Lemmy is still going to be here because it’s not a Google product.
Touche…
Pour one out for project Ara, everyone… And the hundreds of other companies that had a bright future before Google bought and destroyed them.
It’s a decade later, and I’m still bitter about Google Reader’s unceremonious execution.
Gotta be Google Play Music I’m still bitter about. YouTube music doesn’t hold a candle to it, and I’ve never quite been as happy with Spotify or Apple Music. Getting YT Premium with a good music service was great too, but they shot themselves in the foot.
And there’s was just… no reason for it. They even delayed its death when they realized how crap YT Music was, and then later just… decided to do it anyways.
I was so upset about it that I almost de-Googled. And I was all-in on the Google ecosystem. In the end I begrudgingly continued on because I didn’t have the time or energy to find replacements for everything.
But yes, I’m still angry over it. I like NewsBlur, it does everything I need, but I still miss Google Reader, and I would go back to it in a second.
SAME. I use Netvibes and Feedly now, but I miss the social aspect - sharing stuff and having friends’ feeds.
You can’t buy lemmy itself but only instances
Google play music : …(
Feel the Fediverse!
Google made a huge mistake shutting down Google+. If they had built it out to integrate with Youtube, where people could have a space to Tweet, have a Main Page feed like Facebook, and post videos all in the same platform, they would have dominated the market.
I still have a hard time believing that no-one has created a platform that encompasses all of those things. Meta is doing it piece-meal but it’s all disorganized. It should be one unified platform.
That’s why I hope some developers start working on a way to integrate Lemmy and Mastodon and like… PeerTube together into a single frontend. I’d love to be able to manage my Mastodon posts and BS on Lemmy in the same website.
@Shadesto @MargotRobbie AFAIK YouTube did have google plus integration but it was optional.
I don’t really get what the hate was for Google+, it was better than the alternative/competitor at the time (Facebook)
Google+ forced itself on people. I didn’t want it so I stopped using my Gmail entirely. I imagine word of mouth caused people to avoid it.
And the ridiculous part on top of that is that it was the exact opposite situation at first. When it first launched, you had to be a friend of a friend of a Google employee to register or you weren’t getting in. It took me a about a month before a friend of mine studying CompSci at university with the kid of some Google employee was able to pass an invitation my way.
I get the purpose was to generate hype by making it seem “exclusive” like Facebook was in the early days, but it took way too long before the people who genuinely wanted to use it were allowed to openly register for it. It was like that for 3 months, and a lot of people who gave up on trying to get an invite lost interest after the initial buzz died down.
And then Google wasn’t satisfied with upsetting the people that wanted to use it, so they had to go and upset the people who didn’t want to use it by later forcing it on everyone with a Google account.
It’s kind of funny, isn’t this exactly what Meta is doing to everyone with an Instagram account? You have a shadow profile on Threads regardless if you signed up or not.
I wonder why the reaction is so different, maybe because they both are social media? Or maybe just good timing with the whole Twitter debaucle.
I think there is still concern. When Threads launched, the media was full of articles outlining commonly-stated concerns about privacy and the involuntary connection between Instagram and Threads.
The problem is that zoomers who are flocking to it in droves don’t seem to care about any of that. And I don’t think it’s due to ignorance, but probably more like generational defeatism.
Yes, there has for shure been a shift in the culture. Privacy doesn’t seem to be that big of a concern for most.
I’m not so sure it’s just the zoomers that are to blame, plenty of older people don’t seem to care either. But I do feel for the younger generation, having never known the freedom and joys of the pre-corporate internet. Then again, maybe ignorance is bliss after all.
Yea I was annoyed that they were making me sign up for google+ for my youtube account so I never tried it I just set it up so I could keep using youtube.
Google wasn’t comfortable in letting it grow naturally over time. They tried really hard to push on people by combining it with other more popular google products when it didn’t really make sense (i.e. Youtube). Also, as a teen at the time google plus just felt nerdy and weird. It didn’t really feel like something they cool kids would use so no one used it.
Yeah that’s how I felt too. I remember being excited about g+, then I also remember aggressively turning off any association to g+ because no one was on it and it kept pushing it in my face. Come to think of it gmail was similar, invite only and that, but it wasn’t forced even at release and they made it look a lot nicer than what yahoo and hotmail had going on at the time.
