memes @lemmy.world

2w ago

Maybe someday

Year of the ~~Linux Desktop~~ Fediverse!

Side note, DAE find calling them "normies" kinda icky? It's like straight outta 4chan

166 comments

The advantages most of us see in the Fediverse (lack of corporate control, low algorithm interference) are seen by most normal users as either of little importance, or actively detrimental. The Fediverse requires you engage with it to cultivate a feed that gives you what you're interested in. But the people fleeing to Rednote want a strong algorithm that feeds them what they want, and they don't mind influence games being played by the algorithm in exchange for this convenience.
- Personally, I think there's room in the Fediverse for an app with a "strong algorithm" provided it's completely open ofc.
  My biggest issue with algorithms isn't the fact they exist, but that they're proprietary black boxes so no one truly knows how it's being manipulated
  
  We should be able to select different fully open source algorithms from a drop down menu, and load custom ones from fediversealgorithmmenuwithdescriptions dot org, including "no algorithm".
  I assume that's like a billion hours of work, but, goals.
  
  Remember when Musk took over Twitter and "open sourced" the algorithm, although it was impossible to reconstruct anything from what was given, and contained clear signs of being edited and incriminating details suggesting content categorization and prioritization?
  What I really want to see is Facebook's algorithm, because it seems to just produce a neverending stream of alt-right bullshit.
  
  Fwiw Tiktok apparently just open sourced their algorithm a week or so ago.
  I wonder if loops will provide it as an option
  
  It’s gonna happen in the AT protocol I’m sure.
- Recommendation engines aren't the biggest issue. People will figure out how to fins what they want, and be generally happy with that, if looking is easy enough.
  The big issue is that "join the fediverse" is a really, really shitty and incomplete recommendation. It's like "join the blogosphere!"
  And "join Mastodon" or "join Lemmy" is bad, too. It's like asking them to "join Joomla".
  You need to point people to the specific website they should join, and that website has to already have what they're looking for. People aren't interested in building something.
  They just want to consume.
  
  You know, if this rednote thing really takes off, I don't think I can believe the whole "fediverse is too complicated" thing anymore. People are moving to an app that isn't even fully in English. That's WAY more complicated than picking a random instance out of a list (or more likely, just going to the one big one). I'm getting to where I think the vast majority of people just click on what's advertised no matter how stupid it is, and without ads (not people spreading things by word of mouth, I mean actual "ooh, shiny" ads) mainstream uptake of the fediverse will never happen. Good luck outspending the big corps on that.
  Might be for the best anyway. The type of people who respond to ads probably aren't particularly fun to engage with.
- Funny enough, that's also the reason that democracy is always in the brink of collapse.
- Don't get too high and mighty, you're doom scrolling like everyone else.
  
  I mean, I've got definite FOMO, but I generally don't feel the need to continuously search for new content. If the comms in my feed are quiet, that's nearly a good thing.
- It would be nice if the Fediverse (or some apps like Sync) had a strong algorithm that you can choose to activate if you like, once you install the app.
  And could pick from different algorithms, one big barrier to entry for new users is the UX just sucks compared to platforms they're used to.
  Eg. Default lemmy Web UI is TERRIBLE
  
  I kind of like the algorithm idea that Neptune (a potential Tiktok replacement) plans on having.
  https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZT2dbYBKj/
  It plans on giving users different sliders, such as:
  Following
  Friends
  Trending
  Categories
  etc.
  https://www.tiktok.com/@theneptuneapp?_t=ZT-8tE7t6KDR5m&_r=1
  Or maybe something like Fedialgo?
  Or maybe perhaps something like Bluesky's Algorithmic Custom Feeds, but adapted for Fediverse Social Media?:
  https://docs.bsky.app/docs/tutorials/custom-feeds
  https://bsky.social/about/blog/7-27-2023-custom-feeds
  https://docs.bsky.app/docs/starter-templates/custom-feeds
- I actually enjoy not having a strong algorithm here. This way I can spend as little as possible on my only social media app that I use.
- I mean, a software could easily do it they just don't.

