Fediverse

Well, you said it yourself, you're able to comment using your Db0 account on Lemmy.world.

Which websites can you post to using your Reddit account besides Reddit?

Also, third party apps! I really don't like the default Reddit app.

One plus is that it takes more than one autocratic greedy wannabe tyrant to enshittify your entire experience by forcing ads upon you while taking away all the good but not ad-delivery-optimised tools.

The practical benefit is when things go wrong.

Imagine that you'd rather not deal with the Reddit admins, for whatever reason. You have two options: either you suck it up and deal with them, or throw away all Reddit content, communities and people, because of those admins.

Now imagine that you had some issue with the administration of your Lemmy instance. You still have both options above, plus a third one: migrate to another instance. You still have access to [mostly] the same content, communities and people as you did before; but you don't need to deal with the admins of your older instance. You can eat the cake and have it too. That's exactly what I did rather recently by the way.

The advantages of the fediverse are that there is no central ownership or structure of data. Your data is just your data, and your instance is just where you decide to host it.

You can sign up on one mastodon instance and start tooting and gather a following, if your mastodon instance starts enforcing rules that you don’t agree with (such as federating/defederating with meta) then your following belongs to you, not your mastodon instance and you can migrate your account.

Similarly the different services are just ways to present the same data as delivered by ActivityPub. I can access data posted to a Lemmy instance from Mastodon. I can follow pixelfed accounts from Mastodon. I can follow Mastodon users from Kbin, etc.

Right now big social media is like writing in the guest book and they let people look at it if you fill their requirements.

Federated social media is like sending an email to a public inbox that anyone can subscribe to as long as their instance maintains good standing with the sender.

Pros:

• No single entity that have all control.
• No entity profits from it, so you are not a product.
• Related to above: No trackers, no ads, no spyware, etc.

Cons:

• It is run by volunteers: bad uptimes, slower progress, slower fixes, etc.
• Some volunteer may give up and delete the instance. It happened to my first Lemmy account (nothing against you, stux)
• No market-driven decisions means sometimes instances defederate each other for purely ideological reasons. Sometimes very childishly. (again, nothing against stux)
• Lots of fedidrama.

Welcome to Lemmy. Hope you enjoy it.

Is it not just a more inconvenient version of making a reddit account and being able to post practically anywhere?

Reddit is convenient, but then one corporation owns you and they can decide to fuck over anyone for any reason. Hence the 3rd party app fiasco.

No single entity owns the fediverse. It is a little more inconvenient if your server dies, but other servers survive. It is a little more inconvenient if your server blocks other servers and you don't agree with the reasons why. That's the trade off for not having one centralized asswipe in charge.

Also what’s the difference between making an account at one instant and just making one centralized account for the social media?

Not sure what you're asking. You make an account on one lemmy server and that's it.

imagine if someone creates a truly better Reddit alternative than Lemmy and all the others (or maybe just a fork and not truly brand new)

they don't have to fight against the momentum and start with 0 users and 0 content, they get kickstarted by the content already in the Fediverse, so people will be more willing to jump in

so the best platform actually has the chance to shine instead of dying because no one is using it, but it also doesn't leave users behind who prefer the other platforms, and the other platforms have a chance to catch up again with all the access to the shared content

Every social media has tended towards awfulness (Facebook and Twitter being two most glaring examples) to the point where it impacts the user experience, because the companies have to make money somehow. If you're using the service for free, that means figuring out how they can use you as a resource for other people to be able to do something profitable with you, and engineering the site to encourage you to do things that will make somebody money, instead of what you'd like to do with the site. That's why they eventually get infested with ads and user-hostile features to the point that they become unpleasant.

(Reddit is a little more complex; it's still actively good as a source of links and memes and etc, but definitely degraded compared to what it used to be, i.e. well run AMAs, good conversation with a wide variety of people going in depth into their stories, creative outlets, well-informed people talking about tech and politics etc.)

A volunteer-run server won't have that issue. It'll have other significant issues (reliability and ease of use being the two obvious ones), but a lot of people in the modern world and almost everyone you'll talk to here will feel that the tradeoff is worth it.

You don't need to subscribe to a community to post. You can post to any lemmy or kbin community from any lemmy or kbin account as long as the account hasn't been blocked.

There is no difference in making accounts as long as you're not blocked. The only difference is that no single entity can control lemmy. The people who control dbzero are different from the people who control lemmy.world.

Are you familiar with enshitification? Lots of smaller instances people can run themselves holds off the platform enshitifying.

There's a couple things I've noticed while using Lemmy and Mastodon:

Admins and moderators have a sort of distributed power as it's somewhat no longer consolidated to a single instance like Reddit anymore,

• and so there's more incentive to making good decisions for not only for oneself but for the collective (reason being long-term instance sustainability)
  • therefore this system is likely to incentivize admins and moderators to make better long-term decisions rather than chasing short-term goals.
  • anytime I see systems that encourages people to make better long term decisions that makes me happy :D

additionally the fediverse gives more leeway to user choice as you're no longer locked down to an instance

• (this of course changes based on the instance federation/defederation situation which stems from the instance admin's/admins' past and current actions.)
• this allows users to participate on multiple communities using one account instead of having to create multiple accs

the emergent complexity of the systems that builds the fediverse seems like it's currently on a good path for building sustainable homely communities, so I'm cautiously optimistic

so far there's areas I can see that could use some QOL improvement for online discussions boards/forums and Lemmy's current systems seems like a good point to branch out from