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.
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:
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’ll take that a step further: the big default subs on Reddit were essentially worthless. Did anyone really use Reddit primarily for stuff like r/technology or r/news? You would have gotten almost the exact same, if not better, coverage of those two with a couple of tech Youtubers and AP News. Repeat for r/politics, r/worldnews, r/games… etc. Anything that was on there was mirrored elsewhere. If they had gotten Thanos snapped out of existence, it would have ultimately been a mild inconvenience at worst.
The real Library of Alexandria are the small subs. Those are the niches that need to be filled to make Lemmy a viable replacement, and we can’t get there without further growth.
the things you like about Reddit didn’t exist when Reddit was the new alternative to the enshittification of Digg. KBin is brand new and Lemmy was not much more than a tankie hub until recently.
KBin and Lemmy will build the communities you’re looking for over time. The question is: do you want those communities to develop under the shadow of the same algorithms, bots, and content you see on corporate social media, or do you want something new?
Agreed, the main reason I use still use Facebook is that it is home to largest communities for by hobbies. The subreddits for those hobbies were practically graveyards and on lemmy it is no better.
Of course, this doesn’t mean it can’t change, but for some things other communities are better right now.