Mate, you are a none track record.
Recent posts:
What is going on with kbin - a week has passed with no sign of any life
What is going on with Kbin
Issues with the functioning of kbin.social
Why is kbin so full of empty stuff?
Why is kbin so full of empty stuff?
Mbin is born - Fork of kbin
I’m surprised EM hasn’t blocked posts that mention other replacements.
Same with fb (not meta) and google (not alphabet).
Great response. Thanks for putting this together.
I had seen the first two links/points you mentioned before and they are both interesting reads.
The third I had not seen before.
On a meta note:
If you don’t want to watch the full thing, maybe skip to just the end summary
When I read this my thought was: “Oh, is it an hour long deep dive into a subject” and was surprised that it was only 8ish minutes long… and you included a TLDR. Which is a great example of one of the issues with social media now. The collapse of attention spans.
A big factor in this for me is the lemmy-mobile/Kbin-desktop divide. I know it is not true for all people but accessing via mobile seems to exacerbate the short comment, little engagement issue. In part, I think due to the relative ease of typing on an actual keyboard vs a mobile screen.
I gave up viewing reddit on mobile several years ago due to this and to restrict my time on the site to when I was at home. (this was also the reason to access the fediverse via Kbin) Case in point, I would never write comments of the length I have in this thread on mobile.
While reddit and the fediverse look and behave a lot like old school forums that were desktop based, I think it is safe to say the majority of users access it on a mobile screen which changes the interaction dynamic and rewards or encourages the short comment and move on behaviour.
This is also why image based posts gained in popularity as they are easier to consume on a small screen.
I have no real answer to this as I realise that to many people, social media only exists in the mobile space but the way media is consumed does have a strong effect on what is consumed and I haven’t really seen this aspect of doomscrolling talked about in discussions like this.
At times I’d joke to myself that I could predict what the upvoted comments would be.
That was no joke. It was a regular occurrence.
Reddit’s biggest strength was also it biggest draw back, its size.
If you came across a thread that was more than 30 minutes old, there was little point in making a longish, thoughtful and nuanced response as it would be burred at on page 4 and lucky to be seen by anyone. Let alone read by someone who would take it on board and reply to any points you made in a meaningful way.
The main way to gain any visibility was to reply to one of the top 3 or 4 comments, which often lead to a large number of actually replies that were correcting a minor error of fact in the comment, rather than addressing the point of the comment.
The response to this by some people was to hang out in r/new and post comments in the fresh posts in the hope of getting some visibility that way. The down side was there was still little point in spending 5-10 minutes (or more) writing a long form post as two things would usually happen.
1: The post would gain no traction, get lost in the flood of new posts and never be seen on the main tabs, so your reply would be unread.
2: The post would gain traction but in the 10 minutes you were writing a decent reply, the flood of the same jokes and one liners have already drowned out any real discussion.
Whether you cared about Karma or not, the sheer volume of comments and votes drove those that did to endlessly spam the same responses over and over again.It is a great example that at some level humans on mass are no better than the pigeons B F Skinner placed in his boxes endlessly hammering away at the button in the hope that this time a treat will pop out.
Now, I assume, many of us here have had a similar experience. While we may not have liked it, conditioning like that is really hard to break. Personally, I am willing to admit that my first thought was to hit add comment after only writing the first line of my response.
The only thing that is harder than forming a habit is breaking one that is maladaptive and not serving you well.
I’m assuming most of us here want a large community.
Meh. It is not a big driver for me. I have been using text based forums since before slashdot. Some were big, like slashdot, most were not.
Personally, massive is not better.
I didn’t use reddit because it was huge, I ended up there because to swallowed a few niche forums I used to visit.
Outside the small single interest subs, reddit reminded me of slashdot. I felt like a small voice drowned out by sheer mass of the crowd.
Yet, when I’ve seen federated software recommended on other social media websites, every article and many times, we tell everyone about the underlying technology first and THEN about how they actually compare to Twitter/Reddit
In marketing there is a term USP. Unique Sell Proposition. What does your product have that others do not?
The distributed nature of federated software is its USP.
“Why should I move from reddit/twitter/etc?”
It is social media that allows privacy and stops Corps selling your data is its USP.
If the person you are talking to does not care about the above, they have no reason to move.
You said as much yourself:
Telling them about tech-related things that they don’t know about or aren’t really interested in doesn’t help much.
The problem is that in all other aspects of social media: ease of use, userbase etc the various flavours of federated social media are last.
TLDR: If the average user does not care about the technical reasons federated social media differs from the rest. They will see little to no benefit in switching.
The local artist down the street likely doesn’t care about having a deep understanding about federation works or the benefits of decentralized versus centralized social media. They just want somewhere to post their art for others to see and comment on others in their space.
Personally, I am a bit sceptical about the long term sustainability and scalability of data storage for data intensive (images and video) federated services.
If they see a large influx of users and usage, the hosting costs are going to rise fast.
Unless the artist you mention is willing to set up and host their own instance and that is another jump beyond getting them to create an account.
Yup. Though original is probably the better description.