I think this decentralization and federation is what web3 is all about, without all the corporations calling everything to do with monkey pixel art that costs a million dollars “web3”
Hey! This post is not specifically related to the lemmy.world instance. From now on, posts such as these will be removed, in order for the community to stay on topic. However, as this is a highly upvoted post, I’ll just lock it for now.
Hah, web 2.0 was all about the explosion of user-generated content. Corps and cryptonerds wanted to make web 3.0 about making money, but the web has always been about the content, not its monetization. In trying to monetize the content, they’re alienating people and forcing them off the platforms they defaulted to.
Humans like to create and share content, no matter how easy or difficult it is to monetize. If the people who want to monetize humanity’s collective output make it harder to create, then hopefully the result is that people move off the ad-supported platforms and replace them with something that doesn’t rely on centralization with lots of capital to stay afloat.
If nothing else, the way that youtube has made it impossible for segments of the creative community to monetize their content and forced them rely on platforms such as patreon has made it more and more clear that ad-generated revenue is a dead end. You can’t force people to view advertising unless you hold their content hostage, and for the first time in history, they can’t buy out the means of production.
I was resistant to the federverses, but these corpos just think they can get away with anything…
Fuck them I won’t do what they tell me!
It will be fun to watch this place grow, it feels like the start of a new story!
federverses
I’m more a fan of the nadalverses, but to each their own.
Ok apparently my gif did not work
based
Based on what?
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No, you’re amazing
That’s a pretty good base, not gonna lie.
replace them with something that doesn’t rely on centralization with lots of capital to stay afloat
There’s no conceivable reason that reddit shouldn’t be profitable right now with the market saturation they have unless the majority of people who’ve been making money off of the site up until now have been minimal effort contributors trying to get their piece of the money pie. 99% of the work is done by “unpaid” (by reddit) mods yet somehow they still have 2k people on the payroll and still need to centralize more and more capital to cover the overhead, it’s easy to imagine most of their current expenses are going to dumb corporate tech money sinks that are going out of style fast and have little to show for the last decade of spending lol
I mean that’s maybe the only good thing: If they are a public traded company, they have to file public revenue reports. Would love to see where those morons burn their money…
2k people in expensive San Francisco office space. Willing to bet that the % of them dedicated to improving user experience was quite low in comparison to those trying to figure out how to squeeze money out of it.
Every single platform that has claimed “Web 3.0” has been revealed to be a crypto scam, and generally not even a sneaky one. Pop over to minds.com if you’d like a free taste of exactly what that ends up looking like. It’s disgusting.
Very much aware of that.
Good God, minds.com is a cesspool.
replace them with something that doesn’t rely on centralization with lots of capital to stay afloat
That’s what’s silly about the whole thing, there’s absolutely no conceivable reason that reddit shouldn’t be profitable right now with the market saturation they have… unless the majority of people currently making money off of it have been greedy assholes up until now trying to get their piece of the easy money pie. 99% of the work is done by “unpaid” (by reddit) mods yet somehow they still have 2k people on the payroll, it’s hard to imagine most of their current expenses are going to anything but dumb tech company money sinks that are going out of style fast lol
Honestly I’m not even sure what the term web3 means but Lemmy does feel… less commercial, which is really refreshing! And I’m noticing alot less criticizism which is excellent. I’m certainly going to be staying here and trying to help it grow in a positive and mindful way.
I get what others are saying about it feeling like how the internet used to be… I’m really excited to see where Lemmy goes. Hopefully it doesn’t just end up the way its predecessors have gone! Feels like I’m part of a movement to fight the oppression!! Power to the people woo!
You nailed it: It feels like a movement. And movements, especially nascent ones, require buy-in and work from their members. I guess that explains why I feel obligated to participate more than I did at Reddit.
I’ve only been on Lemmy for a day, but it’s already clear no one is gonna build this out for us.
Same here, I think I lebt more comments here today than on reddit the last month
Right? I’m thinking about trying to start my beginner guitar sub (do I still call it sub?). I tried on reddit, posted a few times and it fizzled out. Maybe it would be more successful here. Just a sub dedicated to helping people begin their guitar playing journey. Playing guitar has made such a positive impact on my life, I’d like to share that with others you know?
