Don’t get me wrong I’m a big fan but it seems like the fediverse could theoretically exist with like 5 users whereas a commercial company needs users for revenue. It feels like we are using the masters tools to try to destroy the masters house
A lot of community types just simply don’t work without a minimum critical mass of members.
Imagine asking a programming question on a software development community of just 5 people. You end up with 3 people who aren’t active enough to see the question, 1 person sees but doesn’t have an answer and doesn’t respond (classic lurker), and one person sees it and responds that they don’t know the answer. Now imagine a community of 5 thousand people…it’s suddenly much more feasible to even bother asking the question.
Sure, fediverse could exist with just 5 people, but it would be worthless and pointless.
yea the reason to want more users is for niche communities, I don’t need a billion people just for memes or news, but when you subdivide your users down to niche communities suddenly you’ll want more
I wish there were more people on Lemmy talking about Deus Ex, The 7th Guest, DOS games, Randomizers, or specific TV shows that I’m currently watching (Reddit always had a pretty active sub for each and every show)
One could make the argument that 5000 users is still not mass adoption. If that is enough activity, then mass adoption is not a requirement for the fediverse to be a nice social place to be.
5,000 users in a niche community would need hundreds of millions in the wider network.
This is how bulletin boards used to work. The most successful were focused on a niche and one with 5,000 users would be big enough to be of use to people interested in that niche. But when your niche is part of a much larger community covering all niches, that community needs to be vast to get 5,000 subscribing to any given niche.
The amount of knowledge within the community and the representation of niche subcommunities grows with amount of users. So within huge communities you can be assured you have an expert for nicht topic x somewhere. And even your most outlandish interest is followed by at least a few others. That is what I joined larger social media for at least.
Because more content, better tools, more platforms, and more development. Also if it’s mainstream, you can talk about decentralization in a normal conversation without sounding like a turbo nerd.
Holy shit, this comment section has actually sober and intelligent replies, as opposed to the typical “Reee Meta!” I keep seeing in every post that regards Threads, and it’s annoying because it stifles discussions.
I think it might be a bit of an xy problem. I myself have hoped for the runaway success of the fediverse. But I realized it’s not actually some absolute number of users I want. What I want is for the fediverse to have that same “there’s a community for anything” that reddit had.
I’m starting to hope the fediverse doesn’t get too big now, honestly. There’s a certain number of eyeballs that is going to attract people interested in exploiting those eyeballs, and I don’t know if the fediverse is robust enough to fight them off as the pot of gold they see begins to overflow. It’s hard balance to find. And maybe the decentralized aspect of the fediverse does mean that it can’t be fully assimilated by capital, I don’t know.
I don’t know if the fediverse is robust enough to fight them off as the pot of gold they see begins to overflow. It’s hard balance to find.
By now I think it’s not a balance which can be found. I think “migration to the next thing” is just part of the nature of online identity, if it’s important to you.
After some time the weaknesses of certain systems and platforms will start to show, especially if they start becoming “mainstream”. And then chances are good that pressure will mount, as a new platform will bring up which aims to adress at least some of the weaknesses of the previous platform. Rinse. Repeat.
There are many different visions for “success” of decentralized projects, some of which require/imply explosive growth and some do not. There are also some goals, such as diversity and inclusivity, which can have complicated relationships with the concept of “growth.”
I want all kinds of people (that are NOT BIGOTS) to be join the fediverse, participate safely and form their own communities[1].
To achieve this, it’s beneficial for it to be easy for folks to join the fediverse at all, e.g., being able to easily find an instance and sign up for an account and not worry about the infrastructure or instance politics, and critically to be able to easily find one another and interact. These are also features that just fuel userbase growth generally.
But to sustain it, it’s necessary to have strong moderation (which in turn requires a manageable workload for mods) and to keep large pools of bad actors in check. It’s also important on a safety basis for many users to be less discoverable because high discoverability of marginalized users results in high rates of harassment by bigots. These are features that support a better and safer experience for people who are in the fediverse.
These things are directly in tension, which makes it very difficult to have a healthy fediverse. The result on Mastodon has been a bifurcation of “successful” (by different definitions) instances into, on the one hand, very large but poorly moderated instances with garbage fire local timelines but lots of people and lots of content to interact with, and, on the other hand, smaller, well moderated instances that flourish internally but can be hard to join or to interact with if you’re on one of the large instances.
Both models exert exclusionary forces in their own ways. If you keep everyone in your federation, and that includes nazis, then you are de facto participating in driving people who are targeted by nazis off of the network. But if your happy little closed instances are impossible to join and has a constraining monoculture, then a lot of other nice folks may get left out.