For a while, Google bonuses were tied to social integration. That’s why you saw the huge influx of insanity.
and from what i remember, staying true to typical google fashion, they fucked it up by not opening up the “beta” when they had a critical mass forming behind it. then only to force everyone into having a profile a year or whatever later. lol, too late. i think most of us understood that anything associated with google is assumed to be a never-ending “beta”, so no idea what they were thinking or waiting for.
I think it was definitely the super long beta period where you needed an invite killed it. I knew a ton of people who were interested that gave up
That’s easy to say now, but Orkut (another Google social network, mostly used in Brazil) also had a beta invite system… And that helped it grow tremendously. The secrecy and “status” of getting invited made people go wild - they would even sell invites.
The strategy can work. It’s just very timing sensitive.
Orkut was young when Facebook access was still restricted to college kids only. Google+ was dumb. You’d get and then it was just tumble weeds.
I’m not sure if I’m mis-remembering, but I believe my first Gmail account was by invitation. It was pretty much just an email account back then
Correct, I got my account invite from The Screensavers show with Kevin Rose. They were giving them out randomly to viewers.
Reminds me of Bluesky which is also in a permanent beta.
It was definitely much better than Facebook at the time. Especially the concept of circles that they implemented.
It was invite only for too long, and then, suddenly, it was required for everything Google.
Poorly supported, forced integration with other google services, facebook was good enough TM for most.
It was good but it didn’t really add enough or solve an actual problem. At the time, there wasn’t as much negative sentiment around Facebook. The circles were a neat concept but too much work to use for the average user.
It’s strange to note that if Google had just casually worked on the feature, started gradually integrating it with YouTube etc, they might have beat insta to the punch and also really capitalized on Facebook hate. Instead they made one massive marketing blunder after another.
I agree, and the level of user on G+ was of a techy IT variety of person. It was great and you could have good conversations. Lemmy really has that feel now. Enjoy it till either the general public gets hold of it and it turns into a cesspool or it slowly dies a death.
Personally I hope to face neither of those scenarios, but history is not on our side.
Google mismanaged the shit out of it, which is a shame, because it really was a good platform.
I liked it a lot, honestly. Was a very cool community and Google’s app for it was awesome. The web interface was great too.
The concept of who you chose to share your status was cumbersome. It at least not auntie or uncle friendly
I don’t remember what it was called? Spaces?
I don’t remember what it was called? Spaces?
Circles. It was a killer feature at the time, the idea of different feeds for different groups, all in one profile. Too bad there weren’t enough groups to make it useful.
Being able to share certain posts with everyone (including your parents/grandparents) vs just your friends vs your work colleagues was a brilliant feature that seems to have just been substituted with private group chats instead. Seriously when I was a teenager the amount of stuff I thought about posting but didn’t because it would appear for everyone…
I still miss Google plus so much… It had the most intelligent groups of people I’ve ever experienced on social media both then, and now.
In 12 years, selfhosting will be so cheap and one-push-button easy that everyone will have their own instance and federated with each other. It will be called Neo-Geocities 2.0.
Well, not really the same thing but I saw this the other day. I think it is awesome, but that is probably only nostalgia talking. It is a geocities website for the current day!
Oh man, this takes me back…
There is now Neocities.org so I’d say you’re spot on :)
Related tech: https://small-tech.org/
I can believe that, honestly.
Both Neocities and Yahoo! licking their lips over that name.
So, like p2p clients?
I hate the name Lemmy, there, I said it … as much as I hated the name Google+
deleted by creator
Yeah, I’ve been running around the Fediverse for two years now and the name has yet to grow on me. Makes it slightly difficult to explain to people who are interested. The “iverse” part makes it sound like a metaverse type project which gives some people pause -because of the hype-flop cycle and, of course, all the crypto scams associated with that. Have to begin the pitch with “but it has nothing to do with [that], so don’t worry.” (Edit because autocorrect)
The shitaverse
They should’ve called it Google Circles. Google Plus just sounded like some kind of premium subscription to Google and not like a social network.
I really enjoyed Google+ specifically for the Circles feature. I’m pretty sure it was the age unrestricted global Hangouts chats that killed it… Probably what this scene from Silicon Valley is about.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=hjtr64ZQUWA
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
I don’t care about the name much, but it’s going to make searching for anything on here through a regular search engine cumbersome. Lemmy is just going to bring up results to the late motorhead singer
It’s like how Reddit is
I've read it, Lemmy isLet me tell you… Think an excited person, “Lemmytellyousomething!!!”Oh I like that.