That’s what I’m enjoying about it so far too. Content is sparse but that’s okay. I’m so tired of being marketed to, of being a product. These open source federated apps are janky and quieter, but they feel more real. These aren’t algorithms pushing engagement and outrage or ads every 10 seconds.
Plus on Reddit, corporation makes money from content users create while here everything is open, free and fun.
Let’s just hope we can keep it that way! 🙂
Right? It’s way calmer here. I felt hesitant about that at first, but it’s only because we’ve gotten so used to an endless stream of (often inconsequential and low-effort) content. More isn’t always necessary or better.
Kid-me used to have days off and he’d hop onto Warcraft 3 or various message boards only to realize no one was online because everyone had jobs or was at school. It had a rhythm to it which was really cool. It wouldn’t surprise me if the “always-on” content spam of the modern internet has given people unhealthy ideas about what life is supposed to feel like.
I don’t mind the lack of an endless stream of content so much, however it would be nice if it was easier to not see the same content again and again after already reading it. Maybe some sort of read flag would be good for posts, possibly with a configurable number of new comments after which it is shown again.
I agree wholeheartedly. I think what all of us who care about these alternative underground social networks need to do is try to provide the best content we can, because that will attract other people here, which will benefit us in turn through the content they make!
There might be a case for a more sparse content feed. Sure you can subscribe to hundreds of communities across a hundred different servers but you are more in control of the feed. every post is going to be more relevant and you will have more incentive to take part in conversations instead of just refreshing and having a whole new page of crap.
There are some ease of use improvements to be made of course, this is the most users and fastest growth lemmy has ever seen, so there is some learning to be done as it scales.
Web3 became a marketing term, doesn’t even really have a clear meaning, but it’s used as a catch-all word for blockchain-related things like NFTs, cryptocurrency projects, etc. But most of those are not truly decentralized, whereas Lemmy and other fediverse projects are.
I kind of like the idea of rebranding it around a more honest and inclusive definition of decentralization. Though getting past bad marketing is so hard it might not be worth it.
What is sort of bothering me is how as it becomes more popular, I’ve already seen a few people asking about adding advertising to lemmy instances. I hope advertisers are not looking at diminished revenue with the reddit blackouts and trying to move to Lemmy already. I just can’t stand ads, and hope to never see ads interwoven with posts and comments.
I suppose the benefit to lemmy is that you could always migrate to another instance if yours starts pulling that shit
As far as I know, while account migration is technically possible it isnt implemented yet, so if a server decicdes to shut up shop due to lack of funds your account there is lost and only federated content on other instances will be saved.
So once migration of user accounts and communities is implemented we should be able to easily survive waves of server closures.
I do worry that it will eventually coalesce into a couple of ultra-large servers and lose a lot of it’s decentralisation though. gotta spread out!
I mean, I suppose creating alts on multiple instances might work as an alternative in the meantime. I don’t know if that’s frowned upon though.
Completely agree on the last point, though. It is crucial that we spread out!
I’ve made about 10 alts so far, just making sure to secure my username in case I do need to migrate somewhere
I don’t believe it’s frowned upon. I have one here on infosec.pub and another on fedia.io. I primarily use infosec.pub though
True enough. And I know I’m just a drop in the bucket, but I will do exactly that if it ever happens.
Technically it should already be possible for a company to advertise here, no? Not in the “there are little video boxes you can’t get rid of (barring adblocker extensions)” but in the sense that one could have their employees create accounts and make comments and posts to promote their products. They’d probably have to do it subtly and sneakily, because they’d likely get banned or if they had their own instance, defederated, but they could. Wouldn’t even need to pay anything beyond employee salaries to make it.
I feel like “proper” ads would be more difficult to implement, because even if the software were updated to include the ability to add them, people could and likely would make forks of it that just didn’t display those from federated servers, or clients that don’t on any server, and because the software is open source there would be no stopping it. An instance could defederate instances using such an ad-blocking fork, but that would risk ending up themselves isolated and therefore lose much of their traffic and viability as a platform.