There’s not an easy solution to this. The situation for lemmy will be similar in some ways and different in others. The piece that worries me particularly is that instance politics questions become potentially more charged due to the fact that instances are hosting the communities[2] and not just the users, plus there’s not yet a way to migrate communities.
in the sense of social connections generally, not just “community” as a lemmy feature ↩︎
Because, like it or not, what normies do on social media matters. I, for one, don’t want fuckwads like Zuckerberg, Musk and Spez to continue to be able to skew the conversation in the proverbial town square e.g. during the 2024 election.
Centralized, corporate-controlled social media is literally a threat to democracy.
I’m keen on having as many communities as possible. Having things silo’d into a few mega hubs is a recipe for disaster. Having a concentration of users all in 1 or 2 spaces where there’s no transparency from administrators / moderators is what we should have all learned from Reddit and their recent nonsense.
With Lemmy and an open source app on an open source platform you’re owning the means of production. We don’t need mass adoption, just enough users with a higher level of engagement. We’re now there, or close.
people who like content sorted by “top” or “hot” or upvotes or boosts and so on also need a large diverse number of people viewing and clicking to create a meanigful / representative ranking of content.
Lemmy and kbin both have over 1 million users now, let’s assume half of them is bots, so we’re left with half a million people. I think even that number is high enough for us to generate interesting and diverse content. I mean, can you even imagine how large of a number half a million is? It takes 1 poster to jumpstart the magazine, 10 posters would already be more than adequate.
The fediverse is the best chance any of us have of experience an internet free of tech oligopolies, that’s the biggest difference for me.
Of course mass adoption would make it more likely to have lively niche communities, but most importantly, I think it should be a right for people to exist on the internet without a massive corporation trying to turn them into a nutjob for monetary gain.
All social media has network effects, in which the value to a user is roughly proportional to the number of other users (probably not fully proportional at the high end, but definitely positively sloped).
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A lot of community types just simply don’t work without a minimum critical mass of members.
Imagine asking a programming question on a software development community of just 5 people. You end up with 3 people who aren’t active enough to see the question, 1 person sees but doesn’t have an answer and doesn’t respond (classic lurker), and one person sees it and responds that they don’t know the answer. Now imagine a community of 5 thousand people…it’s suddenly much more feasible to even bother asking the question.
Sure, fediverse could exist with just 5 people, but it would be worthless and pointless.
yea the reason to want more users is for niche communities, I don’t need a billion people just for memes or news, but when you subdivide your users down to niche communities suddenly you’ll want more
I wish there were more people on Lemmy talking about Deus Ex, The 7th Guest, DOS games, Randomizers, or specific TV shows that I’m currently watching (Reddit always had a pretty active sub for each and every show)
One could make the argument that 5000 users is still not mass adoption. If that is enough activity, then mass adoption is not a requirement for the fediverse to be a nice social place to be.
5,000 users in a niche community would need hundreds of millions in the wider network.
This is how bulletin boards used to work. The most successful were focused on a niche and one with 5,000 users would be big enough to be of use to people interested in that niche. But when your niche is part of a much larger community covering all niches, that community needs to be vast to get 5,000 subscribing to any given niche.
The amount of knowledge within the community and the representation of niche subcommunities grows with amount of users. So within huge communities you can be assured you have an expert for nicht topic x somewhere. And even your most outlandish interest is followed by at least a few others. That is what I joined larger social media for at least.
Greater probably of subject matter experts existing. 👍 Bonus points for a solid logical argument
I actually don’t want it to grow any more. There are enough creators available now. People are understanding and knowledgeable .
Because more content, better tools, more platforms, and more development. Also if it’s mainstream, you can talk about decentralization in a normal conversation without sounding like a turbo nerd.
Interesting take. Yeah for some reason the word “federation” is scary even tho it’s popularized as fuck in pop culture 🤷♀️
Holy shit, this comment section has actually sober and intelligent replies, as opposed to the typical “Reee Meta!” I keep seeing in every post that regards Threads, and it’s annoying because it stifles discussions.
I don’t like threads. Not because I’m afraid of some corporate conspiracy. It’s because it just isn’t that good 🤷♀️
While I like the quality of the content on here, I’d always enjoy more quantity. The discussions here are great but always keen for more.
I think it might be a bit of an xy problem. I myself have hoped for the runaway success of the fediverse. But I realized it’s not actually some absolute number of users I want. What I want is for the fediverse to have that same “there’s a community for anything” that reddit had.
I’m starting to hope the fediverse doesn’t get too big now, honestly. There’s a certain number of eyeballs that is going to attract people interested in exploiting those eyeballs, and I don’t know if the fediverse is robust enough to fight them off as the pot of gold they see begins to overflow. It’s hard balance to find. And maybe the decentralized aspect of the fediverse does mean that it can’t be fully assimilated by capital, I don’t know.