Ope, Lemmy just scooch past ye there, tryna get some ranch
Okay, I’m on board now with the name
I really like the name :)
I’m a huge motorhead fan. The name is a not insignificant part of why I chose this as a reddit alternative over the others
I just think it ultimately sounds like a lousy c-grade 3rd party app. Then again, Mastodon isn’t much better. At least Reddit is basically witty.
Lemmy tell you why I like the name…
Three whole syllables is a bold move for mastodon
This is why you should never adopt Google services, there’s a high chance they will kill it off given their awful track record.
At least they let me turn my Stadia controller into a regular Bluetooth controller ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I bought Cyberpunk for Stadia and received a Chromecast Pro and a Stadia controller with it for free. I sold them both which covered the cost of Cyberpunk which later got refunded when Stadia went offline. So I actually made money by using Stadia.
I think the biggest miss Google had was with Google Wave. It was way ahead of its time, and absolutely crashed and burned at launch because of the invite-only model.
I bought a Google OnHub router, which was amazing. It was marketed as the most “future-proof” router at the time. Then Google made Google WiFi mesh routers around a year later, and OnHub was never marketed or mentioned again. Now, in addition to my already concerning privacy issues around Google services, I don’t trust that they will release quality, supported products.
I started reading your comment and thought “please be about Wave” haha. The funniest part about Wave is how they learned no lessons from it.
The invite-only model worked great for Gmail because it was an actual service with real utility and people wanted in (1GB storage was huuuuge). But with social networks, the courting ritual is reversed, because without a critical mass of users the product has no utility.
So what do they do with G+? Invite only 🤦♂️
And by then they had something like half the world running Android, with Google accounts… and didn’t just let them in. Youtube should have been a simple “if you want to check out G+, your Youtube account will get you in, otherwise carry on.” Instead they make it invite only and then bully youtubers into registering.
It’s just mind-boggling how little they understood about social networks after building such a wonderful piece of software for it.
Chromecasts are pretty solid
It’s been a while since I’ve used a Chromecast, but they were always reliable.
I threw mine in the trash in less than a month, didn’t even bother trying to resell it and just wanted it gone. What a pile of fucking shit that thing was. I spent more time troubleshooting than watching.
I have a gen 1 Chromecast that I use almost daily, such a beast
I heard that Google is about to drop support of their older chromecasts. (You might want to look into this to confirm though)
I hope not!
I can’t say I had these problems back when I was using them, but that doesn’t mean much because mine are sitting in a box somewhere and worthless since most TVs and streaming players support it now.
I miss my Google music…
Same reason I don’t get emotionally invested in Fox TV shows.
I’ll still grumble about Gifted getting cancelled for the next 80 years /sigh
Some of these are fucking wild
Killed over 1 year ago, Cameos on Google allowed celebrities and other public figures to record video responses to the most common questions asked about them which would be shown to users in Google Search results. It was over 3 years old.
Imagine googling “does Bruno Mars is gay?” and Bruno Mars himself shows up to tell you if he is or doesn’t
Dammit, Cameo is dead?
I honestly loved the concept and would probably have been a customer if I could afford it.
Contrary to your description, it was mostly celebrities doing custom greetings for fans, sometimes as themselves, sometimes in character and usually bought for people as a surprise gift.
Amongst others, there was Jim Rash wishing a Community fan a happy birthday in character as Dean Pelton and dozens if not hundreds of short to medium length videos of Dave Mustaine from Megadeth recording super wholesome and sincere messages for specific fans.
Can you honestly tell me that doesn’t sound great?
You’re talking about a non-Google product called Cameo.
Cameo = not-Google. Celebrities record videos per fan/follower request.
Google Cameo = Celebrities record short videos as responses to Google searches about themselves.
Similar, but different.
Ah ok, that’s a relief! Thanks for clarifying 🙂
I think Cameo is different from “Cameos on Google.”
I thought it was a made up product I seen on a movie, I can’t remember what movie it was, though.
Jurassic Park?
i think it was about this d list personality or a washed up actor who needs to top up and do his cameos to increase his net worth, and his manager reminding him to do the cameos.
I dont even know if what i remember is existing or just a figment of my imagination. Lol. Just goes to show how fucked up our memories have become due to our online activties.
Damn I’ve never even heard of that but I wish I had, it seems like it’d be fun to fuck around and see how many recorded responses you can find lol
Hahaha, I’d pay to see that
“Hi! Bruno Mars here to finally answer your question. Does I am gay?”
