This convinced me that ActivityPub/Mastodon/Lemmy are doomed and are not a viable alternative to Big Social Media.
All the right-leaning people already left Big Tech a few years ago when they started deplatforming conservatives. They’ve already migrated to sites like patriots.win or forums.red. The only people left to leave big tech in the Twitter/Reddit exodus are the leftists. This means that all the big Mastodon/Lemmy instances are controlled by leftists.
In 2023, standard operating procedure for leftists is to censor people on the right. That is NOT how Big Social Media did it. When they were new sites, they were welcome to everyone. Only once they had a monopoly market position, they kicked out the right. If Lemmy is alienating half the population from the get-go, that’s a nonstarter. It might seem reasonable for political discussion, but for niche interests, you aren’t going to get a critical mass of users to displace Reddit. Things I’m interested in like Godot or Retrogaming have WAY MORE users on Reddit still, and lemmy is now hopelessly fractured. I won’t go back to lemmy.world, and the other instances just don’t have enough users to support a niche interest.
On Mastodon, the big sites go to all the smaller sites and say “You defederate from the same sites we block, or we’ll defederate from you and your instance becomes useless.” Lemmy.world now has the same negotiating position for lemmy, and they’re now throwing their weight around and demanding other sites block exploding heads.
ActivityPub is the decentralized protocol that is controlled by a handful of large websites. I.e., it has zero chance of actually delivering on its promise as currently implemented.
ActivityPub is defective by design. The decision to block or defederate should be done at the user level and not at the site level. A site can and should maintain a default blocklist, but individuals should be able to override the settings. The fact that none of the implementations do this shows that it is designed to create echo chambers and not a true open network.
I can’t use lemmy.world, because it’s controlled by censoring commies. There’s no point staying on exploding heads, because there just aren’t enough users to make a difference. What does exploding heads offer that patriots.win or forums.red or reddit offers? For niche hobby interests, reddit is still the place to go. For politics, you won’t surpass patriots.win.
I also read about how Google killed XMPP. XMPP was an open chat protocol. Then Google started their own implementation of XMPP. Eventually, more than 75% of XMPP users were using it via Google. Then Google decided they weren’t going to follow the XMPP protocol anymore. They made their own proprietary changes and broke compatibility. If you were a Google XMPP user, the net effect was that a few of your contacts disappeared (and you may not have even been aware Google was using XMPP). If you were a non-Google XMPP user, this was a disaster, most of your contacts were now gone and you had to switch to Google.
Facebook is making an ActivityPub client. I assume they’re going to use the same playbook to kill ActivityPub that Google used to kill XMPP. Facebook could even offer the big ActivityPub nodes $100M each to buy them out and the network would then be dead.
Bottom line for me: ActivityPub has no future. Now that it’s fractured into a large group of commies and a small group of free speech posters, lemmy offers me nothing that other free speech websites offer. For niche hobby interests, it’s back to Reddit. For politics, lemmy has no advantage over established free speech forums.
This convinced me that ActivityPub/Mastodon/Lemmy are doomed and are not a viable alternative to Big Social Media.
All the right-leaning people already left Big Tech a few years ago when they started deplatforming conservatives. They’ve already migrated to sites like patriots.win or forums.red. The only people left to leave big tech in the Twitter/Reddit exodus are the leftists. This means that all the big Mastodon/Lemmy instances are controlled by leftists.
In 2023, standard operating procedure for leftists is to censor people on the right. That is NOT how Big Social Media did it. When they were new sites, they were welcome to everyone. Only once they had a monopoly market position, they kicked out the right. If Lemmy is alienating half the population from the get-go, that’s a nonstarter. It might seem reasonable for political discussion, but for niche interests, you aren’t going to get a critical mass of users to displace Reddit. Things I’m interested in like Godot or Retrogaming have WAY MORE users on Reddit still, and lemmy is now hopelessly fractured. I won’t go back to lemmy.world, and the other instances just don’t have enough users to support a niche interest.
On Mastodon, the big sites go to all the smaller sites and say “You defederate from the same sites we block, or we’ll defederate from you and your instance becomes useless.” Lemmy.world now has the same negotiating position for lemmy, and they’re now throwing their weight around and demanding other sites block exploding heads.
ActivityPub is the decentralized protocol that is controlled by a handful of large websites. I.e., it has zero chance of actually delivering on its promise as currently implemented.
ActivityPub is defective by design. The decision to block or defederate should be done at the user level and not at the site level. A site can and should maintain a default blocklist, but individuals should be able to override the settings. The fact that none of the implementations do this shows that it is designed to create echo chambers and not a true open network.
I can’t use lemmy.world, because it’s controlled by censoring commies. There’s no point staying on exploding heads, because there just aren’t enough users to make a difference. What does exploding heads offer that patriots.win or forums.red or reddit offers? For niche hobby interests, reddit is still the place to go. For politics, you won’t surpass patriots.win.
I also read about how Google killed XMPP. XMPP was an open chat protocol. Then Google started their own implementation of XMPP. Eventually, more than 75% of XMPP users were using it via Google. Then Google decided they weren’t going to follow the XMPP protocol anymore. They made their own proprietary changes and broke compatibility. If you were a Google XMPP user, the net effect was that a few of your contacts disappeared (and you may not have even been aware Google was using XMPP). If you were a non-Google XMPP user, this was a disaster, most of your contacts were now gone and you had to switch to Google.
Facebook is making an ActivityPub client. I assume they’re going to use the same playbook to kill ActivityPub that Google used to kill XMPP. Facebook could even offer the big ActivityPub nodes $100M each to buy them out and the network would then be dead.
Bottom line for me: ActivityPub has no future. Now that it’s fractured into a large group of commies and a small group of free speech posters, lemmy offers me nothing that other free speech websites offer. For niche hobby interests, it’s back to Reddit. For politics, lemmy has no advantage over established free speech forums.
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No one’s reading all that bro 🤣
i read it twice. he’s right.
tldr? I’m tempted to put it into ChatGPT for a summary after your comment…
Seems like a sober assessment. So I hate it. LOL.
But let me also say this: small communities can be meanngful and good. That’s what your best friend group is, after all.
We can’t be that, but we can be worth some lulz here & there.