I’m personally crossing my fingers for Discord.
I honestly don’t think the fediverse will become nearly as popular as many seem to.think. It’s still complicated to use/understand for many non-tech enthusiasts, and in the case of Reddit, while people are angry, I doubt most of their users are going anywhere any time soon. Some will leave, but it’s not going to be a small number.
We keep going on about how Reddit relies on it’s “creators”, without whom they’ll die. Frankly, a lot of the highest rated content is just repost of old videos or tiktok videos. A lot of that stuff isn’t original, and the deep conversations are, in my opinion, few and far between. Sure there are some communities whi h have this, but they’re not exactly over represented.
I don’t have statistics to back this up, but I’d be willing to bet an entire doughnut that most reddit users have never posted even a single comment. People with that level (dis)engagement aren’t the type to seek out alternatives. They just kind of drift away.
We may be few, but I’m proud to count myself among those who quit Reddit because of this. (Not that I wasn’t looking for a good reason for a long time).
I knew about Lemmy, Mastadon, and PeerTube before this this latest mess with Reddit, but this finally gave me the push to come over as I’m sure it will for many.
@alehel @noodlejetski I’ll add that when Twitter first hit the fan there was a large influx of Mastodon users, but it quickly fell off. Perhaps there are more tech-savvy Reddit users who will dive into the Fediverse than did with Twitter/Mastodon, but for your average user we’re not approachable enough yet to overcome the inertia of familiarity.
Even if it quickly fell off, I think approximately 70-80% of current Mastodon users came from Twitter, and a big reason for people leaving (after poor onboarding experience) was the small size of the Fediverse. There just weren’t enough people in the Fediverse for the network effect to take hold. With each influx of users I expect to see a slightly higher proportion to stay, although I don’t see this influx (from Reddit) as being particularly large in the first place.
Discord:
They started the software as a light weight voip solution for gamers. And imo they kinda lost focus a long time ago. It is now a sluggish, bloated, messy piece of electron software that has privacy issues and runs very poorly. They keep adding new features that are all paywalled and the pricing is just unreasonable. I’m not against paying for a service at all especially if it is free of ads but i feel like 10$ a month is just way too much for a chat app.
Discord still runs way better than Slack though.
well…idk. I didn’t use slack in years but it’s not really a good point for discord.
It’s like advertising Chlamydia with the slogan "It’s not nearly as bad as Sysphilis! Give it a try!
What does that make Teams? 😛
It’s a microsoft product. So it’s definitely the worst kind of infection
I just hope this is the start of an internet renaissance with less corporate control.
It’ll be hard to get people to not only detach from something they’re accustomed to, but also then attach to something unfamiliar.
I tried and am trying again with Mastodon, but a lack of users I wish to follow, a more confusing premise at times, and just overall more enjoyment overall (if that) with twitter as a platform makes it a challenge.
Lemmy however has checked all the boxes. It literally feels exactly like Reddit, and honestly like a fresh start to avoid the various decisions both Reddit admins and the community itself made along the way. I’m hoping more for the latter experience than forming when diving into the fediverse, but my above statement is most likely applicable for a wide sample of people out there.
I’ve been having trouble getting going with Mastodon. But I’ve also had issues with Twitter as well. Lemmys been great so far.
That’s certainly what it’s feeling like to me.
I remember when I was a kid and the Web 1.0 stuff was popular, things like IRC chat and forums were too intimidating/confusing for me to get into. My introduction to being an internet “citizen” was Web 2.0 and the MySpaces/Facebooks/Reddits of the world, where I had a UX approachable enough not to intimidate my teenage self.
The shift towards the Fediverse feels like a blend of many of the best aspects of Webs 1.0 and 2.0 – I have a UX that feels familiar, but one that comes with a bottom-up, decentralized grassroots feel that is reminiscent of the early internet.
I’m bullish for sure.
I doubt it, things cost money, that’s how we got in the corporate trap originally. If you invest a ton of time and money into something sooner or later you need to get something back.
I’m not convinced you need corporate money though. I think grants/user contributions (add the awards concept like Reddit has?) can get you pretty far a la Wikipedia.
You are right, it could work but it is in no way certain.
I still like IRC and I’m surprised that it got almost completely murdered by Discord.
Well, I don’t think it will STB, but YouTube needs a FOSS equivalent that has the same capabilities sans ads. But, that’s $$$$ infrastructure so I don’t know if that will ever come.
