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.
Couldn’t agree more. The reason I came here was to get away from the algorithm driven inanity of big social.
And I can’t help feeling that the only reason Meta wants to federate Threads is to kill the threat of the fediverse off.
It feels like I found a nice mom n pop shop but Walmart and Starbucks are trying to force their way on the same block. I get that you can defederate or block communities you don’t want, but having FB shove their way in this space feels intrusive.
This site is an aggregator. I want to use it to aggregate content I want to see.
It’s trivially easy for you to not be exposed to things you don’t want to see here, so I’m not really understanding the issue
Yea, most content isn’t original anyways. If it’s actually good content I don’t care where it’s from
“can’t wait for all that meta content”
the content: someones racist uncle yelling at you in the comments
Absolutely no. Facebook is absolutely terrible. Keep them racist Karen boomers away,
I personally want to consolidate all content in the fediverse because I see it as more archival-proof. Companies can come and go, brands can sell and change, but a community effort like the fediverse has a huge potential to last.
Just look at reddit and how many useful guides have been taken down.
If you know where to look, there are a lot of useful news, posts, guides, articles and media floating around but often, these are at the hands of big corporations and companies who can turn their backs on their users any time (and with it, our access to these files/media/etc)
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.
And that right there is why you see the expression “Embrace, Extend & Extinguish” thrown around a lot lately. This is exactly what companies have done to demolish competition in the past.
Having been on the Internet through the period when AOL connected to it, I’m a little skeptic of the idea that linking a behemoth to the fediverse won’t totally fuck up the culture of the latter.
Oh god, the Eternal September when 90% of Usenet was people replying “me too!” to a post that said “me too!” in response to a post that said “me too!” which referenced the previous post that said “me too!”
Especially given the armies of people who cross post any decent content to all networks. I hope that here, due to no monetary benefit and no karma, it is only for the love of sharing. All the good content will make it here, but rather than being a firehouse of crap, the community nature should make the relevant communities more focused.
I still use Facebook for local groups. I think even they realise that niche communities without outrage are where the growth will lie. That’s likely why they are scared of federated networks. It could easily kill them over time.
No karma? What are the little arrows for?
I think what it means is that it doesn’t add up all the little arrows across all posts and comments, by default. Although, I suppose an instance, external tool, or browser plugin could still do that.
Thank you for explaining. I was wondering about all the talk of (lack of) karma.
… there are too many Reddit posts on here. I wish lemmy could have its own content and vibe.
You could try to find content you enjoy on a community instead of just browsing All… It’s a big topic right now so of course you’re gonna see a lot of that when you’re scanning everything.
I’ve seen plenty of posts that are original, or are at least as original as they would be on Reddit.
I’m sure it will eventually, it might just take a little while to wash off the Reddit stink
deleted by creator
Hasn’t every form of social media done this though? It’s on the users to collectively shape the culture of a site as a whole. For example Hacker news manages to maintain its ultra nerdy niche through the years, because the users keep it that way.
For years I’ve had two separate Reddit bookmarks on my toolbar, one for r/all and one for my homepage, because for me those were two completely different experiences. Reddit has both shitposting galore, and also (had?) r/AskHistorians. It managed to be both, and Lemmy can do that too.
Doesn’t mean the culture of a site is invulnerable to manipulation from the social media company itself and outside actors
Purely text based content is way easier on the servers. If all Lemmy users uploaded videos and high res images all the time, the servers could not keep up, right?
- consider that they use hardware that is run on donation (or their own) money
Do people running servers have any options for limiting the amount of pictures and video that users upload to their instance?
Having text-only communities sounds like a good way to attract the right people and be an unattractive option for people who just want max content.
I really like that idea.
It would absolutely demolish the risk of a community turning into a meme sub, or one of subs where people just post pictures of their Raspberry Pi in some retail case over and over again.
And as long as pictures are disallowed on the main post, people could still be free to post links to guides or other important content that contains pictures.
Hmm, links to pictures elsewhere seems like it would be less work for the computer running the instance.
Which would be pretty important if we want to keep monetization as unobtrusive as possible on Lemmy.
