I'll cut to the punch line: Chances are, only a very small handful (like two or three) of the current fedi platforms will survive for the long term. Mastodon is probably here for quite a while. Most of the others will fade into obscurity as the big niches get stably colonized, network effects become more and more dominant, and there starts to be less and less reason for anyone to switch. But so many of them are so much in their infancy now that it's tough to tell in advance anything about the future. Plus, the competition and profusion of new ideas during the current time will be ultimately beneficial for whatever the outcome will be.
this post was submitted on 05 Mar 2024
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I always think about the post I saw a while back that was like "I use KeepassXC, a fork of KeepassX, a port of Keepass". That seems very likely to be true in regards to the fediverse as well.
But I think that's great, as a contributor to one platform I don't necessarily see it as "one software above all", which might be bad to say, but more like we're all sailing on the much larger ship Fediverse, and it's been great to see so much back and forth between the different ones, for example one person helping get pixelfed's avatars federating, or piefed's blogs, which helped reduce page load sizes for mbin by 40%. It's quite possible we're all just slowly contributing to a lot of learned lessons for a yet unstarted software.
All that said, mastodon does have a ton of staying power, as you said. Once they fully support groups, and lemmy has stated they never plan to support microblogs, it's quite possible that mastodon will be a very solid experience for most of what people are looking for.
use KeepassXC, a fork of KeepassX, a port of Keepass
Feels familiar with the dozen of Misskey forks
Unfortunately this is likely true. Witness how quickly the fediverse has become "Lemmy" for a lot of users. Nothing against any Lemmy instances. I just hate how things coalescence, become stale and then invariably becomes compromised by the centralization
It hasn't though. The microblog part of the fediverse is far larger than the lemmy side of things. The fact that it seems like lemmy has become the fediverse is a problem with federation and availability between these two distinct "communities", but it doesn't represent coalescence of the fediverse.
Quite the opposite infact. Before lemmy came around, the fediverse pretty much was only the microblogging community. And now it's more diverse, thanks to lemmy and the other threadiverse apps
I think the structure of these apps in terms of the social interactions they encourage has a ton to do with the quality of the experience.
It's fairly clear to me that the quality of the conversation on Mastodon is simply better. I think it's because the not-quite-4chan-but-almost level of anonymity and randomness to any given interaction on Lemmy makes it easy and consequence-free to be a dick. Enabling mods to deal with it once the dickishness reaches a certain threshold doesn't really seem to do anything to solve the problem, partly because there's a huge range of dickish behavior that doesn't quite rise to the level where it needs mod attention, but still degrades the conversation and dilutes anything good anyone's trying to add.
I don't really have much experience outside the Lemmy and Mastodon communities, but I think app authors spending time on particular UX features would probably be better spending their time on studying in depth the types of interactions their apps are enabling and encouraging, and trying to keep an eye on that as they're designing the system. What those answers are I don't really know, but it seems important.
The killer feature of sublinks is going to the ability to move an existing lemmy instance to it. That is its strength because it means that it's not only start up instances that can use it.
Fully agree. It also means that feature parity + any advantage will be enough for the ecosystem as a whole to eventually migrate from Lemmy to SL.
Hopefully this is enough for a friendly arms race between both dev teams.
Are you planning to move blahaj zone if sublinks is good enough ?
I wouldn't say "planning", but it's an option I'm open to
Yeah the mod tools does seem tempting
That's awesome, I didn't know about that.
I hope that it succeeds. If it does, the whole "Fediverse forums" ecosystem will be better; and perhaps even Lemmy will be better in the process.
Oh yeah but what irks me is how they will integrate lemmy clients into it like will it be compatible as SL also has microblogging ?
I'm not sure but I think that it'll go both ways, with any potential new SL client being able to use Lemmy too.
Yeah i meant about the compatibility thing
Probably any compatibility will only work on the short term. It is unrealistic to think that two separate projects like this will keep compatibility over a long period of time.
Yeah the dev said something along that line
I will be migrating as soon as I can on here, and am making plans to start the "first" full sublinks instance when it reaches somewhat stability for production (sublinks.art). For transparency though, I am contributing to the project within the capacity that I am able to so I'm probably biased.
What would you say your main drive to do so is ?
They wrote ablog post about it
https://jewy.blog/2024/03/04/my-love-hate-relationship-with-lemmy
Yeah found it and my oerspective has changed very much in the time between read the edit. Also ty
I find it disappointing that it's written in Java. Rust is a great choice for Lemmy. Just a matter of taste, but I'd be much more inclined to contribute to a Rust project than a Java one, since I find it more enjoyable to work in Rust.
What makes you say that Kbin and Mbin have died out?
Kbin is only one person and as far as I can tell, it's mostly overrun by spam these days.
Ernest's a cool guy and all but needs to at least delegate some/most moderation.
Nah i said kbin has and mbin is going to if it continues down this path.
Any clarification you can provide on what "this path" means? Edit: Just trying to double check anything would be covered by known issues/roadmap, but it's fair to say there are a lot of issues.
Curious too, mbin still seems actively developped
Nah i meant like its too niche now let's see how it goes.
mbin is in active development, released 1.4.1 last week.
no idea whats up with kbin
Yeah good for you guys
more tools, the better. As long as it's running on activitypub everyone can talk to each other. I don't see any problems.
Having a competition might make lemmy devs implement more features or vice versa. It keeps developers from being too egotistical when users have options.
Eh it is the same as mbin . It maybe more of mbin competitor than lemmy honestly.
My pessimistic side is saying that it's a lot of effort that could've been spent on making Lemmy better instead. If everyone organised around Lemmy, nobody would need to migrate and stuff. If it's due to the devs, could just fork. It seems like the primary motivation is to switch from Rust to Java and switch out the devs at the same time. I don't agree with moving away from Rust and I don't think the devs are as out of touch as some people say (but maybe I just haven't been informed yet).
My optimistic side is saying that this will be good for both projects, as either can thrive independently and Lemmy and Sublinks servers will obviously continue to function together, just like Lemmy and the other Fediverse servers are currently doing anyway. More choice is never a bad thing and maybe some competition can be good for the whole space.
I think only time will tell what happens with both projects.
If it’s due to the devs, could just fork. It seems like the primary motivation is to switch from Rust to Java and switch out the devs at the same time.
They picked Java specifically because it will make it easier for them to get more contributors.
I'm not convinced that that is actually true (that it will bring more contributors, that is). We'll see, but we have yet to see it.
Rust is an extremely hyped language online these days (just check the size of [email protected] and [email protected] for example). If we talk about contributors, I don't think it's a bad choice. Yes, more people right now know Java (apparently not on programming.dev though? 😅), but probably a lot more people are interested in learning Rust than learning Java (Stack overflows survey suggests so). In the (not close, to be fair) future, there could easily be more Rust devs than Java devs.
Besides, in my humble opinion as a professional software engineer, Rust is just a better language than Java. It has native speed and much lower memory usage, but more importantly, it's more reliable and robust than Java (better/more complete error handling essentially). This shouldn't be surprising - Rust is a much newer language that has been able to take all the good stuff from many different languages from the past.
I agree they could just make the tools they want and am pretty sure the devs will merge em . The reason seem political even though both parties won't say it
Actually they did'nt i think its just an excuse.
At the very least, diversity breeds robustness. I think it's good that all the eggs aren't winding up in the same basket
Yeah hard agree instead of duplicting efforts they could've made the tools they want and the devs would've merged it