cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/48234252
With the worldwide wave of social media bans on major platforms aka digital verification, I wonder if we'll see an influx of people to the Fediverse?
🤞🤞🤞 here is hoping <3
BurgerBaron 16 points 7 days ago
And suffer all the problems popularity brings.
awildfaerie 4 points 7 days ago path: 0 24281427 24282267 24282685, hotness: undefined, score: 4, children: 8
dfyx 8 points 7 days ago
There is a middle ground between pulling up the ladder and trying to get everyone in the world on board.
Everyone who is genuinely interested is more than welcome but the fediverse is currently not equipped to handle hundreds of thousands or even millions of new users. Let the general public find their own niche and concentrate on the ones who find us on their own or through friends.
awildfaerie 1 point 6 days ago path: 0 24281427 24282267 24282685 24283399 24286975, hotness: undefined, score: 1, children: 0
BurgerBaron 6 points 7 days ago
I was thinking about:
Server costs, vast increase of bad actors and bots, legal scrutiny, international government narrative manipulation. Overall quality drop from LCD majority who aren't typically early adopters of any new social platform. Stuff like that.
This is your first comment on your new account and you chose to be an asshole. Congratulations.
awildfaerie 0 points 6 days ago path: 0 24281427 24282267 24282685 24282828 24286718, hotness: undefined, score: 0, children: 0
dfyx 3 points 7 days ago
It might be hard to enforce for every instance but even if only 1% of instance admins get strongly worded letters threatening fines if they don't follow the law, I guarantee you that many more will just decide that it's not worth the risk, they close their instances and we end up with even fewer users than before.
Between server costs, moderation effort, discussions whether certain instances should be defederated, and existing legal requirements (like removal requests for copyrighted or illegal material), hosting an instance is already a thankless job and most admins do it for free. The last thing we need is uncontrolled growth that attracts lawmakers' attention as well as users that don't share our values and require even more moderation.
Let the fediverse grow naturally. We don't need to shut anyone out but we shouldn't actively advertise to the whole world either. Recruit your friends who might be interested in the content and culture we already have. Let the rest of the world find their own thing. That way, we can maybe stay under the radar for a couple more years before the problems start.
Skavau 4 points 7 days ago
It might be hard to enforce for every instance but even if only 1% of instance admins get strongly worded letters threatening fines if they don’t follow the law, I guarantee you that many more will just decide that it’s not worth the risk, they close their instances and we end up with even fewer users than before.
Lol, Ofcom still are stuck trying to ban 4chan. You overestimate their ability.
dfyx 2 points 7 days ago
And you overestimate the amount of bullshit the average instance admin is willing to put up with. Sure there will be a few instances who can afford lawyers, offshore servers, whatever. But the majority are hobbyists who think this whole fediverse thing is neat as long as it costs a few bucks for an off the shelf web host and a bit of free time to moderate. And if those people get legal threats, they will either comply or get out because running an instance with 100 users is just not worth the risk of ruining your life.
The fediverse wouldn't die completely but it would for sure lose many smaller instances. We've already lost larger ones like lemm.ee for less.
lambalicious 1 point 7 days ago
I knew that lemmy having the issue of instance identity being tied to DNS was going to eventually bite it in the ass.
It if weren't for that, it'd be as easy as migrating the instance to a different jurisdiction. Which, speaking of, is a whack-a-mole game; what we need is to set up shop in some sort of international waters jurisdiction or something that has enough soverengity and amicability that assures say the UK can't legally threaten it anymore than they can threaten a random online-delivery donut shop in Laos.
c0dezer0 5 points 7 days ago
building its own culture
Sometimes I see users recycle old overused jokes in the comment section.
Like come on. This is a different place. We don't want to become a copy of Reddit.
atro_city 12 points 7 days ago
I just hope they don't all go to "lemmy.world" or some huge instance. Regardless, even the @eucommission is understanding the value of the fediverse and has its own mastodon instance. The German government is also going more opensource, the Dutch government wants to have an alternative to GitHub that might join the fediverse, France has the DINUM which seems to want to aggressively leave US big tech behind.
One big problem I see with the EU finally noticing opensource is that they are new to the game and will take lobbying money. Solutions like BlueSky might easily lead them astray, but I seriously hope they will see "developed by USAians" and go "fuck that, we want Mastodon that's spearheaded by a German non-profit".
It's very imaginable that more duds like BlueSky will pop up to distract from the fediverse and try to grab a piece of the monetary and attention pie the EU has.
rob200 10 points 6 days ago
I'm actually afraid the opposite might actually happen.
if users (especially new potential users to the Fediverse.) find that social media requires them to id verifiy most of them will probably just either stick to a narrow smaller few of sites they know people use, or they'l obsolete themselves from the social media aspects of the internet entirely.
KentNavalesi 0 points 3 days ago
path: 0 24287571 24330640 24343228, hotness: undefined, score: 0, children: 2
That's the most likely scenario.
OpenStars 4 points 7 days ago
Doubtful - Lemmy's userbase continues to shrink or at best hold steady, and while PieFed continues to keep doubling in size, its total subscriber count remains a moderate fraction of Lemmy's.
On the other hand, the tools keep getting better - excruciatingly slowly, but consistently nonetheless.
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fediverse
@lemmy.world
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A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, Mbin, etc).
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Rules
- Posts must be on topic.
- Be respectful of others.
- Cite the sources used for graphs and other statistics.
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Learn more at these websites: Join The Fediverse Wiki, Fediverse.info, Wikipedia Page, The Federation Info (Stats), FediDB (Stats), Sub Rehab (Reddit Migration)
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I actually hope the fediverse doesn't grow too rapidly. Otherwise we will also be forced to implement age verification.
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