Link: https://matduggan.com/boy-i-was-wrong-about-the-fediverse/

It became the only reliable source of information I had. People posted links with a minimal amount of commentary, picking and choosing the best content from other social media networks. They’re not doing it to “build a brand” because that’s not a thing in the Fediverse. It’s too disjointed to be a place to build a newsletter subscription base.

This was a great read to start my day, thank you!

People complain about Lemmy having limited content and engagement. Not in this article so much. I’m sure there were fewer posts in the past too. But what I found is that there are real people on here and you don’t have to wade through bots and shills which makes this community feel much more whole to me.

I learnt something new today, cheers

FYI, I'm doing it to build a brand.

Now please subscribe to my newsletter!

The tickets for Fediretreat are selling fast. Grab yours now!

I'm so hyped for fedipalooza

Fedi Wap as Headliner?

Wet ass piefed?

unless you enter .ml environment...

And it has not enough users. If the fediverse ever became popular enough to hold significant marketshare, we'd see similar issues. The upside to the fediverse is that you can defederate from misinformation peddlers.

Your ideas intrigue me.

Beans company?

Weird I thought the fediverse was mostly delusional leftists talking about how great life is in North Korea, China and Russia and how bad the imperial west is.

I really do not understand all the .ml hate. If you have it so much why are you using their technology (Lemmy)? So much bullshit being reposted as fact. Basically echo chamber brigading. I left Reddit to escape this shit…

Edit: although judging by your post history you lack conviction and joke about everything, so maybe I missed the mark

I really would like to somehow convince more people to adopt the idea that, like, Facebook and friends are run by bad people and you can choose not to use their products. Just stop. Find another way. Be uncomfortable for a little while.

But people aren't up to the challenge.

True, Lemmy feels this way almost exclusively because it's small and hasn't been noticed by mainstream media enough. The second that changes this place will become what reddit was pre-ipo.

That’s why I’m advocating for people to switch to piefed and stop donating to the lemmy project which funds .ml.

That’s why

Which is? I’m still missing something here.

I really do not understand all the .ml hate. If you have it so much why are you using their technology (Lemmy)?

Piefed is a derivative of Lemmy. So you’re not getting away from it.

And Lemmy is a derivative of Reddit so by your logic you haven’t escaped from it.

Lemmy isn’t compatible with Reddit. Piefed is literally implementing Lemmy’s data structures to specifically be compatible with Lemmy.

So since your stated goal is counter to reality, I have to wonder what your real intent is. I only see this drama as weakening Lemmy and Piefed by extension, not strengthening anything.

Lemmy is a small part of the fediverse and the tankie triad is a small part of Lemmy. Barely ever seen that stuff on Mastodon and co.

Yeah, there's definitely still some bullshit and editorialized clickbaity headlines to sift through, but it's not nearly as much and overall the content here feels much more human.

There's just not much incentive to generate engagement for the sake of it (unless you're funhole), and far fewer bots and bad-faith trolls in general. Not to say there's none though.

This is weird ass article. It's like the author has never used an Internet forum before and didn't understand how the Internet works.

Don't stop at the Fediverse. Keep going. You've only just begun.

Right.

Any disagreement must be state sponsored shill bots.

Lemmy as far as I can tell is mostly dup posts and blind links, especially links to youtube. The absence of Spez is of course priceless, but otherwise Lemmy is duller than plenty of single-issue blogs or forums, or even the still-decaying corpse of Usenet. That article is about Mastodon, which has a different crowd than Lemmy does. I'm not big on the "follower" model though, so I'm not there very much.

Wow. I had to stop reading this one. Long on words, poor on writing and spelling and neither circling a theme so much as just edgelording on everything social, I'm not sure whether it was ever getting somewhere.

But life's too short for 6000 words on The Things That Suck With Stuff I Don't Use.

You said it not me.

Fediverse doesn't (as of yet) have a monetization path because of it's "self hosted" structure - I put it in quotes because most people use large instances, but anyone can spin up their own and federate.

The big risk with this is that if it reaches a critical mass where advertisers see potential for profit, the mechanism that would be most convenient, especially with LLMs, is bots.

Say Toyota wants to promote their new car. They contract an advertising agency, who spins up a few dozen LLM agents trained on Lemmy data and instructions to talk up the latest new car. It might make posts, or just comments, but in all cases it will eventually promote that product.

All that for the cost of a few tokens, and the only giveaway would be the "AI phrasing", if anyone catches it.

I think the community is a good size right now. Popular enough that we guarantee getting any content of relevance I care about, but not popular enough to have all the problems you mentioned. I hope the community stays this size and off the radar indefinitely.

Unfortunately the "attitude" system makes Piefed unusable.

My hope is that it will always be a little too disjointed to hold that kind of attention for long.

