moon_matter

moon_matter, 11 months ago

I don't do distro hopping, because I don't believe there is any significant difference between the capabilities provided by individual distro.

Agreed. Hopping never really made sense to me unless you like to tinker. To me, the distro or operating system is just a means to an end. As long as all the hardware and apps I need continue to work as intended I won't budge. I've been on Ubuntu LTS for 10+ years.

moon_matter, 11 months ago

I don't care if something is a monopoly as long as it's a monopoly for it's quality.

But the problem with social media is that monopolies in this area aren't about quality, they are about user base size. Which makes them impossible to dethrone once they hit critical mass. Reddit and other social media sites have a massive amount of content with people willing to figure out a way to sift through the garbage.

It will be interesting to see how bad things get once reddit moderators can no longer use bots and other tools in order to help them sift through content due to the API changes.

moon_matter, 11 months ago (edited 11 months ago)

seem to believe that their platform cannot be easily duplicated, or made obsolete nearly overnight.

As much as it pains me to say it, I think they are right. The value in social media is in the size of their user base and I don't see a mass migration to another platform really happening unless reddit itself went completely offline for several weeks. People do not like change and Reddit will continue to be just "good enough" despite the API changes. If anything their decline will be extremely gradual since moderators will have lost most of their third party moderation tools. And niche communities can probably keep ticking along without them for the most part.

moon_matter, 11 months ago

I think there are already proposals for allowing both communities and profiles to be federated. That would mean that a community's data would be managed and replicated across servers.

But as of right now the issues are really:

1. Server cost - There has been such an influx of new users to lemmy because of reddit that the smaller servers cannot handle the traffic of the larger ones. So they have been (hopefully only temporarily) forced to de-federate from the larger servers in order to reduce traffic.
2. Quality of life - Lemmy is too new and there are lots of quality of life enhancements that still need to take place. The biggest being around how cross-instance viewing, linking and subscriptions work from a user experience POV. Right now someone could link to another community on a different instance and it takes you off-site and that needs to change.

The reality is Lemmy isn't completely ready for the masses yet and still needed to cook for a few more years. People need to be willing to put up with the jank. Reddit and other social media platforms had 10+ years to evolve and improve the user experience.

moon_matter, 11 months ago

Yes. I'm on a KBin account and the UI is part of the reason.

moon_matter, 11 months ago

Reddit was seeded with content by the developers before the users came.

That makes me wonder how people would feel about copying content from other platforms using bots in order to boost some communities. Those that have <1k subscribers could use some seeding.

moon_matter, 11 months ago

As the makers of the most popular distro and the creators of Snaps, the format will continue to exist until Canonical decides it shouldn't. The Linux community doesn't have a lot of say in the matter. Fragmentation and duplication of effort is also nothing new to FOSS and it has both pros and cons.

moon_matter, 11 months ago

Package maintainers prefer appimages/snaps/flatpaks over native because it's as close to write once, deploy everywhere as we're going to get. Maintaining packages for distros is a thankless job often done by volunteers because there's no possible way for the developer to maintain packages for every distro.