay. I'm so tired of being marketed to, of being a product. These open source federated apps are janky and quieter, but they feel more real. These aren't algorithms pushing engagement and outrage or ads every 10 seconds.

Right? It's way calmer here. I felt hesitant about that at first, but it's only because we've gotten so used to an endless stream of (often inconsequential and low-effort) content. More isn't always necessary or better.

Kid-me used to have days off and he'd hop onto Warcraft 3 or various message boards only to realize no one was online because everyone had jobs or was at school. It had a rhythm to it which was really cool. It wouldn't surprise me if the "always-on" content spam of the modern internet has given people unhealthy ideas about what life is supposed to feel like.

I don't mind the lack of an endless stream of content so much, however it would be nice if it was easier to not see the same content again and again after already reading it. Maybe some sort of read flag would be good for posts, possibly with a configurable number of new comments after which it is shown again.

Plus on Reddit, corporation makes money from content users create while here everything is open, free and fun.

I agree wholeheartedly. I think what all of us who care about these alternative underground social networks need to do is try to provide the best content we can, because that will attract other people here, which will benefit us in turn through the content they make!

There might be a case for a more sparse content feed. Sure you can subscribe to hundreds of communities across a hundred different servers but you are more in control of the feed. every post is going to be more relevant and you will have more incentive to take part in conversations instead of just refreshing and having a whole new page of crap.

There are some ease of use improvements to be made of course, this is the most users and fastest growth lemmy has ever seen, so there is some learning to be done as it scales.

What is sort of bothering me is how as it becomes more popular, I've already seen a few people asking about adding advertising to lemmy instances. I hope advertisers are not looking at diminished revenue with the reddit blackouts and trying to move to Lemmy already. I just can't stand ads, and hope to never see ads interwoven with posts and comments.

I suppose the benefit to lemmy is that you could always migrate to another instance if yours starts pulling that shit

As far as I know, while account migration is technically possible it isnt implemented yet, so if a server decicdes to shut up shop due to lack of funds your account there is lost and only federated content on other instances will be saved.

So once migration of user accounts and communities is implemented we should be able to easily survive waves of server closures.

I do worry that it will eventually coalesce into a couple of ultra-large servers and lose a lot of it's decentralisation though. gotta spread out!

I mean, I suppose creating alts on multiple instances might work as an alternative in the meantime. I don’t know if that’s frowned upon though.

Completely agree on the last point, though. It is crucial that we spread out!

I've made about 10 alts so far, just making sure to secure my username in case I do need to migrate somewhere

I don’t believe it’s frowned upon. I have one here on infosec.pub and another on fedia.io. I primarily use infosec.pub though

True enough. And I know I’m just a drop in the bucket, but I will do exactly that if it ever happens.

Technically it should already be possible for a company to advertise here, no? Not in the "there are little video boxes you can't get rid of (barring adblocker extensions)" but in the sense that one could have their employees create accounts and make comments and posts to promote their products. They'd probably have to do it subtly and sneakily, because they'd likely get banned or if they had their own instance, defederated, but they could. Wouldn't even need to pay anything beyond employee salaries to make it.

I feel like "proper" ads would be more difficult to implement, because even if the software were updated to include the ability to add them, people could and likely would make forks of it that just didn't display those from federated servers, or clients that don't on any server, and because the software is open source there would be no stopping it. An instance could defederate instances using such an ad-blocking fork, but that would risk ending up themselves isolated and therefore lose much of their traffic and viability as a platform.

I think it might be ok if some instances decide to run ads. Someone has to pay for the server costs, and ads are an option.

The great thing about the Fediverse is you can move to a different instance if you don't like it :)

You nailed it: It feels like a movement. And movements, especially nascent ones, require buy-in and work from their members. I guess that explains why I feel obligated to participate more than I did at Reddit.

I've only been on Lemmy for a day, but it's already clear no one is gonna build this out for us.

Same here, I think I lebt more comments here today than on reddit the last month

Right? I'm thinking about trying to start my beginner guitar sub (do I still call it sub?). I tried on reddit, posted a few times and it fizzled out. Maybe it would be more successful here. Just a sub dedicated to helping people begin their guitar playing journey. Playing guitar has made such a positive impact on my life, I'd like to share that with others you know?

Web3 became a marketing term, doesn't even really have a clear meaning, but it's used as a catch-all word for blockchain-related things like NFTs, cryptocurrency projects, etc. But most of those are not truly decentralized, whereas Lemmy and other fediverse projects are.

