The Fediverse Isn’t the Future. It’s the Present We’ve Been Denied.
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There are a lot of people who prioritize convenience above all else. Why go shop at a butcher, baker, green grocer, and a liquor store when you can go to one place and get it all? Doesn't matter that the separate entities are specialized and therefore more knowledgeable about the product vs. Walmart where asking an employee is the most useless thing ever.
Same with social media or things like Google. People are lazy. Why shop around when Facebook gives you everything? Why learn how to use the address bar when Google will do the work for you.
So the fediverse goes against that in that it asks users to actually think for a moment about things and requires them to shop around... which, that's just too much work for the average person.
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The fediverse won’t succeed just because it’s better. It will succeed if and only if people choose it.
Part of that is making it monetizable. Influencers can build huge followings (and make some cash) because existing platforms recommend their content to other users.
Mastodon devs have chosen not to provide recommendations and quote posts. That's reasonable, but it reduces the utility of the platform, and it cedes space to Twitter & co.
To my knowledge, the only creator that's exclusive to Lemmy is the unix surrealism author. Until it's easy to monetize content, we're gonna have a hard time attracting creators, and a hard time attracting users.
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It's more like supporting open to all maker spaces. Many contributes to what's there.
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Reddit’s complexity was always vastly overstated. You can login and be posting in seconds in a way that you simply can’t with the fediverse
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I lately have a saying:
"If it's not FOSS, it's not worth your time" -
I’m mixed on her articles. Is she a journalist or is she just posting fediverse circle jerk on the fediverse? She writes well but feels like pretty much the same article every time
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There are a million and one great reasons to be here on Lemmy, but using it to get cash from fellow users wallets is not one of them.
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The only additional step you have on lemmy is choosing an instance and honestly it does not even matter that much which you choose. I'm not saying it's trivial but it is nothing that is inherently more difficult.
Reddit was really strange compared to everything else a few years ago. It only appears easy now because we are familiar with the concept of subreddits now.
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Honestly lemmy specifically is good enough to scratch my Reddit itch. We may not be able to post our way out of fascism, but we can certainly post our way out of the centralized, enshittified platforms like Reddit where we came from.
I think it's more difficult in applications where you want or have to bring a lot of friends to make the apps useful, but in the case of lemmy specifically if there's a baseline level of activity that's enough to fulfill 90% of what i used Reddit for (i.e. snarky memes and random back and forths with relative strangers).
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I hate the idea that everything should be monetised, that only gives us loong videos with laughing heads and so on "to keep you engaged".
We're here without all that crap and well the fediverse is definitely less active but it's content made by people because they like it, they believe in it. Not to shake the money tree.
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We wanna grow too and hopefully be a place with more authentic conversations (better anti-bot defenses) - hyperbolic to say “future’s at stake”?
I think truly delightfully UX would be very yuge. I should learn and contribute
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I think we should be realistic. Content costs money because it requires a lot of effort. It's naïve to think that content would just be created because people feel like posting something. If the Fediverse is to compete with companies like meta, this is only possible if there are opportunities for content creators to earn money. That should be self-evident, but it obviously isn't here.
I'm not saying it's necessary, but it is if the Fediverse is to have mainstream appeal.
Simply because the absolute majority of people are out and about where everyone is. And that's where the content ist. And that's the point: if you want good content, it costs money. It's not just corporations that make a living from it.
What I want to say is this: The Fediverse could provide fairer conditions for the people who produce content. That makes sense and is necessary because the Internet lives from that.
I just don't understand why people here don't want to realize that work has to be paid for. That's really strange.
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It’s an interesting take though because a lot of good content requires funding too, as well as hosting etc.
So how can we solve that in a reasonable way that doesn’t lead to all the bullshit?
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My take is that hosting is no longer expensive, I have a 30€/month fiber link with 700Mb/s up and could theoretically host my videos for hundreds or even thousands of interested people. At 40€ I can have a 10Gb/s up if needed. That's a lot of videos served daily.
Now, I also think that the monymaker needing to serve millions of people can go and do that elsewhere.
So what's missing is a sort of search engine so that when I want to check out fly fishing or knitting I can check out the exquisite videos from the respective community.
Something along those lines.
If people are interested I'll host their videos, and it shouldn't be that hard to make them searchable, but for sure, I can't do it all by myself. What do you think?
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Things need to be paid for, but why does that mechanism need to be baked into the platform?
Imagine I'm the best, most engaging poster and commenter on Lemmy. Everyone loves my posts and comments, shares them, quotes them, and responds to them endlessly. (Maybe in this scenario everyone has brain damage for some reason, and this allowed me to become the top Lemmy user.)
If I'm in that position, what's stopping me from just putting a little blurb at the bottom of each comment saying, "this post is brought to you by Carls Jr." or whoever wants to sponsor my comments. If people for some reason loved my posts and comments enough, I could find sponsors and just put those sponsorships right in whatever comment or post I make. Lemmy doesn't need to be involved. They don't need to go out of their way to recommend my posts either. If they're good enough, then they can be spread naturally by people sharing and engaging with them.
It makes sense for platforms to provider revenue to creators, but only if the platform has substantial ad revenue. YouTube pays its creators, but it also brings in billions of ad revenue. I don't think most Lemmy servers even have ads.
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You and I know this but people at first glance generally do not. Then you try to explain to them how Federation works and their eyes gloss over
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Because the advertising business is highly centralized. Getting sponsorships is not as easy as you think.
An example: YouTube pays content producers per click, so to speak, a ridiculously small amount, but in total, with billions of clicks, a crazy amount. The money to finance this comes largely from advertising revenue (also Google's main business model). They are the Gatekeepers so to speak.
But the content producers can't live off this because Google keeps most of it for itself. They do give people the opportunity to find sponsors themselves tho - and that's how people actually make the most money. But you have to find them for yourself or through intermediaries (that's an industry in itself). This is only realistic if you have sufficient reach (subscribers in the example). And that, in turn, is only possible if you have already invested hundreds of hours in the production of content (you can't make a living if you don't get paid for that).
So I think it would be best if the platforms themselves were powerful enough in terms of reach to be able to negotiate well with advertisers. But not as powerful as Google, for example, who can afford to pay content producers a pittance because - unlike small platforms - they are not dependent on them.
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No you cant, karma requirements bud, try making a new account and posting/commenting anywhere?
