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Viking_Hippie @lemmy.dbzer0.com

We're RIGHT HERE :(

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/24394554

Text for readability:

So far, Americans using RedNote have said they don't care if China has access to their data. Viral videos on TikTok in recent days have shown Americans jokingly saying they will miss their personal "Chinese spy," while others say they are purposefully giving RedNote access to their data in a show of protest against the wishes of the U.S. government.

"This also highlights the fact that people are thirsty for platforms that aren't controlled by the same few oligarchs," Quintin said. "People will happily jump to another platform even if it presents new, unknown risks."

116 comments

  • "This also highlights the fact that people are thirsty for platforms that aren't controlled by the same few oligarchs," Quintin said. "People will happily jump to another platform even if it presents new, unknown risks."

    Once again...meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

  • Honestly the Fediverse needs to realize that decentralizing has consequences for the user experience. The average user is confused by the idea that there are multiple instances of a single community, for example realizing that there is a /c/AskLemmy on multiple instances can be really confusing, especially for lay people who aren't technically inclined.

    Even for those that aren't intimidated or confused, it can still be frustrating to not have a centralized community, and there can be diminished value from not having all the users in one centralized place, e.g. if you ask your question on one instance and it doesn't reach a bunch of users because of defederation and fracture between different instances, the truth is your question isn't really going out to Lemmy but instead some smaller subset of Lemmy users. This dilutes the usefulness of that online community in a lot of cases - there is less content, fewer interactions, etc.

    Ultimately people are only going to sacrifice so much, they may be thirsty for a platform that isn't run by oligarchs, but the Fediverse doesn't seem to offer feature parity for most people, as we saw with the failed migration of users to Mastodon after Elon Musk acquired Twitter.

    • they may be thirsty for a platform that isn’t run by oligarchs

      Except this isn't the case at all, evidently.

      I doubt they care at all who runs the platform they use (again, evidently), they just want the addictive dopamine hit these apps are designed to constantly provide (the vast majority of people didn't leave fb or twitter because of zuck or musk, they left because something more addictive and personally tailored thanks to even more intrusive and manipulative algorithms came along). Honestly, the idea that this migration is fuelled by any anti-rich/anti censorship sentiments (neither of which is met by rednote) is completely ridiculous.

      Otherwise I agree, the fediverse can be hard for people to pick up, which is a shame, but I think those who genuinely do want to get away from oligarchs, the state, and their censorship, rather than just keep swiping (or whatever you do on tiktok/rednote) for their dopamine, are much more likely to actually make the small effort it requires to figure it out.

      • Not everyone has the same situation.

        Sure, some people have every opportunity to research and learn about alternatives, but the number of those people are much fewer than the number of people busy raising kids, holding down jobs, etc. This idea that users are mostly idiots who are addicted to the algorithm is highly reductive, it actually adopts the cynical mindset of the capitalists trying to manipulate people (that users are just marks, idiots to be exploited, deserving of their exploitation). It's honestly surprising to see how much hatred people have for the average user here, considering to my mind Lemmy is meant to be a non-profit, community-driven alternative to corporate apps like Reddit. You would think that mindset would come with some understanding that the users are the victims and that blaming them misses the point. Lemmy is not a perfect alternative to Reddit, as I made my point above, so blaming the users feels a bit delusional to me, and honestly quite convenient to the desires of the oligarchs, which is to ignore social, economic, and otherwise structural inequalities and manipulations and instead focus on the failings of individuals (in this case users) to not exceed their circumstances.

    • The average user is confused by the idea that there are multiple instances of a single community, for example realizing that there is a /c/AskLemmy on multiple instances can be really confusing, especially for lay people who aren’t technically inclined.

      Isn't the same on Reddit? How do people know what is the best community between /r/Games, /r/Gaming, ,/r/VideoGames, /r/TrueGaming?

      It is known for instance than /r/Canada isn't as good as /r/OnGuardForThee , but that is something that people have to figure out too.

      • Yes, and I think Reddit has struggled to gain the same number of users as other social media platforms - their UI is more challenging for a lot of people, and the experience of trying to find communities can be frustrating and confusing. It's a good point, but I still found it fairly easy to find the main subreddit for a given community based on the activity going on. My point about fractured instances is that you don't have something like two /c/Gaming communities that don't overlap in users at all due to defederation. On Reddit a user is on a single instance with all the communities in one place. On Lemmy you have to find not just the community but also the instance that community is on (or an instance that federates with the instance the community is on). All of these extra steps are even more complicated, and remember Reddit's interface was already confusing for lots of people.

    • That's also a feature though. If I want to ask "should I risk snuggling myself into another state (in the USA) in order to get an abortion - what if someone finds out?", then I don't want the opinions of the Alt-Right (or the Alt-Left either), bc... I am not insane?