I kind of like the idea of rebranding it around a more honest and inclusive definition of decentralization. Though getting past bad marketing is so hard it might not be worth it.

The web3 that can be named is not the true web3, or something like that.

The "branded" Web3 was about "how do we create the third Web BUBBLE" more than "how do we create the third Web experience." The people who missed buying AOL shares in 1996 or Amazon in 2002 wanted their chance to get in on speculation, except without the utility of an actual service or product underneath the hype.

But how can this be web3 without blockchain!?

;-)

What about my funny ape pictures? Won't someone think of my funny pictures that costs a cities worth of energy???

This is what reddit felt like ten years ago ... now it's just a matter of growing the community and making it bigger and better.

I felt bad leaving my old communities at reddit ... but in a funny way, I feel like I've stepped into a time warp and jumped back ten years ... now I'm looking forward to the next ten on Lemmy and Mastadon

My thoughts exactly. Ten years ago reddit was "too confusing" for people too.

feels like a modern take on usenet/newsgroups/bbs.

You pick your local server and your chosen feeds and enjoy.

I hope as more small servers start up and die that we don't just end up with a small number of mega size servers though, that goes against the point.

I think one thing that may help with this is letting users stay on their instance when browsing others. Right now, if I want to hop over to another instance, I can definitely link there or comment if using the appropriate channel, but actually going there makes it seem like I am signed out. Implementing features like this https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues/1048 would help make the experience feel more cohesive, and encourage exploration of other instances without confusing users and accidentally encouraging sticking to one's own instance.

Yes, if a new user weren't paying attention they would be caught up by that a lot.

formatting links with /c/community@instance rather than full URLS works on some platforms, but only if the content linked has been federated, otherwise it is out of sync. You then have to know the link was good, the community exists, then do the copy paste into your search to force it to sync, then the link will work for you...

That could be smoothed out with better fed request optimisation. it's particularly poor on smaller instances that haven't federated with much more than the few big servers, or self hosted instances that have to built that from scratch.

I'm honestly very excited about Lemmy and Mastodon.

With federated and decentralized technology, I think there's a real hope of taking the internet back from the tiny selection of corporatized, monetized, sterile silos we have now, where everyone is forced to abide by the same compromise rules and everything can be co-opted or changed at a moment's notice without the userbase's consent, and giving it to smaller, more fun, radical, unique, and interesting internet communities, run by volunteers who really care, for like minded people.

I think it will lead to a much more diverse and richly textured internet, maybe even a more human internet, since each place you go will be a smaller, more intentional community which policies itself and can develop its own interesting culture and set of norms, while still being connected to everything else so the rot of pure isolation doesn't set in.

Technology — especially how it is structured — is never neutral, and I think for the first time in a long while, we've stumbled on technologies in federation and decentralization that actually tend towards good things. The inherent benefits of federation and decentralization to autonomy and resilience and diversity and resistance tocorporatizationn are stunning, and as long as we don't fuck that up by assuming that those benefits are sufficient, don't rest on our laurels thinking we don't need to maintain a culture that is consciously and intentionally oriented around preserving the things we want to see, I think we'll be okay!

Web 1.0, users form communities on bulletin boards, internet forums and newsgroups. It's the birth of Web 2.0, investors and advertisers see potential in large user bases. This leads to social media and mobile apps as fronts for tracking users and big data collection. Smart home and wearables become a plot to bring tracking hardware into your life even when you aren't actively engaging on the internet. The tech billionaire is born at the cost of the privacy and wallet of the user. Web 3.0, a federated Web 1.0 where users take back control of the internet. Tech billionaires live in homeless shelters and eat ramen noodles.

It's starting to feel like the 90's again, but without frames ;-) I haven't felt this engaged with the internet in years

I will have no disparaging of frames, thank you very much.

<table> my beloved

The joy of creating an entire website layout in tables with background images per cell to paint the UI with without a line of CSS

It certainly feels nostalgic to me being on here. I miss the days of webrings and message boards and just crawling ever forward into unknown new places. I was a kid then though, so I thought it was just me becoming wiser/more tech-savvy. Now I realize how freaky all the consolidation is. Even some video game modding communities now have more of a presence on reddit than anywhere else. It's convenient but so weird.

I agree with u/Pelicanen that it feels like the uncertain times of the early internet where things were hosted by individuals and their really small websites. I don't know to what extent it will catch on (although Discord is huge with milleninals/Gen Z, no?) but it's interesting to imagine a world where the internet is primarily large consumer/business-facing websites and then highly decentralized communities.

