Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Fediverse is an opportunity learned societies can't ignore

blogs.lse.ac.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 239 posts

Re: The Fediverse is an opportunity learned societies can't ignore

#51

Post by fy20 »

echelon wrote: post #43
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> main issue with Fediverse is the vast majority of people don't know what it is More awareness won't help while the churn is so high. The Fediverse seems to be happy staying small, actively disdaining the sorts of user-friendly moves that would give them mass appeal (but in the process, perhaps, destroy something its current users find special).

> user-friendly moves Such as? Difficult onboarding? I still think p2p is the way to go. When I get some time, I want to spin up a little p2p app around sharing ad-free news and commentary. (Articles + photos + threads.) It can all be ephemeral, because 99% of the use is in the short-term. I rarely if ever access old tweets or Reddit threads.

The reason why these things don't take off with non-nerds is because the UI and UX of open source tools almost always sucks. That's it. There's nothing more to it.

Over the weekend there was a post about XMPP and somebody asked for a client with the same level of UX as Telegram. There were a few replies, but none of them were what I would say were anywhere near the same level.

For example one of them had an option to choose between three different methods of encrypting chats, and it was one of the most prominent UI features in the chat window. That's great if you want to feel like James Bond and encrypted chat is your main use case, but 99.9% of people are just sending memes and photos of their cats and don't even know what encrypted means.

Element is doing quite well in this department, but last time I tried (admitidely a couple of years ago) there were still some edge cases.

Re: The Fediverse is an opportunity learned societies can't ignore

#52

Post by greyface- »

jdlyga wrote: post #4

The main issue with Fediverse is the vast majority of people don't know what it is. And I would suspect that most readers of Hacker News only know about Mastodon. The Fediverse needs the same kind of evangelical missionaries that made the free software movement such a big deal.

> The Fediverse needs the same kind of evangelical missionaries that made the free software movement

I'd just like to interject for a moment. What you're referring to as the Fediverse is actually OStatus/ActivityPub.

Re: The Fediverse is an opportunity learned societies can't ignore

#53

Post by kromem »

After spending a number of months on Lemmy as my primary social media, I actually think the fediverse makes one of the biggest issues of social media much worse.

There's a very real and dangerous trend towards extremist positions as a result of social media bubbles. I'm sure most people have noticed how large family gatherings have shifted over the last 15 years, and how some family may no longer even be invited as a result of social media driven shifts.

The fediverse makes these bubbles so much worse, with servers of like minded moderation creating a trend towards groupthink as opposed to representing a variety of opinions.

So while it's promising from a standpoint of shrugging off corporate driven issues in managing social media, the fragmentary nature is perhaps the opposite of what social media actually needs, which is less bubble driven optimization with regression towards extremist means and more broad exposure and interaction with regression towards the normal mean.

Re: The Fediverse is an opportunity learned societies can't ignore

#54

Post by DeIlliad »

coldacid wrote: post #41
threeseed wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The Fediverse needs the same kind of evangelical missionaries Weirdly enough this is likely to be Meta with Threads. Once it adds ActivityPub integration we should start to see a lot of cross-pollination with Mastodon users.

Don't be too sure of that. Plenty of instances have preemptively blocked Meta and it's likely that if and when Threads goes AP, more will follow. Some of us still remember Eternal September and would like to avoid a repeat.

Everyone believes they were around before Eternal September and not the ones that caused it.

Re: The Fediverse is an opportunity learned societies can't ignore

#55

Post by Sophistifunk »

flagrant_taco wrote: post #48
fingidiotta wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

as someone who has actively gone out looking for weird porn on the fediverse, I struggled

I assume it's better these days, but Mastodon avoided adding proper search for years because the core devs knew there was plenty of questionable content or there and making it discoverable would put many hosts at legal risk.

That's not at all why mastodon doesn't have search. It's all about stopping "bullying" when you post something stupid.

Re: The Fediverse is an opportunity learned societies can't ignore

#56

Post by inamberclad »

kromem wrote: post #53

After spending a number of months on Lemmy as my primary social media, I actually think the fediverse makes one of the biggest issues of social media much worse. There's a very real and dangerous trend towards extremist positions as a result of social media bubbles. I'm sure most people have noticed how large family gatherings have shifted over the last 15 years, and how some family may no longer even be invited as a…

I think this is largely moot because just about every social media site will either allow you to select your communities or algorithms will filter for you based on your behavior.

Re: The Fediverse is an opportunity learned societies can't ignore

#57

Post by linuxandrew »

candiddevmike wrote: post #50
jdlyga wrote: post #4

The main issue with Fediverse is the vast majority of people don't know what it is. And I would suspect that most readers of Hacker News only know about Mastodon. The Fediverse needs the same kind of evangelical missionaries that made the free software movement such a big deal.

You could run a battery optimized, opportunistically available mastodon instance from your phone, but Apple and Google won't let you. The amount of wasted compute in everyone's hands is staggering.

Something like https://www.manyver.se/ ? It is available on Google Play, Apple App Store and F-Droid.

It seems they have had some issues with Google Play and the App Store with their weird catch-all policies, requiring integration with Google/Apple login etc. but they have managed to work around it for the time being.

Re: The Fediverse is an opportunity learned societies can't ignore

#58

Post by Dig1t »

jdlyga wrote: post #4

The main issue with Fediverse is the vast majority of people don't know what it is. And I would suspect that most readers of Hacker News only know about Mastodon. The Fediverse needs the same kind of evangelical missionaries that made the free software movement such a big deal.

One of the things I hear repeated in startup circles is that a product needs to be 10x better than the thing it’s replacing to have a realistic shot at displacing it. I honestly don’t feel like even if every single social media user in the world was exposed to the fediverse that it would be compelling enough to cause a critical mass to switch. What does it do better than the sites users are already on?

Re: The Fediverse is an opportunity learned societies can't ignore

#59

Post by chmod775 »

kromem wrote: post #53

After spending a number of months on Lemmy as my primary social media, I actually think the fediverse makes one of the biggest issues of social media much worse. There's a very real and dangerous trend towards extremist positions as a result of social media bubbles. I'm sure most people have noticed how large family gatherings have shifted over the last 15 years, and how some family may no longer even be invited as a…

> I'm sure most people have noticed how large family gatherings have shifted over the last 15 years, and how some family may no longer even be invited as a result of social media driven shifts.

So because of social media bubbles, people split their families into bubbles too? If even in a real life setting, where no algorithm curates who they interact with, people choose to segregate despite of family bonds, then that sounds more like a people problem than a social media problem to me.

There's definitely families out there who can get together despite holding diametrically opposed political opinions, even discussing them at the dinner table without getting overly emotional about it and needing to un-invite people from later gatherings. I'd call that a normal, functioning family.

Re: The Fediverse is an opportunity learned societies can't ignore

#60

Post by sleepybrett »

MisterBastahrd wrote: post #33

The Fediverse is something that we already tried in many different fashions and it was never mass-adopted because it doesn't have the features that people want. It's the API equivalent of people asking for iPhones while nerds keep on throwing Raspberry Pis at them and pretend that they're the same thing if you squint hard enough. It is not the same, it will never be the same, you will never get the masses to adopt it…

... yup, email was a total failure.
Post reply on HN