so lemmy.
It is for me, but I have my doubts that the majority will avoid the corporate-owned spaces.
I think it’s always going to be a sort of long-tail phenomenon, with most people involved in the biggest platforms, but a large number of small platforms that attract a minority of the overall population.
Depends on where you live, but in the US I think there will be a sharp divide between two general groups: a minority who put some thought into what they do, and the vast meme-ified masses who accept whatever is laid out for them.
Curated experiences are the reason we’re in the shit right now.
But yeah, maybe boutique curated exepriences will somehow be qualitatively different, and not just finer market segmentation.
Not all of Reddit works, but some of it does for some people, and the reason it works for them is because the moderators shape communities that the community members enjoy participating in.
Personally, I think active communities below the Dunbar number (about 150) in size are some of the most rewarding to participate in, long term. But, there are always a lot of people who flock to wherever the biggest crowds are.
I think they meant human-curated.
I’d say genuine. Genuine experiences. Sharing shit for sharing’s sake. Not for better SEO. Not for profit. Just unadulterated human expression.
That’s how I envision using the internet for entertainment in the near future. I’ll still use the shitty corporate sites when I must, for transactional browsing. I’m not going to pretend I can push Amazon, Microsoft, Google, online banking, etc. out of my life just like that.
But I will actively seek authentic spaces. They will be a tad smaller than your average social network, Reddit, and whatnot. But I’m certain they’re out there and more people will join me in this search and populate these small spaces as time goes on.
Lemmy, Mastodon, the IndieWeb movement. The first steps. I hope to find more!
Smaller communities don’t get targeted for commercial exploitation. But, then, something has to support them even if they don’t cost much to run - they still cost something, both for bandwidth/storage and moderation/curation effort.
Of course. I have nothing against Fediverse server admins setting up a Patreon —ideally Liberapay— or something similar to receive donations to cover running costs. I have and continue to contribute financially to indie devs or server admins when I can.
Not everyone will do that of course. But there again, running stuff at a small scale shouldn’t be crazy expensive either. The operational costs of keeping a microblog or indie site running are little to none. I host my blog and all of my side projects for free in a cloud provider.
Running a Fediverse server is more expensive. Last time I looked into what it would roughly cost to stand up a barebones stack to host a Mastodon server in a public cloud, it was like a hundred bucks a month. Not cheap but it may be big enough to house a couple thousand users. If at least 0.5% of your userbase donated some money to cover running costs, you might be ok.
Alternatively, if you have a server lying around at home, loads of people self-host at home, which is a tad cheaper.
I’m not saying a fully decentralised indie internet wouldn’t have its shortcomings, of course. I’m just saying I’d happily take that over the current state of the web.
For what it’s worth, I looked around and saw “ready to run” Mastodon hosting services starting at $6 per month, not too long ago. Tempting, but the service is the easy part, maintaining the community can be much more challenging.
Ah, good suggestion that! $6/mo sounds way more affordable than self-hosting from scratch for sure. I fully agree the really difficult (and valuable) part is the people you bring in and keep, not the tech.
I firmly believe that connecting people to their IRL friends is an important part of the potential of the Internet, as it is shown by Facebook, for example.
But I also believe there are people looking to connect with new people and finding a community where they can express themselves wholly. I think the current Internet is weak in this regard, weaker than it has been before, but I think it’s possible to build a place where people can connect.
Pretty much. I should be able tobmake friends with any human on earth with an internet connection. That this is still hard is something we need to fix
I have a friends Discord I set up a year before Covid, and for about a year only 3 people used it, mainly to play some games together.
But when Covid hit, it obviously gained some traction. And now it’s THE place I interact with friends since I’ve long ditched the likes of Facebook.
I keep going back and forth on whether or not to possibly set up a Mastodon server for friends. The hardest part would be convincing people to use it. But it could just be like our little shared space that could still interact with the wider world. It’d be kinda cool to have a Local feed be just people you know in real life.
yes, but where could we find something like that?
The future of the web may be relearning the browser (and other tools)
Real issue is how much effort are people willing to put to maintain those communities.
Divide and conquer I guess
We should be able to bootstrap activityPub to GeoCities websites. WordPress integration is taking a long time.
That’s backwards, activitypub is higher level than websites. And you can literally make a website already and embed an activitypub stream
Is there something like a masterlist of forums. Id like to join some but dont know where to look.
This is what Google used to be for.
Discourse has some of the forums that use it on its website
The best I can think of off hand is to look at the mobile apps that are designed to interact with traditional forums, because they will have directories of all the ones that are integrated with them. For example, Tapatalk and Fora Communities. You should be able to find thousands of forums categorized in those apps? I’ve never used these apps myself, but have heard of them.
Just like as it was in the past
You’ve found the leading light of destiny burning in the ashes of your memory.
And that’s how it started. are we approaching a big crunch of sorts?
First infinity didn’t go great. Not sure I want to see more.
I wasn’t too early, but I joined reddit around the Dota 2 beta, so circa 2012, and damn the site became more and more garbage the more people it had, most comments became nothing but karma farming one liners, references or snide shit.
Communities grew into massive echo chambers, quality of discussions went down the drain.
now they’re heading to lemmy to do the same thing
meh, lemmy is pretty stagnant from what I have seen, plus you can create your own instance and mostly defederate from a lot of stuff.
It costs money to run these things so monetization always rears its head.