I think it might be ok if some instances decide to run ads. Someone has to pay for the server costs, and ads are an option.
The great thing about the Fediverse is you can move to a different instance if you don’t like it :)
Web 1.0, users form communities on bulletin boards, internet forums and newsgroups. It’s the birth of Web 2.0, investors and advertisers see potential in large user bases. This leads to social media and mobile apps as fronts for tracking users and big data collection. Smart home and wearables become a plot to bring tracking hardware into your life even when you aren’t actively engaging on the internet. The tech billionaire is born at the cost of the privacy and wallet of the user. Web 3.0, a federated Web 1.0 where users take back control of the internet. Tech billionaires live in homeless shelters and eat ramen noodles.
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I’d buy that for a dollar
I understand that reference
It’s pretty dope. Been following the fediverse for a while, but I’ve never used twitter so mastodon felt kinda useless to me. I’ve never used facebook, so friendica felt kinda useless to me.
Anonymous strangers posting links and having discussions? Now that’s more my jam.
I’ve loved that part of reddit and still do to a point. The thing that’s been creeping into the platform is the problem with bots and astroturfing.
My favourite part was AMAs by scientists and authors or even ppl like Gov Schwarzenegger. I hope fediverse develops to that point one day.
I remember when AMAs were organic and people actually answered questions. Before prepared questions and answers became a thing.
I loved seeing those IAMAs too. Schwarzenegger, Obama, NASA scientists and Woody Harrelson (can we talk about Rampart?)! Unfortunately I think the web is worse now, far too much focus on monetization, bots, propaganda> and astroturfing.
I’m hoping that Lemmy flies under the radar in the sweet spot of enough subscribers but not too many.
The only bot issue I heard of is following people, which one would only get notified if they use new reddit or official app. What were the other bot problems? What’s to stop the bots on this site?
My thoughts exactly
Same here, neither of those are my thing, but lemmy scratches my needs. Of course without reddit fucking up, I would never have checked it out, but now I’m really hoping this gets big, without losing it’s core
It’s nice to have this space to retreat to. Even if it doesn’t outcompete the corporate web anytime soon, the existence of another option will constrain how bad they can get a bit, and will create a place for refugees to go after each new outrage. And it’s not like the core functionality of any of the corporate sites was that complicated underneath all the bloat, after people have been on here working out the kinks for a while there’s no reason it should be any less convenient of an experience.
agreed, i can’t remember the last time reddit added an actual useful feature.
The only thing they did do relatively recently that I liked was adding the option for subs to not archive posts that are older than 6 months. But I guess when you think about it, that’s more of just taking a restriction away, and less of adding something new. Other than that, though, it’s either just useless stuff or stuff that actively made things worse.
Holy shit, is that why I got a random influx of trolls commenting on 5 year old comments?
To be fair about the archiving thing you have to consider that being able to make old data read only allows you to optimize a lot of things. With good engineering the allowance for archival should make the whole site faster and more stable. So sort of a soft feature.
I get that, and it could make sense to archive things at some point, but I do think it was nice for certain communities, aside from things like sports, news, etc., to be able to still comment on old posts. Especially help posts or things like that, because they could still be relevant months or even years later.
There should be a way to unarchive something if that’s the case, which works better than a new post which references the previous one with small addendums or questions. This is especially useful when people are searching for information on certain topics and everything is contained within one post rather than 5 posts because the earlier ones were archived. Many people will never continue searching and see all of the newer information once they have found the old now incomplete posts.
word is they’ve got 300 full time devs in the april fools experiment department
The multi-image post, but only worked on new reddit.
Seeing your post my first thought was that multi-image albums always worked on old.Reddit. But actually I was thinking of a Reddit Enhancement Suite feature. Which is another open-source toolkit that was provided by the community to Reddit.
Happy to see that the Open Source came up with something top-to-bottom like Lemmy and the Fediverse!
I meant actually making a post with multiple images. Old reddit only allowed one, whereas new reddit, you can upload multiple to one and it creates a gallery.
Yes, RES would let you see all the images afaik. I can’t remember the last time I browsed on my desktop without RES.
Feels like old school forums again. A little barebones compared to some of the corporate stuff, but that’s not a bad thing. Just the simple what’s needed no extra fluff.
