We need to assess the power imbalances and strategize accordingly. This whole "boycott Threads" reaction, for example, works in their favor. They already have hundreds of millions of users. Because of the whole "FediPact", now we have lots of people migrating away from Mastodon because their instance does not let them follow some celebrity or NBA player, or sports journalist. Instead of blocking Threads, we should have worked to let people away from Twitter and into Threads so that they could learn and understand how federation works.

After this would be the time to go after the popular YouTubers and say "hey, why don't you setup your instance instead of using Threads? You won't lose your audience, and you have more control over your brand and online presence!"

This is what any sane person with minimal understanding of marketing would think. But instead of that, we got some reactionary crybabies that want to have the Fediverse only to themselves.

[–] laverabe@lemmy.world 2 points 3 months ago (1 children)

The nice thing about Lemmy is that it doesn't have celibrities and NBA players. It's (mostly) honest discussion for the most part, sure you have a lot of people who getting angry but at least it's not like reddit or Facebook or whatever where you never know if a post/comment is real or a paid advertisement. Yeah it'd get more reach, more people, more popularity with thread integration, but there would also be more people. ...eternal September . It would be guaranteed to happen. Like you said, it's about marketing. Once Lemmy has more than a few thousand people, marketers are gonna do the same thing they did to reddit. ...destroy it. Yeah the shareholders are making out, but it's value is gone.

I started on reddit in 2008, and Lemmy is a mirror image of what the community looked like back then. You don't need inorganic growth to grow Lemmy. It just needs quality discussions and people, the organic growth will come naturally. The only thing that needs protection against is 'linking' with any for profit entity.

Connecting with threads and bluesky and whatever else would grow Lemmy, but for what purpose? I'd argue Lemmy isn't the end solution, maybe the devs can evolve it to work over the long term, but really I think if a social media solution is really going to tackle Facebook et al, it's going to have to be self hosted servers on every computing device in the world; where no government or organization can control, regulate, and most importantly one that cannot be manipulated for gain of a nation state or corporation.

I know of no such software, but I have a feeling such a solution would be superior to the fediverse in taking down the existing social media cartels.

[–] rglullis@communick.news 3 points 3 months ago (1 children)

The nice thing about Lemmy is that it doesn’t have celibrities and NBA players.

If you are starting with something that is completely subjective, how do you expect to get any meaningful discussion? You might not care about these things. It doesn't mean that this is not important to others.

Also, it's not just about the celebrities and NBA players. It's about the conversation surrounding these different interests.

…eternal September . It would be guaranteed to happen.

It happened on Reddit many years ago, and because of the long tail it simply didn't matter. Just stay from the (relative) popular subs and things work quite well, as long as they are some minimal critical mass. If you are the type that insists in participating in tiring and pointless discussions about politics, then yeah you are going to have a bad time.

marketers are gonna do the same thing they did to reddit.

Conjecture, that's not a certainty. In an open network, it's a lot easier to design and implement systems where you can actually verify who is behind an account. Or to implement a system that filters content from anyone who is not part of your web of trust. Or to do like spam filters that run content analysis before even hitting your inbox. You can not implement these things on closed networks because it would destroy their KPIs, but we don't care about that here.

I’d argue Lemmy isn’t the end solution,

Of course it isn't, but it's the best we have at the moment. If we keep waiting for some ideal solution before working to get people out of the closed systems, it will never happen. Worse still, if we don't get more people, we will hit a local maxima and never innovate. This is already happening on Mastodon.

where no government or organization can control, regulate, and most importantly one that cannot be manipulated for gain of a nation state or corporation.

Here we agree, 100%.

[–] laverabe@lemmy.world 2 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

thank you for the link, it was an interesting read. I really like the idea of using a web browser, like firefox or a fork of it, as a basis point for a distributed social web.

I don't really understand how it would do that but it is a very interesting idea. I guess since firefox is open source anyone could create this ability. Is there a discussion about this somewhere on the web? Lemmy is a good a place as any as it's too unimportant and tiny right now ;)

[–] rglullis@communick.news 2 points 3 months ago

Thanks!

Maybe I wasn't too clear on the post about one thing, though. There is no need to fork the browser. I believe this could be implemented as a simple browser extension or even as Progressive Web App, like Voyager or Elk. The idea that I'm working with is actually to fork either one of these applications and just change its internal libraries to make it "speak" ActivityPub directly, instead of using Mastodon's or Lemmy's APIs.

Is there a discussion about this somewhere on the web?

Specifically about this approach, no. But https://matrix.to/#/#fediverse:pixie.town is a good room for people working in Fediverse/Social Web.