Add it all up, and the social web is changing in three crucial ways: It’s going from public to private; it’s shifting from growth and engagement, which broadly involves building good products that people like, to increasing revenue no matter the tradeoff; and it’s turning into an entertainment business. It turns out there’s no money in connecting people to each other, but there’s a fortune in putting ads between vertically scrolling videos that lots of people watch. So the “social media” era is giving way to the “media with a comments section” era, and everything is an entertainment platform now. Or, I guess, trying to do payments. Sometimes both. It gets weird.
As far as how humans connect to one another, what’s next appears to be group chats and private messaging and forums, returning back to a time when we mostly just talked to the people we know. Maybe that’s a better, less problematic way to live life. Maybe feed and algorithms and the “global town square” were a bad idea. But I find myself desperately looking for new places that feel like everyone’s there. The place where I can simultaneously hear about NBA rumors and cool new AI apps, where I can chat with my friends and coworkers and Nicki Minaj. For a while, there were a few platforms that felt like they had everybody together, hanging out in a single space. Now there are none.
I’d love to follow that up with, “and here’s the new thing coming next!” But I’m not sure there is one. There’s simply no place left on the internet that feels like a good, healthy, worthwhile place to hang out. It’s not just that there’s no sufficiently popular place; I actually think enough people are looking for a new home on the internet that engineering the network effects wouldn’t be that hard. It’s just that the platform doesn’t exist. It’s not LinkedIn or Tumblr, it’s not upstarts like Post or Vero or Spoutable or Hive Social. It’s definitely not Clubhouse or BeReal. It doesn’t exist.
Long-term, I’m bullish on “fediverse” apps like Mastodon and Bluesky, because I absolutely believe in the possibility of the social web, a decentralized universe powered by ActivityPub and other open protocols that bring us together without forcing us to live inside some company’s business model. Done right, these tools can be the right mix of “everybody’s here” and “you’re still in control.”
But the fediverse isn’t ready. Not by a long shot. The growth that Mastodon has seen thanks to a Twitter exodus has only exposed how hard it is to join the platform, and more importantly how hard it is to find anyone and anything else once you’re there. Lemmy, the go-to decentralized Reddit alternative, has been around since 2019 but has some big gaps in its feature offering and its privacy policies — the platform is absolutely not ready for an influx of angry Redditors. Neither is Kbin, which doesn’t even have mobile apps and cautions new users that it is “very early beta” software. Flipboard and Mozilla and Tumblr are all working on interesting stuff in this space, but without much to show so far. The upcoming Threads app from Instagram should immediately be the biggest and most powerful thing in this space, but I’m not exactly confident in Meta’s long-term interest in building a better social platform.
Tell me you never experienced Usenet or the internet before Facebook and friends fucked it up, without telling me. We literally used to have all the things he’s talking about, with much less of the drawbacks, before the internet became commercialized. Now the commercial web’s unsuitability has finally reached the point of undeniability, and we’re trying to figure out how to get back to that.
Yeah, and the author all but freely admits that. But they’re apparently willing to throw all that away to have it “feel like everyone’s there.”
Maybe this is me being uncharitable, but to be blunt it sounds like he just wants to feel like he’s sitting at the cool kids’ table.
I think they mostly just want to be able to have parasocial relationships with celebrities and influencers. Arnold Schwarzenegger would give advice occasionally on the bodybuilding subreddit, IIRC. Having your favorite YouTuber dip into the comments section for a quick moment just to say a thing or two was something Reddit/Twitter had that was really cool.
The fediverse kind of has that. Shout-out to Technology Connections, who is on Mastodon - @TechConnectify - as well as Not Just Bikes, who is @notjustbikes on Mastodon but is considering moving to Bluesky. (If you’re on Kbin, you can follow them from Kbin at https://kbin.social/u/@TechConnectify@mas.to and https://kbin.social/u/@notjustbikes@notjustbikes.com respectively.) But most influencers aren’t on the fediverse, outside of huge nerds.
The issue is that until we have a Reddit-like service which has a plurality of Reddit users and a Twitter-like service that has a plurality of Twitter users we’re going to be in this weird state. Both Reddit and Twitter still exist. They still have people who make posts there. Some celebrities still post there. While Twitter is finally collapsing due to its dumb rate limiting, Reddit has enough bots to maintain the illusion of being an active community, and plenty of Google SEO to get new users to move there. It’s obvious that - while splintered - both those places aren’t going to magically disappear.
Then we have Bluesky (which I predict will be a monster once it comes out of invite-only mode, if only because it’s built up so much hype) and Threads. Both are targeting Twitter specifically, and I predict that one will win. Jimmy Wales (of Wikipedia) is also working on his own Twitter clone, which may be a dark horse in the race as well.
I’m not confident that the fediverse will “win” on the Twitter clone side. While I expect that Threads will get a lot of “normal” people on it who use Instagram, a lot of the fediverse is cutting Threads off ASAP to try and prevent “embrace, extend, extinguish” from leeching people from Mastodon into Threads. Bluesky seems to be a frat house at the moment (from what I’ve heard) but it may self-regulate. It’s already seen a recent spike due to Twitter’s rate limiting.
My prediction is in 2-3 years we will be back in the same game we were playing before, but with new players.