Were living in interesting times.
By now I think it’s not a balance which can be found. I think “migration to the next thing” is just part of the nature of online identity, if it’s important to you.
After some time the weaknesses of certain systems and platforms will start to show, especially if they start becoming “mainstream”. And then chances are good that pressure will mount, as a new platform will bring up which aims to adress at least some of the weaknesses of the previous platform. Rinse. Repeat.
All that is solid melts into air
This is kinda what I was getting at towards the end of your comment. More shitheads doesn’t necessarily mean better content
There are many different visions for “success” of decentralized projects, some of which require/imply explosive growth and some do not. There are also some goals, such as diversity and inclusivity, which can have complicated relationships with the concept of “growth.”
I want all kinds of people (that are NOT BIGOTS) to be join the fediverse, participate safely and form their own communities[1].
To achieve this, it’s beneficial for it to be easy for folks to join the fediverse at all, e.g., being able to easily find an instance and sign up for an account and not worry about the infrastructure or instance politics, and critically to be able to easily find one another and interact. These are also features that just fuel userbase growth generally.
But to sustain it, it’s necessary to have strong moderation (which in turn requires a manageable workload for mods) and to keep large pools of bad actors in check. It’s also important on a safety basis for many users to be less discoverable because high discoverability of marginalized users results in high rates of harassment by bigots. These are features that support a better and safer experience for people who are in the fediverse.
These things are directly in tension, which makes it very difficult to have a healthy fediverse. The result on Mastodon has been a bifurcation of “successful” (by different definitions) instances into, on the one hand, very large but poorly moderated instances with garbage fire local timelines but lots of people and lots of content to interact with, and, on the other hand, smaller, well moderated instances that flourish internally but can be hard to join or to interact with if you’re on one of the large instances.
Both models exert exclusionary forces in their own ways. If you keep everyone in your federation, and that includes nazis, then you are de facto participating in driving people who are targeted by nazis off of the network. But if your happy little closed instances are impossible to join and has a constraining monoculture, then a lot of other nice folks may get left out.
There’s not an easy solution to this. The situation for lemmy will be similar in some ways and different in others. The piece that worries me particularly is that instance politics questions become potentially more charged due to the fact that instances are hosting the communities[2] and not just the users, plus there’s not yet a way to migrate communities.
in the sense of social connections generally, not just “community” as a lemmy feature ↩︎
In the lemmy feature sense ↩︎
Thanks for the thought out reply 🙏
Because, like it or not, what normies do on social media matters. I, for one, don’t want fuckwads like Zuckerberg, Musk and Spez to continue to be able to skew the conversation in the proverbial town square e.g. during the 2024 election.
Centralized, corporate-controlled social media is literally a threat to democracy.
I’m keen on having as many communities as possible. Having things silo’d into a few mega hubs is a recipe for disaster. Having a concentration of users all in 1 or 2 spaces where there’s no transparency from administrators / moderators is what we should have all learned from Reddit and their recent nonsense.
It seems like a common belief on here is “centrally located social networks erode democracy” 👍
Because if this place really did have only 5 users, it would be boring and pointless.
With Lemmy and an open source app on an open source platform you’re owning the means of production. We don’t need mass adoption, just enough users with a higher level of engagement. We’re now there, or close.
Here here. I just hope people stay. I’ve already known a couple people that have reopened Reddit accounts unfortunately.
It’s all about content and diversity. Without a huge number of users you won’t get all these niche communities that one loves Reddit for.
Where is the active plant doctor community? Where are the folks from different professions weighting in with their opinion?
The Fediverse could exist with 5 users. But it would be boring. It just now crossed a threshold where one could hope that if becomes something.
people who like content sorted by “top” or “hot” or upvotes or boosts and so on also need a large diverse number of people viewing and clicking to create a meanigful / representative ranking of content.
I agree, but only until a certain number.
Lemmy and kbin both have over 1 million users now, let’s assume half of them is bots, so we’re left with half a million people. I think even that number is high enough for us to generate interesting and diverse content. I mean, can you even imagine how large of a number half a million is? It takes 1 poster to jumpstart the magazine, 10 posters would already be more than adequate.
The fediverse is the best chance any of us have of experience an internet free of tech oligopolies, that’s the biggest difference for me.
Of course mass adoption would make it more likely to have lively niche communities, but most importantly, I think it should be a right for people to exist on the internet without a massive corporation trying to turn them into a nutjob for monetary gain.
For continued development and more content.
All social media has network effects, in which the value to a user is roughly proportional to the number of other users (probably not fully proportional at the high end, but definitely positively sloped).
probably an “S-curve” type relationship