So here is a stupid question

What exactly is the fediverse? What's included in it? I've hear much about fediverse and Lemmy, but is Lemmy part of it or not? Are other systems like Blue sky a part of it or not? Do I transparently see posts from all those different systems?

As soon as there is "unlimited" content, the vast majority of said content is shit

Even better.

Most instances have human moderation, gating for bots, and yes, and you actually have to take 5-10 minutes to figure out how it all works, so the stupid people are automatically excluded by sheer complexity.

I fucking love Mastodon.

Agree, this seems completely toxic and ripe for abuse.

The fediverse is the overarching architecture. So lemmy is part of the fediverse. It is a federated collection of servers that are somewhat independent, but still part of the system. I'm going to make a very poor analogy, but think of it like your spice cabinet. The individual spices are instances while the cabinet itself is the fediverse. Or at least that's my understanding of it. If I'm mistaken, please someone enlighten me.

yo dog. let me tell ya all about the neighborhood you live in!

Really reeks of "if you hate capitalism why do you participate in it?"

I’m just happy to not support a transphobe and a massive hypocrite build their echo chamber that censors words they consider ‘bad.’

If they spend as much time developing the software as they spend policing thought it might be worth something.

Not a stupid question at all. Loosely, I think, it's any site that trades information using the ActivityPub protocol. Because they use the same underlying protocol, they can easily trade content/posts with each other and yes, Lemmy is part of the Fediverse for that reason.

This is also why you can see posts from lemmy.ca or piefed.social or whatever.domain users while browsing lemmy.world - anyone who sets up a site with the Lemmy software can participate in the network and trade posts with all the others - these are individually called instances. These sites can decide that they don't want to trade posts with certain other sites (ie: trolls set up a farm on their own instance) and exclude them from their users being able to see them, this is called defederation.

In theory, a Mastodon instance could see content from a Lemmy instance (and Pixelfed and Loops and so on) as they all use the same underlying protocol to trade information, but in practice, it seems that sites basically stick to trading with other sites in their wheelhouse.

BlueSky also started with ActivityPub but I believe they did something to their software to make it proprietary.

The usefulness of all this is: no member site can get a monopoly on content. The largest Lemmy site is lemmy.world and I have an account on there. I switched to dbzer0 because I disagreed with some of the actions taken by lemmy.world (they defederated from some content that I wanted to see) so I came over here and now I can see that content.

Anyway, that's my understanding of it.

What exactly is the fediverse?

Servers that can federate over ActivityPub protocol. Any server that uses ActivityPub can be considered part of the fediverse.

What’s included in it?

Clones of corporate owned sites: twitter (mastodon, misskey), tumblr (wafrn), reddit (lemmy, piefed), facebook (friendica), plus others

I’ve hear much about fediverse and Lemmy, but is Lemmy part of it or not?

Yes, it is

Are other systems like Blue sky a part of it or not?

Bluesky isn't, since they use a different protocol, but it's possible to bridge and interact with it. Wafrn does it.

Do I transparently see posts from all those different systems?

This is the biggest "it depends" situation. For instance, by default, lemmy ignores most posts from mastodon and similars. However, mastodon users can post to lemmy communities if they use the proper @, but they cannot specify a title - their post body will also double as the title. They can also reply to comments, they're easy to spot because they always have an @user when replying.

Some server types integrate the different things better than others. Friendica and Wafrn seem to be the best for "variety integration".

People are fucking addicted to instagram and I'm the annoying "get rid of that shit" preacher to everyone I can. My gf has reduced her usage, but still checks it from time to time.

I always ask "Do you really need to use it?" - and almost always, their answer is "not really, but it's the only place I can find X". Some of my gf's friends use it to find new places to go. Some of my boardgaming friends still use it, mostly to "know what events are coming up" or what new games are being released.

Instagram is essentially this age's yellow pages of a telephone list, small businesses are super dependent on it and they're forced to post fucking stories everyday or get erased by the algorithm

It's one of those self fueling problems. Businesses post on Instagram because people go there, and people go there in part because that's where they found out about businesses doing stuff.

Better options are possible, but the big money is backing this hell. Less money to be made from RSS feeds , web rings, and email newsletters.

I don't use any social media other than this. I find out about bands I like playing from their email lists or bandsintown. I'm on a couple "things happening in the city" email newsletters. It doesn't demand my attention.

I watched a Greenlandic toddler munch meat from the spine of a seal with its head very much intact.

I kind of want to know the context of this

In theory, a Mastodon instance could see content from a Lemmy instance (and Pixelfed and Loops and so on) as they all use the same underlying protocol to trade information, but in practice, it seems that sites basically stick to trading with other sites in their wheelhouse.

Whenever you see somebody linking to the user they're replying to at the beginning of their comment, you're likely seeing somebody posting from Mastodon because their UI is user-feed-oriented instead of thread-oriented.