Regardless of the negative aspects, Meta joining the Fediverse will definitely make the numbers of active users explode. This will probably bring the network and its concepts to many people and also a matter of public debate.
Depends on what the view of “mainstream” is. With Threads, Tumblr, Discourse looking to join the Fediverse within a years time it’s going to grow by millions. It’s annoying when people use “algorithms” the Fediverse has algorithms. They are simply a tool. Awesome thing is that if any platform becomes hyper aggressive and looking to monetise users data there are ways to cut them off and there are other platforms and clients to use. Showing people interesting posts isn’t harmful, it’s done on the Fedi currently. Anyways, I believe adding millions more is good enough. It doesn’t need to be 100s of millions of active users
It will never be mainstream for the fact its a confusing mess for most people to figure out, let alone tech literate ones. Facebooks involvement or not.
Haha of course not. Fediverse and mainstream social networks have completely different purposes. One is about creating small communities and the other about pushing viral content to vast amounts of people and generating revenue through ads. There will never be a meaningful interaction between the two.
I don’t think it will ever be mainstream. It’s confusing enough for IT literate people with a basic understanding of the concept, I can’t see it ever getting popular with the wider public.
My main concern is the overlap between lemmy instances, meaning me and my mate can be looking at for example a channel named ‘news’ and see different contents because we are on different instances. So you either subscribe to all news channels on all major instances and see lots of duplicated posts, or miss out on some posts.
This can (should?) be resolved by the client application. There is nothing stopping us from developing one single frontend that can pull data from different instances and shows it in an uniform way.
Well most of the complexity would be hidden. For example the Mastodon mobile client hides much of it. You can even sign up for a server there.
My main concern is the overlap between lemmy instances, meaning me and my mate can be looking at for example a channel named ‘news’ and see different contents because we are on different instances. So you either subscribe to all news channels on all major instances and see lots of duplicated posts, or miss out on some posts.
Yeah there has been much debate going on about that here
IIRC, the fediverse pertains to an interconnnected network of servers that are managed individually. Privacy is an option that led many current users to the fediverse but is by no means a requirement.
If/when threads joins the fediverse, it will have addictive algorithms and collect large amounts of user data.
My guess is that it will be like the banking system in the US where many ppl go to the exploitative larger banks out of seeming convenience w/o realizing that the alternative, less popular Credit Unions actually have the consumers' best interest @ heart
Yea I’d say its gonna be a while befote the idea of federated social media really takes off. I think one of the bigger reasons is just ease of use.
The federation aspect of this is kinda confusing when your first hear about and most users just want an easy experience.
Now you can say “oh just join lemmy.world and be done with it” but then comes another issue. Which is “wheres my account in this other instance?” Its not there. And it wont be there until porting accounts becomes a more integrated part of Lemmy and other federated socail medias.
I think those are the biggest things holding it back for now. I think it will catch on as more and more folks become more aware of (and care about) corporations like facebook(meta) or reddit don’t care what you think and will walk all over you for a quick buck.
Unlikely. Maybe a few years down the line but the fediverse isn’t mature yet. Aside from mastodon and maybe firefish most sites are still in beta and missing features and quality of life. Even Lemmy is missing things like tags and a proper on-boarding experience. Things are slowly trudging along but I think the average person won’t take you seriously when you say the fediverse is an alternative that’s as good as the social media they’re used to.
Have you checked out Pixelfed lately? The main developer is going like gangbusters over the last couple of months. It’s maturing quickly. I don’t think that guy sleeps.
Mostly an Insta clone. Every post starts with one to ten pictures, with text below. So it’s more suited to posting photos than text.
I actually think it’s better than Instagram in some ways now. That being said, some of the instances are a little slow, but that’s not the fault of the software.
Yeah. I forget that we're still likely in the 'early adopter' phase of things for now, which is why a lot of the UX is hit or miss depending on the instance and iteration
I would say Mastodon already has. I’ve been spending a lot of time there over last few weeks and there’s more content than I can consume. Breaking news stories are covered well, including live blogging, although a lot of that content is cross-posed from Xitter. Plenty of people to follow, including authors, photographers, journalists and scientists. An increasing number of media outlets have a presence there, as well.
Xitter still has an order of magnitude more users, but Mastodon is mostly Nazi-free (which is nice).
Same here, lots of content cross-posted from reddit. Most of which seems to be bot posts with zero engagement, but lately I noticed many of the human posts, which do generate engagement, are themselves just cross-posts of these bot cross-posts.
So basically we’re like 2nd level social media, feeding off what Xitter and reddit pre-filtered for us. To become mainstream would mean to reverse this flow. I’d already be happy if we could shut these bots off and be independent from what we left.
There’s definitely way more content on Mastodon than just xitter cross-posts. Also, there is content variety which is kinda lacking here on lemmy. Maybe say after a year or so if lemmy continues to develop, we may see better quality and variety of content here.
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