cross-posted from: https://europe.pub/post/372863
cross-posted from: https://metawire.eu/post/61363
The right-wing billionaire’s platform has recently lost about 10 percent of its European user base.
I hate X but I also dislike echo chambers
I also hate when people think an echo chamber is something inherently bad. Everything is an echo chamber. Your family, your friends, your local gaming community, your workplace. An echo chamber only becomes a problem when bad actors take control.
Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, or even Google. They give a shit about your wellbeing, as long as they profit.
Echo chambers are okay, no even necessary to stay mentally sane, as long as people share their honest takes without large scale agendas and manipulation.
Echo chambers are okay, no even necessary to stay mentally sane, as long as people share their honest takes without large scale agendas and manipulation.
You’re using a different definition of “echo chamber” than I’ve ever heard of. What you’re describing is groups of people sharing opinions that can differ with one another in good faith discussion. If differing views are being introduced its, by definition, not an echo chamber.
An echo chamber is when only one set of opinions are voiced, and all responses are in support of that opinion, hence the “echo” portion of the term.
If we are throwing around big words, we have to be precise though.
Echo chambers always existed and we are in them all the time. A few hundreds or thousands years ago, we lived in small groups. Those definitely had different opinions, but overall had the same values. Those were echo chambers. Now, where those bad? No, you want people to be in line on foundational topics.
But if you start to manipulate these opinions on the ground level, you’re going to divide people.
Global warming? Is it really that bad? Migrants? Aren’t the stealing our jobs? LGBTQ+? Aren’t they just harassing our kids and women? Hitler? Was he really that bad???
Do you get what I mean? Echo chambers aren’t the problem. They always existed. It’s bad influence that turns everything to shit.
What you’re describing is groups of people sharing opinions that can differ with one another in good faith discussion.
The problem is, this is what fashies consider an “echo chamber”. The definition itself is not applied in good faith by certain cohorts. For example, people having good-faith debates are “liberal” echo chambers, because not toeing the alt-right fascist line is never considered to be good faith.
Europeans don’t like Nazis.
Americans, well…
A lot of our biggest communities still have like two mods taking care of everything and are prone to cherry picking. It‘s the same old forum structures where the internet bubble effect is just as strong if not stronger than on larger, already problematic platforms. Some of the things I‘ve seen and experienced lately bring back memories from those internet forum days. Good ones but also the worst ones. And I have to admit it makes me doubt the Fediverse is actually scalable. There‘s just a lack of accountability in the end.
Which is not to say a federalized platform isn‘t an alternative to giant corporations. Those have their own problems and fair share of fuck ups. But I think I‘m already starting to see the limits of the Fediverse. At least in it‘s current stage.
The fediverse is much more than just lemmy. That being said i also disagree for lemmy. Drama between mods and communities was a regular thing on reddit. Still reddit managed to grow quite big before the bots took over. And companies are in no way more accountable to the users. Look at what happened with twitter under Musk. The only realistic choice you have as a normal user is to leave. And in the fediverse leaving a shitty instance still allows you to connect with all the other content from a different instance.
Could you elaborate on the scalability problems of the fediverse in comparison to corporation owned platforms?
I fear communities are lacking resources and structure to handle the masses. It‘s something corporations already struggle with but they house like 10000 times more active users. One way to go around that was mentioned above and suggested that new users may keep creating new instances and communities so a few places don‘t just explode in size. But from my experience, if a community already covers a topic, there won‘t be much competition and we end up with a power mod environment (Reddit) at best and instances going dark from overload (hug of death) at worst.
But I don‘t want to sound too bleak about all of this. In the end these are challenges that someone might already work on.
The fediverse is about options. If you don’t like how someone else runs their platform or community you can create your own. It’s awesome because you don’t get locked into one platform. And in the future I think we will see more big companies and organisations running their own stuff. But I agree that at the moment it is not what “normal people” are looking for and it will take quite some time until it develops. But to be fair the same was the case for reddit.
I guess there is a hope that if more people join the Fediverse existing instances and communities won‘t just become more bloated but people create their own alternatives. However I have to say that I have no interest in running one myself. I‘m mostly here to discuss things that pique my interest. Running a community just isn‘t what I‘m here for and I‘m afraid too many people are just like me in that regard and we‘ll create an environment that‘s all too similar to Reddit.
I also don‘t think it‘s good for the platform when people leave a community with a grudge to create a competition „with blackjack and hookers“ style. I want people to come and just create communities because they want to. That‘s where I see a future for the Fediverse.
But I also wouldn‘t want to subscribe to 5 communities about the exact same topic because that would just spam my feed with the same threads probably. However I would actually like to hop between them easily so I don‘t stick around the same few people or have to abandon one for another. A lot would have to change about the way we interact with the platform (UI) and how it‘s connected for this to work though. I‘m thinking about subscribing to topics and it shows you a good mix of communities where overlapping threads are kind of stacked or something and you could swipe cards to see comments from different communities about it or something. This is a tough one to figure out. Might not even be possible at all.
Don’t go to BlueSky !!! They’re not better than X. They obey to the same leaders… MONEY, GREED, AND POWER. A few weeks ago they restricted 72 Turkish protesters the access to their BlueSky accounts on simple request of the Turkish Government. So, BlueSky cannot be trusted they will secure the accounts of their customers. If Trump would ask BlueSky to block all accounts of members who are against him, they’ll do it right away.
Oh boy, where do I even begin:
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Federation. People have no idea what it is, which means that they have to familiarize themselves with all these technical concepts just to create an account.
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Servers. Most mastodon servers are locked, and you have to petition the admins to let you in, which often implies waiting more than a day. In other sites, you can create an account in 5 seconds, so mastodon is at a disadvantage.
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Lack of an algorithm. This implies people won’t see the content they like, which means they have to go and actively look for content. Most people don’t want to spend time doing that, they just want to log in, laugh at funny memes ans look at pretty pictures.
BlueSky may not be ideal, but anything is better than X.
X is just a machine for turning billionaire cash into political domination.
I mean, Mastodon is German, so they’re probably moving here. The federated fork of Dorsey’s Twitter is second.
There is always that one comment saying “b-but its technically kinda federated”. It doesnt fucking matter if its federated if 99.999% if all users are on one instance. The entire concept of a long lived, enshittification resistant fediverse relies entirely on being decentralized with a reasonably evenly distributed userbase. You fucking bet lemmy would already be completely worthless right now if people hadnt stopped lemmy.world from grabbing more communities and users.