It's pretty dope. Been following the fediverse for a while, but I've never used twitter so mastodon felt kinda useless to me. I've never used facebook, so friendica felt kinda useless to me.

Anonymous strangers posting links and having discussions? Now that's more my jam.

Same here, neither of those are my thing, but lemmy scratches my needs. Of course without reddit fucking up, I would never have checked it out, but now I’m really hoping this gets big, without losing it’s core

I've loved that part of reddit and still do to a point. The thing that's been creeping into the platform is the problem with bots and astroturfing.

My favourite part was AMAs by scientists and authors or even ppl like Gov Schwarzenegger. I hope fediverse develops to that point one day.

I remember when AMAs were organic and people actually answered questions. Before prepared questions and answers became a thing.

I loved seeing those IAMAs too. Schwarzenegger, Obama, NASA scientists and Woody Harrelson (can we talk about Rampart?)! Unfortunately I think the web is worse now, far too much focus on monetization, bots, propaganda> and astroturfing.

I'm hoping that Lemmy flies under the radar in the sweet spot of enough subscribers but not too many.

The only bot issue I heard of is following people, which one would only get notified if they use new reddit or official app. What were the other bot problems? What's to stop the bots on this site?

Hah, web 2.0 was all about the explosion of user-generated content. Corps and cryptonerds wanted to make web 3.0 about making money, but the web has always been about the content, not its monetization. In trying to monetize the content, they're alienating people and forcing them off the platforms they defaulted to.

Humans like to create and share content, no matter how easy or difficult it is to monetize. If the people who want to monetize humanity's collective output make it harder to create, then hopefully the result is that people move off the ad-supported platforms and replace them with something that doesn't rely on centralization with lots of capital to stay afloat.

If nothing else, the way that youtube has made it impossible for segments of the creative community to monetize their content and forced them rely on platforms such as patreon has made it more and more clear that ad-generated revenue is a dead end. You can't force people to view advertising unless you hold their content hostage, and for the first time in history, they can't buy out the means of production.

I was resistant to the federverses, but these corpos just think they can get away with anything...

Fuck them I won't do what they tell me!

It will be fun to watch this place grow, it feels like the start of a new story!

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replace them with something that doesn’t rely on centralization with lots of capital to stay afloat

There's no conceivable reason that reddit shouldn't be profitable right now with the market saturation they have unless the majority of people who've been making money off of the site up until now have been minimal effort contributors trying to get their piece of the money pie. 99% of the work is done by "unpaid" (by reddit) mods yet somehow they still have 2k people on the payroll and still need to centralize more and more capital to cover the overhead, it's easy to imagine most of their current expenses are going to dumb corporate tech money sinks that are going out of style fast and have little to show for the last decade of spending lol

I mean that’s maybe the only good thing: If they are a public traded company, they have to file public revenue reports. Would love to see where those morons burn their money…

2k people in expensive San Francisco office space. Willing to bet that the % of them dedicated to improving user experience was quite low in comparison to those trying to figure out how to squeeze money out of it.

Every single platform that has claimed "Web 3.0" has been revealed to be a crypto scam, and generally not even a sneaky one. Pop over to minds.com if you'd like a free taste of exactly what that ends up looking like. It's disgusting.

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I mean I definitely agree that this feels great, but decentralization and federation is what pure Bitcoin and crypto are all about. In many ways this community reminds me of the good vibes and great minds the early days of cryptocurrency discovery encouraged. This predated some of the corruption, VCs, and crypto bros that came around in 2013 during the first boom.

I still think that early soul of empowerment and community is there in Bitcoin itself but you gotta dig a little deeper to find it. I expect Lemmy will also “commercialize” to some extent in coming years, but it’ll always be better than Reddit and other centralized platforms that want to feature gate and censor unfairly.

I think the crux of what you are saying is that decentralized is a means to create a community. Most of us here want the idea to succeed and are putting in the effort, much like early crypto. Where both Reddit and Crypto failed is when commercial interest took hold. And to your point as long as Lemmy remains commerically disinterting, it will be a true community.

But, because of the decentralized nature, even if a commercial interest takes hold, it will be on individual servers. I can see the NBA or the Olympics or niche topics having their own servers -- and I would argue that is a good thing for those interested to host. The value is that you can have both the astro turfed along side the organic with competing interests in the "why."

I like that idea. The corps and sellouts get their own place, the underground has theirs, normies, weebs, etc. Everyone actually gets a place and unlike Reddit, they can't really encroach on one another.

