this post was submitted on 05 Mar 2024
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[Outdated, please look at pinned post] Casual Conversation
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I'll cut to the punch line: Chances are, only a very small handful (like two or three) of the current fedi platforms will survive for the long term. Mastodon is probably here for quite a while. Most of the others will fade into obscurity as the big niches get stably colonized, network effects become more and more dominant, and there starts to be less and less reason for anyone to switch. But so many of them are so much in their infancy now that it's tough to tell in advance anything about the future. Plus, the competition and profusion of new ideas during the current time will be ultimately beneficial for whatever the outcome will be.
Unfortunately this is likely true. Witness how quickly the fediverse has become "Lemmy" for a lot of users. Nothing against any Lemmy instances. I just hate how things coalescence, become stale and then invariably becomes compromised by the centralization
It hasn't though. The microblog part of the fediverse is far larger than the lemmy side of things. The fact that it seems like lemmy has become the fediverse is a problem with federation and availability between these two distinct "communities", but it doesn't represent coalescence of the fediverse.
Quite the opposite infact. Before lemmy came around, the fediverse pretty much was only the microblogging community. And now it's more diverse, thanks to lemmy and the other threadiverse apps
I think the structure of these apps in terms of the social interactions they encourage has a ton to do with the quality of the experience.
It's fairly clear to me that the quality of the conversation on Mastodon is simply better. I think it's because the not-quite-4chan-but-almost level of anonymity and randomness to any given interaction on Lemmy makes it easy and consequence-free to be a dick. Enabling mods to deal with it once the dickishness reaches a certain threshold doesn't really seem to do anything to solve the problem, partly because there's a huge range of dickish behavior that doesn't quite rise to the level where it needs mod attention, but still degrades the conversation and dilutes anything good anyone's trying to add.
I don't really have much experience outside the Lemmy and Mastodon communities, but I think app authors spending time on particular UX features would probably be better spending their time on studying in depth the types of interactions their apps are enabling and encouraging, and trying to keep an eye on that as they're designing the system. What those answers are I don't really know, but it seems important.
I always think about the post I saw a while back that was like "I use KeepassXC, a fork of KeepassX, a port of Keepass". That seems very likely to be true in regards to the fediverse as well.
But I think that's great, as a contributor to one platform I don't necessarily see it as "one software above all", which might be bad to say, but more like we're all sailing on the much larger ship Fediverse, and it's been great to see so much back and forth between the different ones, for example one person helping get pixelfed's avatars federating, or piefed's blogs, which helped reduce page load sizes for mbin by 40%. It's quite possible we're all just slowly contributing to a lot of learned lessons for a yet unstarted software.
All that said, mastodon does have a ton of staying power, as you said. Once they fully support groups, and lemmy has stated they never plan to support microblogs, it's quite possible that mastodon will be a very solid experience for most of what people are looking for.
Feels familiar with the dozen of Misskey forks