This is extremely interesting. So many products that I’ve never heard of and many of them were actually around for 6-12 years before being axed or coming up on death soon. A lot of these I had heard of and even used occasionally over the years and I didn’t realize were gone now.
It’s amazing how many cool projects they’ve funded the creation of, but never really advertised, and subsequently killed
Why the F would they kill Google Domains. Don’t they own a freaking cloud? How is having a registrar not essential when you own a cloud?
Damn, that page is so interesting. Thanks for the rabbit hole.
Holy shit, Google has ADHD.
At this point I’m just waiting for them to axe YouTube out of the blue and with maybe 2 days warning. If Google announces a project nowadays I just assume they’ll kill it off at some point.
Google Domains
Wait… This is a bit of a problem- all my domains are on Google Domains. Are there any other registrars with $12/yr domains that I can migrate to?
Edit: considering cloudflare
Your contract should be moved over to Cloudflare automatically and they have committed to honoring existing prices for now.
I thought it was sold to squarespace?
Any of them if you register for just one year lol
I used namecheap because they had .com for I think 11$ on sale, and I bought two domains for my stuff
But they sure ask a lot for cool names
I already have the domains I just want to transfer them away from squarespace
They actually sold Google Domains, still wild. No problem! :D
Selling it to Cloudflare. Dunno why, presumably not profitable enough.
That is, indeed, the link that I posted 🙃
Google Reader. Never forget…
I still haven’t found a replacement for it.
I enjoyed Tiny Tiny RSS back in time.
Feedly
Can attest, Feedly’s pretty nice
NewsBlur. Been there since the unceremonious execution of GReader. It gets the job done.
Wow, so many products I didn’t realize were dead. I remember when they were pushing Duo.
Some of them weren’t really killed, just renamed. Duo for example is now Meet
2017 - 2023
Service
YouTube Stories
Killed 15 days ago, YouTube Stories (originally YouTube Reels) allowed creators to post temporary videos that would expire after seven days. It was over 5 years old.
I found one I’m happy about. Good riddance!
What, but they still have YouTube Shorts.
Do shorts disappear?
Thank goodness…
The beauty of the Fediverse is that no single entity controls it… In 12 years, I’d wager we’re still around.
I would wager most of nowadays instances have either fallen into obscurity or just finished existing, I think we will see instancea more focused in scalability if thr fediverse grows in popularity, whoch will kind of dominate the space.
lemmyworld might survive i think.
If I had to guess for a few I would say beehaw and lemm.ee will also still be alive in some way or another, but I dont think they will keep being as big in proportion to other instances as they are now.
and there will be 1000000s of different versions
10 of which will be enormous and will be the vast majority of what most users see.
True. That’s already happening now if you notice lemmy.world, mastodon.social, pixelfed.social, etc.
Yeah, a temporary protest was not gonna do the trick. But hey, oftentimes, things gotta get worse before the get better.
It’s just a matter of how much worse.
With open source and interoperability, this is a good thing, because then you can choose the experience you wanna have. You’re not bound to a single vendor-locked platform that’s subject to continuity issues or a degraded experience that forces you to move elsewhere and start over in terms of following/followers. You simply pack up and migrate to another instance.
I kind of feel like a single Lemmy instance will
domonatedominate and become the defacto instance that everyone just joins.Since people post to channels that you can search for and subscribe to, there is no incentive for that to happen.
unless one just feeds you tons of ads and harvests user data. That’s one reason why Gab, which is a fork of Mastodon, was defederated from most of the 'verse before Gab just went ahead and turned federation off.
You could create a Lemmy instance that made it far less user friendly to connect to other communities, and “forced” other users to join its communities because ‘that’s where everyone is’. That’s one of the reasons why there is so much fuss over how to handle threads.net when/if they turn on federation.
I think that’s against the plan with Lemmy and distributed instances, but they can improve sign up, and make it possible to migrate your user between instances, or do some unique username across all instances.
A cool feature would also be that a user could backup all their posts and votes.
The whole system is crap.
We should have gotten something that’s actually decentralised and P2P like Aether.
What we got was centralised servers + a glorified RSS feed that enables even more echo chambers than Reddit did… The fediverse is doomed to remain irrelevant imho
Then go to Aether. Nobody’s forcing you to stay here.
Simple fix, just don’t join big instances, create new communities on small instances and self-host. If everybody does so, nobody has an interest into coercing users in a hermetic system, because they have far more to loose through possible defederation
I think a big help to avoid this is if any “official” apps automatically point to something like lemmyverse search or Fediverse Observer rather than Join Lemmy or any single instance.
