cross-posted from: https://lemmy.whynotdrs.org/post/494473
Compared against the predominant incumbent social media platforms, the fediverse is very small.
information sources:
I wonder how long it’ll take before we finally collectively reject the SV ethos that size is the only metric that matters and success is only achieved via monopoly…
There was a time when Usenet and BBBses and IRC was tiny and yet people still found value through community in those places.
Maybe, and I know this is a wild idea, platforms don’t have to include every human on the planet to be meaningful, relevant, or valuable.
this was very comforting to read
I was an avid Reddit user but dropped it like a stone in the kerfuffle - it took a while but Lemmy has now replaced that 90%
I’d love to see a content propagation analysis.
My sense is that a ton of new memes are first shared on Lemmy then shared across to other social media.
…Ok, so the niche forums don’t have critical mass yet, and you’d have to post to some general thread to get any response - but all the cool and thoughtful people are here, so the level of general discourse is higher, I love it.
Lately I’ve been seriously thinking about resurrecting my FidoNet node. It looks like FidoNet still exists!
Nice! I just played through Road To Gehenna and it really made me want to do a modern BBS equivalent.
FidoNet does still exist, but it’s commonly called “fight-o-net” for a reason, as there are… some characters there.
If you do resurrect your node, I’d suggest also picking up FSXnet, as it’s the second largest network, is better maintained, and has a no-politics-or-religion rule that makes it way more pleasant to be on.
Or, you know, you could call one of the BBSs out there, and make a sysop’s day by being a user, as non-sysop users are not super common, at this point. You can try my BBS at http://bbs.stormbbs.com or telnet://telnet.stormbbs.com, if you’d like to see FSXnet and FidoNet in their current lives.
But there are plenty of other BBSs out there, too, and my BBS is really only special because I have an ANSI calendar with a different graphic every day that I made 370-ish graphics for. It celebrates a holiday every day.
And if you’re wondering about BBS networks in general, I recently found out about https://clrghouz.bbs.dege.au/domain/list , which has way more info than I was expecting about what the available FTN networks look like.
I hear this one loud and clear. I was on the internet in 95, and worked in SV for 20 years, and when I saw the small number for Lemmy in this graphic it made me happy.
Same. We don’t need to be 500m
An elite 1.5 million.
I’m absolutely fine with 1.5 million. I enjoy lemmy much more than reddit. I feel like content and conversations here are better. None of the karma farming and corporate promotion disguised as natural content.
Although you’re correct, I find fediverse lacking in the department of the more niche stuff, e.g. fandoms of specific games, communities by geo proximity, obscure hobbies.
But well, Reddit wasn’t like this from the start and I hope the diversity and smaller communities will be here instead of there with time.
Former r/fountainpens Reddit refugee here, and I agree 1.5m users doesn’t generate the kind of traffic for my hobby to figure in any sort of way. I miss the engagement
Yep, I used to be on r/diyhotas and that was already a niche within the HOTAS niche within the simulator game niche 😂
While I was also part of some niche communities back in the Reddit days, thanks to Lemmy, I switched to Linux and have found interesting new websites, tools and apps. So I’d say overall it’s a net positive.
1.5 million is almost entirely Mastodon users which have no clue how Lemmy’s commenting culture works so rarely contribute in a way that makes sense to both the Mastodon commenter and the Lemmy comenter/poster at the same time.
Lemmy has ~20k ish actively commenting accounts.
It’s nuts how a difference of hundreds of millions of people doesn’t actually feel like a ton more people or provide any better quality except in some niche spots
I already saw this happening on Reddit. The largest subreddit were filled with generic posts. They got a lot of content, not necessarily good content. But there were plenty of small or medium sized subreddits that had much better content. The Fediverse feels like it is missing the big subreddits. It also feels too small to have the small niche subreddits. What is here in terms of content feels more like a few medium sized subreddits.
Just responding to what you say about generic, but lately when I lurk reddit the only stuff I see is REALLY generic Relationship stuff (front page without log in o/c) and recycled OAF memes.
This is a good point. My interactions with the Fediverse over the last few months has been sublime. Maybe users here are just proportionally more active?
Numbers are nice, but they’re not everything. Yeah, we could onboard 2 billion lurkers, but how would that improve anything?
