Does anyone else feel like Kurzgesagt is describing the Fediverse in their latest video?

qaz@lemmy.world to Fediverse@lemmy.world – 183 points – The Internet is Worse Than Ever – Now What?
youtube.com

I'm talking about what they say at 8:20:

Bulletin boards, forums, blogs. The main difference to today was twofold:  

For one there were no algorithms fighting to keep you online at any cost – at some point you were done with the internet for the day, as mind blowing as this may sound.

But more importantly: The old internet was very fractured, split into thousands of different communities, like small villages gathering around shared beliefs and interests.

These villages were separated from each other by digital rivers or mountains. These communities worked because they mirrored  real life much more than social media:  

Each village had its own culture and set of rules.  Maybe one community was into rough humour and soft moderation, another had strict rules and banned  easily.

If you didn’t play by the village rules,  you would be banned – or you could just go and move to another village that suited you better.

So instead of all of us gathering in one place, overwhelming our brains at a townsquare that in the end just leads to us going insane, one solution to achieve less social sorting may be extremely simple:

go back to smaller online communities.

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Or just forums.

Yeah there's not much that the Fediverse adds to the equation that a forum wouldn't handle. It's actually worse in a lot of ways, because on a forum you're not going to have seven different subforums dedicated to the same topics, like the federation does by having 200 servers each with generally similar and redundant subcommunities. Sports is a big example I use, because it's the most evident.

One of the most popular moderation moves on this platform has been to lock these excess communities and forward them to a central one that is actually active.

There's some growing pains, but within a federated system, I think there needs to be community aggregation at a certain point. There's no need to host 50 different identical communities, and it's arguable that it makes things worse. I'm hoping that someone will eventually be able to develope the tools to easily allow for community aggregation in the future.

Isn't it kinda the opposite? A fediverse is not multiple separate isolated villages, it's a bunch of villages all bundled up together in one place within walking distance.

kinda. but compared to e. g. Twitter its much more splinteted. Twitter is more like one giant city. also your seeing mostly what Twitter decides. mastodon shows you what you subscribed to. things are less viral.

You can put twitters feed to following only and it's kinda the same thing tbh. I don't think Mastodon did anything to fix the core issue from the video, you're still bombarded with opinions from people you don't have much in common with. Whether it's millions of people on twitter or thousands on Mastodon, it's still more than what our stupid brain is able it process IMHO.

I do interpret it as not having an exuberant userbase atm, many share the sentiment of lemmy feeling like early internet and this is probably why. But this means once it's large enough, the same might happen to the fediverse.

But the great thing about the fediverse is how you can create your own instance and do with it as you please, maybe allow partial federation so people can read but not interact, or an entirely sepperated federation. Create your own village but still be interconnected by a high speed train network.

I feel like it's unlikely to happen regardless of the userbase. Fediverse as a whole seems to have been built on different merits and it's curated by the large corporations, so they won't be coming here with their algorithms and ad-revenue and thirst for profits and engagement.

The biggest difference between Fediverse and the old-school internet websites, like forums and blogs and such, is that Fediverse is relatively easily intertwined; it's an ecosystem that consists of autonomous small-ish communities that get to choose whether and what they share. If you want, you can basically make one account, subscribe to as much shit from the Fediverse as you like, and have it all come to your curated feed (defederation happens, though) - or you can treat it all as separate platforms and have one account for each, with occasional guests hopping by (like you're with d.gs and I'm with feddit.de).

Even if there are platforms that later use the same protocols to try and get some profits, they'll most likely be out of everyone's memory much like Threads (remember that?) because it's just not the same as creating some kind of "everything platform" and have people walled off there to "engage" with rage-inducing content and have them (hopefully) generate ad revenue.

Thats's where OP's kurzgesagt video comes into play, they state that we as humans do not have the mental capacity to process the amount of information that is available to us. Social media hijacks this need for connection.

We as humans tend to seek out likeminded people, every kind of person is welcome here but the fact that we're all using the same platform connects us in a way. There comes a point in every social media where this interconnection fades away due to a growing userbase, because when a platform reaches this point users no longer feel that base connection and start interacting with people in a completely different, much more negative, way.

The OP video explains how engagement driven rage content is not the cause of that, but rather a result of this loss of interconnection.

I do agree/hope the fediverse has smaller chance of that happening, but statistics would probably predict a similar direction when this platform hits a critical mass.

The villages being meaningfully separate spaces is more pertinent than how far apart they are. I'm on the instance that I'm on because of communities it federates with I'm interested in participating in. I moved instances to achieve this.

