To discuss how to grow and manage communities / magazines on Lemmy, Mbin, Piefed and Sublinks
Resources:
Megathreads:
Rules:
80% the people on TT, YT and IG are there to follow content creators that are only on those platforms to make money.
Until creators can easily make money on Fediverse platforms, they'll always play second fiddle to closed platforms that market and share profits, no matter how crappy the returns are.
Users are trapped by the network effect and a desire for ease of use over anything else.
The corporate alternatives will always be an easier sell.
Twitter > Bluesky
Instagram > Upscrolled
TikTok > RedNote
Reddit > no corporate alternative
YouTube > no corporate alternative
Discord > no corporate alternative
To get the average user, you don't just have to convince them to leave Twitter, you have to convince them to leave corporate social media and all of their friends that still use it.
You have to convince them to accept additional inconvenience and complexity (@usernames and @instancenames?) in exchange for no direct, tangible benefit. (We know it's worth it, but the average user doesn't know and doesn't care.)
The people who could handle that are already here. Adoption going forward will be (at best) a slow trickle until we reach some level of critical mass.
Why people don't leave Reddit
Reddit has the advantage of years of community-built knowledge, and it's a "one-stop shop". Looking for the gaming community? Go to reddit, type in gaming, it'll be in the top 3, if not the top 10.
Go to the threadiverse, and you have to run the gauntlet of servers (what's an instance?), deferated instances (why can't I see XYZ?), and 20 communities with similar names (which gaming community is the "real" one?). The switching cost is too high for most as long as Reddit still exists.
Why people don't leave Discord
Discord is easy to set up, and they're digging their claws into game dev by making it easy to monetize communities (enshittification, here we come!).
~~Revolt~~ Stoat isn't federated, so each server is segregated from the others. As they grow, users will centralize for the sake of convenience. My bet is they either sell out or remain a niche alternative.
Element is (still) too complicated and unreliable. Audio sharing is inconsistent (no audio streaming on desktop screenshare, mics won't work, etc). Video calls aren't fully implemented.
::: spoiler Why people won't leave YouTube No one can match YouTube's sheer scale. They have billions of videos and billions of users. Their monetization system means that creators are identified to create quality content for the platform.
By contrast, PeerTube's best content is often mirrors or backups of content from other platforms. PeerTube is a great backup, but without monetization to incentivize creators, it's not a real alternative.
20 communities with similar names (which gaming community is the “real” one?)
On this one, I agree with them. Network effects do not go well with splittism. And yet it's hardly surprising we're here given the ills of contemporary society: narcissism, snowflakery, identitarianism, intolerance for contradiction. For every subject there must be ten separate communities (AKA echo chambers, bubbles) so that nobody has to see anything that they might disagree with.
I'm caricaturing, of course. But this issue is real. Given the political orientation here, it probably affects the fediverse more than corporate social media. And whatever the wrongs and rights of the subject, it is not helping the cause of attracting newcomers.
It's a marathon not a sprint, hopefully we'll slowly but surely chip away at it.
As your post highlights UX is everything, hopefully the Fediverse can get as good UX as the main platforms
What's with Piefed? Isn't it just another Lemmy instance?
PieFed is a different software. Lemmy is written in Rust and has a certain set of features.
PieFed is a newer project, written from scratch in Python, by completely different people. It includes Lemmy's features and shows the same posts as Lemmy, but has additional features such as polls, events, feeds (which are the same thing as multireddits on Reddit), emoji reactions, flairs, notifications for new comments coming for some specific post or new posts coming in some specific community, messaging with Mastodon users, and some other stuff that fails to come to my mind right now :)
There are several PieFed instances: https://piefed.fediverse.observer/list
My god, thank you for putting the names under the logos. I've seen too many people just put the logos without any text because it's "clean", but then the viewers have no idea what to search for lol
People are fleeing to another close source centralized app that’s not federated. People will use anything but Fediverse. :(
Probably the clearest indicator that the lack of technological literacy in mass market society means that marketing budgets are incredibly effective, and most won't question the incentives of the platform holder.
I don't feel like loops is ready for this exposure. Not yet.
If folks can't install it through the regular stores or even f droid then it may risk always being the complicated and nerdy alternative.
Kind of like Linux has problems getting out of the very techy reputation that it used to have
wtf? you mean reddit -> lemmy right?
PieFed = Lemmy but better. (In my opinion)
They share the same content, but PieFed has more features and better UX.
I'm typing this from PieFed right now
Piefed is a perfectly fine alternative to Reddit.
I wish there were a better name that represents lemmy & piefed. I know "threadiverse" is probably the "correct" name but it's a bit... shit.
Well let's add facebook & discord alts as well.
Revolt got at cease and desist for the name. They renamed it to Stoat.
It kind of looks like Stoat is just an Open Source Discord clone? ~~While the idea is great, it looks like all their servers are hosted by them (correct me if I'm wrong). Was really hoping for some kind of self hosted Discord where all the data is stored locally.~~ I use Mumble currently, which is great for voice chat, but there are simply not enough features.
Edit: Actually I found the github page and it seems like there is a way to deploy this locally. Disregard
