Fediverse

Not in its current form. Anyone who's tried to start a tech company knows you have to make your solution simple to use. Making software easy to use is actually surprisingly hard, involving experts in user interfaces, a lot of thought on user onboarding and training.

Lemmy as it currently stands is relatively new-user hostile for non-technical users. Content discovery isn't very clear, people are confused about how to find communities to follow, and the mobile apps are barebones.

That's not to say it can't get there, but until you never need to mention that the system is federated, I think a lot of people will be turned off from the complexity of using Lemmy. The community right now is motivated to use Lemmy and I would imagine a little more on the technical side, but getting your parents to use Lemmy or Mastadon would be a challenge currently.

There is a powerful network effect to overcome here, and I don't think "being federated" is enough to overcome it for most people. Reddit and tumblr and discord offered us "what if all your forums/blogs/chatrooms were in one place" which is massively convenient, and why people flocked to those platforms. Thats a transformative user experience. being federated is transformative, but the change to the user experience -- beyond a larger barrier to entry -- is minimal. The point of mastodon is that its functionally equivalent to twitter without being centralized. But there are no decentralized places left on the internet, beyond those holdouts who are either very attached to their old technology or want to maintain their unilateral control over their platform, and who are unlikely to federate.

I don’t think it will replace it, but I do think that it will create a place for a niche group of conscious folks to build a community without the capitalistic aspects of life that have ruined a vast portion of the internet.

We just need to be sure to keep perspective and be ready to support and our server admins/developers. The lack of big tech funding is what could potentially hurt us here in the fediverse. Nothing is free and it’s on us to pay our own way before advertising starts to creep in.

It looks like they're going to merge

https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/8/23754304/instagram-meta-twitter-competitor-threads-activitypub

No. While it's not that complicated it is still more complicated than current social media. People won't like that.

As long as a hardware will be sold with microsoft/google/twitter/facebook by default, no chance fediverse replace all these well-established applications. BUT it's not a problem for me : i use what i like, open-source, and i let other use what they want.

Could it? Of course, absolutely.

Will it? Well, that's a much more complicated question, with a much more pessimistic answer.

I don’t believe that it will replace it but that is maybe a good thing. I’d be Ok with fediverse staying in niche with active user base, because once it’s mainstream it’s gonna attract corporations to enshittificate it like they did it with Twitter or Reddit.

And I’d be cautious with “Internet is flawed”, it’s for us more conscious users but for vast majority of people Internet unfortunately is fine.

Yes, I think so. It could. Is it likely to happen? No!

I see a distributed architecture central to have a “public space” online that works in the long term. The communication infrastructure shouldn't be controlled by any single party.

However the way people work and the way capitalism works, it's utterly difficult for something like ActivityPub to become the standard. F**book joining in frightens and encourages me at the same time.

No it turns the problem from your account being owned by a company looking to turn a profit to random people on the internet. If we had a way of downloading our accounts and transferring instances then maybe.

In the sense that it would take over facebook or instagram? No, not a chance.

For me personally it can. Not sure about everyone else.