When we have a critical mass of people, we can get random experts chiming in about interesting topics in an organic way.

  • Andrew@piefed.social
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    14 days ago

    That comment chain demonstrates a real appeal of Reddit. Even for something like a post-episode TV discussion, a critical mass of people means that not only can you have the discussion in the first place, but there might be some extra info from someone who worked on the set, or attended an audience taping.

    You can click to see the rest of the comments to see plenty wrong with Reddit too, but it’s not like there’s any particular drive to prevent the elements of Reddit culture that I find annoying from coming to Lemmy too.

    I’d be surprised if there’s ever a critical mass of people on a federated app though. If there is, it’s more likely to be on something with the proper funding, that hides the details from regular users (e.g
    it’ll be BlueSky, not Mastodon). On Reddit, Lemmy has a reputation for being too complicated, for the mundane reason that is. Too much stuff that should happen doesn’t, and the answer to why are the stuff that ‘normies’ don’t want to hear (LW and PD instances are both a bit unstable atm), or they’re so unintuitive that that they’ll need answering forever (e.g everything around discussion languages, instance blocks, newly-discovered communities , etc etc).

    I’ve just seen a user accidentally submit the same post to the same community multiple times (the worst I’ve seen is 4 times). Preventing that is some real ‘web dev 101’ shit. Federated apps can be an interesting hobby for inexperienced devs (like me), and mildly diverting for anyone who wants to use them as a user, but a critical mass of users?! Forget about it.

    • JaggedRobotPubes@lemmy.world
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      14 days ago

      All the others will get bought out and enshittified. The future is not there.

      The Fediverse has the potential to be the future. It’s gated behind open sourceheads not being all…open-sourcey about. Making it clunky to use and badly designed and then pulling the establishment economist “you poor schlub you’re just too dumb to get it” card, thereby shooting their own efforts in the foot.

      If they can make it open source AND easy to use/intuitive/well designed, then we have a solid future. If not, the future still won’t be those other places.

      • OpenStars@piefed.social
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        14 days ago

        It might though - don’t underestimate how much some sheeple prefer to simply be taken care of, rather than e.g. make a simple change to a config file. They will allow companies to sell all of their data, and not blink an eye. X is enshittifying for entirely different reasons (political ones), and Reddit for sheer stupidity, and Google as well, and… well but anyway, look at how many people are still on them, as opposed to here.