this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2023
422 points (97.5% liked)

Lemmy.World Announcements

29084 readers
279 users here now

This Community is intended for posts about the Lemmy.world server by the admins.

Follow us for server news 🐘

Outages πŸ”₯

https://status.lemmy.world/

For support with issues at Lemmy.world, go to the Lemmy.world Support community.

Support e-mail

Any support requests are best sent to [email protected] e-mail.

Report contact

Donations πŸ’—

If you would like to make a donation to support the cost of running this platform, please do so at the following donation URLs.

If you can, please use / switch to Ko-Fi, it has the lowest fees for us

Ko-Fi (Donate)

Bunq (Donate)

Open Collective backers and sponsors

Patreon

Join the team

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

I think this decentralization and federation is what web3 is all about, without all the corporations calling everything to do with monkey pixel art that costs a million dollars "web3"

top 50 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] [email protected] -4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Hey! This post is not specifically related to the lemmy.world instance. From now on, posts such as these will be removed, in order for the community to stay on topic. However, as this is a highly upvoted post, I'll just lock it for now.

[–] [email protected] 52 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Honestly I'm not even sure what the term web3 means but Lemmy does feel... less commercial, which is really refreshing! And I'm noticing alot less criticizism which is excellent. I'm certainly going to be staying here and trying to help it grow in a positive and mindful way.

I get what others are saying about it feeling like how the internet used to be... I'm really excited to see where Lemmy goes. Hopefully it doesn't just end up the way its predecessors have gone! Feels like I'm part of a movement to fight the oppression!! Power to the people woo!

[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 year ago (4 children)

That's what I'm enjoying about it so far too. Content is sparse but that's okay. I'm so tired of being marketed to, of being a product. These open source federated apps are janky and quieter, but they feel more real. These aren't algorithms pushing engagement and outrage or ads every 10 seconds.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Right? It's way calmer here. I felt hesitant about that at first, but it's only because we've gotten so used to an endless stream of (often inconsequential and low-effort) content. More isn't always necessary or better.

Kid-me used to have days off and he'd hop onto Warcraft 3 or various message boards only to realize no one was online because everyone had jobs or was at school. It had a rhythm to it which was really cool. It wouldn't surprise me if the "always-on" content spam of the modern internet has given people unhealthy ideas about what life is supposed to feel like.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Plus on Reddit, corporation makes money from content users create while here everything is open, free and fun.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

Let's just hope we can keep it that way! πŸ™‚

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago

I agree wholeheartedly. I think what all of us who care about these alternative underground social networks need to do is try to provide the best content we can, because that will attract other people here, which will benefit us in turn through the content they make!

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago (2 children)

You nailed it: It feels like a movement. And movements, especially nascent ones, require buy-in and work from their members. I guess that explains why I feel obligated to participate more than I did at Reddit.

I've only been on Lemmy for a day, but it's already clear no one is gonna build this out for us.

load more comments (2 replies)
[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

What is sort of bothering me is how as it becomes more popular, I've already seen a few people asking about adding advertising to lemmy instances. I hope advertisers are not looking at diminished revenue with the reddit blackouts and trying to move to Lemmy already. I just can't stand ads, and hope to never see ads interwoven with posts and comments.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago (5 children)

I suppose the benefit to lemmy is that you could always migrate to another instance if yours starts pulling that shit

load more comments (5 replies)
load more comments (2 replies)
[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Web3 became a marketing term, doesn't even really have a clear meaning, but it's used as a catch-all word for blockchain-related things like NFTs, cryptocurrency projects, etc. But most of those are not truly decentralized, whereas Lemmy and other fediverse projects are.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago

I kind of like the idea of rebranding it around a more honest and inclusive definition of decentralization. Though getting past bad marketing is so hard it might not be worth it.

[–] [email protected] 46 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

This is what reddit felt like ten years ago ... now it's just a matter of growing the community and making it bigger and better.

I felt bad leaving my old communities at reddit ... but in a funny way, I feel like I've stepped into a time warp and jumped back ten years ... now I'm looking forward to the next ten on Lemmy and Mastadon

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

My thoughts exactly. Ten years ago reddit was "too confusing" for people too.

[–] [email protected] 38 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yes, I would call it web1. Decentralization are basic concepts of the internet and it was more decentralized in the 90s. Getting back to the roots.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago

Great point. Lemmy and Mastadon look more like an effort to claw back the web of open access and decentralization from VCs, grifters, and the like.

