I don't get people that are here in the fediverse and want to bring over the content that is on FB, IG, TikTok, etc.
This has come to mind because all the chatter about Meta federating.
I see a lot of people saying they'd love to have that type of content here when Meta federates, and that those will be the best instances because they will have the most content, but they will still be accessible without compromising their privacy.
I truly don't get this.
I'm not here for mass-produced content, if I wanted that, I'd be in other platforms. The beauty of these communities is they are not filled with posts that are all the same, algorithms and bots. It's just a community of real people having conversations.
If you want mass-produced trendy content, please, consume it elsewhere, and when you are inevitably fed up, then come here and enjoy the slow-paced, real community.
PD: I hope this doesn't come across as wall-keeping (or however it's said lol), It's my honest opinion.
I recently compared it to sitting in a comfortable little cafe that serves delicious food and looking around and saying, "Gee, I wish this was a McDonalds."
It just doesn't even begin to make sense to me.
And I'm with you - gatekeeping or no - anyone who wants Twitter or Reddit or Facebook content can already go to Twitter or Reddit or Facebook to get it, and that's exactly what they should do.
I think it makes sense if you realise that people are here for such a huge variety of different reasons.
Some of us (including probably yourself) are here because we're hoping that the fediverse might be an open alternative to corporate social and everything that entails.
Others are here because one of their favourite reddit subs might have closed.
Others probably got caught up in the fuck /u/spez thing and just think it's cool to hate spez without really understanding what's going on.
Others are probably here because it's a just a new virgin landscape for trolling, or building a following or being some kind of influencer.
That's why a lot of these people would see Meta's arrival as great news. More people more content.
I will say though, the fediverse is the first platform that can cater to all of these people. For example, you might end up with a group of lemmy instances which refuse to federate with any instances which federate with meta. I'm not saying that's a good idea, just that it allows everyone to be catered for.
On my Instagram account, I follow a whole bunch of zoos, rehabilitation centers, parks, etc. that would never join a niche platform but make absolutely amazing content. I would love for there to be a commercial product for that kind of content to reach directly the fediverse. I also enjoy minor "celebrities" (drag queens, podcasters, voice actors) who again, don't really care for quirky alternative social media products. I wish I could see their content directly from my more private Lemmy account.
I personally want to consolidate all content in the fediverse because I see it as more archival-proof. Companies can come and go, brands can sell and change, but a community effort like the fediverse has a huge potential to last.
Just look at reddit and how many useful guides have been taken down.
If you know where to look, there are a lot of useful news, posts, guides, articles and media floating around but often, these are at the hands of big corporations and companies who can turn their backs on their users any time (and with it, our access to these files/media/etc)
I see a lot of people saying they’d love to have that type of content here when Meta federates, and that those will be the best instances because they will have the most content, but they will still be accessible without compromising their privacy.
And that right there is why you see the expression "Embrace, Extend & Extinguish" thrown around a lot lately. This is exactly what companies have done to demolish competition in the past.
Having been on the Internet through the period when AOL connected to it, I'm a little skeptic of the idea that linking a behemoth to the fediverse won't totally fuck up the culture of the latter.
I’m not here for mass-produced content, if I wanted that, I’d be in other platforms. The beauty of these communities is they are not filled with posts that are all the same, algorithms and bots. It’s just a community of real people having conversations.
The problem with the fediverse is that it's not really filled with posts at all. Maybe the Tech or Random magazines, if that's what you're looking for, but if you want to talk about cars or suits or model trains or whatever, you'll be lucky if you see one post across the fediverse in a month. Niches are empty, because most people here mostly have one interest in common, which is the fediverse itself.
Conversely, the value of large-scale social media, and the theoretical ideal of the fediverse, lies in positive network effects. You're into some obscure Japanese manga only four people who speak English have ever read? odds are, three of those people are on reddit, and you might find them. Looking for a review on a bootmaker you saw at the thrift store? Go to /r/goodyearwelt, there will be twelve threads about it, none of them sponsored or anything, diving way too deep into details you never could have imagined wanting to know.
But right now, look through lemmy.world or whatever, and tell me:
What are some good anime? Some good Shonen anime? Some good non-Shonen anime? An anime that represents trans issues well?
Where is a good place to get a suit under $400? In the US? In Europe? What's the difference between Huntsman and Edward Sexton's cuts?
What's a good recipe for a cake? What about a salad? How do you deflame a red onion?
Who is the vice president of the United States? Who is the secretary of state? Who is the Under Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property and Director of the United States Patent and Trademark Office?
Trivial questions, right? Most of them haven't come up here at all. Reddit is a massive corpus of knowledge, answering questions way more obscure than these, with enough people around to answer whatever question you might have in a variety of niche communities. People want that on a service they can trust.