      Also, isn't Lemmy far less fractured than Mastodon?

      • yes, the bug is a feature in some sense, but it's still also a bug 😅

        Do you know how big Lemmy is compared to Mastodon? I actually know much less about Mastodon, I just never could use anything like Twitter, trying to fit my thoughts into so few characters was futile (and yeah, maybe that's a me problem, but still). Anyway, just completely speculating that if Lemmy is newer and smaller it might not have had the same opportunity to develop the same animosities and fractures, but at this point I'm literally making up fictions.

    • Maybe there should be a library of all the communities that have matching names and goals, so that an app can present them as one group with all the posts and comments merged as if it was just the one community.

      The app would need some smarts so as to de-duplicate posts etc.

      • A semi-unified view is sorta what you get when instances are federated with one another, not that communities with the same name get unified but at least both communities' posts show up in one place. But the problem is even if you solve those problems, you still have instances that will defederate over differences in moderation policies and politics, etc. - ultimately a given set of instances will still always be a fractured subset of all the Lemmy instances. Maybe with enough people in a set of instances this wouldn't be a problem, but you have to find a way to get that many people to show up and stick around, and you have to keep those instances playing nice with one another and not falling apart like Mastodon instances did when a huge number of people migrated. People bring drama and overwhelm these smaller communities which are maintained by volunteers running servers and moderating. Ultimately what you see is that people just quit, and there is no stability - and then users leave and don't come back.

        It's just not a model for gaining and retaining users, tbh.

      • Maybe there should be a library of all the communities that have matching names and goals, so that an app can present them as one group with all the posts and comments merged as if it was just the one community.

        Not sure people want to see a merge between !politics@lemmy.world and !usa@lemmy.ml

    • Maybe I'm just old but the concepts are no harder than irc or Usenet. It's been around forever.

      • I think my mom would find IRC and usenet very difficult to get into using, for example. Being old doesn't mean it's accessible or understandable to people. Even worse, the young people (like "Gen Z", as much as I hate to use generational thinking) seem to be less tech-literate than Gen Y, so lots of the relevant user base are not going to navigate these things even if they seem simple to a lot of us. Just the curse of expertise I guess (where you forget what it was like before you knew things, how intimidating it all was, etc.).

    • If someone gets confused about two different places with the same name existing then, frankly, they are not good enough to join lemmy to begin with. They'd just lower the quality of the platform, and i say that as someone who doesn't contribute all that much myself.

      • sure, I can understand that concern, but I think there are plenty of users who might need better UI/UX for so many different reasons (thinking of disabilities like dyslexia, etc.) that have nothing to do with the quality of the content they would bring.

        My point is that users bring content and activity, and that is why people ultimately want to join and stick around in an online community. Not every person who finds the Fediverse confusing is "not good enough" - I just hard disagree with you, there are plenty of good people with useful and entertaining things to contribute who would be more likely to if there weren't barriers. Regardless, this attitude is exactly what I think undermines the Fediverse, it's arrogant and alienating. Lemmy shouldn't be just for the technologically privileged, websites in general should be accessible to people of all kinds and perhaps online communities especially. What's the point of a community-built social media alternative if we reject most humans who would make up that community?

  • 2 massive issues I have with pixelfed: No support for webp No support for hevc/heic

    I don't use an iPhone but I do use heic for 10bit. As heic is default on iPhone, this means that iPhone users go through all the hassle to set up a pixelfed account but then can't upload anything.

    That's not good.

  • I'm going to be honest, I do feel a little baffled but maybe that's because I didn't vibe with tik tok.

    I think the pros are probably responsiveness and uptime (compared to fediverse things). Even now, hexbear goes down for one reason or another, to say nothing of back when we were the biggest lemmy instance (sorry Des, god that was a while ago), and setting up a new server is something that the vast majority of people don't want to do (especially compared to just signing up for an account). I think this is especially the case if you mostly consume video. While peertube (and others?) does exist, video is still pretty big per second of content, meaning that sort of continuous scroll video is a big ask for a small private server.

    Compared to Facebook or Twitter or whatever, its unlikely that a Chinese spy is going to rat your weed ring out to American feds, unlike Facebook or Twitter (which routinely co-operate with American cops, no warrant).

    Lastly, network effect, which is the big one. If the big creators you follow (idk what tiktok is like) go somewhere, you're going to follow them (well, not you, fellow lemmy person, but you know who I'm talking about). And your preference is that all your big creators go to the same place rather than to a dozen fediverse instances. Not that it would be insurmountable, but it would be a bigger ask.

    Specific oligarchs may still be an effect (Zuck or Musk are not necessarily the most popular people).

116 comments