People complain about the algorithms on other social media but you can see here exactly why they have them.

Without them it becomes hard to get connected to things that interest you.

For Lemmy I've managed to build a decent feed by browsing all and subscribing to communities I like.

You just have to do the algorithms job now.

As for the big communities it's exactly what happened to the old internet. It used to be a large collection of individual sites but discovery was hard. So the front pages of the internet started popping up.

I expect the same thing will happen to the fediverse eventually. It's just a better user experience sadly.

Like the Internet ten years ago???

You realize that ten years ago was 2013, not 2001 or something? The Internet was not quiet in 2013, in fact I found it a lot more engaging then.

Everything has positives and negatives. It's up to you to evalute what you want and what you're willing to put up with.

On one end, traditional social media is totally centralized, controlled solely by the corpo. On the opposite, you have total decentralization like P2P networks for torrenting.

You pointed out the problems on one end, very little regulation of spam, scams, total decentralization is often very much isolationist.

To me, federation is the best of both worlds, and I'm willing to deal with some of the frustrations of that structure.

I personally enjoy some regional centralization like you get in the Fediverse, if you really don't like any instance's policies, you can spin up your own personal instance and federate with the instances you want.

For me, the unifying nature of the All-feed allows me to enjoy the specific content I am seeking while still being stationed in a specific instance that generally caters to my preferences.

I am not sure what isthc issue with (1) I agree that you follow people or community, it's a bit more complicated to follow the global which is too fast and the local might be to slow but how is it different from main social media ? If you follow no person/community you won't find much content (well indeed tik tok has an amazeng algorithm)

The fediverse especiallà Mastodon/Firefish has a community large enough to be usable. May be not for a kid who want to spend 7h a day browsing tiktok but if you just want to see some post and comment there is already more than enough.

No idea about how crypto based platform fare. I tried lbry a while ago and never tried nostr

1. like the Internet ten years ago

I would like that. I liked the internet ten years ago. I think today it's filled with yet more noise and lots of low-effort posts. But I don't know where Lemmy is headed. In August/September I was pretty active here and had lots of nice conversations and in the last few weeks I struggled a bit getting meaningful discussions going. And there seem to be a lot of posts where OP doesn't engage and just dumps a question. And people only reply to comments in order to point out mistakes.

I don't know your exactly problem. Maybe you're using Lemmy/Mastodon wrong?! If you mean there's not enough activity in niche interest communities, I agree...

2. each instance tend to be quite diverse. To find someone to follow, I must switch between different instances

I really like diversity, that's great. But why do you have to switch instances? The fediverse is supposed to be a connected network of instances. You should be able to do everything from everywhere, subscribe across instances and not needing to switch.

3. Fediverse isn’t truly decentralized; instances operate under the will of server owners

I think you confuse decentralized with anonymous / free speech / unmoderated platforms. Federated means it consists of several independent servers that get interconnected. Each server has it's own autonomy, rules and people who make decisions. (Distributed is yet another term for something slightly different.) If you mean something where nothing gets moderated and no-one banned, I suppose there are platforms like it. But I haven't yet seen an unmoderated place I like. They are fun for trolls and shitposters for like 3 days, then they become a place for hate and scams, ads and crypto schemes. Mostly posted by bots. And everyone normal will leave the platform so it's just toxic people mixed with lots of bots. You can post something but the only thing you get as a response is someone writing 25-times the n-word and some crypto-scam bots posting unrelated ads. So here, the will of server owners and moderators is what keeps this place running. Of course they don't always do the right thing. But still, we need them unless you have something different in mind. Maybe a better way to distribute power?

I don't know, I don't feel that I have updates I need to get.... I just scroll Lemmy and discuss things for a while, then do other things. I'm happy it doesn't have tons of activity because social media is not supposed to take over our lives.

I see people on the bus sitting on tiktok and I feel sorry for them.

And as for switching instances, you are doing it wrong. You can subscribe to any community in the fediverse right from your instance.

quiet and like the Internet ten years ago.

That's what I'm looking for.

Your brain is healing, give it some time.

been on lemmy.world, accessing via voyager on ios. its basically identical to reddit from an end-user perspective. sure its janky sometimes and content doesn’t get refreshed as frequently as a website that has millions of daily active users but the content is generally more enjoyable and im getting just as much of a dopamine hit of infinite scrolling as i was back in the day, with significantly less annoyance on top.

I find Lemmy works pretty well for a decentralised network.

It is possible to see what everyone has been subscribed to when sorting by all, and so subscribe myself to it to get it in my subscription feed.

There are nice apps like Liftoff which can manage multiple accounts at the same time, and even view instances all feed without an account on them.

Mastodon on the other hand is a bit lackluster in comparison I'd say. The subscription model is pretty had to start using as I need to either find # or people to subscribe to, and even subscribing to them. And even after doing that the posts aren't that interesting or feel empty due to no comments/likes/boost.

