Right now the user count Lemmys is comparatively tiny when held up against reddit - but the user count isn’t the thing that makes a social media site, it’s the engagement

So even if you’re used to lurking, try to get a little more active! Post memes, vote on posts, talk in the comments, whatever!

If people come here and see activity, content, and discussions, they’re more likely to stay and contribute their own - if they come and see a ghost town, they’ll just go back to reddit

  • qprimed@lemmy.mlEnglish
    2·
    1 year ago

    abuse of the user is pretty much baked into every corporate owned, centralized service. I mean, it literally creates an abusive power dynamic. walking away is often the only option and, without alternatives, that can be difficult.

    Federated social is important because it offers and alternative that breaks the cycle of abusive and empowers the content creators and consumers again.

    my apologies for using possible trigger words and concepts above, but I am so sick and tired of the same cycle time after time. we need this change.

    • vepro@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      Another problem I see is monopolization. If there is only one platform with no competition, there is no incentive to innovate. Good example is YouTube. No one can just afford tbps of bandwidth and exa or even zettabytes of storage, so federation (PeerTube) is a way to balance and distribute the load over many individual servers/nodes. (PeerTube also uses a p2p streaming mechanism to reduce strain on the server)

      • pain_is_life_is_pain@beehaw.orgEnglish
        3·
        1 year ago

        Wow, there’s so many new things to play with! Never heard of PeerTube before, but excited about the idea of a federated YouTube challenger!

        And it looks like there’s no shorts on PT? Awesome!

        • vepro@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1·
          1 year ago

          Google might start messing up the alternate frontend Invidious too (the exception The video returned by YouTube isn't the requested one. (WEB client) (VideoNotAvailableException) started appearing, which is still fixable though), which is a nice option to view yt without the clutter, especially when not logged in.

          In case you know the media player mpv, you can pass yt links directly into it and view just the video through it. You need to have yt-dlp installed for this. Then you can type

          $ mpv 'https://youtube.com/watch?v=....'

          This is more for Linux though, idk how it is for Windows

          • qprimed@lemmy.mlEnglish
            1·
            1 year ago

            YT has been playing games with 3rd party viewers forever. the number of times 3rd party viewers have had to rush out new builds to circumvent the latest YT breakage is disheartening.

            At some point google will permanently wall off its garden to trap its users. what then, my friend?

            • vepro@lemmy.worldEnglish
              2·
              1 year ago

              Then one must either resort to the official youtube frontend (which is still bearable as long as content blockers work normally, I could not imagine getting spammed with ads) or using other ways of watching like PeerTube. Circumvention should always be possible in a way though as long as Google doesn’t employ DRM on YouTube videos.

              • qprimed@lemmy.mlEnglish
                4·
                1 year ago

                but, in a better world, circumvention should never be needed. with peertube, lemmy, mastodon, et al. there is no concept of circumvention - there is nothing to circumvent. thats the end goal here, at least for me (and I hope for others as well)

                • vepro@lemmy.worldEnglish
                  2·
                  1 year ago

                  Yeah, and in the Open Source nature of the fediverse applications alternate frontends will also be able to thrive. (though the main fediverse app frontends come less cluttered / cleaner out of the box)

      • qprimed@lemmy.mlEnglish
        3·
        1 year ago

        exactly. the internet was historically much more decentralized. laziness, ignorance and apathy got us to the centralized mess we are in today.

        we (the unwashed masses of the world) cant directly compete on raw dedicated bandwidth and storage, but we can complete on quality and raw decentralized accessibility. the decentralization helps to mitigate the centralized storage and bandwidth advantages of the big players.

        with enough federated instances, we will have a massively redundent medium through which like minded users can congregate and share ideas in a federated and self organizing way. the possibilities are pretty damn tantalizing.