A lot of people are going to rednote as a show of protest:
these people have had their data mined since they were babies, they've been taught by the market since birth that their data isn't something they should value
then they're told that it's bad that these other people can access their data, with no explanation as to why it's any different
while at the same time being told that it's totally fine for the folks who are already mining your data to sell it to the people who shouldn't have your data
So they're basically saying "you're lying, and your explanation contradicts your previous behavior, so I'm gonna do the exact opposite of what you want"
\ Again because they don't actually care about their data

Unfortunately, Fediverse apps still have a lot of UX issues compared to their mainstream alternatives. Those will need to be smoothed over for mainstream adoption to take root.
They’re attractive to the tech inclined who are comfortable working around what, to them, is minor clunkiness. Mainstream users have shorter attention spans and are more likely to move on when there’s friction.
Far as the meme is concerned, the only Fediverse equivalent is Loops which is still in closed beta.
- UX issues
  Easiest way to sum up Facebook
  
  Not with their onboarding.
  (Also, familiarity is a kind of UX lubricant, all on its own)
- Except Voyager app (or webapp) that shits ready for the masses
  Feels 100% like the Apollo app for redit, plus blocked features of Apollo are free in voyager
  
  Agreed, the Voyager app for lemmy is the GOAT.
- I don't know, though. I'm someone who gave up on Linux Mint because I just couldn't get it to work properly. I wouldn't say I'm tech inclined. I used a button phone until 2022. I only got a smartphone because my sim stopped working with my Nokia. The only issue I had with Lemmy was the sign up (it was during the reddit exodus so the sign ups weren't going through, but I'm glad cos I nearly joined ml).
  Mastodon was easy as heck to join. I got a friend to sign up, no issues, and he has no idea what the fediverse even is.

Fediverse fanboys when they realise that their obscure and socially complex software isn't know by many people specially outside of the tech bubble, and that it's not the same experiences that they will get with known platforms:
- The obscurity and social complexity is the whole reason I'm here haha. My hope is that even if/when fedi apps become the standard, we'll still have ways to curate ourselves into small corners as that's just way nicer.
  
  That's why I subscribe not to topics, but to interests. It doesn't solve the problem but it puts me with more interesting content and like-minded people, hopefully. Then again I don't want to be in a bias bubble...
- known platforms
  I seriously doubt that people 'knew' about some random app that isn't even translated all the way.
  
  If the app was elevated as a point of protest, then people only knew about it because it went viral recently.
  Lemmy was also briefly elevated during the Reddit exodus.
- You should try this new messenger app.

You're missing the important factor of the cultural zeitgeist
People who flocked to RedNote weren't just going there for an alternative to TikTok
They were specifically going there because the US government said "you can't go on the Chinese App!" so they said "Oh yeah? I'm gonna find an even MORE Chinese app to hang out at!"
- Then decades of sinophobic propaganda melted. It was amazing to watch.

You're expecting Zoomers and Gen Alpha irreversibly addicted to short-form video content, which has resulted in an attention span that doesn't extend past 30 seconds, to READ?
- Ok boomer
- (Not all of us, please. I'm 18 - and I love to read - and that's how I'm even a media and middleware loving nerdy programmer, and that's how I'm here!!! I'm not even from a developed nation...)
  (...I've been recommended by YouTube, videos of gen-alpha peeps talking about and using GNU-Linux OSs passionately, even!)
  
  No, not all of you! Or any other group, for that matter. Although I could certainly be wrong, I don’t think the comment is a blanket statement regarding the whole of the two generations, but rather just the portion of the demographic specifically mentioned, which certainly does exist.
  Many people older than those two specific generations don’t fit into the “younger generations dumb!” trope that gets highlighted by another commonly referenced subset, so I’d suggest not using that group as a measurement for all older generations. I hope that makes sense.
  Ignorant people have a tendency to be loud to compensate for their ignorance, and shouldn’t be used to define those with more nuance.
- I find this mentality disgusting. "Young people bad!"
- My kids use a plethora of short-form video apps, and they also read novels, in addition to hobbies like cooking, knitting, crocheting, mechanical work, etc.
  Maybe it's just your kids.
  