BUT, I really hope that by the time Discord pisses off its users, that matrix or another federated equivalent will have figured out the UI/UX to capture a large chunk of those users. I used to live in IRC, but discord finally killed it. And I hate using proprietary software for so much chat.
Peertube is a thing. The problem with a platform like YouTube is that it’s so dependent on its creators, which peertube just doesn’t have. Although not FOSS, I am quite a fan of nebula since it is kind of a community owned project and many of the channels I was already subscribed to are on nebula too. I don’t mind paying a few bucks a month to access ad free content while also supporting the creators.
The day I don’t see “join our Discord” where I would earlier expect to find “visit our forums” will be a good day.
A bloated live chat monolith is not what I want to use to discuss game bugs or podcast episodes.
Agreed. Live chat has its place for certain things, but for other things a forum type interface is better suited.
Yeah, several groups of friends of mine are using Discord to chat and arrange roleplaying nights and such. I use those regularly. But I’ve got several “project” Discords that are forum replacements and I find I almost never go there. Certainly never when I don’t have some specific goal I’m trying to fulfill.
I don’t know when they introduced it, but at some point, in some servers, I noticed a new channel type: forum. The fact that this is a thing is the greatest proof that Discord is not the end all, be all solution to communication.
Nothing is, really. One thing I really enjoyed about the 00s web was its diversity, because different things had different places and different formats, and the ever-lasting stakeholder grasp wasn’t as successful at trying to put people in one place to show them ads and drive engagement to please the statistics gazers.
that’s my biggest pet peeve, too.
GloriousEggroll, the mastermind behind modified version of Valve’s Proton, posts his code on GitHub, and then links to his Discord as a place for reporting bugs.
I actually quit using his Linux distro in large part because the communications were so terrible with Discord being the only way he disseminates information (so so poorly).
There were issues and the necessary information couldn’t flow effectively in either direction.
Thats uhhh… interesting. Why…?
the only reason I can think of is “to spite me”.
Revolt seems to be to Discord what Lemmy/Kbin are to reddit, but I dont see most people bothering with it unless discord makes some reeaaallly huge mistakes to piss the community off.
People seem pretty annoyed at the changes to usernames, but probably not enough to leave Discord.
Discord is doing a lot of stupid things lately i must say
God I hope so. Discord works fine as a voice chat and groupchat for games. But it’s insane to me that people use it as a replacement for message boards or websites and hosting files. It isnt indexed so you cant google it and a groupchat is a terrible format for this. Even as reddit dies you have some people acting like a glorified group chat is a good alternative. As an addition and supplement to a message board or website community sure this is how it’s always been even in the old days there were boards with an active IRC chat. As the replacement? Awful.
It is a terrible format but it has the extreme advantage of being free.
The whole current fiasco stems from services being free and then trying to cash in later hoping that users won’t switch, there’s no guarantee that Discord won’t pull similar stuff to Reddit. In fact they already are hostile to third party clients.
Discord has to pull this sometime becuase venture capital isn’t going to sustain it for eternity and “Nitro” makes next to nothing compared to cost. I just hope Matrix has the tech to save me when it hits.
Teamspeak has a pretty slick new version that looks very much like discord. Not fediverse but pretty easy to self-host.
Discord already kinda sucks, I find the app not nearly as smooth as before, and it tries so hard to choke nitro into you, it also has so many bloaty extra features.
Maybe it’s just the use I try to get from it. Discord has evolved more towards community channels, and for that (at least the bit I tried to use them) it seems fairly decent. Most of the time I just wanna use it to play with 2 or 3 friends, I could definitely use a minimalistic app that does just that.
If you really only want group calls for a handful of people I can only recommend Signal for that. Just create a group chat in there. You can start a call and select it to not ring on the other peoples end and then you can just hop in and out just like a discord vc. It has a desktop app for Mac/Linux/Windows too so you could use it while gaming too. The app is not pretty but it’s minimalistic and it works. Everything is end to end enrypted even the calls and video calls.
You could even screenshare with it but i never tested how well that works. It’s free and open source. It is not federated however. But still the most easy to use and best secure and private messenger out there.
Just go back to IRC if you hate it that much.
Isn’t that sort of like saying “go back to Digg if you hate Reddit so much”?
Personal Knowledge Management Apps / Note-Taking Apps.
