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Joined 7 months ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2024

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  • Are content creators we already know expected to start their own servers? Or will there be a general mega instance for everyone to post to.

    Honestly - both?

    Good examples are going to be Floatplane and Nebula for the single-content-creator platform and the group of creators platforms.

    There’s no real reason you can’t build a platform and require someone to pay you to have access, and it seems to have been successful for both groups.

    Video hosting is expensive, but it 's not prohibitive and a group of creators could certainly come up with a useful platform and self-host it and still be profitable.

    Now, the question is, of course, if peertube is the right choice for that and if it offers anything they’d need, but that’s a different discussion.



  • Search will never search non-local content.

    Which is the point I’m trying to make: right now, you cannot use search as a discoverability medium, unless you’re on something the scale of mastodon.social.

    Search with a focus on new content discoverability is utterly useless for smaller or single user instances, because a search that only finds things you already know about isn’t exactly a useful search for discoverability.

    If I have to be on the biggest instances, then there’s very little difference between something like Bluesky and Mastodon in terms of usability, and uh, I might as well pick the one that’s more likely to have the most growth and diversity of content.

    We have to give up on the idea of having easy and direct access to the whole of thw fediverse.

    I agree, and it’s why I’ve pretty much migrated back to centralized services with the exception of Lemmy, because Lemmy works very well in terms of finding useful shit to follow in a way that literally no other federated platform does.


  • The problem I ran into is that every single platform that primarily interacted with Mastodon (The keys, etc.) had the same exact same set of problems.

    While yes, my Firefish instance had search, what was it searching? Local data only, and once I figured out that Mastodon-style replies didn’t federate to all of someone’s followers, it became pretty clear that it was uh, not very useful.

    You can search, but any given server may or may not have access to data you actually want and thus, well, you just plain cannot meaningfully search for shit unless you go to one of the mega instances, or join giant piles of relays and store gigabyte upon gigabyte upon gigabyte of garbage data you do not care about.

    The whole implementation is kinda garbage for search-based discovery from it’s very basic design all the way through to everyone’s implementations.



  • Install it and use it?

    Their PDS is self hosted, but it does still rely on the central relays (though you COULD host that yourself if you wanted to pay for it, I suppose?).

    It’s very centralized, but it’s not that different from what you’d have to do to make Mastodon useful: a small/single user instance will get zero content, even if you follow a lot of people, without also adding several relays to work around some of the design decisions made by the Mastodon team regarding replies and how federation works for those kind of things, as well as to populate hashtags and searches and such.

    Though really you shouldn’t do any of that, and just use a good platform for discussion, like a forum or a threadiverse platform. (No seriously, absolutely hate “microblog” shit because it’s designed to just be zingers and hot takes and not actual meaningful conversations.)




  • My read was ‘we need to make more communities, AND we need more users’ and I’m not sure why more communities solves anything since I’ve shown Lemmy to several actual real touch-grass kind of friends and they’re all like ‘but why? there’s nothing there.’

    Which is both very wrong, and completely understandable because if you go searching for a community about something, you’ll find a whole lot of no activity ones and that’s just a misleading and confusing presentation which they’re taking the wrong impression away from.

    I don’t think there’s a group of users who are just sitting out there waiting for a community about Longaberger baskets to make the jump off reddit, but there are a LOT of people who would move if it looks like it’s not just another “reddit killer” with lots of empty zones of nothingness.


  • Hard disagree.

    A million empty communities simply makes all of lemmy look like a barren wasteland nobody uses.

    We, if anything, need to stop making a community for every single edgecase that someone might ever one day want to talk about, and focus on the basics, until there’s enough people interested in some random niche thing to justify adding the community.

    That is to say, it should be organic community growth led by users making a more specific community from a larger community, and not server admins making, for example, 421,000 different sports team communities hoping users will somehow magically appear and use any of them.

    Lemmy is still at the scale that a single /c/NFL could more than adequately handle the entire volume of people talking about NFL games, and we don’t really need a /c/ for each league, team, player, and coach or whatever.



  • I don’t think a change in testing on YouTube for the last few days made any difference to the number of people who used PeerTube last month.

    I like PeerTube and use it where I can, but it’s still basically the content problem, which is to say there’s no content on PeerTube from anyone I follow on Youtube with the exception of one dude. (Hi Jan Beta!)

    I watch mostly tech/retro tech/retro gaming/random old crap Youtube stuff so it’s a big overlap in user bases, but, well, no monetization means there’s no incentive for people who do that as a job so there’s still… nothing there.

    Youtube won’t make a critical screw up that’ll tilt the scales meaningfully in the favor of other platforms unless they massacre payouts to the point that Patreon and sponsor funded creators no longer care about Google’s pennies, and will be more receptive to at least parallel uploads to other platforms.

    The user experience is unlikely to enshittify enough that creators decide to bail from the google money, no matter what they do.



  • A vast majority of instance software will store all old remote non-media data (that could easily be re-fetched when needed) permanently, even if nobody has seen it in years.

    Seriously, this is the most befuddling design decision. There’s no reason to cache that data more than like, maybe a week.

    Maybe it’s because I’m a sysadmin background type and not a programmer, but the endless obsession that fedi-software has with caching everything at every stop along the route from the poster to the person reading the post is just the most weird thing to me.