this post was submitted on 18 Dec 2023
190 points (97.5% liked)
Technology
59390 readers
3596 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Everyone's been dumping on Meta for integrating ActivityPub support, but I wonder if perhaps that's what's precipitating smaller projects like Flipboard and Discourse to be making similar announcements more. Here's hoping it's the start of an avalanche.
Or maybe, activity pub is doing way better than anyone thought and they want to get in on the action. You sound like a positive person, what positive thing would Meta do for the fediverse other than bring lots of people to it?
Isn't bringing people to it a quite important thing ?
I know this is a polarizing subject but in my opinion there is not much as important as increasing a social network userbase.
I'm sticking to Lemmy, but I'm pragmatic, I know it may never grow enough so that a niche community can live.
Right now my favorite game doesn't have a community and even if I create one and actively post to it I know we will have 3/4 people subscribe to it at peak.
Overwatch has a very small community on Lemmy even though it's a pretty huge game still. It's thousands of time smaller than the subreddit. I accepted it and moved on but that kind of sucks.
So bringing users and content creators to Lemmy through other more mainstream social networks through activityPub is fine by me. As long as you control when to cut the cord I don't really see the issue.
"Isn't bringing people to it a quite important thing ?"
Depends. Smaller places tend to develop certain traits, that the people there like (because they were part of creating them, or decided to stay because of them). When such a place becomes popular and gains a lot of new users, there comes a point where those traits that made the place feel good to the people who were there tends to get lost and the place loses what was good. Eternal September and all that.
If it's really that necessary, maybe we need better mechanisms to preserve small communities, but I feel like trying to keep most people in big techs walled gardens so that we can enjoy our spaces just feels selfish and short cited.
That depends on when you ask. When the fediverse is gaining users people on the fediverse would agree. When the fediverse is losing users people on the fediverse will say it's better if it stays niche.
Yes, it's important with one very important distinction. We want more people that are going to make the place better, not worse. Bringing threads people here isn't likely to do that. What if we block them until we have our feet under us with great people, then we can decide if it's worth it. This would be way easier than building a new fediverse. Also, start inviting small forums to check out your community to make it thrive, not huge userbases with hellish corporate overlords.
Do you know how I know the people coming over won't be great? Not a single person has ever brought up how great the people who would be coming over would be. It's only, there would be more.
I don't necessarily want more people, just the people I have interest in following. Most of those people didn't stick around here for more than a couple weeks after the Twitter takeover though.
I don't know anything about the flipboard people, they might be a nice add in?
I don't agree with this """gatekeeping""" ideology for the Fediverse.
Who's to decide if the threads user are a good addition or not ?
Can't we just give them a chance and then decide if we want to defederate. It feels like pre-emptive moderation.
It's rejecting people just because they are using Threads instead of attempting to filter the bad users of Threads through moderation. Also even if you try to keep these bad users out nothing prevents them to create an account on your instance and keep on bring a nuisance. The only solution to these users is moderation with defederation being the ultimate moderation tool.
Let's give new users a chance to fit in the Fediverse and defederate only if the issue arises but not before that.