I don’t think you’re being uncharitable. The author sounds like they can’t cope with anything that isn’t slick, polished, and already popular. Frankly, Lemmy doesn’t need people who can’t deal with growing pains.
Over the past decade or so, gamers have been psychologically conditioned to accept lootboxes and microtransactions as a standard part of the gaming experience (especially younger people who don’t even remember a time before lootboxes).
Similarly, I think the “corporate internet” era has also forcefully conditioned FOMO onto the majority of people. So many people coming over to Lemmy/Kbin have literally said something along the lines of, “I don’t like the fragmentation, if I’m not subscribed to every single instance then I feel like I’m missing out.”
The missing out part is a real frustration of this format. I’m finding it difficult to find those niche communities full of passionate discussion like people keep saying exist. I’ve seen several communities of the same name, none of which are very active, but which would be active if there was just one of them.
The individualized instances and communities have their benefits, but they come at the cost of discoverability and activity-per-community.
I’ve been going outside, the library, and engaging with my kids. Lemmy and Discord do scratch a social itch but they aren’t the time sink reddit and Twitter were
Ah yes, this outside I’ve heard so much about
TLDR - Reddits success was not in its variety but in its ease of use. We need a central place to simple make accounts and login to that is always up and stable and we need a unified front end for searching for communities.
Lemmy needs a front page and centralized signup, login and search spot. It is a waste of time and effort to explain the mechanics of how it operates to new users. If someone can easily signup, login and search communities (and create them) then the mechanics of how the system works can be explained at a later date.
The biggest issues for Lemmy right now and in the medium term are going to be scale, finding communities and signups.
There is so many people from Reddit and other sites that the current mega communities get bogged down and start being unusable which only adds to the confusion on signing up.
There are some ways around this but none are easy or obvious. A new user will know less popular servers to make an account on if the main ones are inaccessible. Also the log in at one server and you can sue the rest is not something that is quickly explainable.
Finding communities is also a challenge though it’s getting better with various sights and apps starting to pop up and we still need a lot of the main ones from Reddit created here but even a medium sized Reddit community would render a Lemmy server unstable.
It’s better to bask in this island of growth and engagement than to sink down a rabbit hole of revenue that yields nothing. It’s such a satisfying feeling to talk to people you know and respect instead of diving into a karmic spiral full of bots flooding the place with toxicity. When the author says, “There’s simply no place left on the internet that feels like a good, healthy, worthwhile place to hang out,” I think that somehow this is a good place. For the first time in a long while I feel compelled to join the discussion and share my thoughts. It’s true that “the Fediverse isn’t there yet,” but that’s what we’re here for. Just the thought that some things are still halfway in the oven, or haven’t even found their way in yet, makes the whole experience much more rewarding. And remember, there are no ads. Every day I miss Reddit and Twitter less (I had closed my account there a long time ago). I believe Lemmy has a bright future ahead of it, the success of which I believe depends on preventing uncontrolled growth. Time will tell.
I would argue that Mastodon and friends are a “good, healthy, worthwhile place to hang out”, at least it really feels that way to me. It seems to have attracted a really wholesome crowd that really delights me considering I’m used to it being less of a crowd but just a handful of techie people hanging out in an obscure clubhouse. All the same people I have followed there are still there yet I now have a buffet of variety to chat with.
All very true. Lemmy is the closest thing to a Reddit alternative that I’ve found so far. But the signup process was kinda hard, and the user experience of the apps (I’m using mlem now) needs work. It’s confusing and clunky.
The harder it is to get started, the more like “original Reddit” it will be.
It was fun when Reddit was obscure. It got less fun when everyone and their cousin was on Reddit, it turned into other social media.
Lemmy may be more resistant to that. Hear me out… With Reddit (and Digg, and Facebook, and Twitter, and every dead or dying platform you can think of), you’ve got a single company owning everything on that platform. When short-term profit ultimately dictates they shittify the platform, it takes a tremendous amount of willpower and forethought to resist.
Willpower and forethought the various platform owners clearly lacked.
But Lemmy is an open source project, and anyone can spin up a Lemmy platform, then join the fediverse. If one platform’s owners decide to shittify, it doesn’t affect the rest, and everyone can easily migrate to another with minimal fuss.
My impression is that this makes Lemmy much better situated to avoid ever becoming a late-stage Reddit.
I’m genuinely confused - I made my Lemmy account a few weeks ago but wasn’t the sign up just “email”, “password”, captcha, click email link, done? Isn’t that the exact sign up of reddit and most websites?
Sure - some instances have gated signups and require some questions / prompts - but a bunch don’t ? What am I missing? I’ve seen the “confusing sign up” comment a few times
Just echoing what you said here. It’s incredibly simple. Some don’t even require an email.
Check out this new beautiful thing: https://lemmy.bolha.one/lemmy.world/
source code: https://github.com/rystaf/mlmym
edit: added link to the source code
Now we just need a Lemmy Enhancement Suite browser extension for FireFox.
True, almost all parts are there, but thise need to be better integrated.
The fediverse can be tricky to sign up to and once you are there it is hard to find communities/interest to subscribe to. But I am learning how. And it is working for me. Another fediverse user gave me a webpage that helped me find more communities to join. Lemmy Explorer you can select the Home icon at the top to set your home federated server. Kbin.socal for me.
I even found a Baldur’s Gate community and a Calvin and Hobbes community.