Yeah I definitely agree -- you summarized my feelings nicely.

I would also add that as exciting concepts/technologies grow and commercialize they tend to become more subject to noise and self-interest interfering with some of their higher order "platonic" (ideal) forms. I fundamentally think that the more federated/decentralized a service can be, the better its original purpose and perfect form can be maintained. Practically I do think it's challenging for both currency and link aggregation to be properly decentralized, but I think both Bitcoin and Lemmy are inherently beautiful implementations if you strip them down to their core.

I hate how crypto bros and scammers kidnapped the term web3. In reality is a nice concept, but they just turned it into a libertarian dystopia.

I like the overall trend towards ownership and non-centralized tools implicit in web3. If everything happening on the internet is owned by wall street, then it's not going to act like the real internet.

If there's a crypto aspect that has uses beyond grift, I'm open to it. There are certain ways it could be used to disintermediate owners and creators. I'm not sure if that's happening yet. Ownership rights with digital content do leave a lot to be desired.

I hope we soon see the end of the "gold rush" era in crypto and start seeing actual cool stuff being done with it. Especially since legacy banking will simply co-opt it sooner or later.

BLOCKCHAIN is stupid and that's the end of it. Legacy banking will never ever switch to a stupid, inefficient and ineffective system over whatever they have now that does millions of transactions per minute with a small energy footprint.

The question is really, are the inefficiencies in blockchains or related solutions worth the trade off of Wall Street/Fed not running the economy. And they aren't all proof-of-work Bitcoin either, Ethereum for instance is pretty finely tuned and on proof-of-stake now.

About that: if you think a bunch of crypto bros can do a better job of managing an economy than the Federal Reserve can, then I seriously question your sanity. The Fed hasn't exactly done a great job of keeping the economy stable, but the value of cryptocurrency is not even remotely stable.

The value of cryptos are measured relative to USD and are highly volatile because they're based on subjective predictions of what the value will look like 10, 20, 30 years in the future. The Fed doesn't control the value of USD beyond their ability to manipulate its supply, which for the most part only serves to devalue it. Meanwhile, crypto supplies are algorithmically deterministic and not subject to human influence or corruption. It's a very poor comparison and TBPH shows you don't really understand the fundamentals.

The value of cryptos are measured relative to USD and are highly volatile because they’re based on subjective predictions of what the value will look like 10, 20, 30 years in the future.

Indeed. It's a vehicle for speculation (aka gambling), not a viable currency.

The Fed doesn’t control the value of USD beyond their ability to manipulate its supply, which for the most part only serves to devalue it. Meanwhile, crypto supplies are algorithmically deterministic

Then it's doomed to deflate endlessly. A quick look at the Great Depression should tell you why that's catastrophically bad. The Fed keeps the USD inflating for a reason.

It’s a very poor comparison and TBPH shows you don’t really understand the fundamentals.

No crypto bro has any business lecturing anyone on economic fundamentals. Especially not one who seemingly doesn't know that deflation of the main currency is to be prevented at all costs unless you want to see bread lines.

Lol no, it's the same way any up-and-comer has volatile value initially because there's uncertainty as to the outcome.

Great Depression "deflationary spiral" was a direct consequence of the Fed's inflationary policies during the 1920s. These are all just discredited mainstream econ talking points. And get out of here with this "crypto bro" BS, god forbid anyone have an original thought that differs from your thinking.

The problem is that crypto is unregulated, the regulations are there for a reason, to stop things like ponzischemes and all the other things that already has happened that fucked people over. Maybe if they got regulated in some way, so that those things couldn't happen easily, as it is now, I would say no.

That's where my head is at. They're building and improving it. Legacy banking isn't exactly green itself, as card transactions have a pretty hefty carbon footprint. Further, banks are eyeballing their own "CBDCs", which is basically cryptocurrency but without the intended benefits of decentralization.

Zero knowledge roll-ups have a lot of green promise with gas fees... but DeFi isn't better than legacy banking yet. Still, I think it will be sooner or later if only because some of those folks are actually trying to improve it (where banks are only really doing their best work at trying to get more exploitative).

My 2c, the development around Ethereum isn't really that dystopian or scammy, and there's still promise for decentralizing financial institutions. A lot of people tried to cash in on it is all. Was just reading an article about the gold rush around marketing cereal ~1860-today, companies loading it with sugary and cartoon marketing to brainwash kids, etc., but that doesn't mean cereal is bad for you.

someone tried making a Reddit clone called Plebbit and it was built on the Ethereum network, avatars had NFTs, the UI was similar to new Reddit, was clunky, extremely unresponsive and its mascot was the NPC wojak meme so it's just a 4channer trying to swindle money. To actually make an account you had to pay for an address LMAO

Yes, a lot of people saw easy money and tried to cash in on fads. Remember the "Million Dollar Website"? Just because that was stupid doesn't mean the internet was a scam.