I like it like this, but I’ve always been a minimalist. With a few QoL changes/fixes (especially for the mobile app) this will be perfect.
I agree, it’s got a really solid foundation and Lemmy’s got nowhere to go but up
So you’re saying that the real web3 was… the friends we made along the way?
web3 was within us the whole time
web3, uh, finds a way
Long way to go for ease of use, but the foundation is SOLID.
Decentralised without crypto-ifying everything. this is the way.
I gotta admit though, this has to be one of the first reasonable use cases for blockchain technology that I can think of - a P2P database for social forums… decentralised, but a single “instance” no matter how you access it. I imagine the blockchain sizes would get ridiculously large though, and all sorts of moderation issues. Probably not feasible, though I’m sure there’s a project on GitHub I’m not aware of…
If you were to host the entire forum on a blockchain, every node would have to hold the blockchain. So not scaling horizontally, but instead copying the “database” a bunch of times. Think of hosting all of the data in reddit on a thousand nodes. Sure you could access it from any node, but the database would be just as big as before, just copied around a bunch of times.
In a way this thing is already much more decentralized than a blockchain could ever be, in that every server doesn’t hold all of the data at once. Much better use of resources IMO.
Yeah that’s a good point. But this way we can’t mine LemmyCoin. Won’t someone think of the shitcoins!?
For sure if reddit can have moons, then a blockchain forum should have their own shitcoin. How else would the founder of the decentralized platform make some bank? Get donations from from the general public for the volunteer work they do on the project? No way :)
A much better use of resources, but you shard the data amongst potentially untrusted hosts (ie, anybody can stand up a lemmy instance and start hosting posts/comments, and then get sick of hosting it and delete their instance and all the uploaded data).
Federation only allows access to the network of servers, it doesn’t protect the data at all, which means at any moment an entire community of useful historical information could just be wiped away (especially since there’s currently no monetary incentive to continue hosting, its only being done out of desire to be part of the network).
I guess I’d rather see the blockchain (or simpler caching/mirroring) approach, something like the torrent network, so that no single person has access to delete content. We can all choose to not view or not mirror content we don’t agree with, but nobody can single-handedly own or modify the data
Unless each node holds all the data, it is not guaranteed to stay available. Mirroring content across 2, 3, or even 10 servers wouldn’t guarantee that it will remain eg. after 10 years. Even torrents die after they are no longer popular and people stop seeding them.
I still hold my opinion that using an actual blockchain to hold the conversations is not scalable solution at all. Only unique thing it would enable is for unwanted content to remain permanently in the system.
This is what reddit felt like ten years ago … now it’s just a matter of growing the community and making it bigger and better.
I felt bad leaving my old communities at reddit … but in a funny way, I feel like I’ve stepped into a time warp and jumped back ten years … now I’m looking forward to the next ten on Lemmy and Mastadon
My thoughts exactly. Ten years ago reddit was “too confusing” for people too.
The internet was always intended to be decentralized
I’m nostalgic for when it was. Hopefully in some form it can be again.
It’s so exciting to have another paradigm shift afoot. I feel a little regretful (not sure that’s the right word here) that I wasn’t born early enough to grow up with the rise of internet forums. It’s not all bad because I also would not grown up during this great time of queer development, but it would’ve been neat. So now I get to live through and experience a similar time with web3 type stuff. The whole concept makes my little CS heart smile.
It’s definitely an “everything old is new” situation. It’s kind of fascinating how the technology has both become ubiquitous, and been monetized like perhaps nothing before it, but is still able to find a way to serve interests beyond capitalism. It’s a pitiful bar, but I still think it’s neat.
It’s also very nice to know that I get a choice. Like, if I enjoy an instance, I can give them a $5-$10 donation and that will be worth tons more than any ads I wasn’t going to watch anyway. Once I get a bit more used to these instances, since I’m fortunate enough to be able to, I fully intend to pay some part to help them run. I get there are people who would rather watch ads, but this feels so much better to me.
All this gets me a bit hopeful that we will go full circle and end up using the internet like the old days, even though it is kind of impossible now.
