this post was submitted on 11 Jul 2023
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Fediverse

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A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).

If you wanted to get help with moderating your own community then head over to [email protected]!

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Learn more at these websites: Join The Fediverse Wiki, Fediverse.info, Wikipedia Page, The Federation Info (Stats), FediDB (Stats), Sub Rehab (Reddit Migration), Search Lemmy

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[–] [email protected] 170 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Lemmy is still going to be here because it's not a Google product.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago (6 children)

Touche...

Pour one out for project Ara, everyone... And the hundreds of other companies that had a bright future before Google bought and destroyed them.

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[–] [email protected] 131 points 1 year ago (14 children)

I don't really get what the hate was for Google+, it was better than the alternative/competitor at the time (Facebook)

[–] [email protected] 58 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Google+ forced itself on people. I didn't want it so I stopped using my Gmail entirely. I imagine word of mouth caused people to avoid it.

[–] [email protected] 50 points 1 year ago (3 children)

And the ridiculous part on top of that is that it was the exact opposite situation at first. When it first launched, you had to be a friend of a friend of a Google employee to register or you weren't getting in. It took me a about a month before a friend of mine studying CompSci at university with the kid of some Google employee was able to pass an invitation my way.

I get the purpose was to generate hype by making it seem "exclusive" like Facebook was in the early days, but it took way too long before the people who genuinely wanted to use it were allowed to openly register for it. It was like that for 3 months, and a lot of people who gave up on trying to get an invite lost interest after the initial buzz died down.

And then Google wasn't satisfied with upsetting the people that wanted to use it, so they had to go and upset the people who didn't want to use it by later forcing it on everyone with a Google account.

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[–] [email protected] 39 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Google wasn’t comfortable in letting it grow naturally over time. They tried really hard to push on people by combining it with other more popular google products when it didn’t really make sense (i.e. Youtube). Also, as a teen at the time google plus just felt nerdy and weird. It didn’t really feel like something they cool kids would use so no one used it.

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[–] [email protected] 30 points 1 year ago (1 children)

and from what i remember, staying true to typical google fashion, they fucked it up by not opening up the "beta" when they had a critical mass forming behind it. then only to force everyone into having a profile a year or whatever later. lol, too late. i think most of us understood that anything associated with google is assumed to be a never-ending "beta", so no idea what they were thinking or waiting for.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago (5 children)

I think it was definitely the super long beta period where you needed an invite killed it. I knew a ton of people who were interested that gave up

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[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 year ago

It was invite only for too long, and then, suddenly, it was required for everything Google.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

It was definitely much better than Facebook at the time. Especially the concept of circles that they implemented.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago

Poorly supported, forced integration with other google services, facebook was good enough TM for most.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

It was good but it didn’t really add enough or solve an actual problem. At the time, there wasn’t as much negative sentiment around Facebook. The circles were a neat concept but too much work to use for the average user.

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[–] [email protected] 68 points 1 year ago (6 children)

In 12 years, selfhosting will be so cheap and one-push-button easy that everyone will have their own instance and federated with each other. It will be called Neo-Geocities 2.0.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Well, not really the same thing but I saw this the other day. I think it is awesome, but that is probably only nostalgia talking. It is a geocities website for the current day!

https://neocities.org/

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[–] [email protected] 49 points 1 year ago (15 children)

I hate the name Lemmy, there, I said it .. as much as I hated the name Google+

[–] [email protected] 27 points 1 year ago (2 children)

They should've called it Google Circles. Google Plus just sounded like some kind of premium subscription to Google and not like a social network.

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[–] [email protected] 46 points 1 year ago (13 children)

This is why you should never adopt Google services, there's a high chance they will kill it off given their awful track record.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (1 children)

At least they let me turn my Stadia controller into a regular Bluetooth controller ¯⁠\⁠_⁠(⁠ツ⁠)⁠_⁠/⁠¯

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[–] [email protected] 46 points 1 year ago (8 children)
[–] [email protected] 48 points 1 year ago (10 children)

Some of these are fucking wild

Killed over 1 year ago, Cameos on Google allowed celebrities and other public figures to record video responses to the most common questions asked about them which would be shown to users in Google Search results. It was over 3 years old.

Imagine googling "does Bruno Mars is gay?" and Bruno Mars himself shows up to tell you if he is or doesn't

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago (12 children)

This is extremely interesting. So many products that I've never heard of and many of them were actually around for 6-12 years before being axed or coming up on death soon. A lot of these I had heard of and even used occasionally over the years and I didn't realize were gone now.