I don't know, it just feels like a fancier web 1.0 where things were less centralised (personal websites, forums etc).

It's nice to have this space to retreat to. Even if it doesn't outcompete the corporate web anytime soon, the existence of another option will constrain how bad they can get a bit, and will create a place for refugees to go after each new outrage. And it's not like the core functionality of any of the corporate sites was that complicated underneath all the bloat, after people have been on here working out the kinks for a while there's no reason it should be any less convenient of an experience.

Feels like old school forums again. A little barebones compared to some of the corporate stuff, but that's not a bad thing. Just the simple what's needed no extra fluff.

agreed, i can’t remember the last time reddit added an actual useful feature.

The only thing they did do relatively recently that I liked was adding the option for subs to not archive posts that are older than 6 months. But I guess when you think about it, that's more of just taking a restriction away, and less of adding something new. Other than that, though, it's either just useless stuff or stuff that actively made things worse.

To be fair about the archiving thing you have to consider that being able to make old data read only allows you to optimize a lot of things. With good engineering the allowance for archival should make the whole site faster and more stable. So sort of a soft feature.

I get that, and it could make sense to archive things at some point, but I do think it was nice for certain communities, aside from things like sports, news, etc., to be able to still comment on old posts. Especially help posts or things like that, because they could still be relevant months or even years later.

There should be a way to unarchive something if that's the case, which works better than a new post which references the previous one with small addendums or questions. This is especially useful when people are searching for information on certain topics and everything is contained within one post rather than 5 posts because the earlier ones were archived. Many people will never continue searching and see all of the newer information once they have found the old now incomplete posts.

Holy shit, is that why I got a random influx of trolls commenting on 5 year old comments?

The multi-image post, but only worked on new reddit.

Seeing your post my first thought was that multi-image albums always worked on old.Reddit. But actually I was thinking of a Reddit Enhancement Suite feature. Which is another open-source toolkit that was provided by the community to Reddit.

Happy to see that the Open Source came up with something top-to-bottom like Lemmy and the Fediverse!

I'm enjoying the lemmy.world experience, and I believe decentralised social networking could be the future. I am a refugee from Reddit and hopeful there is hope for a open, community focused platform.

As for this platform, I am apprehensive about somebody running the server I have my account with having the power to remove my account and my posts, but I guess this is true of any network in existence.

My concern in the long run is who pays for the hardware and energy costs even if it is federated. Without some kind of reliable funding model who will pay the bills?

Hopeful for many enjoyable encounters in the Fediverse.

You'll always have to rely on someone else, unless you build the thing yourself.

The beauty of the fediverse concept is that it's about as easy as possible to build it yourself.

The cost of running a host is a matter of economical management:

  • It costs almost nil to run text-based content.
  • Images take a bit of memory and bandwidth, but are even manageable with an old cellphone under a set number of users.
  • Videos are a major drag, and very expensive unless you're embedding them.

Most open-source is funded as passion projects by devoted geeks who typically already make a living doing other computer things anyway, and fediverse is a bit of the same.

It's no different from using an email provider. Just get one that you trust will stay a while. But there are no guarantees. Google could kill off GMail tomorrow.

I agree. I think there are moderstion logs though which is a good step towards transparency, I think there should be admin logs too for the same.

As for the running costs, I hope there is a more transparent system rather than running it for profit and selling it to corporations.

Long way to go for ease of use, but the foundation is SOLID.

Decentralised without crypto-ifying everything. this is the way.

I gotta admit though, this has to be one of the first reasonable use cases for blockchain technology that I can think of - a P2P database for social forums... decentralised, but a single "instance" no matter how you access it. I imagine the blockchain sizes would get ridiculously large though, and all sorts of moderation issues. Probably not feasible, though I'm sure there's a project on GitHub I'm not aware of...

If you were to host the entire forum on a blockchain, every node would have to hold the blockchain. So not scaling horizontally, but instead copying the "database" a bunch of times. Think of hosting all of the data in reddit on a thousand nodes. Sure you could access it from any node, but the database would be just as big as before, just copied around a bunch of times.