That said, I do think we need to figure out image hosting at some point.
I asked a similar question previously one of the makers of lemmy responded to me:
Open an issue on that or write a bot
… I thought sometime in the future I will make such a bot … but turns out I need to use typescript for that.
Write it in Rust, bro!
I might be willing to help with this if you want to tackle it and are interested in help. I’m newish to Lemmy but want to get my feet wet. What tech stack do you prefer? Typescript is a very short leap from Javascript if you already know it, IMO.
I get why some want it. I just wish they’d stop. They want ease of access to all the things they like. I hate those other platforms and have no accounts on them and I don’t want to see them here and prefer the community driven content over yet another algorithm pushing garbage I hate. They always try to spin their algorithms as finding content you want and tailoring it to you. But it’s never the case. They take the vile shit that they support and push that, mingling it with a few crumbs of real content. And eventually the crumbs disappear too. I don’t want any of that corporate nonsense around. I really like a good large community without that influence.
I understand why you want that, and I’m glad that decentralization/defederation allow you to keep that.
I have to ask though, why do you want to keep other people from getting that algorithmic, corporate content if they want it? Especially since this will allow them to do it without giving up so much personal info via apps. (While also allowing us to interact/evangelize the FOSS way > corporate systems)
I don’t want to keep them from it. I just prefer they go to their other platforms for it. Because by inviting it to this platform, it degrades this platform in my eyes. I don’t have another place to go to get away from that content, they do have a place they can go to for that content. I’d appreciate it if we can respect that boundary. Keep this place free from the corporations that are destroying so much of our world. At least as much as possible. Nothing good can come from opening this door, and if it opens, history will repeat itself once more because there is always a new crop of people unwilling to listen to warnings. No good comes from aligning with growth at all costs corporations. It just isn’t possible.
Some automated algorithms can be good for content discovery and discovery of new creators tho
- if you are to lazy to type in your search term into a text box
- if you do not even know how to articulate the name of the content you search for in text form
These automatic suggestion algorithms are perfect for mindless scrolling in an entertainment sense … these ranking algorithms justify the massive data collection we witness today.
I wonder if there is another way of decentralized way of content creator discovery without the current drawbacks.
I really don’t think anything justifies the massive data collection that currently happens. While “feeding the algorithm” may be their superficial excuse, data harvesting is really there for the resale value.
Putting my tinfoil hat: Would Meta be capable of having people in the Fediverse posting positively about Meta joining the Fediverse? Because anyone with 2 braincells and that has arrived here so far and gone through the trouble of understanding ± what this is about, set up an account etc, would understand by now the way the world works and why its such a bad idea to have Meta have a foot in the door here.
I think that an open systems that are universal and interoperable are inherently superior to any walled garden. If people think that the fediverse can’t handle or incorporate large corporate interests then this is a failed experiment and they should just shut it down now. Superior open systems should be able to dominate a free market environments, and people either don’t believe this to be the case, or the fediverse is inferior and will never beat the centralized competitors.
I also hate Facebook but for those reasons I think that Facebook joining the fediverse would actually improve Facebook, not worsen the fediverse.
I have put on that same hat already believe me
This companies are all about profit and control and monopolies and give zero shits about you, quality content or anything else. Fuck them
Thing is, they don’t have to pay people for that. Some people just love having the contrarian “not everything meta does is bad” opinion because they think they’re being clever
Its a mix: contrarians, Meta shills and NPCs.
I feel like I understand both, though what I miss isn’t the mass produced content, its how much more viable small communities were on reddit. The big communities here on lemmy are way better than the ones on reddit (which universally sucked) but most of the communities I wanted to engage with regularly are kinda niche. Its a double edged sword, but I do think the community feel here is so much nicer, even if it comes at the expense of small communities being absent, or less active
Yeah same. Mixed feelings about all of this
Like you said, big communities here have been pretty great, but the smaller communities I frequent on Reddit (Talking about genshin and Honkai subreddit which aren’t event small) are pretty dead here.
I talk a lot about the casual community of Reddit and how I wish Lemmy could attract those users. I see Meta as a way for this casual community to come here, but then again, Meta is bleh