  Thanks for encouraging your kids to have diverse interests and hobbies instead of letting a glowing screen raise them. I don't have children but if I did I would hope to achieve the same for them.
  
  You know what, I shouldn't comment before I eat breakfast. You're fine, I hope you have a very nice day.
  
  There are plenty of kids who aren’t interested at all in the activities yours are.
  Maybe your kids are the exception.
- Your comment is another proof that Lemmy/Fediverse is lacking young people
  
  More or less is proving my point no?

Have you seen what acquiring lots of mainstream users does to a platform?
- It allows it to have a large range of content covering a variety of interests?
- Gotta second this. Especially if the growth is sudden. It's very difficult to integrate newer users into the existing culture.
  There are merits to being a smaller community.
- That's what I love about the fediverse. Sure, the huge instances will struggle to maintain their identity, but new instances can be spun up for approx $15/mo USD. Pass the hat around to 100 people and you can easily cover that.
  Also instances do not have to please everyone, and they don't have to push ads, or worry about being a friendly corp playground, so they can just tell people who don't fit the vibe to fuck right off.

Best thing that happened recently. Wonderful wonderful chaos, when the best plans of authoritarian politicians go awry. And I mean both Chinese and American politicians.
- I agree. Although the method of resolution could vary widely, depending on the party in power, if the US masses keep jumping from foreign platform to foreign platform.
- I don’t see how this is authoritarian, Bytedance’s bad intentions are clear. They could make money from selling the app, keep making money from it in a stock sale but yet they’d rather have 0 dollars than relinquish control of their brainrot engine. It’s clear that the CCP values it more as a cultural weapon than as a product.
  
  Why sell it, when they can just give trump a paycheck under the table to keep it going?
  
  A forced sale guarantees ByteDance gets a fire sale price. If there's any way forward that allows them to sell not-under-duress, there's a chance for far more upside.
  That works even for pure economics game theory, aside from wanting to continue in what they built on principle/commitment/interest in the project.
  Would Zuck give up Facebook for the right price? Would he give it up for a highly discounted price of a rush sale?
  
  Nobody would want to take a shitty deal, and since your comment was posted it's back online in the US. You sound like you don't understand how business works and are twisting facts to fit your understanding of the situation.

Guess they're China's problem now.
- Not until they move there
  
  I assure you, people can be a problem from afar.

Even worse; they flood the internet with „china actually kinda based“ posts. Orientalism is back and nothing changed
- In art history, literature and cultural studies, Orientalism is the imitation or depiction of aspects of the Eastern world (or "Orient") by writers, designers, and artists from the Western world. Orientalist painting, particularly of the Middle East,[1] was one of the many specialties of 19th-century academic art, and Western literature was influenced by a similar interest in Oriental themes.
  Critical studies
  Edward Said
  In his book Orientalism (1978), cultural critic Edward Said redefines the term Orientalism to describe a pervasive Western tradition—academic and artistic—of prejudiced outsider-interpretations of the Eastern world, which was shaped by the cultural attitudes of European imperialism in the 18th and 19th centuries.[20] The thesis of Orientalism develops Antonio Gramsci's theory of cultural hegemony, and Michel Foucault's theorisation of discourse (the knowledge-power relation) to criticise the scholarly tradition of Oriental studies. Said criticised contemporary scholars who perpetuated the tradition of outsider-interpretation of Arabo-Islamic cultures, especially Bernard Lewis and Fouad Ajami.[21][22] Furthermore, Said said that "The idea of representation is a theatrical one: the Orient is the stage on which the whole East is confined",[23] and that the subject of learned Orientalists "is not so much the East itself as the East made known, and therefore less fearsome, to the Western reading public".[24]
  In the academy, the book Orientalism (1978) became a foundational text of post-colonial cultural studies.[22] The analyses in Said's works are of Orientalism in European literature, especially French literature, and do not analyse visual art and Orientalist painting. In that vein, the art historian Linda Nochlin applied Said's methods of critical analysis to art, "with uneven results".[25] Other scholars see Orientalist paintings as depicting a myth and a fantasy that did not often correlate with reality.
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orientalism
  Yeah i dont think that people saying "China is kinda based" are trying to appropriate chinese culture from the perspective of a culturally and racially superior western hegemonial empire. Quite to the contrary actually.
  
