this post was submitted on 23 Feb 2024
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Everyone wishing for more users might be wishing on a cursed monkey paw. I don’t know what the sweet spot number of active users is — I want more so we can have contributors to niche communities — but there’s a tipping point. You want your favorite bar/restaurant/message boards to be popular but not too popular.
Personally I think it's more important to break big-tech's hold on online communication. Every single user who leaves a centralized platform to join the Fediverse is a win in my books! Another thing is that we never had a mainstream decentralized, nonprofit and non-algorithmic social network before afaik, I'm actually not sure if the climate will evolve like it did with the other networks.
I guess I just don't have faith in the majority's conversation. Once you have a lot of dumb people, all the content starts devolving. Especially the comments.
As a dumb myself, it's a difficult problem that I don't have an answer to.
But maybe it's a net positive. Don't spend all day on one platform. And the dumb jokes are nice for being less serious all the time. As long as there is still good conversation
Bro, we've had like 3 dozen memes at the top about Taylor Swift's airplane just in the last week. We are not exactly avoiding what I just complained about. So I guess it'll be okay
As long as the influx of dumb users is matched by a sufficient influx of less-dumb users to help grow niche communities, I think it might be fine. I rarely browsed the large 1M+ subreddits, and mostly stuck to the subs with a few thousand users.
Honestly I feel like the proportion of dumb people here is ever so slightly worse than it was on reddit. It feels like people here are always missing the point of everything, not getting simple jokes, arguing about dumb stuff...
Yeah, even more than on reddit.
Honestly, I’m scared of what will come of it. Lemmy is fragile and the lessons of yesteryear don’t apply thanks to AI and evolving spam methods. That said, I’m still cautiously optimistic about the future of lemmy.
I don't get the hate against algorithms, they're just a tool, can be good and bad
I'm referring to recommendation algorithms, the bad thing about them is that they can be used to manipulate people. Algorithms in general are fine of course.
recommendation algorithms are fine too, the problem with modern social media is algorithms tuned for engagement.
And which algorithms would that be?
Whatever algorithms youtube, tiktok, instagram etc. use to drive engagement. They don't have any names that I'm aware of
The problematic ones for that are mostly recommendation algorithms afaik, but there are others like gamification ofc. You can call them engagement algorithms if you want to be a bit more broad. But that's what I mean when I criticize "algorithmic" platforms, and I think that's what most people mean when they talk about algorithms in this context.
I still can’t believe we haven’t seen a @whitehouse.gov.social or whatever spring up. Why in the world would they not want to control their social media presence in house? Why allow Twitter that luxury?
If they went cold turkey on Twitter and set up @[email protected] the posts would still end up on Twitter because people would cross post them (just like we see Twitter posts on Masto or lemmy).
At least some EU governments have started making their own accounts.
I emailed my region’s national weather service and asked that they join Mastodon and the meteorologist said they wanted to but there’s an approval process for communications and it takes awhile to add new services.
I’m basically completely off X (and haven’t had a Facebook account for years) but during a recent storm, I made a new Twitter account that just follows local government accounts. It’s annoying that the fastest way to find out about flooded roads and stuff is X and I really hope that changes soon.
Thank you for doing that!
Good meteorologist
I follow a couple of not stations that have a Masto presence, but I get where you are coming from.
Hopefully the tide will shift more this year.
I know that some people are upset about Threads federating, but I feel like some people may never end up on Masto but could have a Threads account. A local weather station, for example. But if you could simply subscribe to them via Masto without ever making a Threads account that’d be great. And the weather station gets to serve more people (the “normies” — for lack of a better word — on Threads and the nerds on Masto).
Why .social? Why not .us?
Just as an example, really.
A lot of Masto servers I’ve seen have use the .social extension. I feel like it does lend itself to letting people know what to expect when seeing a handle that ends with .social. It’s maybe an easy connection to make that that’s some sort of social media entity.
They certainly don’t have to use that type of url, but I think it’d be cool and it makes sense for what it is.
I’ve thought that news stations should do the same, too. Like an @[email protected] would be cool and have built in verification simply because they could lock down its users to only approved people so you’d know that @[email protected] is definitely Wolf Blitzer. No need for checkmarks.
I have no idea who Wolf Blitzer is, but for example there are social.network.europa.eu, social.bund.de and social.kernel.org. So US can use social.gov.us
Oh yeah. Making a subdomain like that also works. And maybe is even easier for existing domains.
And you don't even pay for subdomains
They really went for a double subdomain and network.europa.eu is not even a thing. Also it's insufficiently Latin. curia.europa.eu and consilium.europa.eu is proper, europarl.europa.eu already makes much less sense it should be senatus.europa.eu.
That's how registrars start cranking up the renewal price for .social domains.
#strongerICANN
ICANN's renewal fee is $0.18
poontang.gov.social
.us is sketchy AF. They should use something.gov.
.gov domain should be either abolished or allowed for use by any governments. Of course US is sketchy AF.
That would be confusing. I want to be able to tell govt.nz apart from the US one.
I think their preference is to have US government under .gov.us
.gov is allowed for use by any governments that invented the internet.
I think once domains like @washington.usa.gov or @newyork.usa.gov get adopted for precenses on the network we'll be golden, the EU is already making huge steps for this (as always) so I honestly think it's only a matter of time, with custom software too I imagine.
You'll know we're proper big when subtle coca cola placements worm their way into posts
Those aren't ads, Coca-Cola™ is just so crisp and refreshing that we can't help talking about it naturally!
Hey fellow kids. This guy needs to get with Pepsi™ , the taste of the new generation!
This is why I believe in some geo-located communities.
It's easier to find common ground when you're complaining about the same weather.
And then when you're interacting with the wider communities, your host community can give context to your way of thinking.
Grow more, then we can moderate the desired communities of interest so everyone will be happy.
I was on reddit for I think about 15 years. Around 30,000,000 users seemed pretty damned nice.
The unwashed masses (like myself) will eventually change Lemmy. I don’t think it will ruin it completely because the best part about having hundreds of millions of lemmings is the niche communities.
The main instances and communities are going to get shot to hell though. I’ve accepted that.