I don't think many people want more tools to talk to strangers about nothing. Scale gives rise to better conversations and interactions in niche areas.
I agree thoroughly. The main reason me, you, and the majority of people moved here was to catch a break from the barrage of monotonic, retarded content on mainstream platforms.
Personally I want the Fediverse to become the norm. So that means not having an opinion on what sort of content I do/don't want. I get why people like the "secret club" vibe but secret clubs of smarter-than-average people don't make the world a better place. Letting the masses do what they always did in a better way does.
That's not to say I'm pro-Threads; I don't think gaining users through a single massive server which will be the way 90% of users engage with the Fediverse and can kneecap other servers that don't follow their rules (which particularly worries me because of their ban on porn; I think most popular Fediverse servers ban porn, but not all, and with Facebook it's clearly in the name of "advertiser friendly") is healthy growth for the idea of federation.
Especially given the armies of people who cross post any decent content to all networks. I hope that here, due to no monetary benefit and no karma, it is only for the love of sharing. All the good content will make it here, but rather than being a firehouse of crap, the community nature should make the relevant communities more focused.
I still use Facebook for local groups. I think even they realise that niche communities without outrage are where the growth will lie. That's likely why they are scared of federated networks. It could easily kill them over time.
I get why some want it. I just wish they'd stop. They want ease of access to all the things they like. I hate those other platforms and have no accounts on them and I don't want to see them here and prefer the community driven content over yet another algorithm pushing garbage I hate. They always try to spin their algorithms as finding content you want and tailoring it to you. But it's never the case. They take the vile shit that they support and push that, mingling it with a few crumbs of real content. And eventually the crumbs disappear too. I don't want any of that corporate nonsense around. I really like a good large community without that influence.
Purely text based content is way easier on the servers. If all Lemmy users uploaded videos and high res images all the time, the servers could not keep up, right?
consider that they use hardware that is run on donation (or their own) money
It’s not really the content quality or mass usage that bothers me. The Fediverse is built on ideals of open source, privacy, decentralization, controlling your own experience and your own data, etc… All these things are incompatible with Meta and other mega corporations. In fact they are a direct threat to corporate greed. Meta is not a friend of the Fediverse and its premise, and their meddling here can only erode those ideals. Regardless of content, number of users, and so on, I hope the devs, at least, can stay the course and not cave to corporate pressure, and that all the Twitter/Reddit refugees can remember why they ultimately left those platforms in the first place.
Putting my tinfoil hat: Would Meta be capable of having people in the Fediverse posting positively about Meta joining the Fediverse? Because anyone with 2 braincells and that has arrived here so far and gone through the trouble of understanding +- what this is about, set up an account etc, would understand by now the way the world works and why its such a bad idea to have Meta have a foot in the door here.
I feel like I understand both, though what I miss isn't the mass produced content, its how much more viable small communities were on reddit. The big communities here on lemmy are way better than the ones on reddit (which universally sucked) but most of the communities I wanted to engage with regularly are kinda niche. Its a double edged sword, but I do think the community feel here is so much nicer, even if it comes at the expense of small communities being absent, or less active
Some government services use twitter to publish news or information. I expect they will be in Threads too. If I can access them through federation then it's a huge win for the Fediverse.
Hasn't every form of social media done this though? It's on the users to collectively shape the culture of a site as a whole. For example Hacker news manages to maintain its ultra nerdy niche through the years, because the users keep it that way.
For years I've had two separate Reddit bookmarks on my toolbar, one for r/all and one for my homepage, because for me those were two completely different experiences. Reddit has both shitposting galore, and also (had?) r/AskHistorians. It managed to be both, and Lemmy can do that too.
Right now fediverse is mostly made up of techy people - which is fine! But there are many other kinds of people you might potentially want to interact with online. Threads could bring in normies and celebs to the metaverse. Normies are a mixed bag - this includes your racist uncle but also your really cool and funny friend who can't be bothered to set up a mastodon account. Celebs are a source of real world influence (I'm including politicians and journalists for example in this category) which is obviously attractive. I'm gonna miss cyberbullying local politicians on twitter, and it would be nice to be able to continue doing so through the comfort of e.g. kbin.
I get your point and I largely agree but it isn't that hard to see the appeal of threads for me. I don't think it's gonna work out in the end though so I really hope they mostly stay of the broader fediverse.
I believe most people just want more content than anything, but with opening it up to all of those other social media platforms, you get all of the junk that comes with it.
I personally left those platforms to get away from all of the social media drama, and I don't mind less content as long as it quality.
I'm a Reddit refugee and I've been moving all the pictures and videos from my old niche subreddit to my new niche Kbin magazine. I'm afraid Reddit will collapse, and the collection of floaty things I've been building up will become lost media if it's not reposted somewhere else. I like the Fediverse's mission and I want to see how the Fediverse develops. Also, I want to have a complete and functional artsy magazine on Kbin to show the others back on Reddit that it can be done well.