These villages were separated from each other by digital rivers or mountains

But the concept of federation in the fediverse removes these separations.

Not really, each Mastodon or Lemmy instance still has its own culture and rules. Federation just allows you to travel across borders with your same passport.

Some definitly do, but I think it depends on which one you're on and how you use it. All my communities are on other instances and unless it's an extreme instance like lemmygrad, I basically don't really care or pay attention to which instance a community is on.

Yeah you're not wrong, but just because they choose to be similar doesn't negate the ability to be different if desired, something not afforded to people who ran communities on commercial platforms.

The concept of Federation ensures the ability to do ones own thing if desired, not negate it.

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The Fediverse just gives a path, it doesn't restrict the paths. Anyone can make or join any community.

You could say the same about facebook groups or reddit. As long as you have an account on the platform, you can interact with any community on the platform. That's not separation.

They were talking about the early days, where you had to make an account for every different forum or community you joined and there was basically no interaction between those different forums.

No, those are closed systems. You can't start your own Facebook instance, you can launch a server with a lemmy instance.

But that's just the technical aspect of how the site infrastucture works. Unless you're someone that exclusivly browses the local feed, the fact there are multiple instances has little impact on the user expirence.

The point in the video was, that you used to only interact with people in a single community. Like, you were on a forum for a specific game and you talked with people about that game, usually not knowing much else about them. So you lived in the same village.

On today's social media platforms, including the fediverse, that's not really the case. I can interact with you in a forum about a game ... and then see you post some political opinion in another community we share ... and suddenly you're no longer just in my village, but you're also a member of the rival tribe.

I am subscribed to several different instances of lemmy and I go to all of them through LW all sorted by new.

I am subscribed to several different instances of lemmy

You mean you have accounts on different instances? I guess that is kind of a workaround that avoid the problem in the video. Then, you could just as easily make a separate facebook account for each group you join. But I don't think that's how most people will use it.

No, I just use my LW account, but I could make other accounts if I wanted to. I could use Mastodon or any other service to browse the Fediverse with.

You mean you have accounts on different instances?

I guess they meant community rather than instances

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Maybe they're soft launching on the fediverse 😄

Would love to see it. An explanation video on how the fediverse works, put out by Kurzgesagt, would be so helpful

Little instance-birds dying and exploding in spectacular fashion, all to a comfy jingle and a soothing narration of how the Internet is Doomed Regardless.

Kurzgesagt — in a Nutshell.

Yeah but there's literally nothing the Fediverse does better than a PHBB forum.

I actually hate the interconnected yet fragmented environment here - there's absurd amounts of redundancies in communities, resulting in dead spaces; you don't need 20 different federated servers all with their variations of the same communities, for example sports teams - you have fanaticus.social which is literally specifically for sports, but then every single local instance like midwest.social or lemmy.ca will have duplicate or even triplicate communities. This does nothing but make the whole platform seem big and empty and bereft of users or interactions.

I think once a community gets popular, the duplicates die away or act as backups when an instance goes down. That's generally a good thing because instances have disappeared overnight, and Lemmy is still in development

We had a movies&tv instance that was popular, and then it disappeared overnight so the smaller local instances took over till we got a new popular one

"literally nothing"

As if PHPBB forums didn't have duplicated subforums

If they were properly curated, they didn't. It's not like an admin from any other instance can delete duplicate communities from other instances.

Why would the admin of one PHPBB forum "curate" subforums on another PHPBB forum? If you had 10 different PHPBB forums about politics in separate countries, they would all have a "world" subforum (or something similarly named) in each. The only thing happening with the fediverse is that you're actively seeing what would happen if PHPBB forums were connected.

Admins can block them though. Infinite communties in infinite combinations makes a lot more sense when you think about content moderation. Like- imagine if the only politics community Reddit allowed was run by the r/conspircacy mods.

The fediverse is basically like PhPBB forums with a single login.

I remember there being at least 3 separate popular forums just for the Dodge neon.

It's pretty bad for small communities. A new factorio update drops and we have a thread on beehaw, lemmy and kbin gaming communities. Meanwhile the actual factorio community (on either of these servers) also gets a thread but it's mostly empty.

For some communities this makes sense but I feel like it just kills any smaller ones, they just never get a chance to take off properly.

It doesn't help that the fediverse search is just atrocious.

Yeah. In my opinion lemmy is just one layer to deep for the federated concept. Everybody should host their own subreddit and not their own reddit.

That's partilly more on the people creating duplicates without looking if the community doesn't exist already.

Granted, the lemmy explorer tool might not be around for too long for people to be easily able to - since someone on you instance needs to known a community exists on other instance and access it for everyone to see it. And some people might just not be aware of it as well.

