Decentralised social media offers an alternative to big tech platforms like X and Meta. How does it work? Podcast

theconversation.com Decentralised social media offers an alternative to big tech platforms like X and Meta. How does it work? Podcast

The Conversation Weekly podcast speaks to Robert Gehl, an expert on alternative social media platforms, about decentralised social media.

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“Poorly”
- Is that what they say or what you're saying?
  
  Me. You can’t deny that lemmy and mastodon feel shoddy compared to the big names. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t use the other motherfuckers, but there are tons of times where I reload my feed and it errors or is empty.
  Just the nature of running your own services, and I accept it.
  But still, anyone coming from Reddit is going to 100% say it feels shoddy.
  
  Running Sync for Lemmy against sh.itjust.works gives me an almost identical experience to Reddit.
  Except for the content. Lemmy doesn't have enough people posting and has an exceedingly narrow Overton window (for example).
  I want Lemmy to succeed, but we really need to retain users.
  
  !communitypromo@lemmy.ca
  
  So you are saying Lemmy can't compete because we don't have enough Nazis? Weird take.
  This fallacy that you can have a wide range of viewpoints anymore is dead, and is parroted by folks that miss the days of yelling at people on the Internet. However, Trump has taken his cult far enough Right they are beyond meaningful discussion/debate. You can't debate things that aren't even based in reality, and when you call them on it they dismiss it as hearsay/honest mistake/do your research.
  For example, the media called Musk on his quote of the US sending $50 million worth of condoms to Gaza. His response was nonsense.
  "Some of the things that I say will be incorrect, and should be corrected. So, nobody’s going to bat a thousand. I mean, any – you know, we will make mistakes, but we’ll act quickly to correct any mistakes.”
  
  So you are saying Lemmy can't compete because we don't have enough Nazis?
  I'm saying that comments outside of a very narrow world view on Lemmy are greeted with hostility. Like the comment I'm replying to.
  This covers lots of different areas. I get downvotes and snarky comments when I say I like the wrong Lemmy client or browser. When I ask about suggestions for a ttrpg, I get a snarky comment saying I'm asking questions wrong. When the leader of the Canadian Conservative party comes up in conversation, saying he does anything effectively is met with snark and downvotes - not that he's good, but that he's effective at something.
  I understand this is a shitty time in US politics. I don't like the outcome either - Trump is gonna make my life worse, and I don't live in the US. But look at your comments on this thread: they're hostile towards people that probably agree with you. This kind of rage makes the platform unwelcoming and shitty.
  
  I took your comment to mean you didn't think we had enough Nazis on Lemmy, to which I will respond hostile towards. If you are anti-Nazi then you should not use the idea of an anti-Nazi comment to illustrate this fake idea of to narrow of political viewpoints on Lemmy.
  Also, debating fascism is a whole different thing than people giving you shit over your choice of browser or Lemmy client. You shouldn't conflate the two.
  
  I don't think any comments in this thread have referred to Nazis or fascism, other than yours. Nobody here is disagreeing that those things are bad.
  I used your comment as an illustration that Lemmy has a tiny Overton window: when anyone comments outside the window, they're smacked down. Instead of asking the original commenter for clarification, your comment suggested they want Nazis on the platform. That was a good illustration of my point.
  Your comments in this thread only make sense if you assume the worst about other Lemmites. Please don't do that. If there's ambiguity, there's no need to assume we're douche wagons. Maybe ask for clarification. Make a friendly joke? I dunno.
  
  You implied that my anti-Nazi comment from a different post was somehow a negative, thus making this thread about Nazis/fascism. It was a poor example of what I think you wanted to convey in terms of how you see political discourse on Lemmy.
  You also for some reason see Nazis the same as people that disagree or down vote you about browser choice. That seems like a giant leap, and conflating the two is painting Lemmy with a broad brush. They are two wildly different issues and deserve different discussions as to why.
  And my original comment came from someone that just stated that Fediverse was worse than the Commercial versions that are havens for fascists. And also the fact they track you around the Internet. So I did ask the question, and now you're trying to turn this into some kind of douche wagon rodeo apparently.
  
  lemmy cant comepete because lemmites love preaching to the choir
  
  but there are tons of times where I reload my feed and it errors or is empty.
  Sounds like your server or your app is an issue.
  A few years in and I haven't seen that except for just straight up downtime (planned or otherwise).
  
  Just saw the other day that the Pixelfed developer pushed out a new feature pretty quickly and it reminded me of how much faster you can push new features out when you're working on a small team with very few developers.
  Then I realised that... At the place I work at (an app most likely installed on your phone) - well every change will have a huge impact. If 0.05% of the users' performance is degraded - that's a shit ton of users. So we have processes in place. We test on all kinds of devices before releasing.
  Running a high quality service at scale is hard and it's expensive and it's not always fun because you have to leave your cowboy developer guns at home and do the homework before pushing to production.
  