In a way this thing is already much more decentralized than a blockchain could ever be, in that every server doesn't hold all of the data at once. Much better use of resources IMO.

A much better use of resources, but you shard the data amongst potentially untrusted hosts (ie, anybody can stand up a lemmy instance and start hosting posts/comments, and then get sick of hosting it and delete their instance and all the uploaded data).

Federation only allows access to the network of servers, it doesn't protect the data at all, which means at any moment an entire community of useful historical information could just be wiped away (especially since there's currently no monetary incentive to continue hosting, its only being done out of desire to be part of the network).

I guess I'd rather see the blockchain (or simpler caching/mirroring) approach, something like the torrent network, so that no single person has access to delete content. We can all choose to not view or not mirror content we don't agree with, but nobody can single-handedly own or modify the data

Yeah that's a good point. But this way we can't mine LemmyCoin. Won't someone think of the shitcoins!?

For sure if reddit can have moons, then a blockchain forum should have their own shitcoin. How else would the founder of the decentralized platform make some bank? Get donations from from the general public for the volunteer work they do on the project? No way :)

The crypto side of web3 definitely felt way more "consumerist minded" with the way wallets were able to connect to multiple websites(exchanges) in order to "buy" things(alt/shitcoins). But federated social media feels like a much better use of decentralization so far.

I do not like using Web3 to refer to federated platforms. Indeed, Web3 is strongly associated with blockchains, cryptocurrencies and NFTs.

To me Web3 meant federated or p2p stuff, like Secure Scuttlebutt, way before cryptocurrency and NFTs stole the term. I think we should steal it back rather than stop using it!

Web3 has been a pretty big disappointment in that case.

Lemmy is like web 1.5 with threads. Threads which still actually need a lot of work, I might add.

Yeah I feel the same too. And I think decentralization is the only way to web3.

Distributed networks are very very complex to make. But decentralized networks have the simplicity and features of centralized networks with the addition of freedom that distributed networks give.

The best of both worlds really.

What we're seeing here seems more like a restoration of the architecture of pre-web Internet services, like SMTP, NNTP, or IRC.

The protocols are built on top of HTTPS and JSON as a session layer, rather than on lines of ASCII as in those classic protocols ... but the architecture looks a lot more like "a bunch of servers under independent administration, that agree to share messages with each other in a network" than like anything with the stink of blockchains on it.

Pretty much yeah.

But what's wrong with bolckchains? That technology is good too, a bunch of lowly monetization schemes based around it shouldn't deface the core idea and its possibilities.

I don't think anything is inherently wrong with blockchain technology, but what it's been molded into (a purely speculative profit driven ecosystem ) is a waste of it's potential.

The notion that any "Web" technology (i.e. user-facing publication, sharing, & discussion) needs to be coupled with a fraught¹ payment system seems like a fundamentally contentious issue, mostly introduced by people who stand to profit from the success of those payment systems regardless of benefit to Web users.

¹ Regulatory issues, cut-and-run scams, and so on. Some blockchain services have turned out to be securities regulation violations. Some have turned out to be outright frauds where the issuers have just run away with "invested" money. In any event, nobody should today be relying on any blockchain service when creating forums or other services intended for the general public.

@kiriakos @fubo Blockchain is also a cool technology I think but I don't think it's so well suited for social networks because any node needs to store all the data so it becomes quite heavy with time. Blockchain is better suited for financial transactions which it does really well in my opinion.

Blockchain is well suited for storing authentication and provenance information. The Fediverse could benefit from blockchain stored instance, user, and community metadata.

This is it 100%. I don’t think there is a major platform that does not already exist in the fediverse. I’m sure there is something, but even Instagram and YouTube can be replaced… well the YouTube one is hard due to the bandwidth and storage needed. But the tech is out there.

I think at some point this web3 will take over. Things like YouTube, will eventually come, but we need a lot of cost reduction in current tech to be able to do that.

We are finally taking the web back.

Now we just need a federated Youtube replacement.

There actually already is! PeerTube is the fediverse alternative to YouTube, hopefully it'll be able to grow more sometime in the near future.

I have a hard time imaging a free, open video hosting service will ever succeed. YouTube's infrastructure is insane, and that's reflected in their costs.

Any sustainable video hosting platform is going to need a solid monetization plan because the costs of hosting and streaming exabytes of video is just not sustainable on donations. Platforms like Floatplane or Nebula seem like good alternatives, but they've chosen for a subscription-only model - which I personally think is the fairest solution.