Maybe I subscribed to the wrong #, but I find Lemmy much more enticing than mastodon.

I find it difficult to get all the updates I need on a particular instance, and except for a few very large instances, most others appear quite quiet and like the Internet ten years ago.

About this particular problem, I see no reason to not join the largest instance in any case. Sheer discoverability of content is massively improved from sitting in the biggest pool, as I still have to subscribe to the communities I want to see.

Fediverse isn’t truly decentralized; instances operate under the will of server owners, who can ban and remove content as they please.

It's the Fediverse, not the Decentriverse.

I’ve been on Mastodon for a year now and have no problem finding people to follow. Mostly through boosts by people I already know or by following hashtags. I don’t ever go to local or federated timelines. But my goal is not to have a constant stream of new content, so I’m not actively looking for people anymore. I want to open it 2-3 times a day for a few minutes and be able to see most of what happened.

Hashtags should be your main focus though. That’s how you find people and content of your interest.

Give yourself time. Anything less than 3 months to get used to a platform is unrealistic. Humans don't like change, if after 3 months you still have issues, then fair shout

I made accounts all over the place and settled on kbin. It federates with Mastodon as well as lemmy, you can follow hashtags and block instances or websites yourself, and I just find the interface way more intuitive.

I've been here for a few months and my feed is finally at the point where my needs are being met and I never run out of internet.

Pick one you do like and just use that. I originally overthought the Fediverse and made accounts everywhere and thought I wanted all the things. Turns out it's perfectly fine to just use one and get content federated over from the others.

Also, most phone apps allow you to store credentials for multiple instances and quickly switch between them which is really handy.

I didn't know about Nostr, and honestly, thank you for letting me know. I find the idea behind the protocol to be pretty interesting, but wouldn't use it myself. I'm not keen on the idea of removing moderation altogether.

However, I do think that it's about time we rethink how moderation works on the Internet, and the fediverse should be a good place to start doing so. Perhaps my biggest gripe with the fediverse is that moderation works exactly the same as in corporate social media. Right now, moderators are picked under discretion of whatever the criteria of the admin are, and they are not subject to "the will of the people" so to speak. If a mod or admin acts in bad faith, the only recourse for the rest of the users is to leave, and maybe setup your own instance if you have the technical know-how. And while corporate media admins are somewhat constrained by investors, fediverse admins don't have to respond to anyone. Which is better than being bound by investors, but here, admins can and do take harsh decisions on a whim without having to justify anything to anyone. Which is honestly not a good thing.

So, while I imagined the fediverse as some network of interconnected small, self-managed communes, what we actually have is a network of petty fiefdoms, some of which do listen to their users even though they are under no obligation to do so, and others outright don't. I don't mean to say that centralized services are better at this, but in the end I'm having some of the same problems regarding arbitrariness of moderation and admin decisions here that I had on Reddit and Twitter.

I see the fediverse as the future of social media, but not in its current form. The way it currently works keeps us bound to drama and petty feuds between admins of instances, and that is unavoidable while large fedi platforms are hosted by single people or very small groups of people. Perhaps the way that this could be avoided would be by using a protocol that enforces decentralization of hosting, like Nostr does. I imagine it would work sort of like a torrent, where we are all sharing and hosting the instance or the communities we use, whether completely or only partially. Or perhaps an instance is made out of multiple relays which are hosted separately. This way, we wouldn't have issues such as admins unilaterally defederating instances because of a disagreement or stuff like that, since we'd all be admins in a way.

I wouldn't want to do away with moderation, but decisions such as who gets to be moderator, who gets to keep being moderator, and who we ban, fed with or defed from, is consulted via democratic process enforced by design. Otherwise, it's not going to be meaningfully different from centralized media once the big instances become big enough.

oh yeah man. the internet was just dead in 2013 ????????

I don't mean to be critical, but you complain about having to use multiple instances, then refer to Facebook and Twitter, and I can only assume you used Reddit or something similar, as well. So, two or three silos are two or three silos, whether it be those I listed or Lemmy, Mastodon and kbin (is that even the same as the other two? I don't know). Now, I can appreciate you wanting something more unified, but we didn't have that before and we're closer now.

OTOH, if you're talking multiple instances of a single fediverse app such as Lemmy, that's entirely up to you and where you decide to hang your hat. I pretty much just use one and it works well enough as long as defederation doesn't hit you.

People should leave Twitter, Facebook, etc. because they are Nazi bars. If you hang out at a Nazi bar, you're a Nazi. Case closed.

However, not migrating to any platform is a valid option. You don't have to do the Fediverse. You don't have to do Nostr. You don't have to do forums. You can just make a website for yourself with a blog, and communicating with others by email, XMPP instant messaging, or IRC.