I remember fidonet…
It technically still exists. And even had some sort of resurgence post-2014, apparently.
I wasn’t born early enough to grow up with the rise of internet forums.
It was…interesting, LOL. A wild west frontier.
I miss that era. And the age of instant messengers. So many fond memories of MSN Messenger!
I remember two kids in my school literally getting into a fight over MSN vs Yahoo Messengers. Good times. I used Trillian.
Ah I had forgotten about Trillian!
I just looked it up - it’s still around!
I also wasn’t born early enough to experience the rise of Internet forums. I was a late Reddit adopter, only jumping on in 2020. It is fascinating and exciting to be experiencing this in real time. Even if this isn’t an instant and drastic shift, it’s still a part of Internet history in the making.
I hate how crypto bros and scammers kidnapped the term web3. In reality is a nice concept, but they just turned it into a libertarian dystopia.
I like the overall trend towards ownership and non-centralized tools implicit in web3. If everything happening on the internet is owned by wall street, then it’s not going to act like the real internet.
If there’s a crypto aspect that has uses beyond grift, I’m open to it. There are certain ways it could be used to disintermediate owners and creators. I’m not sure if that’s happening yet. Ownership rights with digital content do leave a lot to be desired.
I hope we soon see the end of the “gold rush” era in crypto and start seeing actual cool stuff being done with it. Especially since legacy banking will simply co-opt it sooner or later.
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The question is really, are the inefficiencies in blockchains or related solutions worth the trade off of Wall Street/Fed not running the economy. And they aren’t all proof-of-work Bitcoin either, Ethereum for instance is pretty finely tuned and on proof-of-stake now.
About that: if you think a bunch of crypto bros can do a better job of managing an economy than the Federal Reserve can, then I seriously question your sanity. The Fed hasn’t exactly done a great job of keeping the economy stable, but the value of cryptocurrency is not even remotely stable.
The value of cryptos are measured relative to USD and are highly volatile because they’re based on subjective predictions of what the value will look like 10, 20, 30 years in the future. The Fed doesn’t control the value of USD beyond their ability to manipulate its supply, which for the most part only serves to devalue it. Meanwhile, crypto supplies are algorithmically deterministic and not subject to human influence or corruption. It’s a very poor comparison and TBPH shows you don’t really understand the fundamentals.
The value of cryptos are measured relative to USD and are highly volatile because they’re based on subjective predictions of what the value will look like 10, 20, 30 years in the future.
Indeed. It’s a vehicle for speculation (aka gambling), not a viable currency.
The Fed doesn’t control the value of USD beyond their ability to manipulate its supply, which for the most part only serves to devalue it. Meanwhile, crypto supplies are algorithmically deterministic
Then it’s doomed to deflate endlessly. A quick look at the Great Depression should tell you why that’s catastrophically bad. The Fed keeps the USD inflating for a reason.
It’s a very poor comparison and TBPH shows you don’t really understand the fundamentals.
No crypto bro has any business lecturing anyone on economic fundamentals. Especially not one who seemingly doesn’t know that deflation of the main currency is to be prevented at all costs unless you want to see bread lines.
Lol no, it’s the same way any up-and-comer has volatile value initially because there’s uncertainty as to the outcome.
Great Depression “deflationary spiral” was a direct consequence of the Fed’s inflationary policies during the 1920s. These are all just discredited mainstream econ talking points. And get out of here with this “crypto bro” BS, god forbid anyone have an original thought that differs from your thinking.
The problem is that crypto is unregulated, the regulations are there for a reason, to stop things like ponzischemes and all the other things that already has happened that fucked people over. Maybe if they got regulated in some way, so that those things couldn’t happen easily, as it is now, I would say no.
Cryptocurrency is specifically designed to be infeasible to regulate.
That’s where my head is at. They’re building and improving it. Legacy banking isn’t exactly green itself, as card transactions have a pretty hefty carbon footprint. Further, banks are eyeballing their own “CBDCs”, which is basically cryptocurrency but without the intended benefits of decentralization.