I agree that it's difficult, although the whole point of having a federated platform is that no single node would have to host exabytes themselves but each instance could host a certain amount of videos that are relevant to its topic. This of course comes with other downsides but I don't think there's ever going to be a perfect solution.

Storage is cheap but at scale the bandwidth requirements are too much for hobbyists to handle

With the quick death of Twitter and the even quicker death of Reddit, we as a community are speedrunning the transition to federated social media. We only need good mobile UX and keeping the growth, and we're set. It feels like a post-apocalypse right now, and I am not sure how to feel about it.

Feel optimistic about it, we’re the trailblazers, pioneering the post-Rexxit era!

I say let’s keep up this momentum and continue making this a space people want to be in and engage with.

We’re already off to a strong start, let’s commit and see what new corner of the internet we can define for ourselves.

Yeah, Corporate went off the deep end sniffing coke.

yeah, i love this new paradigm. i don't understand it but i hope it'll lead to a better experience with cool usability features later on. hopefully a good buffer against evil & suits & etc

i love how post URLs have numbers now. you can get dubs and trips!

Wasn't web3 about everything being under control of a handful of mega corps that own everything? So more like web4 then.

and a looooot of shady crypto shit.

"The dark side" of crypto.

Meme coins.

The future of the internet isn't artificially scarce digital collectibles? 😲

No one tell my StarCitizen ship collection this...

are those even scarce tho

Yea, SC does this really dumb thing where they only sell some ships a few times a year and when they do sell them they sell limited batches of them... the very definition of artificial scarcity and FOMO.

But really... probably not that scarce..

watch them turn those ships into NFTs and charge you for each one of those a second time

oh no, you can't use your old ships on the new metaverse, they're tied to your legacy account! Here, use our convenient minter service to transfer them to your web 4.0 address, for a small small fee of $50* per ship!

^*fees^ ^subject^ ^to^ ^current^ ^network^ ^conditions^

SC players are crazy... some of them would just rebuy 10k worth of space ships and brag about it...

I forgot it even existed. Is it a game yet or still just a series of presentations and announcements?

Its a game now, buggy as hell but a game. It can be fun but not something you can sink hundreds of hours into unless you just enjoy that sort of thing. They do free fly's every few months you can try it for free.

web3 was always a cryptocurrency scam and was doomed to fail. Federation is more a return to the early web with a way to link everything together to compete and get similar services to megacorps while distributing costs.

This is what I keep thinking as well. The "kids today" don't remember usenet, IRC, etc. All were decentralized systems capitalizing on distributed compute resources and moderation. They did have problems when it comes to direction, moderation, systems playing "nice", fragmentation, etc. But I still feel the plusses outweigh the minuses in a federated system. Unfortunately the public does like their "benevolent (until they aren't) dictators"...

yeah, the lack of brand presence is a convenient side effect, its refreshing, just like the iconic McCafé® blend. Crafted to perfection by expert baristas, just the way you like it. Get one today at McDonald's®. I'm Lovin' It!

Good call. To me, Fediverse feels akin to the earlier days of the web. Fresh, new, relatively unspoiled. Nobody knows exactly wtf is going on, but the possibilities seem vast.

How do you use mastodon or even Twitter for that matter? I've been active on Reddit for a decade plus, but any time I try to tweet or toot it just goes nowhere to no one and I quickly lose interest. How do you get started with this stuff?

Find a few dozen people you like and start responding to their posts. Other people will see them and reply to them, and you can build up a network of people you interact with socially.

It's not quick, but the patience helps to filter down to just the people you actually trust and want to interact with.

In addition to this on mastodon (and *key instances) you can use hashtags can be used to follow and join in on topics you wish to post about. I find that people on the fediverse tend to be a lot more responsive when you talk to them in regards to something they have posted.

Good as dead then.

@hugz @kiriakos
What do you mean as good as dead. I lf you haven't noticed committed are popping up left and right. Give it sometime and the fedeverse will supass Reddit. It just doesn't look like it right now

Federation definitely feels like the next major stepping stone of the internet's evolution. Protocols like ActivityPub and Matrix feel like a bit of a "new beginning" for communities on the internet.

do you use Matrix yourself? how hard was it set up? every time i look into it i can't help but feel lost

I have an account, but I don't really use it much. Not because I don't like it, but because I don't have much to say really. I'm more of the lurker type.

The important thing about Matrix is to think of it like email. Homeservers are like your email provider, like Hotmail or Gmail or Protonmail. You look for a homeserver, then you just make an account on that homeserver. The "main" homeserver is matrix.org, but it's recommended not to make an account on there if you can avoid it. Remember that making accounts on these homeservers is free, so there's no reason not to make accounts on a few of them to try out.

