I’m talking about what they say at 8:20:
Bulletin boards, forums, blogs. The main difference to today was twofold:
For one there were no algorithms fighting to keep you online at any cost – at some point you were done with the internet for the day, as mind blowing as this may sound.
But more importantly: The old internet was very fractured, split into thousands of different communities, like small villages gathering around shared beliefs and interests.
These villages were separated from each other by digital rivers or mountains. These communities worked because they mirrored real life much more than social media:
Each village had its own culture and set of rules. Maybe one community was into rough humour and soft moderation, another had strict rules and banned easily.
If you didn’t play by the village rules, you would be banned – or you could just go and move to another village that suited you better.
So instead of all of us gathering in one place, overwhelming our brains at a townsquare that in the end just leads to us going insane, one solution to achieve less social sorting may be extremely simple:
go back to smaller online communities.
Or just forums.
Yeah there’s not much that the Fediverse adds to the equation that a forum wouldn’t handle. It’s actually worse in a lot of ways, because on a forum you’re not going to have seven different subforums dedicated to the same topics, like the federation does by having 200 servers each with generally similar and redundant subcommunities. Sports is a big example I use, because it’s the most evident.
One of the most popular moderation moves on this platform has been to lock these excess communities and forward them to a central one that is actually active.
There’s some growing pains, but within a federated system, I think there needs to be community aggregation at a certain point. There’s no need to host 50 different identical communities, and it’s arguable that it makes things worse. I’m hoping that someone will eventually be able to develope the tools to easily allow for community aggregation in the future.
These villages were separated from each other by digital rivers or mountains
But the concept of federation in the fediverse removes these separations.
Not really, each Mastodon or Lemmy instance still has its own culture and rules. Federation just allows you to travel across borders with your same passport.
Which isn’t what is described in the video.
deleted by creator
No it’s old school forums like phpbb. You registered into each you joined.
Some definitly do, but I think it depends on which one you’re on and how you use it. All my communities are on other instances and unless it’s an extreme instance like lemmygrad, I basically don’t really care or pay attention to which instance a community is on.
Yeah you’re not wrong, but just because they choose to be similar doesn’t negate the ability to be different if desired, something not afforded to people who ran communities on commercial platforms.
The concept of Federation ensures the ability to do ones own thing if desired, not negate it.
The Fediverse just gives a path, it doesn’t restrict the paths. Anyone can make or join any community.
You could say the same about facebook groups or reddit. As long as you have an account on the platform, you can interact with any community on the platform. That’s not separation.
They were talking about the early days, where you had to make an account for every different forum or community you joined and there was basically no interaction between those different forums.
No, those are closed systems. You can’t start your own Facebook instance, you can launch a server with a lemmy instance.
But that’s just the technical aspect of how the site infrastucture works. Unless you’re someone that exclusivly browses the local feed, the fact there are multiple instances has little impact on the user expirence.
The point in the video was, that you used to only interact with people in a single community. Like, you were on a forum for a specific game and you talked with people about that game, usually not knowing much else about them. So you lived in the same village.
On today’s social media platforms, including the fediverse, that’s not really the case. I can interact with you in a forum about a game … and then see you post some political opinion in another community we share … and suddenly you’re no longer just in my village, but you’re also a member of the rival tribe.
I am subscribed to several different instances of lemmy and I go to all of them through LW all sorted by new.
I am subscribed to several different instances of lemmy
You mean you have accounts on different instances? I guess that is kind of a workaround that avoid the problem in the video. Then, you could just as easily make a separate facebook account for each group you join. But I don’t think that’s how most people will use it.
No, I just use my LW account, but I could make other accounts if I wanted to. I could use Mastodon or any other service to browse the Fediverse with.
You mean you have accounts on different instances?
I guess they meant community rather than instances
Maybe they’re soft launching on the fediverse 😄
Would love to see it. An explanation video on how the fediverse works, put out by Kurzgesagt, would be so helpful
Little instance-birds dying and exploding in spectacular fashion, all to a comfy jingle and a soothing narration of how the Internet is Doomed Regardless.
Kurzgesagt — in a Nutshell.
Yeah but there’s literally nothing the Fediverse does better than a PHBB forum.