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago (5 children)

Google Reader. Never forget...

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[–] [email protected] 39 points 1 year ago (9 children)

The beauty of the Fediverse is that no single entity controls it... In 12 years, I'd wager we're still around.

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[–] [email protected] 37 points 1 year ago (14 children)

Sorry, I'm in the minority that actually liked Google+.

[–] [email protected] 27 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I thought circles was the best idea. I loved having a bit more control over posts. Unfortunately, only two of my friends used it, so it was worthless for me for the most part.

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[–] [email protected] 35 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (6 children)

I kind of feel like a single Lemmy instance will ~~domonate~~ dominate and become the defacto instance that everyone just joins.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Since people post to channels that you can search for and subscribe to, there is no incentive for that to happen.

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[–] [email protected] 35 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I remember getting a few of my friends to try G+ with me, then getting in and realizing we were the only ones there. Feels like Lemmy already has more people than that ghost town ever did.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Facebook and Google was always about friends family and local before any random and stranger interaction becomes relevant.

Reddit and Lemmy is all about strangers. Oftentimes you dont even want people to know you or care about that. So userbase is way easier to create without feeling as if it was too small.

Facebook started locally and slowly created circles until the entire world found their friends and families and joined themselves

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[–] [email protected] 33 points 1 year ago

I hope that it'll look less buggy. Today was awful.

[–] [email protected] 32 points 1 year ago (6 children)

Only place I've ever accidentally uploaded a dick pic and so glad I had like 2 friends on there who never checked lol. It was a fun 2 weeks.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago

Lol are you sure it was an accident or did it only become an accident when your 2 friends didn’t look 😜

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[–] [email protected] 28 points 1 year ago (10 children)

Google+ didn't work because they didn't push it hard enough and they made it an invite only beta instead of just allowing everyone to join.

Yes - I'm being serious they didn't push it hard enough. If you had a Gmail or YouTube account it should have just instantly become a Google+ account in some sort of private mode so it doesn't inadvertently leak your info.

If they would have just pushed it out to everyone, day one, mandatory, no opt out, then we'd still have Google+ today.

Like if they made Google Talk the default messaging client on Android we'd still have Google Talk. I don't recall Apple making iMessage an optional messaging app you don't have to use.

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[–] [email protected] 27 points 1 year ago

I feel like the fediverse is already way more active than what Google+ ever was.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 year ago (15 children)

I wonder if civilization will last 12 years

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[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I mean this post has 1200 upvotes. Considering most people don't engage with the voting system that makes me think that there's a decent amount of people here. At the very least it means there's a lot of people here who engage with the community. More come every day. If this post were on Reddit, it would be on r/all right now. That's not bad for a community with a fraction of the users.

I think that in 10 years this place will be doing alright. I think the growth that's happened in the last few months won't last, but I think that growth will still steadily happen. The reddexodus doesn't happen every day but with most social media platforms shitting their geriatric pants more and more lately, I think a consistent flow of refugees will come here.

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[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 year ago (4 children)

I honestly hope lemmy will not die. It will have to become simpler though. For many people, it will be simply way too complicated to wrap their head around the fact of many instances and most of them will worry about not being able to interact with people from other instances.

Also, the main lemmy web app is not necessarily good and alternatives such as wefwef are far easier to use.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

We just need to be better about simplifying the explanation. Don't tell people "it's a federated website using an activitypub backend to communicate like mastodon, but only links to federated lemmys not including mastodon instances...." Tell them "it's a fourm that shares posts and comments with other fourms that agree to work together". If they want more detail they can easily find it themselves.

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago (8 children)

I actually liked Google plus… but like everything Google create, they killed it.

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago (9 children)

Anyone remembers wave? Or what was it called - was definitely ahead of its time.

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

By then I predict the big corp news media will report on Lemmy like it’s the new 4chan. Unmoderated instances that no major instance links to will give them plenty of ammunition. Non technical users will believe it to the frustration of all Lemmy.

Not trying to be a downer when they attack you, you know you’re winning

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Original Google+ before nymwars was so good. The photo walks and the community was amazing.

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago (1 children)

If Reddit can make it for 12+ years, I’m sure Lemmy can too!

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Geez it's just so incredibly sad to me that facebook has survived this long and even THRIVED while probably being the worst version of what they do, and being the most evil doing it

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago

I loved Google+ at the time but I was invested in the Google services ecosystem back then.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Please tell me someone remembers Google wave and the insane amount people were paying on eBay for an invitation. (Sorry, just randomly remember it when I saw Google+)

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