You’re unlikely to be in conversation with hundreds of millions of people at a time; or even thousands of people. Conversations happen with just a handful of people. So those platforms with billions of people perhaps allow for some ultra-niche subgroups, but otherwise are just providing a lot of low-value noise with the additional people.
There is an interesting, and almost universal phenomenon on reddit that every time a subreddit gets past about 40,000 subscribers, the discussion quality immediately drops off a cliff, unless extremely harsh moderation policies are implemented to explicitly weed out low effort content which brings its own set of problems.
My theory on why this occurs is the scaling power of moderation. I think you computer people are probably very familiar with the concept of scalability, and that size is its own challenge at the hyperscale. So for a centralized system like Twitter or Instagram or Facebook, moderation can only scale vertically, so a huge moderation team is needed to contend with the scale of these platforms alone, which also forces the need of personalized recommendation algorithms to promote this that are actually interesting to individual users.
Reddit was able to partially avoid this phenomenon with the subreddit system, which means everyone was able to effectively manage their own, smaller subgroups who shares common interest without intervention from the site admin/mods to achieve a form of pseudo-horizontal scaling. You can also see the success of that with Facebook Groups, which are one of the few reasons why people still use Facebook for social media even though they do not want to interact with the current Facebook audience.
Lemmy, and the rest of the fediverse platforms would suffer the problems even less, as now every group admin can now be completely independent from one another, which means that real horizontal scaling can be achieved and hopefully preserving the discussion quality to a degree as it grows.
IMHO, the other part of the problem is that spicy hot-takes quickly get engagement from other users and bubble up to the top. And a lot of those spicy comments are trash, but not in violation of rules, so mods leave them up.
You can see that clearly with both Twitter and reddit. There is no worse feeling than spending time to write something with thought only to not have anyone interact with these posts at all, while tired one-liner and ragebait gets a ton of likes and comments.
However, Lemmy’s algorithm doesn’t really punish writing long form contents the same way reddit does from my experience, so I feel more free to take a little bit longer to write out my thoughts here compared to elsewhere.
One way I thought of to encourage long form content and high quality, is to limit the number of short form content from users.
I imagined every week users would be granted 14 comments that are limited to 250 characters and unlimited long form content. You could also grant more short form comments with every long form comment or with every new oc post.
The only issue would be that long form does not mean high quality and with chatgpt it’ll be easy to create long form posts. Maybe an AI system that evaluates the quality of the post could work but then gaming the system would happen.
Just a thought I had, the numbers about the length and amount of posts could be optimized or use an AI
I like that you’re describing an anti-Twitter, where people have to express themselves in over 250 characters, rather than under 140 or 280.
Just saw a meme the other day about how the old mantra “Don’t feed the troll” seems to have fallen by the wayside and about 90% of the issues on the internet right now are caused by that.
This is a big thing killing my interaction with Lemmy as well. I want to like it, but I drop into a discussion thread and the top-engaged/boosted comments are spicy and almost designed to promote maximum anger. And I feel like, “Do I really, really want to spend significant time writing out a deeper comment to engage with this community…?”
great comment!
i tend to agree. i think the fediverse is probably the best model moving forward. it is a challenging problem!
I think this is great. It might be 1/1000th of these other systems, but I think the fediverse is at a tipping point where I’m not seeing the same things every day. I don’t think critical mass needs to be a ranked competition.
I feel like tgere was an exodus recently because Isaw more interaction with posts.
Some AskLemmy posts had >200 comments.
Since you posted it in a selfhosting community, this is the feeling I get:
Quick, everyone get more friends and grow that family!
It’s cozy here :)
Your father smells of elderberries.
‘LinkedIn’
LinkedIn is as much Social Media as talking with your manager is Socializing.
It’s really plastic and fake feeling there, more so than anywhere else.
Since when does “plastic and fake” means it’s not social media?
yes but it doesn’t always feel like it.
LinkedIn feels like Uncanny Valley social media.
Like there are Alternates there trying to imitate human interactions.
All Social Media = Plastic and Fake.
Life is plastic, it’s fantastic.
Flood it with memes
Let’s not pretend that the degenerate comment section in YouTube is peak high society though.
Or really any place where strangers mostly zing each other. It’s just like the opposite extreme of linked in
I mean it’s a far better place to network and interact with professional statuses and companies than other social networks. I like the Fediverse but I also have a work related presence on LinkedIn.