Mastodon.socialwas already by far the largest before the only app named “mastodon” available in the major mobile repositories was built to automatically have you create an account on mastodon.social to “Make it easier for the normies”.The fact that I dont’ even know the name of any lead developers of #lemmy as opposed to /u/gargon@mastodon.social is probably a good sign too.
I remember getting a few of my friends to try G+ with me, then getting in and realizing we were the only ones there. Feels like Lemmy already has more people than that ghost town ever did.
Facebook and Google was always about friends family and local before any random and stranger interaction becomes relevant.
Reddit and Lemmy is all about strangers. Oftentimes you dont even want people to know you or care about that. So userbase is way easier to create without feeling as if it was too small.
Facebook started locally and slowly created circles until the entire world found their friends and families and joined themselves
You were expecting Facebook, but google plus was always a creature more resembling Reddit and Lemmy. It was an aggregator, and source of discussion.
Sorry, I’m in the minority that actually liked Google+.
Circles were a good idea
I thought circles was the best idea. I loved having a bit more control over posts. Unfortunately, only two of my friends used it, so it was worthless for me for the most part.
Circles prevented over sharing with the wrong people, which is the entire business model of social media.
I enjoyed it as well. It was pretty cool. Then I became busy with other stuff and one day I heard the news that G+ would be shut down.
If only you stayed active on it, Google wouldn’t have shut it down.
Kidding lol. I used it too, it was pretty sweet. It felt like a mix of Twitter and Tumblr.
It was a pretty cool platform but their biggest problem was making it invite only, therefore forcing it to be smaller than competing platforms. Invite only may work for Gmail but not for social media.
I also enjoyed Google+. I liked the app and the interface. The content was pretty good for a bit.
I don’t really know what is the problem with google+ except they are born in the wrong time where Facebook are still on the rise, instagram is new and trendy and Zuckerberg is not dreaming on metaverse
One of the things that probably killed it was Google enforcing people to use their real names on there. Which of course affected also commenting on YouTube as well.
I quite liked Google+ overall. Would have been good to have a proper competitor to Facebook.
I never had my real name on it. Someone said it was based on the real name field of your email address, but I also never had my real name in that.
Sometimes when I leave google reviews, the business owner will respond and be like “Thanks for the 5 star review, Firstname!”
Ive been using Firstname Lastname since I was born, which was 01/01/1900.
Are you my neighbor by any chance? I live at 123 Main Street, Anytown 45678
Nah, I live across the way, at 123 Streets Rd, Cityville. Nice place.
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What did you like about it? It was basic af from what I remember. It was a FB clone, at best.
One of its plus points (no pun intended) was that it was the first social media platform to allow more granular control over who saw your posts. You could people to ‘circles’ and limit posts to which ever circles of friends you selected (if I’m remembering this correctly).
I think at that time on Facebook, you only had the option of Public, Friends or Private. It spurred Facebook on to introduce more granular control as well. So if nothing else, Google+ was good for that.
Only place I’ve ever accidentally uploaded a dick pic and so glad I had like 2 friends on there who never checked lol. It was a fun 2 weeks.
Lol are you sure it was an accident or did it only become an accident when your 2 friends didn’t look 😜
Risky click of the day
almost watched a tik tok knockoff. that was close.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/shorts
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
This was pretty good lol
Google+ didn’t work because they didn’t push it hard enough and they made it an invite only beta instead of just allowing everyone to join.
Yes - I’m being serious they didn’t push it hard enough. If you had a Gmail or YouTube account it should have just instantly become a Google+ account in some sort of private mode so it doesn’t inadvertently leak your info.
If they would have just pushed it out to everyone, day one, mandatory, no opt out, then we’d still have Google+ today.
Like if they made Google Talk the default messaging client on Android we’d still have Google Talk. I don’t recall Apple making iMessage an optional messaging app you don’t have to use.
Absolute truth. I was onboard with G+ early. I handed out invites to everyone I could. I pushed my spouse to use it. Ultimately what killed it was it being invite-only, and mainly only tech enthusiasts were on the site initially. When other people got invited by them, and the newer users didn’t see their friends and family on the site, they just left and never revisited it. That was my experience anyways. The model Threads used will be the model that all large social media sites use to roll out new social media products, it just makes the most sense.