[–] [email protected] 35 points 1 year ago (3 children)

It's starting to feel like the 90's again, but without frames ;-) I haven't felt this engaged with the internet in years

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (6 children)

I will have no disparaging of frames, thank you very much.

load more comments (6 replies)
load more comments (2 replies)
[–] [email protected] 32 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'm honestly very excited about Lemmy and Mastodon.

With federated and decentralized technology, I think there's a real hope of taking the internet back from the tiny selection of corporatized, monetized, sterile silos we have now, where everyone is forced to abide by the same compromise rules and everything can be co-opted or changed at a moment's notice without the userbase's consent, and giving it to smaller, more fun, radical, unique, and interesting internet communities, run by volunteers who really care, for like minded people.

I think it will lead to a much more diverse and richly textured internet, maybe even a more human internet, since each place you go will be a smaller, more intentional community which policies itself and can develop its own interesting culture and set of norms, while still being connected to everything else so the rot of pure isolation doesn't set in.

Technology β€” especially how it is structured β€” is never neutral, and I think for the first time in a long while, we've stumbled on technologies in federation and decentralization that actually tend towards good things. The inherent benefits of federation and decentralization to autonomy and resilience and diversity and resistance tocorporatizationn are stunning, and as long as we don't fuck that up by assuming that those benefits are sufficient, don't rest on our laurels thinking we don't need to maintain a culture that is consciously and intentionally oriented around preserving the things we want to see, I think we'll be okay!

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 29 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Web 1.0, users form communities on bulletin boards, internet forums and newsgroups. It's the birth of Web 2.0, investors and advertisers see potential in large user bases. This leads to social media and mobile apps as fronts for tracking users and big data collection. Smart home and wearables become a plot to bring tracking hardware into your life even when you aren't actively engaging on the internet. The tech billionaire is born at the cost of the privacy and wallet of the user. Web 3.0, a federated Web 1.0 where users take back control of the internet. Tech billionaires live in homeless shelters and eat ramen noodles.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)
load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 29 points 1 year ago

The web3 that can be named is not the true web3, or something like that.

The "branded" Web3 was about "how do we create the third Web BUBBLE" more than "how do we create the third Web experience." The people who missed buying AOL shares in 1996 or Amazon in 2002 wanted their chance to get in on speculation, except without the utility of an actual service or product underneath the hype.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 year ago (1 children)

feels like a modern take on usenet/newsgroups/bbs.

You pick your local server and your chosen feeds and enjoy.

I hope as more small servers start up and die that we don't just end up with a small number of mega size servers though, that goes against the point.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I think one thing that may help with this is letting users stay on their instance when browsing others. Right now, if I want to hop over to another instance, I can definitely link there or comment if using the appropriate channel, but actually going there makes it seem like I am signed out. Implementing features like this https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues/1048 would help make the experience feel more cohesive, and encourage exploration of other instances without confusing users and accidentally encouraging sticking to one's own instance.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 year ago (1 children)

But how can this be web3 without blockchain!?

;-)

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

What about my funny ape pictures? Won't someone think of my funny pictures that costs a cities worth of energy???

[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago

It certainly feels nostalgic to me being on here. I miss the days of webrings and message boards and just crawling ever forward into unknown new places. I was a kid then though, so I thought it was just me becoming wiser/more tech-savvy. Now I realize how freaky all the consolidation is. Even some video game modding communities now have more of a presence on reddit than anywhere else. It's convenient but so weird.

I agree with u/Pelicanen that it feels like the uncertain times of the early internet where things were hosted by individuals and their really small websites. I don't know to what extent it will catch on (although Discord is huge with milleninals/Gen Z, no?) but it's interesting to imagine a world where the internet is primarily large consumer/business-facing websites and then highly decentralized communities.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I'm enjoying the lemmy.world experience, and I believe decentralised social networking could be the future. I am a refugee from Reddit and hopeful there is hope for a open, community focused platform.

As for this platform, I am apprehensive about somebody running the server I have my account with having the power to remove my account and my posts, but I guess this is true of any network in existence.

My concern in the long run is who pays for the hardware and energy costs even if it is federated. Without some kind of reliable funding model who will pay the bills?

Hopeful for many enjoyable encounters in the Fediverse.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

You'll always have to rely on someone else, unless you build the thing yourself.

The beauty of the fediverse concept is that it's about as easy as possible to build it yourself.