I’m surprised Snapchat is that popular. It’s not something I hear about too much anymore.
it’s one of the only commonly known messaging platform to most people that:
1: isn’t owned by a company that many people hate, even if they don’t know much about it.
2: isn’t platform locked and doesn’t discriminate.
3: doesn’t require money or verification to use.
i can see how it’s kinda settled out this way. whatsapp never caught on in the u.s. because everyone here was happy with sms and mms when the rest of the world was picking up Whatsapp. from what i understand that’s literally just because texting was cheap in the u.s… now people want more than mms, but apple is being apple about it so we need a third party app. by this point Whatsapp is owned by Facebook and the “privacy” of it is openly mocked by the average non tech person. everyone hates Facebook so the idea of willingly adopting another Facebook messenger that you’re not already on seems crazy. anyone that would accept that is just going to use Facebook messenger instead. anyone that wouldn’t will find something better.
Snapchat has no big controversies. no one knows who owns them. they don’t really try to be more than a messaging platform. i can see why people would uncritically choose it as their default. i bet it’s big among the kids who don’t play that whole blue bubble iphone supremacy game, but don’t use discord either. so i guess the non nerdy kids that aren’t elitist dicks. that’s who I’d guess uses it amongst the youth these days.
edit: before the suggestions come, I know these aren’t good solutions. I’m just theorizing why. getting my friends on matrix as best i can…
And here I am, using Google messages, Facebook messenger, Whatsapp and line. And teams and discord. And steam chat.
Oof
It’s the WhatsApp equivalent in the US tbh. People ask for each other’s Snapchat instead of numbers sometimes these days
So this graph should include WA, TG, signal, matrix etc
No, because those don’t have social media functions built in. Snapchat has those TikTok slideshows and ads among posting pictures of yourself too. It’s more of an all in one that many use
Realistically this graph wouldn’t include Snapchat, as it’s less of a “social media” than the others. Most people nowadays use it strictly as a messaging platform.
Everyone at my work uses Snapchat regularly. I was pretty surprised to hear them all mentioning it as I hadn’t really heard of it in years. They’re between the ages of 22-40s if that changes anything.
It seems a lot of kids these days in the US use it
Seriously, who on earth uses facebook? Lol
The only website on this graphic that has some actual value (apart from the fediverse of course) is youtube.
My wife uses Facebook every day.
She’s a very family oriented person and she’s gonna be wherever they are.
She’s the kind of person who wakes up and calls her mom, then her grandma, then her sisters every single day. Hell, she even talks to her nephews every day and they’re toddlers.
There really isn’t anything that compares as far as that goes.
Didn’t Facebook build infrastructure and give out free phones in India and other developing nations to get them online? I’m sure it was more to harvest their data, but I’m sure that counts pretty solidly for them
They got a service provider to let its users browse Facebook for free, but that was banned a year later for being unfair. It’s still a thing in other developing counties I guess.
Seriously, who on earth uses facebook?
Me? I know it’s the current hotness to not be on there, but I don’t get sites like Instagram / TickTock / Snapchat where its just reacting to photos and images. I want words dammit.
3 billion of them. So, over a third of the population of earth does (at least according to this graphic).
LinkedIn is pretty useful fwiw
Me, tbh I don’t like meta but the groups in facebooks is probably what keeps me there, for example there is a group about an anime and the guys there literally translate the new volumes of the novel months faster than other piracy sites, almost in the moment, there is also the memes and other posts that only appear around those groups. Not even reddit has that content, so what keeps me attached to facebook is mainly anime groups
deleted by creator
I do.
Look we are on the map!
You got to think at least 2/3 of Reddit is Bots right
Same with Facebook, them or dead accounts
Wow, the Fediverse is actually visible :0
LET’S GOOO
yes, but slowly.
I’m surprised Reddit is bigger than Xitter. Is that mostly because people have been leaving the Musk project in recent years?
As far as I’m aware, twitter has actually been a lot smaller in terms of users than you might imagine from its influence.
It has a relatively low number of active users, but the fact it’s designed to be a centralised public forum (rather than users being selective who can follow them like Facebook) means it is/was very attractive for businesses, celebrities and politicians.
Also that – thanks in large part to movements like the Arab Spring using Twitter to organize and publicize – it became the go-to social media for reporters. The news -> celebrity -> news cycle closes itself nicely there, making it very difficult for either group to go anywhere else.
