Tl:dr: Remember the human, even if the project doesn’t work, it wasn’t as useless as it may seem, resources consumption may be concerning

Also disclaimer: I have no involvement in the Fediverser project other than following it from afar and discussing with the creator in a few comments.

Hello everyone,

As the other thread is already quite active and I guess my comment would probably be drown there, I open this new to bring an alternative perspective on the project.

Remember the human

First of all, could we please try to limit the hostility against the project creator? It’s fine to disagree, to block, to defederate, but wording such as “hate”, “screw the person” don’t seem to align with “remember you will be interacting with actual, real people” and “Be respectful of others.”

Now that this is out of the way, a few considerations to take into account:

The Network Effect - the issue that Fediverser is trying to solve

As most of you probably know, the network effect prevents most of the users of an existing platform to switch to another one. “Why would I go there where there will be no one, when all the people I want to interact with are here?”

It was the case for Mastodon until Twitter started to really become mediocre, and Signal still hasn’t convinced most of the Whatsapp userbase to make the switch. Matrix is struggling to be a full Discord replacement, but has the benefits of having bridges with most of communication platforms (https://matrix.org/ecosystem/bridges/)

Those bridges can ease potential reluctant users to at least try out Matrix, as they can still access their previous network.

That was the whole idea behind Fediverser. I remember the initial plan being a two-ways bridge between Lemmy and Reddit, allowing people to see content from Reddit from Lemmy, interact with it, and having people on Reddit seeing responses too.

Added with all the Lemmy pros that we know (third-party clients, alternative front-ends, etc.), it could be a huge helper into bringing more people into Lemmy. Which brings us to the next question.

Do we need more users?

I know this is highly debatable, but I will try to bring some perspective on this.

I have been an active user on Lemmy for a few months now. I like it here, great apps, nice people, interesting discussions.

But still, I still to go Reddit too.

Why? Network effect. As much as Reddit sucks today, there is still content that is only posted there, and sometimes I just want to read that content. And I’m not talking about niche topics like obscure fandoms. Parenting, personal finance, relationship advice, fashion advice are topics that aren’t very popular on Lemmy. And probably won’t become anytime soon due to the network effect. Which is fine for me.

But the issue I see is that overtime, the migration might never really happen. We might be in a “next year is the year of the Linux Desktop” or a “Chrome vs Firefox” situation rather than a “Digg to Reddit migration”. And I’m taking examples where the alternative is still widely used. Lemmy could actually become Diaspora, as over time, more and more people just think that the convenience of a Revanced third-party client is better than having to browse two platforms.

But to be fair, the future doesn’t even matter that much. What I wanted to say here was that I understand why the Fediverser creator wanted to avoid that scenario, and tried to accelerate the process.

Resources consumption

The list of instances part of the Fediverse project can be found here: https://communick.news/c/communick_news_network. I had a look at two, https://level-up.zone/ which replicated a gaming sub, and https://selfhosted.forum/. While they are quite active, they don’t seem to be that active (most of the threads have less than 5 comments, there are a few that high the hundreds, but they are quite rare).

I have seen several admins complaining about the system resources consumed by alien.top instances, “as much as the largest instances”. Does that mean that if tomorrow reddit.old dies, we double or triple the number of users on Lemmy, instances would have to be shutdown? Can we afford a growth this large? The scalability issues have been mentioned since June, and it seemed that things had improved on that side, but should we be worried that Lemmy will hit a scalability ceiling at some point?

However, to be fair, I guess this point is mainly assessed as a “low return on investment” for the resource consumption. Which brings us to the previous point “What what Fediverser trying to solve”.

As a conclusion, I hope this perspective might help people see why this project was made, and that maybe it does not deserve all the hostile reactions from the other thread.

That’s it, thank you if you made it to the end. Looking forward having a discussion in the comments.

Have a good day.

Edit: I noticed I didn’t mention the copyright issues in the comments, but to be fair I’m far from being knowledgeable on the question. It might however have a Streisand effect of having Reddit sue a single person over comments that are made for free by Reddit users. Is that worth being sued by them, I don’t know (also, what about alternative front-ends like LibReddit, or archive websites?)

