this post was submitted on 29 Nov 2023
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Fediverse

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I'm talking about what they say at 8:20:

Bulletin boards, forums, blogs. The main difference to today was twofold:  

For one there were no algorithms fighting to keep you online at any cost – at some point you were done with the internet for the day, as mind blowing as this may sound.

But more importantly: The old internet was very fractured, split into thousands of different communities, like small villages gathering around shared beliefs and interests.

These villages were separated from each other by digital rivers or mountains. These communities worked because they mirrored  real life much more than social media:  

Each village had its own culture and set of rules.  Maybe one community was into rough humour and soft moderation, another had strict rules and banned  easily.

If you didn’t play by the village rules,  you would be banned – or you could just go and move to another village that suited you better.

So instead of all of us gathering in one place, overwhelming our brains at a townsquare that in the end just leads to us going insane, one solution to achieve less social sorting may be extremely simple:

go back to smaller online communities.

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[–] DmMacniel@feddit.de 82 points 11 months ago (1 children)
[–] canis_majoris@lemmy.ca 20 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Yeah there's not much that the Fediverse adds to the equation that a forum wouldn't handle. It's actually worse in a lot of ways, because on a forum you're not going to have seven different subforums dedicated to the same topics, like the federation does by having 200 servers each with generally similar and redundant subcommunities. Sports is a big example I use, because it's the most evident.

One of the most popular moderation moves on this platform has been to lock these excess communities and forward them to a central one that is actually active.

[–] Alteon@lemmy.world 14 points 11 months ago

There's some growing pains, but within a federated system, I think there needs to be community aggregation at a certain point. There's no need to host 50 different identical communities, and it's arguable that it makes things worse. I'm hoping that someone will eventually be able to develope the tools to easily allow for community aggregation in the future.

[–] Kaldo@kbin.social 54 points 11 months ago (3 children)

Isn't it kinda the opposite? A fediverse is not multiple separate isolated villages, it's a bunch of villages all bundled up together in one place within walking distance.

[–] exocortex@discuss.tchncs.de 11 points 11 months ago (2 children)

kinda. but compared to e. g. Twitter its much more splinteted. Twitter is more like one giant city. also your seeing mostly what Twitter decides. mastodon shows you what you subscribed to. things are less viral.

[–] Kaldo@kbin.social 5 points 11 months ago

You can put twitters feed to following only and it's kinda the same thing tbh. I don't think Mastodon did anything to fix the core issue from the video, you're still bombarded with opinions from people you don't have much in common with. Whether it's millions of people on twitter or thousands on Mastodon, it's still more than what our stupid brain is able it process IMHO.

[–] elbarto777@lemmy.world 2 points 11 months ago
[–] kernelle@0d.gs 4 points 11 months ago (2 children)

I do interpret it as not having an exuberant userbase atm, many share the sentiment of lemmy feeling like early internet and this is probably why. But this means once it's large enough, the same might happen to the fediverse.

But the great thing about the fediverse is how you can create your own instance and do with it as you please, maybe allow partial federation so people can read but not interact, or an entirely sepperated federation. Create your own village but still be interconnected by a high speed train network.

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[–] gila@lemm.ee 3 points 11 months ago

The villages being meaningfully separate spaces is more pertinent than how far apart they are. I'm on the instance that I'm on because of communities it federates with I'm interested in participating in. I moved instances to achieve this.

[–] theKalash@feddit.ch 34 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (2 children)

These villages were separated from each other by digital rivers or mountains

But the concept of federation in the fediverse removes these separations.

[–] Corgana@startrek.website 23 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (2 children)

Not really, each Mastodon or Lemmy instance still has its own culture and rules. Federation just allows you to travel across borders with your same passport.

[–] topinambour_rex@lemmy.world 16 points 11 months ago (2 children)

Which isn't what is described in the video.

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[–] theKalash@feddit.ch 2 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

Some definitly do, but I think it depends on which one you're on and how you use it. All my communities are on other instances and unless it's an extreme instance like lemmygrad, I basically don't really care or pay attention to which instance a community is on.

[–] Corgana@startrek.website 3 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Yeah you're not wrong, but just because they choose to be similar doesn't negate the ability to be different if desired, something not afforded to people who ran communities on commercial platforms.

The concept of Federation ensures the ability to do ones own thing if desired, not negate it.

[–] YoBuckStopsHere@lemmy.world 4 points 11 months ago (7 children)

The Fediverse just gives a path, it doesn't restrict the paths. Anyone can make or join any community.

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[–] otter@lemmy.ca 23 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Maybe they're soft launching on the fediverse 😄

Would love to see it. An explanation video on how the fediverse works, put out by Kurzgesagt, would be so helpful

[–] nintendiator@feddit.cl 12 points 11 months ago

Little instance-birds dying and exploding in spectacular fashion, all to a comfy jingle and a soothing narration of how the Internet is Doomed Regardless.

Kurzgesagt — in a Nutshell.

[–] canis_majoris@lemmy.ca 13 points 11 months ago (6 children)

Yeah but there's literally nothing the Fediverse does better than a PHBB forum.

