Kichae

rumschlumpel@feddit.org I will give it to dansup, Pixelfed is really well done. Easy to use, very inviting, not particularly bogged down by trite engagement features nor people clutching at pearls over which server to join. You upload your pictures, post them, and the comments and likes roll in. It’s a really solid UX, with a very supportive – if not overly chatty – user base. I’m not at all surprised that it’s managed to maintain a significant audience.

JohnnyEnzyme No, I just believe that hosting a site like this is a responsibility, and that responsibility extends beyond keeping the hamster alive. If someone wants to run a hobby site, they can run a single-user instance.

JohnnyEnzyme What I mean is curating their communities, ensuring they have mods for them, shuttering any that are inactive, and finding other sites they can partner with to split community loads.

You know, actually taking responsibility for the social network they’re running, rather than treating them like some sort of natural phenomenon that just suddenly sprung up on domains they purchased.

Kierunkowy74 Ok, but why does that make them not part of the threadiverse? “They don’t universally participate” is also true of, well, Lemmy-based websites.

Kierunkowy74 > technically Friendica or some NodeBB users can take part in discussions with their users too, but…

But what?

Blaze (he/him) Comment consolidation really isn’t a solution, and is an amazingly short-sighted fix. It works to prevent the establishment of local community or server cultures, and presumes the end-point of the fediverse is a more complicated, less well funded version of centralized media. That the “fediverse” is out there, and that any particular website is just an empty vessel to access it.

This actively works against everything we need to actually create a space that appeals to people who aren’t here already. It cuts us off aat the knees before we’ve even stood up.

Like, imagine merging politics on Midwest.social and politics on lemmy.ca…

Pandantic [they/them] Or shuttered. Site admins need to be actually managing their websites, not just keeping the server online. Behaving like corporate social media operators doesn’t provide a meaningful difference from corporate social media for most people.

die4ever@retrolemmy.com Yeah. Controlled growth is important when you’re trying to grow a forum. Especially when you’re trying to grow a forum that is aping someone else’s UX (and doing it kind of poorly). But, of course, there’s an option in the server settings to limit who can create new communities, and seemingly no site admins have chosen to use it.

But the other thing is just… you can’t advertise “Lemmy”. This has been the problem with everything on the Fediverse. Everyone is trying to sell the server software as the experience. It’s like trying to get people to your blog or whatever by selling them on “Wordpress”.

The issue is, people keep trying to treat this space like Reddit, a website with multiple orders of magnitude more users than the entire Fediverse.

We need to grow things out in a more controlled manner. Broader topic spaces that can house discussions of of families of niche topics. Themed servers.

Meaningful attempts to advertise these spaces outside of fedi, to people who are interested. And that means selling them on something other than “Lemmy”, because “Lemmy” isn’t a selling point to basically anybody.

Touche. I guess what I should have more rightly said was, given the level of contribution users have shown themselves willing to make, it’s too small to be a job.

But in the end, I believe people aren’t willing to pay because we look like other spaces where they don’t have to pay, and we gate nothing behind paywalls. Most people don’t pay for services on the Internet, they pay for special privileges and to stand out. And if basic talk and text service was freely provided by volunteers, they’d milk those volunteer organizations dry, too.

Weirdly enough, community might actually be enough, but the Fediverse doesn’t really have much in the way of communities. As I think you yourself point out elsewhere, the Fediverse is lacking the connective tissue of shared ideology, goals, or even interests. It’s also both too large to create the familiarity that binds people socially, while also being too small to sustain itself off a donation model that makes sure there are professional admins and server mods. It’s too big to be a hobby, and too small to be a job.

Aping the aesthetic of commercial social media is a significant issue here, because form follows function, and the function of commercial social media is not community, but convincing end-users to be content generators. People on Reddit and Twitter are accustomed to an endless stream of input generated by nameless, faceless entities that they don’t give two shits about, with some celebrities and internet-famous people interjecting from time to time. That requires tens of millions of users fighting for fleeting attention from fickle consumers. We have tens of thousands of people who – as far as I can tell, based on the types and volume of posts – are mostly interested in consuming, not fighting for attention.

These are not the people who fund these kinds of endeavours. Neither group is – the content generators are no more interested in paying to get attention than the content consumers are to give it. So, without the firm social ties that motivate keeping the lights on, there is only burnout for the few who are willing to materially support the place, and gradual decay for everyone else.