Eh, the whole reason I refused to use it WAS because they forced it on me so hard. Being forced into having one of you wanted to watch YouTube did my head in and I refused to use it. Same reason I don’t use Microsoft edge even though it’s a little less shit now
They started out like that, but then they tried to force it down everybody’s throats and it backfired. It was mismanaged from start to finish, which is a shame because it really was good despite Vic Gundotra.
Nah dude, there’s no way that would have worked, the reason why g + backfired was literally because everyone on yt was forced to make a g account to just comment.
I think you misunderstand what they’re saying. You shouldn’t have had to make an account. G+ should’ve just been a part of your existing Google account.
I don’t recall Apple making iMessage an optional messaging app you don’t have to use.
But… it is optional. Opt-out, sure, but optional nonetheless. I have disabled it on my work phone.
As far as I’m concerned, barely anyone uses iMessage outside US. If it weren’t for the US market, it would have been discontinued long ago.
To be fair, most Americans don’t know anything exists outside of America.
If they would have just pushed it out to everyone, day one, mandatory, no opt out, then we’d still have Google+ today.
Is this comment for real, or sarcasm? Did the upvoters forget about Google Buzz already?
That’s what they did with Google Buzz, and that was even less popular than G+ every was.
I feel like the fediverse is already way more active than what Google+ ever was.
I wonder if civilization will last 12 years
It made me think: can a Lemmy instance be hosted on a local network.
Like if the global internet is down but we maintained a local network in the village. Can we use Lemmy or mastodon?
Maybe when we have a good weather we manage to connect to the next village, so can we connect to their instance at this moment ?
It is straightforward to run an isolated network with TCP/IP, DNS, and web servers. The hard part would be dealing with software that complains/fails if you’re not using HTTPS.
In general, you would want an offline copy of the entire software stack (e.g. a Gentoo Linux mirror) so you can patch whatever problems you encounter.
You would have to run your own CA and get everyone to install your root cert on their devices. That what happens already with tech like smart cards and SSL inspection firewalls. It’s all about trusting the connection implicitly.
“Mate I dont trust you”
“Its okay, I have a certificate”
“This just says ‘Trust me bro’ and has your name at the bottom.”
“If you still dont trust me, just call this guy, he will vouch for me!”
“This is your own phone number.”
Yup! 😂
It would mpst likely come down to infrastructure maintenance capacity, so if we’re tallking regional or sub-regional maybe. For example southern california probably has enough industrial capacity that so long as raw materials can be acquired maintence would be relatively simple. But if we’re talking scattered individual townships without much intertown services then a BBS would probably be easier and more practical to maintain.
I don’t need a social network in a village, I’ll just step out of my house and yell.
Depends on how dense or spread out it is. If it’s dense and everything is in one place you might not need anything more than just going outside.
If it is spread out though you may want communication methods other than mail and if people already have the computers and existing infrastructure (many places have cables for network and phone lines) to set up a local network then that might be the best option.
I’m waiting for it to start
just one more turn…
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/zKQfxi8V5FA
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
Cool, sauce code. Good bot.
Bro bot
Wait… this was referenced in a futurama’s episode? That show is pure gold
I honestly hope lemmy will not die. It will have to become simpler though. For many people, it will be simply way too complicated to wrap their head around the fact of many instances and most of them will worry about not being able to interact with people from other instances.
Also, the main lemmy web app is not necessarily good and alternatives such as wefwef are far easier to use.
We just need to be better about simplifying the explanation. Don’t tell people “it’s a federated website using an activitypub backend to communicate like mastodon, but only links to federated lemmys not including mastodon instances…” Tell them “it’s a fourm that shares posts and comments with other fourms that agree to work together”. If they want more detail they can easily find it themselves.
Federation is the invisible glue that makes it all work… I have my own server but i can talk to you on lemmy.world without having to think about it or do anything special. Most people joining in the future won’t need to care federation even exists, just like they don’t care SMTP exists.
That said I suspect there will be a few mega servers anyway… just like gmail… people seem to like being where everyone else is.
I feel like the explanation using email as an example works pretty well. Most people understand how different emails from different providers can communicate, but their account is hosted on one platform.
Even better is to talk about phone carriers, because people seem to know those better than emails these days. “Just because your phone is using Carrier A doesn’t mean you can’t call your friends on Carriers B and C”
Just took a quick peak at wefwef.
You consider that easier?
Significantly. If you are used to the UI it is a very fast experience. The learning curve can be a bit sharp unfortunately.
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