Zero knowledge roll-ups have a lot of green promise with gas fees… but DeFi isn’t better than legacy banking yet. Still, I think it will be sooner or later if only because some of those folks are actually trying to improve it (where banks are only really doing their best work at trying to get more exploitative).
My 2c, the development around Ethereum isn’t really that dystopian or scammy, and there’s still promise for decentralizing financial institutions. A lot of people tried to cash in on it is all. Was just reading an article about the gold rush around marketing cereal ~1860-today, companies loading it with sugary and cartoon marketing to brainwash kids, etc., but that doesn’t mean cereal is bad for you.
someone tried making a Reddit clone called Plebbit and it was built on the Ethereum network, avatars had NFTs, the UI was similar to new Reddit, was clunky, extremely unresponsive and its mascot was the NPC wojak meme so it’s just a 4channer trying to swindle money. To actually make an account you had to pay for an address LMAO
Yes, a lot of people saw easy money and tried to cash in on fads. Remember the “Million Dollar Website”? Just because that was stupid doesn’t mean the internet was a scam.
Yes, I would call it web1. Decentralization are basic concepts of the internet and it was more decentralized in the 90s. Getting back to the roots.
Great point. Lemmy and Mastadon look more like an effort to claw back the web of open access and decentralization from VCs, grifters, and the like.
Federation definitely feels like the next major stepping stone of the internet’s evolution. Protocols like ActivityPub and Matrix feel like a bit of a “new beginning” for communities on the internet.
do you use Matrix yourself? how hard was it set up? every time i look into it i can’t help but feel lost
I have an account, but I don’t really use it much. Not because I don’t like it, but because I don’t have much to say really. I’m more of the lurker type.
The important thing about Matrix is to think of it like email. Homeservers are like your email provider, like Hotmail or Gmail or Protonmail. You look for a homeserver, then you just make an account on that homeserver. The “main” homeserver is matrix.org, but it’s recommended not to make an account on there if you can avoid it. Remember that making accounts on these homeservers is free, so there’s no reason not to make accounts on a few of them to try out.
The other thing to think about is your matrix client. This is similar to an IRC client or an email app. Luckily, this matter even less than the homeservers since you can freely switch between these anytime with basically no issues. If none catch your eye, Element is the sort of “reference implementation” so you can just try that one if you want. It has a web version too: https://app.element.io
There’s some cool more advanced features like spaces and threads, but you don’t have to worry about those much at first.
sweet thanks! i’ll have to look into it more. i know that you can bridge other apps too, like discord and telegram which would be really awesome
That’s what I use Matrix for. I actually just pay for Element One and that gets me Signal, WhatsApp and Telegram all in one app (and a more convenient one than any of them). It’s great and zero effort, but you can’t then add your own bridges for other services. If you need them you might better hosting it yourself.
Creating an account? (basically the same as anywhere really) or your own instance? (Pretty easy, there are ansible playbooks, docker containers)
Not too hard just a couple things to get used to but it genuinely was barely harder than discord for an easy sign up
Federation definitely feels like the next major stepping stone of the internet’s evolution.
Ever heard of Email?..
Or XMPP for that matter.
Federation has been a core principle since the beginning.
You don’t have to be condescending.
Exactly. Most people have only used the Internet in its current centralized form. Not everyone had the benefit of being around in the IRC/XMPP/Icecast/BBS/Usenet/etc. days. Federated services are a new concept to many people.
Not everyone had the benefit of being around in the IRC/XMPP/Icecast/BBS/Usenet/etc. days.
Dies and turns into a pile of greymuzzle dust.
We’re getting old. Sorry
You have never used email?
Most people don’t think of email and social media as being two aspects of the same thing.
I’ve used everything I’ve listed. I’m one of the people who was around on the internet in the 90s and 2000s.
Email is pretty centralized at this point https://cfenollosa.com/blog/after-self-hosting-my-email-for-twenty-three-years-i-have-thrown-in-the-towel-the-oligopoly-has-won.html
It’s starting to feel like the 90’s again, but without frames ;-) I haven’t felt this engaged with the internet in years
I will have no disparaging of frames, thank you very much.
I loved frames and will not hear a word said against them
I miss the blink tag and how annoying it was
Absolutely. The spark of the internet is back!