  I swear some people think Westerners expressing any interest in anything Asian at all ever, or thinking an Asian country does something better than their own, is orientalism.
  
  Culturally and racially superior?

I don't think there are any experiences on the fediverse right now that are comparable to TikTok. Loops is still beta, isn't it? If Reddit was banned and people clocked to some Chinese forum I could agree with this meme.
- Love your avatar. I miss Netscape. Not that I remember it being awesome or anything. Just nostalgia.
  
  Compared to Internet Explorer it certainly was awesome, as I recall.
  
  Yeah, same. I sort of vaguely remember it as a kid. I had this saved on my computer from somewhere and saw it while making my Lemmy account. What's cool is that it is actually animated on some platforms.
  
  I remember just feeling cool for using something different than everyone else.
  Kind of uncomfortable how my other tech choices map onto this logic. Linux, vim, fediverse, ... Am I a dickhead?

I think that it was less: let's find alternatives, than it was fuck you government TikTok isn't Chinese enough. It was a direct answer to the government telling us which social media apps we were allowed to use. Also, 100% avoidable if they'd passed data protection instead. It really felt like the government enforcing private interests on its citizens.
Americans typically don't like the government telling us what to do. It's all fine if Facebook buys all the competition, but it's another thing when the government makes the competition illegal because they won't sell to zuck or musk.
Honestly, Redbook was sort of neat. I doubt it has much staying power as it was really just a protest, but it was sort of a historical feeling moment.

You mean they signed up for an app that actually works and generates a feed for you vs one that doesn't do either of those things?
- No, I think they mean “Well, fuck. The thing I liked is being taken away, and here’s where everyone else is going, so I should do that, too.”
  That’s just my interpretation, though.
  
  Sadly, yes
- exactly

I like the fediverse because there's no algorithm feeding me crap.
But from all the memes I've seen about people's "Chinese spy" perfecting their feed. I guess normal people love the algorithm
- That is definitely the appeal. My friends who use apps with algorithms like tik tok tell me that is the reason they use the apps. I can't blame them. Those algorithms showed me loads of obscure musical artists that are still my favorite today (and that is a good thing for indies/small businesses who don't have much money for ad spaces). There is a lot of good reasons for algorithms like that, the problem is the data necessary to make them work and what other stuff they do with it.
- I don't think algorithms are inherently bad, honestly I think the lack of an algorithm holds the fediverse back. On lemmy, sorting by popular creates an okish feed, enough to familiarize yourself with different comms, but on mastodon and the like, it can feel empty. While algorithms are associated with corporatism, an opt in adapted to fediverse sensibilities algorithm, could make some fedi apps more accessible.
  
  Agree
- I guess normal people love the algorithm
  The TikTok algorithm was/is (guess it’s back up, but not going back after the Trump messaging) really good about picking smaller niche videos. I had never really thought to get into spinning my own wool until I saw people working with dog hair brushes to card. Lots of recycled/punk/broke bitch crafts, which is a good way to glue me to the phone.
  I think algorithms can be good, there just isn’t much incentive to make them good. TikTok has really good discovery features, but it also wants to show you Family Guy clips next to video game footage so that you’ll shut your mind off and buy something.

Red note just added a feature that lets you translate any comment to English (or presumably the local language of your phone number) . Online reviews and Airbnb have done this for a long time. It's a simple yet amazing feature, one that will really remove barriers to appreciating different cultures. I would love to have it here so that everyone can speak their native tongue and others could appreciate it. I always want to know what the French and German communities are up to (those are the most common other languages I see).
- Browser plugins can do that.
  
  Great point

What is the one on the left anyway?
- Fedivserse logo, thats lemmy, mastodon, sharkey, mbin and all the other decentralised social medias.
  
