Comment on Is the Fediverse stalling?
rglullis@communick.news 3 days agoWhat’s stopping small businesses and influencers
There is nothing stopping them, but there is no one here that wants them to come:
- Scroll around for a bit on the federated timeline of your preferred Mastodon instance, tell me how long it takes for someone to display an anti-business sentiment.
- There is no one coordinated movement to get creators on YouTube and tell them “hey, if you start putting your videos on PeerTube we will contribute to your Patreon”.
- Every and any effort to build a public searchable index of the Fediverse was attacked on the grounds of “I don’t want my data used by marketers”.
- The majority view on “how to best fund the Fediverse” is “set up donations”. Whenever I bring up “I think it’s more fair if everyone paid just a little bit, this is why my instance is only for paying members”, I am immediately treated as an evil capitalist pig.
What reporters?
There were a number of reporters from the NYT/WSJ/CNN who set up Mastodon accounts in 2022 and were harassed on Mastodon.
Does this, by the way, not depend on the instance?
Do you think that Fediverse is a good representation of the overall political spectrum?
Skavau@piefed.social 3 days ago
People don't really respond well to advertisements and influencers on Reddit either, for context.
So here do you just mean "people tend to be democratic socialists/communists/anarchists"?
Oh, well I don't know enough about Peertubes success here. I don't really use that.
Oh for goodness sake. I simply don't believe that a paywalled system as you imagine could ever even approach Reddits numbers, or even Blueskys.
Not really. So? Neither are major reddit subreddits in many cases.
rglullis@communick.news 3 days ago
I feel like we are talking about different things. You seem to be more focused on Reddit vs Lemmy, and I am talking about the “Closed” social networks vs the wider Fediverse.
The comparison is not to Reddit. It’s Instagram/TikTok/YouTube. Maybe you heard of those: it’s a place where WNBA players making $100k/year by playing can make $20k per Instagram sponsored post.
First, lumping together all these three ideologies as one single block is a bit handwavy. Second, I am not talking about “anti-corporate”. I’m talking about anti-business. If you think that the majority of people are that extreme in their political positions, I’d guess your worldview is quite skewed.
This is a strawman: I’m saying “We should not have to rely on open registration instances and hope that the admins get enough funds to keep going”, which is not the same as “all instances should be paywalled”.
I think if we didn’t have as many open instances, we’d end up with more people self-hosting and running a server for their own friends, or we would start hearing from students asking their universities to run a server for them, or we would get hyper-localized instances where some group would pool resources to run a service for themselves, etc.
Again, it’s not just about reddit. Also, it’s about having places where politics are not such a proeminent part of the discussion. E.g, Threads got a lot of their initial momentum by avoiding politics and getting sports journalists to post about NBA and football.
Skavau@piefed.social 3 days ago
Sorry, I'm thinking strictly in terms of Reddit vs. Lemmy/Piefed/adjacent networks because they are essentially Reddit alternatives that function the same.
If Piefed (or Lemmy) brings in effective community migration where an entire community can be lifted from one instance to another, then I am not bothered by future lemm.ee scenarios happening. Communities can become nomadic, and that's fine.
That's on people needing to do that. You don't need to convince me of that. I'm doing it with music and TV.
rglullis@communick.news 3 days ago
From Evan, co-author of ActivityPub: The Fediverse should be more like the Facebook Platform (lots of client apps using the same social graph) rather than the Apple App Store (a bunch of one-feature apps that have to bootstrap their own social network each time).
Instead of thinking “Lemmy/Piefed vs Reddit” or “Mastodon vs Bluesky vs Twitter” or “PeerTube vs Youtube”, think that the Fediverse can be so much more than a poor man’s version of the proprietary networks. This mentality is still rooted in the silos created by Big Tech.
First, I think that community migration implementation from PieFed has very bad implications. It is literally rewriting history.
Second, if we want to make the Fediverse something really accessible, it needs to be a lot more reliable. Yeah, when we are a few thousand people it’s easy to coordinate the migration of a few dozen communities. But if we are talking about millions or billions of people, we can not afford to have constant failures. People have expectations set by the corporate networks, so the whole system needs to be as reliable as them.