this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2023
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Frankly, I think it's entirely because of the self-selected nature of the people migrating, and the fact that the whole federation thing is mildly confusing so only people who have made sense of it and worked out how it works are here. If/when it becomes more obvious and popular beyond early-adopters, it'll be targeted by all the same bots and propagandists and chudiots as anywhere else.
It's practically the same reason reddit and other online communities were so much better a decade ago - idiots simply couldn't find their way to them / it was "icky nerd shit".
It makes me giddy to think of how fast people are working on readers/apps for Lemmy that will make all of this way easier for more people to adopt.
Yeah, but i feel there's a lot to be done in the base lemmy protocol too - such as migrating your account to another server - should the current one fall etc etc
Of course mastodon is the most mature in this regard, I hope lemmy does too
I think you’re right. It seems like there’s a pattern for every new platform.
Early adopters make the the site fun, valuable, and worth while
People start to notice and the platform grows, becoming slightly worse, but still pretty cool.
Platform explodes in popularity and it goes to complete shit.
It’s happened with Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Reddit. I’m sure that day will come for this place as well. I guess we’ll just need to enjoy it while it lasts.
But I think a piece of this that’s important to remember is the messed up incentives that most platforms have had beginning around the time they took on serious funds from big investors.
From the moment you bring in serious investment dollars from Silicon Valley funds and SV wannabes, your incentive is no longer to build something that seriously delights users just for the sake of delighting users, everything is in service to shareholder value.
Reddit is perhaps the most classic example of our time of a truly wonderful platform being destroyed by shareholder value coming first.
But since we can make our own instances easily, we can get rid of the rif raf more easily than on reddit
I really hope this doesn’t lead to people forming their own echo chambers and instances become tribes who hate on each other
Well, it's bound to happen to some extent (e.g.: instances blocking lemmygrad), but you have a lot of power to mitigate this effect as an individual user. By default, nothing's blocked, so it's on you as a user if you choose to "live" somewhere that's interested in proscribing undesirables.
It's not a perfect solution. Perhaps leadership changes (or you change) and suddenly your interests are no longer aligned. Nobody wants to get stranded! Eventually maybe user migrations will be a thing, but for now we'll just have to do our best to choose our home-bases wisely based on our own ideological and practical needs (SDF represent!)
I already found my way, commented and subscribed to other instances from beehaw and I wasn't even aware I did it at first, tbh. I don't know if they all connverse seamlessly like that, but hopefully we will be able to keep it nice and civil.
Can you though? There have to be communities to join, and they are what get polluted. As I understand it, switching instances won't help.
Someone then has to police a community if you want to "get rid of the riff-raff" and they will follow who-knows-what criteria for their policing. Just look at all the right-wing subreddits for an example of how policing doesn't necessarily raise the quality of discussion.
Couldn't agree more, there's definitely a bit of a barrier that potentially the average joe wouldn't bother with.