After EverNote and Co. many people got angry / fustrated.
Since I found https://obsidian.md I’m actually happy with everything - as the plugin’s are open-source, it’s flexible and there is no lock-in as it’s all simply markdown format. ObsidianMD is just a markdown viewer - but with superious UX. There are also alternatives to that like Logseq though.
After seeing this, I cannot imagine anymore to use something like Google Notes, OneNote, etc.
Check out org-mode in emacs. It’s amazing.
Matrix, what seems to be the most ovious replacement to Discord, is an incredible piece of software from a technical point of view. It have Conflict-free Replicated Datatype, which give an hard guarantee that no message will be skipped over and old message will also be fetched. Something that ActivityPub doesn’t permit, and is quite a problem with Mastodon at times (much less on lemmy, given you follow communities, and so everything on these communities will be synced, thought not backfilling)
Discord is a likely contender, but I think it’s likely to be Instagram. It’s got a very dissatisfied userbase, and there’s already a few reasonably active pixelfed servers
What about YouTube?
I looked online and there seems to be PeerTube at least.
I would love for something to replace YouTube, especially something in the Fediverse, but video unfortunately has much higher storage and bandwidth requirements, so it’s hard to imagine that not being totally cost prohibitive at high levels of traffic, even if it’s split across so many different servers. I’d love to be wrong on that, though.
There isn’t much left.
First Facebook with their whole meta thing, then Imgur deleting all NSFW content and images uploaded by non-registered members, afterwards Twitter and now Reddit.
Twitch made a big mistake with their new sponsoring rules, but seems like they are reverting / changing it again due to bad community feedback.
Discord had a few changes the community didn’t like, but nothing ground breaking yet. But they get more and more greedy and their platform is filled with scams, hackers, bots and sadly many bad people like child predators and content which Discord support does nothing against. They seem not to care.
YouTube, well, I think they might be next actually. More and longer unskipable ads, restricting or demonetizing many videos, bad communication with their creators and less rewards for smaller creators. In addition, they might put high quality resolutions behind their already existing expensive subscription paywall. There isn’t any competition which is urgently needed.
UPDATE: Bad news about YouTube continues. Just now, YouTube Ordered ‘Invidious’ Privacy Software to Shut Down in 7 Days.
Which other big social media platforms are left?
The problem with anything video is still that it costs way too much to host, unless you’re a giant who already has their own data centers and massive data pipes. You can’t just throw it on a cheap VPS like text-based services
Are you thinking of it as a centralized replacement to YouTube? If you’re centralized, yeah, you probably need a data centre the size of Malta. There are decentralized alternatives (like PeerTube) where the cost is also distributed. If you’re using PeerTube, you literally can “just throw it on a cheap VPS”, and lots of people do, with no problems.
I think the real reason decentralized video isn’t going to catch on is because video (and YouTube in particular) has not been a community thing for many years now. There are very few YouTubers who make videos to build a community or connect to a community. YouTubers are on there for money, and there’s really no alternative that can both host the videos and pay out big cheques to content creators.
@duncesplayed @kalleboo tbh most of YTs I know either run sponsor ads, or have Patreon/paid for community. It is already slowly moving away from ads system in YT, which simply does not work.
Github, but Gitea’s not yet federated, though they’re working on it.
Gitlab’s a great alternative too, it’s definitely more resource intensive than Gitea but their community edition is packed with features. A federated Git platform sounds intriguing…
I have been on/off gitlab for a few years but they do sometimes weird things that drive me nuts. For example last time i check you cant search a repo issues without logging in.
One of main things i use repo sites for is to troubleshoot and searching issues is a great way. Why put a barrier to that? I cant imagine it is a big server load. Just dickish.
You can search issues without being logged in, but that setting has to be enabled in a repo or group’s permissions (Settings > General > Visibility, project features, permissions). Project visibility has to be Public, and issues should be set to Everyone with Access. I think tissues are defaulted to private or internal by default.
With people learning about Fediverse, I’m guessing Instagram. Why? Because IG has become overwhelmed with influencers and TikTok-like junk. The initial wave of people into Pixelfed will be techies that want a break from that scene. Their friends will hear about it. The friends that just want to have an IG-like experience to share their pictures with friends while avoiding all the rest of the noise will slowly transfer over. Once they hit the critical mass, the switch will happen. This will take at least another year or two.