The cost of running a host is a matter of economical management:

  • It costs almost nil to run text-based content.
  • Images take a bit of memory and bandwidth, but are even manageable with an old cellphone under a set number of users.
  • Videos are a major drag, and very expensive unless you're embedding them.

Most open-source is funded as passion projects by devoted geeks who typically already make a living doing other computer things anyway, and fediverse is a bit of the same.

load more comments (2 replies)
[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago (7 children)

It's pretty dope. Been following the fediverse for a while, but I've never used twitter so mastodon felt kinda useless to me. I've never used facebook, so friendica felt kinda useless to me.

Anonymous strangers posting links and having discussions? Now that's more my jam.

load more comments (7 replies)
[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago

Yeah I feel the same too. And I think decentralization is the only way to web3.

Distributed networks are very very complex to make. But decentralized networks have the simplicity and features of centralized networks with the addition of freedom that distributed networks give.

The best of both worlds really.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago

Yeah, Corporate went off the deep end sniffing coke.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (7 children)

Hah, web 2.0 was all about the explosion of user-generated content. Corps and cryptonerds wanted to make web 3.0 about making money, but the web has always been about the content, not its monetization. In trying to monetize the content, they're alienating people and forcing them off the platforms they defaulted to.

Humans like to create and share content, no matter how easy or difficult it is to monetize. If the people who want to monetize humanity's collective output make it harder to create, then hopefully the result is that people move off the ad-supported platforms and replace them with something that doesn't rely on centralization with lots of capital to stay afloat.

If nothing else, the way that youtube has made it impossible for segments of the creative community to monetize their content and forced them rely on platforms such as patreon has made it more and more clear that ad-generated revenue is a dead end. You can't force people to view advertising unless you hold their content hostage, and for the first time in history, they can't buy out the means of production.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (8 children)

I was resistant to the federverses, but these corpos just think they can get away with anything...

Fuck them I won't do what they tell me!

It will be fun to watch this place grow, it feels like the start of a new story!

load more comments (8 replies)
load more comments (6 replies)
[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I mean I definitely agree that this feels great, but decentralization and federation is what pure Bitcoin and crypto are all about. In many ways this community reminds me of the good vibes and great minds the early days of cryptocurrency discovery encouraged. This predated some of the corruption, VCs, and crypto bros that came around in 2013 during the first boom.

I still think that early soul of empowerment and community is there in Bitcoin itself but you gotta dig a little deeper to find it. I expect Lemmy will also β€œcommercialize” to some extent in coming years, but it’ll always be better than Reddit and other centralized platforms that want to feature gate and censor unfairly.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I think the crux of what you are saying is that decentralized is a means to create a community. Most of us here want the idea to succeed and are putting in the effort, much like early crypto. Where both Reddit and Crypto failed is when commercial interest took hold. And to your point as long as Lemmy remains commerically disinterting, it will be a true community.

But, because of the decentralized nature, even if a commercial interest takes hold, it will be on individual servers. I can see the NBA or the Olympics or niche topics having their own servers -- and I would argue that is a good thing for those interested to host. The value is that you can have both the astro turfed along side the organic with competing interests in the "why."

load more comments (2 replies)
[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (4 children)

I hate how crypto bros and scammers kidnapped the term web3. In reality is a nice concept, but they just turned it into a libertarian dystopia.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (9 children)

I like the overall trend towards ownership and non-centralized tools implicit in web3. If everything happening on the internet is owned by wall street, then it's not going to act like the real internet.

If there's a crypto aspect that has uses beyond grift, I'm open to it. There are certain ways it could be used to disintermediate owners and creators. I'm not sure if that's happening yet. Ownership rights with digital content do leave a lot to be desired.

I hope we soon see the end of the "gold rush" era in crypto and start seeing actual cool stuff being done with it. Especially since legacy banking will simply co-opt it sooner or later.

load more comments (9 replies)
load more comments (3 replies)
[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (6 children)

Long way to go for ease of use, but the foundation is SOLID.

Decentralised without crypto-ifying everything. this is the way.

load more comments (6 replies)
[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (12 children)

It's nice to have this space to retreat to. Even if it doesn't outcompete the corporate web anytime soon, the existence of another option will constrain how bad they can get a bit, and will create a place for refugees to go after each new outrage. And it's not like the core functionality of any of the corporate sites was that complicated underneath all the bloat, after people have been on here working out the kinks for a while there's no reason it should be any less convenient of an experience.

load more comments (12 replies)
[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

@kiriakos or skipped 3 and went right to web 4.0

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago
load more comments
view more: next β€Ί