For the past couple days, some of my posts have been making Fedia's home page and apparently other instances' home pages too. It's good to be seen, but I'm afraid I'm getting more attention than I actually deserve. I like seeing art of fantasy worlds and interactions, and I'm not alone in that. But, I'm afraid I'm corrupting your feeds with stuff you aren't looking for, just because I'm doing it first.
You don't want this - that's fine, you can just block the instances you'd like to avoid, that's one of the best features of the fediverse. But if someone else would like to see this content, why not give them such option? Why would you want to decide for the others? Let them make this decision.
Isn't that what an aggregate site is meant to do? Filter content from other sources into user curated lists, ranked by users voting on them, thus creating a community of discussion unique to the platform?
I don't want a Meta account, but I want to communicate with the billions of people who do, including all of my family and friends.
But that is the power of the Fediverse. There is room for both small isolated instances as well as those that are part the larger "main" network, and everything in-between.
Personally, I am fresh enough to all this that I feel it's prudent to kind of sit back on the discussion, and am leaning toward the "defederate" option.
However - I deleted my Facebook years ago, and never had Instagram or Twitter. It would be nice to interact with my own family and friends who do most of their online presence in places like that. So I kinda get it. I'm not after the mass-produced content but it would be cool to hear from people I know again that I've lost touch with because I'm stubborn about FB.
Just spitballing - and please consider that I haven't been at Lemmy long enough to know if this is a terrible idea - but what about an instance that hasn't blocked Facebook and other big corpos, but doesn't raise their content by default? Like what if you have to actively connect with people on them? Seems like a decent middle ground, until Facebook decides to break it anyway.
I'm going to go against the grain here... I actually DO support Meta being federated. I know people are afraid that doing so will ruin the "secret club" vibe going on here, but that's the beauty of the Fediverse! Just join an instance that doesn't federate with Meta! Personally, there is some mass-appeal content that I like to consume, particularly relating to following certain public figures, and I'm looking forward to the convenience of being able to do so from within the Fediverse. But also, I'll keep a separate account on a non-Meta instance to keep participating in the secret club.
Whilst I completely agree that having deals with company such as facebook is not a good idea, currently we have a lack of content.
I fully understand you don't want content by bots and similar rubbish. I don't want that, too.
However, reddit was a good place for news and information. E.g. when I needed some tech support, probably someone on reddit already had a similar problem or I could ask and almost any relevant subreddit was spectated by some competent people.
I joined “threads” and spent about 5 mins reading their garbage opinions before deleting it. I like it how they act as though it’s the “less toxic” twitter lol. Wait until the freshness wears off, then they revert back to their default toxic state. I give it a month.
If meta federates we all gonna see their content it will fade away the rest of the instances,same like the lemmy world is the biggest instance in lemmy so if I sort by all ,all I see is the post from the lemmy world,so same thing will happen if meta federate, correct me If I am wrong
... Some people just like letting the corporate algorithm sort content by controversies and rage baits. Maybe they will make their own instances focused only on that, but I hope that they will not be worth federating with. Eventually some of these will go back to corporate platform and whine on how "bad and bleak is the Fediverse". Good, keep whining and "advertising". We don't want people with that attitude here anyway.
It definitely feels like I have a voice in the spaces that I hang out here. The comments in reddit, insta, fb are so swollen that comments seemed pointless unless you comment on brand new posts. Maybe not everything needs to be here.
I will just say, that image of what the fediverse is (or ought to be), while not rare, is not shared by everyone.
If you actually want gatekeep only high effort posta you might want to go to Tildes.
I don't think gatekeeping is the answer, I mean I always wanted this platform yo grow horizontally unless there are many, many instances and a lot of people for variety. If you want to see only high effort content only join appropriate communities, it's as easy as that. To justify blthr block because it will taint the space is just a bad arguments in my eyes.
I see Zuckerberg trying to capture the Fediverse as a good thing, but only because it will test how resilient it is, and expose any weak spots the community can fix.
Bad actors are inevitable in a federated network, and they're supposed to become increasingly ostracized if they keep at it. Let's see how resilient the Fediverse is against a thirsty bad actor with a deep wallet.
Strange that I do not see those people who would accept meta with open arms. How could a conscious person could be receptive towards such an abusive platform?
I do enjoy some random / silly content though, looking at sites like squabbles.io you can see how popular that can be. I'm pretty happy with the content coming through here, but some of the more light stuff is also very appealing
I feel META getting into the Fediverse platform is a great idea, brings it to the masses more easily. We just need to make sure META doesn't take control of it as everyone should be able to use the platform they wish to use.