  While I like the logo, I also realize that the logo also evokes blind hatred from people. Unfortunately, you only have to mention the color scheme, which for many is like a declaration of war. Sick world

Perfect meme to describe what's happening. Yes, fedi has some UX issues and is not very beginner friendly.
But also, people have gotten so used to being spoonfed content from an algorithm that tells them what they want to see that they can't handle the prospect of "build your own algorithm"
Corpo-curated-content is a hard drug and most people don't realize that they have an addiction.
- Tiktok exposes me to all kinds of viewpoints I'd never have even thought to search for.
  \ Lemmy is a circle jerk by comparison.
  When you say "build your own algorithm" what you really mean is "decide who is allowed in my echo chamber, and what is the sort order of the content from those people". You can do that on Tiktok too, it's called the "following" feed, smh.
  But elitist Lemmy neckbeards are never willing to hear that they're not actually special
  
  You deserve an award for telling the truth

power users/businesses: "you can't go VIRAL on mastodon"
Regular Users: "yOu HaVe To PiCk A sErVeR?????"

Is the cute little monster thing eating powdered sugar with his whole face?
- Is this old? Is this what old feels like?
  
  Yeah, people not recognizing Elmo is a special kind of pain.

I don't think you can localize to a language. You localize to a region, you translate to a language. Localization goes beyond mere translation, they are different concepts.
- We call both localization, because what you're doing is branching out controls, formats, and such to a locale, which is not necessarily a location or a region. You could have en-us, en-ca, en-us, en-uk, en-au, en-sp, or you just have en to translate it to English and call it a day
- Not to tech bros, they were to hungover from their sketchy frat bro ragers full of men hoping to get lucky and commit sexual assault to pay attention in that one humanities class they took freshman year.
  Language studies are an obsolete profession to them, the future they have built is bullshit all the way down, there is nothing left to study other than the language of utter incompetency and proud willful ignorance steeped in chauvinism which they eminate like a 2005 vintage Abercrombie & Fitch mall store eminated vapors of shitty cologne.
  
  It's a bit akward to respond to that, since I did a Master's in CompSci, lol. At least I can distance myself from that massive burn a little by saying that I was the akward virgin type and didn't like the machine learning courses I had to take.
  Language studies seem fascinating to me, I always found the stuff my sister was doing in her studies pretty interesting. A friend of hers was even trying to become an interpreter, that sounds so difficult.
  
  Not that I disagree with the sentiment but in most software systems localization does not just mean translation either. Localization as a practice includes date, time, and number formats, preferred units of measure, language and dialect, and sometimes a few other things. I'm not saying localization or translation are done well, or that the Big Tech companies give any shits about it at all, but its not as though computer professionals are all entirely ignorant of these distinctions.

Yep that's addiction it's hard to recover.

OK but my wife is actually excited by how it lets her see Chinese experiences

I recently listened to Paul Frazee talk about Bluesky on the Software Engineering Radio podcast and it struck me that one thing they got right was looking at social media like a search engine looks at the web, instead of like a centralized platform(Facebook) and instead of like a federated network of platforms(fediverse).
If your feed is understood to be just the search results you see, then users can understand that their algorithm is something they need to work on in the same vein that they change their search parameters on Google or Bing or other search engines.
- you don't have access to the algorithm though.
  
  No, but you have access to the protocol so you write your own algorithm.
  Then it is your algorithm, using the common protocol, that goes out and retrieves search results for your feed.
  Likewise, 3rd party corporations can write their own algorithms on the protocol and everyone can choose which algorithms fill their personal feed with search results - turning them on or off on a whim, at a personalized level.

This is fine. I don't want mainstream users. I want niche weirdos.

Yeah, I use "normie" occasionally and it kinda makes me feel like le edgy teen. But the problem is that I'm not sure if there's another word that quite replaces it either. Sometimes it's the only word that works in a particular context.
- "Average person"?
  
  Doesn't have the same vibes though. To me 'normie' has always been a little bit of an insult on top of just describing the 'average person'. "Average person" is for when you're describing statistics. "Normie" is for when you're describing people that clutch their pearls and their bible when a goth walks past.

we love our chinese/american overlords!

Who?

166 comments