  • shrugal@lemm.eeEnglish
    0·
    10 months ago

    My opinion on it is pretty simple:

    • I’m here to read posts by and talk to humans, and a post made by a human somewhere else and copied over by a bot without said human’s knowledge or consent is not “made by a human” anymore as far as I’m concerned.
    • I don’t f*cking care about the size of the Fediverse above a certain threshold, and we have reached that imo. There are great posts and discussions here already, so it’s fine if it attracts more people and it’s fine if it doesn’t. The important bit imo is that the people who join do so because they understand and care about the platform’s goals and ethos, not just because it has the biggest potential audience.
    • Communities mainly populated by bots feel like grotesque ghost towns. Answering a post and later realizing it was made by a bot makes you feel tricked and deceived. Your posts being copied to another social network by a bot impersonating you feels cheap and desperate, and like your rights are being seriously violated (which is probably the case)! This all could very well give Lemmy the bad rep of being the “fake bot social network”.
    • On the big plan behind it, who the hell would want to or should take over a Lemmy account from an instance that’s widely known to be populated by bots, maybe even blocked or defederated for that reason?! That’s pretty much the worst entrance to the Fediverse you could have, almost guaranteeing a bad experience from the get go!

    So by all means advertise Lemmy outside of the Fediverse, but don’t fill it with bot content just to make it look like one of the big social networks on first glance. Imo it will do much more harm than good, because you alienate the people already here and you give it a bad rep in the outside world.

    • rglullis@communick.newsEnglish
      0·
      10 months ago

      i’m here to read posts by and talk to humans

      We read a lot more than we talk, or at least I hope that we do so. Do you think that the content is only valuable if you can interact with it?

      Should we just forget about books because it doesn’t have a comment section?

      I don’t f*cking care about the size of the Fediverse above a certain threshold, and we have reached that imo.

      That can only possibly be true if your niches are so extreme that you and your peers are ostracized by the mainstream channels or if you have no niche interest whatsoever.

      Anything in between is completely non-existent in the Fediverse. Take a look at any subreddit after the top 250, and you’ll be hard pressed to find a corresponding Lemmy community, and even if you do manage to find them I’ll give you 100:1 odds they are dead or in a zombie state.

      The maker community is non-existent here.

      The technology communities have nothing but the usual stream of anti-corporate news that gets a lot of clicks but does not bring any actionable to people.

      Same thing for urban planners or those interested in sustainable development. If all you care about is getting shitty memes and having a circlejerk of people saying “look at that asshole because of his big car” then sure !fuckcars will be enough for you. If you want to have a community of people to get organized to see how they can improve their cities and making more human-scale development, you are SOL.

      There was an instance for researchers in ML/AL that (I believe) was run by some serious people. The instance seems to be abandoned and the admins is back at posting at Reddit.

      they understand and care about the platform’s goals and ethos, not just because it has the biggest potential audience.

      This is the same type of gatekeeping that makes sites like lobste.rs completely irrelevant. It may have a higher SNR in relation to something like hackernews, but at the end of the day what matters is the total amount of signal if the noise can be filtered properly.

      Answering a post and later realizing it was made by a bot makes you feel tricked and deceived.

      Yes, that is indeed a problem and unfortunately I haven’t been able to implement the solution as fast I’d like. But if you know that the post is from a bot who potentially will become a real user (by migrating through the fediverser portal) and that one of the reasons to make it more compelling to them is by having content here that is not available elsewhere, why not write anyway? At the very least, your comment might be helpful to the other “real” users accessing the community. Also, the more real people start participating, the less the feeling of “ghost town” there is.

      On the big plan behind it, who the hell would want to or should take over a Lemmy account from an instance that’s widely known to be populated by bots, maybe even blocked or defederated for that reason?

      1. It helps if you stop thinking about them as “bots” in the same sense that we talk about “Twitter bots”. Twitter bots are created by someone with the intent of misinforming or giving the impression that some opinion is shared by a larger group of people. The alien.top “bots” are nothing like that. The content created by them is actually coming from a Reddit user and I am being very diligent about not mirroring anything on the popular subs. A lot of the spam is already filtered by Reddit itself and I honestly am getting less spam reports from alien.top accounts that I got from, e.g, lemmy.blahaj.zone.

      2. The fediverse is so small, but so small, that alien.top has reached top 5 in status count in less than two months. So far, I know of only lemmy.world that decided to defederate with it. If alien.top ever becomes minimally popular, it will be the people on LW that will be in the minority and they will be the ones missing out on content, not the other way around.

      3. I’ve already disabled the bots, but if alien.top gets burned because of some stigma associated with them, I can create another fediverser instance that does only automated subscription to the proper communities, or I can add it to communick.news or any of the other 15 topic-based instances that I am running. I hope that it doesn’t get to that point, but if I have to sacrifice alien.top in order to keep the idea of fediverser and the topic-based instances intact, I will.