I actually hate the interconnected yet fragmented environment here - there’s absurd amounts of redundancies in communities, resulting in dead spaces; you don’t need 20 different federated servers all with their variations of the same communities, for example sports teams - you have fanaticus.social which is literally specifically for sports, but then every single local instance like midwest.social or lemmy.ca will have duplicate or even triplicate communities. This does nothing but make the whole platform seem big and empty and bereft of users or interactions.
I think once a community gets popular, the duplicates die away or act as backups when an instance goes down. That’s generally a good thing because instances have disappeared overnight, and Lemmy is still in development
We had a movies&tv instance that was popular, and then it disappeared overnight so the smaller local instances took over till we got a new popular one
!moviesandtv@lemm.ee for people wondering
“literally nothing”
As if PHPBB forums didn’t have duplicated subforums
If they were properly curated, they didn’t. It’s not like an admin from any other instance can delete duplicate communities from other instances.
Why would the admin of one PHPBB forum “curate” subforums on another PHPBB forum? If you had 10 different PHPBB forums about politics in separate countries, they would all have a “world” subforum (or something similarly named) in each. The only thing happening with the fediverse is that you’re actively seeing what would happen if PHPBB forums were connected.
Admins can block them though. Infinite communties in infinite combinations makes a lot more sense when you think about content moderation. Like- imagine if the only politics community Reddit allowed was run by the r/conspircacy mods.
The fediverse is basically like PhPBB forums with a single login.
That’s partilly more on the people creating duplicates without looking if the community doesn’t exist already.
Granted, the lemmy explorer tool might not be around for too long for people to be easily able to - since someone on you instance needs to known a community exists on other instance and access it for everyone to see it. And some people might just not be aware of it as well.
That’s partilly more on the people creating duplicates without looking if the community doesn’t exist already
Which is not bad; actually and to the contrary, it can be a part of each instance’s cultural identity and it’s a practical way of ensuring the diversity and viability of smaller instances.
Discussing c/soccer in an Argentinian lemmy can be very different than discussing it in hexbear, for example. Not to mention it’s likely most of everyone would’t even be able to participate in hexbear’s. Furthermore, general subjects becoming tied to the largest instances, which statistically have more surface to cover the creation of communities for any subject ever, returns us to the same problem of conversation and community becoming centralized into a “Reddit” instance.
A good perspective I didn’t have.
Are you talking about https://lemmyverse.net/ ? Why should it disappear?
What I meant is I have no idea how long it exists, so people might not have the luxury of using it to check for existing communities.
Didn’t mean to start a panic with bad wording :)
I see. Hopefully it will stay around, or an equivalent will emerge :)
I do too! Its incredibly handy
I think we’ll collectively figure it out with time and have more specific, yet popular instances, rather than instances trying to be the all-places with communities. Like an instance for memes where communities act as sub-categories or something.
But I maybe wrong, I’m not on oracle or something.
If they were talking about anything specific, as hard to believe as it is, there is actually another community based website out there slightly larger than lemmy that allows you to subscribe to your interests and unsubscribe from others.
Facebook?
Reddit
What’s reddit?
No one knows
It’s like an inferior knock-off of Lemmy.
Weird ass name
Reddit or my username???
Unfortunetly for most people “go back to smaller online communities” would probably mean going from XTwitter to a Facebook group…
All of these things still exist. Theres just massive cities now, and they’re shitty like cities in real life.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/watch?v=fuFlMtZmvY0&t=23s
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
I learned a lot, and made a lot of IRL friends, on various message boards over the years. ADVrider.com used to be a lot of fun but I haven’t checked it out lately. One thing that was cool was looking for vehicle-specific forums, like a forum for EX-500’s or F150’s. These forums were great for keeping whatever car you have running, and were full of knowledge on the problems found in specific cars. A lot of them still exist.
I would be closer if every instance had a specific topic, Its much better than other social medias It would be closer if forums united through acativitypub
Instances do have quite distinct topics. This one is about programming, there are servers dedicated to specific languages, countries, or regions, others even just focus on a single game, movie, or another topic.
The best things on the Internet have always been the weird, random shit people do. Not what companies do to make money. When the business that runs a website that hosts content made by others starts forgetting that, they will inevitably fail.
They know this, and they keep trying to make it harder for the Internet to operate the way the fediverse does by adding laws that restrict it and repealing laws that protect it.
Lol
just saw it