That’s partilly more on the people creating duplicates without looking if the community doesn’t exist already

Which is not bad; actually and to the contrary, it can be a part of each instance's cultural identity and it's a practical way of ensuring the diversity and viability of smaller instances.

Discussing c/soccer in an Argentinian lemmy can be very different than discussing it in hexbear, for example. Not to mention it's likely most of everyone would't even be able to participate in hexbear's. Furthermore, general subjects becoming tied to the largest instances, which statistically have more surface to cover the creation of communities for any subject ever, returns us to the same problem of conversation and community becoming centralized into a "Reddit" instance.

A good perspective I didn't have.

Are you talking about https://lemmyverse.net/ ? Why should it disappear?

What I meant is I have no idea how long it exists, so people might not have the luxury of using it to check for existing communities.

Didn't mean to start a panic with bad wording :)

I see. Hopefully it will stay around, or an equivalent will emerge :)

I do too! Its incredibly handy

I think we'll collectively figure it out with time and have more specific, yet popular instances, rather than instances trying to be the all-places with communities. Like an instance for memes where communities act as sub-categories or something.

But I maybe wrong, I'm not on oracle or something.

If they were talking about anything specific, as hard to believe as it is, there is actually another community based website out there slightly larger than lemmy that allows you to subscribe to your interests and unsubscribe from others.

All of these things still exist. Theres just massive cities now, and they're shitty like cities in real life.

I learned a lot, and made a lot of IRL friends, on various message boards over the years. ADVrider.com used to be a lot of fun but I haven't checked it out lately. One thing that was cool was looking for vehicle-specific forums, like a forum for EX-500's or F150's. These forums were great for keeping whatever car you have running, and were full of knowledge on the problems found in specific cars. A lot of them still exist.

The similarly named AVSForum is still a great resource full of insanely knowledgeable A/V nerds. The 3si forum is still the place to check if you happen to be into Mitsubishi 3000GTs or Dodge Stealths.

I miss my little crew at MarcSeal.com/forum, a small guitar community. I don't like to brag about my accomplishments, but let's just say I was a moderator.

Well... for example, I said "maybe you don't need to drag yourself through literally every bit of shitty irrelevant news, if it is stressing you out to the point of reduced quality of life" earlier - and was promptly informed there was no need to be "an uninformed idiot". So I dunno, seems pretty friendly to me.

You can do the former without being the later, fuck that person

I would be closer if every instance had a specific topic, Its much better than other social medias It would be closer if forums united through acativitypub

Instances do have quite distinct topics. This one is about programming, there are servers dedicated to specific languages, countries, or regions, others even just focus on a single game, movie, or another topic.

The best things on the Internet have always been the weird, random shit people do. Not what companies do to make money. When the business that runs a website that hosts content made by others starts forgetting that, they will inevitably fail.

They know this, and they keep trying to make it harder for the Internet to operate the way the fediverse does by adding laws that restrict it and repealing laws that protect it.

Kurzgesagt Is becoming a conspiracy channel. As someone who experienced the era of Bulletin boards, forums, blogs. Kurzgesagt Got the information wrong. Yes, there was small communitys like current fediverse, kbin is such an example where Lemmy world is much bigger. Yet, nothing is bad about it.

Rules exist for a reason Kurzgesagt, always have been. They themselves should know how toxic people can become.

I recommend everyone to stop watching Kurzgesagt. Tell people to stop Kurzgesagt crazy thinking and tell Kurzgesagt how wrong they are.

What are you even talking about? I feel like I got 0 useful actionable information from your comment, just a vague sense of dread. What rules are they breaking? What specifically is wrong with this video?

Kurzgesagt is saying internet is bad. However, the research they source is telling people that the internet is just being misused and governments aren’t doing anything to protect everyone. The other research says humans will stay in what they believe because of their social network. Kurzgesagt Will never mention it.

Anything to substantiate this? What specifically do you have an issue with?

The source clearly outlined that people will stay within their community because they believe in their choice. Yet, Kurzgesagt makes no mention of it. The other source is from news papers mentioning social media platforms and impact on people. Looking into the research tells you everything else. The data was collected in certain areas but should not be used as evidence for all of the internet. Things like video, music and outside activities take time and just claiming to only look at past twitter or only older people of Facebook isn’t going to get enough context in internet problems. Kurzgesagt Will never mention the research because the research is saying they want more data.

I stopped watching them when they did their climate change video, which was such a corporate greenwashing feelgood bullshit video that I just couldn't justify it anymore.