  Brother I feel that. Half the incidents over the past month have been p90 latency issues because someone pushed a bad query to prod.
  That’s why I’m not interested in running any fediverse stuff; maybe a few years ago it would have been fun, but I’m just not in the mood to do work and then do unpaid work.
  I will say the Pixelfed app feels pretty damn nice, though.
  
  You mean networks dont just manage themselves?
  
  Crazy right? I’m sure AI will solve this for us this year 🥴
  
  But still, anyone coming from Reddit is going to 100% say it feels shoddy.
  I didn’t 😎
  Where are you getting errors in your feeds? A specific app? Never had issues on Lemmy with Voyager or the website.
  
  I use the boost mobile app exclusively to browse lemmy. Does a great job, it's identical to reddit except with so few people my stupid comments actually get attention
  
  Lemmy on Voyager is flawless as fuck.
  In fact I have been lately on Bluesky and spending much more time there these days, since people who I respect say “it’s an open standard” and “a true bulwark to the next Musk or whoever wants to buy it”, but I regularly find myself wondering, “what am I looking for here [on Bluesky]?”
  The anonymity of reddit type platforms, of which Lemmy is the most future proof, is highly preferable. Bluesky (Twitter/Xitter, etc) feels lie a bunch of ‘identities’ wanting on some level to get the karma their post deserves plus the karma their identity ‘deserves’
  
  I came from Reddit, strong disagree. I think the lemmy UI is far cleaner than reddit. Bluesky is way better than twitter and is technically decentralized.
  Mastodon, for sure is a bit shitty with little thought put into discovery.
  
  Agreed. I don't use Bluesky much either but when I do it's always leagues better than Mastadon. I get the issues but from an ease-of-use view it's clearly superior. It's time we stop seeing mastadon as the flagship software of the fediverse. Realistically it's going to be pixelfed or maybe Loops, with Lemmy being a bit more niche. Which I think is fine and to be expected given the format and traits transactional as a second tier in mass appeal.
  
  Yeah, the biggest issue to me is users. It is still pretty quiet in the niche communities where in reddit you'd have a lot of eyes for even the most obscure topics
  
  You didn't ten years ago. Give it time. Be the change.
  
  For sure. I am starting communities on stuff I want to talk about.
  
  But still, anyone coming from Reddit is going to 100% say it feels shoddy.
  What makes you say that?
  
  Reddit/Twitter have had years of development and tons of funding. you're comparing Applesnto oranges. give the little guys (Lemmy/Mastodon) some time to catch up? that they already work as well as they do compared to massive corporations is pretty impressive. And just to counter your experience, I've had zero issues with Mastodon. Lemmy has a few minor UX bugs that will eventually get ironed out.
  
  Saying it runs poorly is a huge reach. Lemmy runs great and gives me 75% of what I wanted from Reddit.
  
  I don't have the same experience, for me it's been quite rock solid for the past year or a little more. I have seen mabe two or three downtime for maintenance on lemme.ca and have used my other account on .world while it came back. So no real downtime given one server down does not mean all servers down. I have had wayyyy more issues with Reddit.
  I have used "Connect" for most of the time and am currently trying out "Summit". Both apps are great. I do like "Summit" a little more for now but have been using it for just 2 days.
  
  I mostly only use Lemmy but my instance has great up time and running out of new posts is not a bad thing to me considering how addicted I was to reddit (and admittedly now to Lemmy.
  I have a Mastadon account but considering I lost interest in Twitter ~15 years ago I'm just not into the format.
  
  Agreed, I really hope the Fediverse focuses on UX
  
  I don’t know why you’re getting downvoted. You’re spot on
  
  I mean sure maybe some of the huger instances have more hardware behind em. Mine works well most of the time, but I do run into issues often enough that I feel like we aren’t on par with Reddit.
  And I don’t expect it to be, and I’m fine with it. My admin is running it himself for free (to me) afaik, and I like the guy, so I ain’t complaining.
  The UX of lemmy on the whole is also worse; seeing the same post fifteen times because someone blasted it to multiple instances and communities does get old.
  Guess I’m not allowed to be critical even though I literally said I’m fine with it all. 🤷🏻‍♀️
  
  People place convenience too high on their priority list when figuring out what services to use.
  
  I would disagree. The default UI might feel shoddy, but using apps and custom UIs like tesseract or photon and it really doesn’t look shoddy at all.
- In which regard? Not enough Nazis? Not enough analytics following you around the net building a profile on you?
  
  Relax.
  https://midwest.social/comment/15324636

36 comments