I actually hate the interconnected yet fragmented environment here - there's absurd amounts of redundancies in communities, resulting in dead spaces; you don't need 20 different federated servers all with their variations of the same communities, for example sports teams - you have fanaticus.social which is literally specifically for sports, but then every single local instance like midwest.social or lemmy.ca will have duplicate or even triplicate communities. This does nothing but make the whole platform seem big and empty and bereft of users or interactions.

[–] otter@lemmy.ca 15 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I think once a community gets popular, the duplicates die away or act as backups when an instance goes down. That's generally a good thing because instances have disappeared overnight, and Lemmy is still in development

We had a movies&tv instance that was popular, and then it disappeared overnight so the smaller local instances took over till we got a new popular one

[–] Blaze@discuss.tchncs.de 3 points 11 months ago
[–] onlinepersona@programming.dev 12 points 11 months ago (1 children)

"literally nothing"

As if PHPBB forums didn't have duplicated subforums

[–] canis_majoris@lemmy.ca 3 points 11 months ago (2 children)

If they were properly curated, they didn't. It's not like an admin from any other instance can delete duplicate communities from other instances.

[–] onlinepersona@programming.dev 6 points 11 months ago

Why would the admin of one PHPBB forum "curate" subforums on another PHPBB forum? If you had 10 different PHPBB forums about politics in separate countries, they would all have a "world" subforum (or something similarly named) in each. The only thing happening with the fediverse is that you're actively seeing what would happen if PHPBB forums were connected.

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[–] PlasterAnalyst@kbin.social 8 points 11 months ago

I remember there being at least 3 separate popular forums just for the Dodge neon.

[–] Kaldo@kbin.social 3 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

It's pretty bad for small communities. A new factorio update drops and we have a thread on beehaw, lemmy and kbin gaming communities. Meanwhile the actual factorio community (on either of these servers) also gets a thread but it's mostly empty.

For some communities this makes sense but I feel like it just kills any smaller ones, they just never get a chance to take off properly.

It doesn't help that the fediverse search is just atrocious.

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[–] illi@lemm.ee 2 points 11 months ago (5 children)

That's partilly more on the people creating duplicates without looking if the community doesn't exist already.

Granted, the lemmy explorer tool might not be around for too long for people to be easily able to - since someone on you instance needs to known a community exists on other instance and access it for everyone to see it. And some people might just not be aware of it as well.

[–] lambalicious@lemmy.sdf.org 4 points 11 months ago (1 children)

That’s partilly more on the people creating duplicates without looking if the community doesn’t exist already

Which is not bad; actually and to the contrary, it can be a part of each instance's cultural identity and it's a practical way of ensuring the diversity and viability of smaller instances.

Discussing c/soccer in an Argentinian lemmy can be very different than discussing it in hexbear, for example. Not to mention it's likely most of everyone would't even be able to participate in hexbear's. Furthermore, general subjects becoming tied to the largest instances, which statistically have more surface to cover the creation of communities for any subject ever, returns us to the same problem of conversation and community becoming centralized into a "Reddit" instance.

[–] illi@lemm.ee 4 points 11 months ago

A good perspective I didn't have.

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[–] Tier1BuildABear@lemmy.world 11 points 11 months ago (1 children)

If they were talking about anything specific, as hard to believe as it is, there is actually another community based website out there slightly larger than lemmy that allows you to subscribe to your interests and unsubscribe from others.

[–] elbarto777@lemmy.world 2 points 11 months ago (6 children)
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[–] Sanctus@lemmy.world 10 points 11 months ago

All of these things still exist. Theres just massive cities now, and they're shitty like cities in real life.

[–] smileyhead@discuss.tchncs.de 9 points 11 months ago

Unfortunetly for most people "go back to smaller online communities" would probably mean going from XTwitter to a Facebook group...

[–] CADmonkey@lemmy.world 6 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I learned a lot, and made a lot of IRL friends, on various message boards over the years. ADVrider.com used to be a lot of fun but I haven't checked it out lately. One thing that was cool was looking for vehicle-specific forums, like a forum for EX-500's or F150's. These forums were great for keeping whatever car you have running, and were full of knowledge on the problems found in specific cars. A lot of them still exist.

[–] ivanafterall@kbin.social 4 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

The similarly named AVSForum is still a great resource full of insanely knowledgeable A/V nerds. The 3si forum is still the place to check if you happen to be into Mitsubishi 3000GTs or Dodge Stealths.

I miss my little crew at MarcSeal.com/forum, a small guitar community. I don't like to brag about my accomplishments, but let's just say I was a moderator.

[–] sarmale@lemmy.zip 3 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

I would be closer if every instance had a specific topic, Its much better than other social medias It would be closer if forums united through acativitypub

[–] onlinepersona@programming.dev 4 points 11 months ago

Instances do have quite distinct topics. This one is about programming, there are servers dedicated to specific languages, countries, or regions, others even just focus on a single game, movie, or another topic.

[–] amio@kbin.social 3 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Well... for example, I said "maybe you don't need to drag yourself through literally every bit of shitty irrelevant news, if it is stressing you out to the point of reduced quality of life" earlier - and was promptly informed there was no need to be "an uninformed idiot". So I dunno, seems pretty friendly to me.

[–] OmenAtom@lemmy.world 6 points 11 months ago

You can do the former without being the later, fuck that person

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