The other thing to think about is your matrix client. This is similar to an IRC client or an email app. Luckily, this matter even less than the homeservers since you can freely switch between these anytime with basically no issues. If none catch your eye, Element is the sort of "reference implementation" so you can just try that one if you want. It has a web version too: https://app.element.io

There's some cool more advanced features like spaces and threads, but you don't have to worry about those much at first.

sweet thanks! i'll have to look into it more. i know that you can bridge other apps too, like discord and telegram which would be really awesome

Federation definitely feels like the next major stepping stone of the internet's evolution.

Ever heard of Email?...

Or XMPP for that matter.

Federation has been a core principle since the beginning.

You don't have to be condescending.

Exactly. Most people have only used the Internet in its current centralized form. Not everyone had the benefit of being around in the IRC/XMPP/Icecast/BBS/Usenet/etc. days. Federated services are a new concept to many people.

It really does feel a bit like the early days, for me. Bunch of strangers talking to each other in, generally, good faith. 'Course there were also tons of pop-ups, the banner would've taken an hour to download at that resolution... I like this more. lol

Wishfully thinking, but, I hope companies follow this

There's been quite a lot of large companies and institutions on the Fediverse, mostly on Mastodon. As long as there are people there, corporate will follow too.

Some examples:

Then there's all the big FOSS tech groups like KDE and Mozilla who are on the Fediverse too.

As long as there's an audience, people will come, just have to withstand the growing pains.

That's fine, as long as no instance gets like 99% of the userbase and we are back to square one

That's my concern - that some company buys up some of the most popular instances, then "encourages" their members to concentrate on just one instance, builds up the number of communities on it until it becomes totally dominant and then cuts out all the other instances.

Not that the others couldn't just continue, obviously, but if they're starved of users they'll be starved of content too and the gravitational pull of the big one(s) might drive the small ones into obscurity or closure.

BRB, got a business idea...

Might seem naive, but I actually have a hard time imagining this. There's just not a lot to make one instance more desirable than another, which seems like a bad thing, but I don't think it is. I decided against signing up on lemmy.ml because it was laggy, so I went with a smaller instance- all the same content, but without the lag. If a lot of content gets created on one instance, there's no pressure to pile in, because you can view, comment and interact from a different, smaller instance.

That's exactly what Apple, Google, and Facebook did to XMPP. They all started with a federated open protocol messaging system. At first iChat users could talk to GChat, and Messenger users, as well as users of thousands of other servers. After they built their network they closed off federation under the guise of "feature development".

To this day, iMessage still uses an XMPP based backend. But green text is for Apple users only!

I finally dipped my toes in and having a blast.

Just need to get Sync/Apollo/etc .. aka the BOYS to come and make some mobile apps and we're SET :)

Is Jerboa on Android the only application currently?

Yeah I think so. It's not too bad tbh, but would love to see this ecosystem flourish.

This is why I'm hoping people stay even after the blackout. Lemmy has potential but a big part of it is the community. I already like it here and I've seen it grow despite being here for only a week. It's honestly amazing to watch.

I'm definitely here to stay. Reddit is now reportedly working on blocking the site on mobile browsers. It's not a stretch to assume they'll kill old.reddit, too, to maximise profits.

Proof of Stake will keep actual resource costs maintainable, and Blockchain does do some cool stuff for decentralization, and therefore federation. Right now Lemmy instances are tied to DNS. Hopefully in the future they will be tied to cryptographic assets. Distributed Autonomous Organizations are a great example of the potential.

What advantage would switching to crypto have? I'm not well versed in how Lemmy works yet but I don't see why Lemmy would need blockchain.

Blockchain/proof of work is indeed not necessary, but identities should not be bound to instances. That's the thing #nostr gets right and the #fediverse doesn't.

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@smegma_yogurt@iusearchlinux.fyi @almeida_alvaro@iusearchlinux.fyi

Consegui pingar vcs?

Os pings são tão diferentes aqui. meio estranho.

Pq? como apareceu?

Aparecia como notificação, mas quando eu clicava na notificação não aparecia.

Só apareceu depois de eu mandar mostrar todas as notificações e não só as não lidas.

Mas ele ainda contava como não lida no simbolo.

Hey! This post is not specifically related to the lemmy.world instance. From now on, posts such as these will be removed, in order for the community to stay on topic. However, as this is a highly upvoted post, I'll just lock it for now.