I’m personally crossing my fingers for Discord.
I still like IRC and I’m surprised that it got almost completely murdered by Discord.
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One can only hope so. I hope matrix gets a solid push when the chat gatekeepers have to open up because of EU regulation. If they can get invovled in the planned standards an implement them fast enough into matrix that might be a gamechanger.
As OneRedFox says, it’s all about the UX. From the perspective of your average gamer, IRC has awful UX. I know that speedrunning, romhacking, and other gaming subcommunities have used / still use IRC, but they’re very much on the technical side of gamers. Discord is a lot friendlier to the average gamer (I know, I know, it’s Electron and proprietary and shit for reasons besides those two, but consider your average console CoD player here). I still like IRC, too, though I’d love to see it evolve a little more quickly. IRCv3 is nice but my goodness, how long have they been working on it?
Personal Knowledge Management Apps / Note-Taking Apps.
After EverNote and Co. many people got angry / fustrated.
Since I found https://obsidian.md I’m actually happy with everything - as the plugin’s are open-source, it’s flexible and there is no lock-in as it’s all simply markdown format. ObsidianMD is just a markdown viewer - but with superious UX. There are also alternatives to that like Logseq though.
After seeing this, I cannot imagine anymore to use something like Google Notes, OneNote, etc.
I have reluctantly been using obsidian after trying every floss alternative. It is portable, easy to start with and there is a rich plugin community. Unlike joplin, the closest floss competitor, it actually stores files in plain markdown so if you need to access them through another tool you can. Obsidian adheres to the unix philosophy better than joplin. :(
They are both electron which sucks but at least with obsidian you do not have to be running the application all the time because of the plain markdown thing.
How do you manage tasks in obsidian?
There’s a tasks extension that will show all of the tasks across any note in a sidebar
Also shoutout to Logseq, love this app. Open Source and privacy focused. https://logseq.com/
Check out org-mode in emacs. It’s amazing.
Discord is doing a lot of stupid things lately i must say
God I hope so. Discord works fine as a voice chat and groupchat for games. But it’s insane to me that people use it as a replacement for message boards or websites and hosting files. It isnt indexed so you cant google it and a groupchat is a terrible format for this. Even as reddit dies you have some people acting like a glorified group chat is a good alternative. As an addition and supplement to a message board or website community sure this is how it’s always been even in the old days there were boards with an active IRC chat. As the replacement? Awful.
It is a terrible format but it has the extreme advantage of being free.
The whole current fiasco stems from services being free and then trying to cash in later hoping that users won’t switch, there’s no guarantee that Discord won’t pull similar stuff to Reddit. In fact they already are hostile to third party clients.
Discord has to pull this sometime becuase venture capital isn’t going to sustain it for eternity and “Nitro” makes next to nothing compared to cost. I just hope Matrix has the tech to save me when it hits.
yeah i totally agree
Teamspeak has a pretty slick new version that looks very much like discord. Not fediverse but pretty easy to self-host.
Wow, I had no idea. Thanks for letting me know!
I tried to research more about it, but other than a few screenshots it’s very hard to find info on what’s actually new in.
There isn’t much left.
First Facebook with their whole meta thing, then Imgur deleting all NSFW content and images uploaded by non-registered members, afterwards Twitter and now Reddit.
Twitch made a big mistake with their new sponsoring rules, but seems like they are reverting / changing it again due to bad community feedback.
Discord had a few changes the community didn’t like, but nothing ground breaking yet. But they get more and more greedy and their platform is filled with scams, hackers, bots and sadly many bad people like child predators and content which Discord support does nothing against. They seem not to care.
YouTube, well, I think they might be next actually. More and longer unskipable ads, restricting or demonetizing many videos, bad communication with their creators and less rewards for smaller creators. In addition, they might put high quality resolutions behind their already existing expensive subscription paywall. There isn’t any competition which is urgently needed.
UPDATE: Bad news about YouTube continues. Just now, YouTube Ordered ‘Invidious’ Privacy Software to Shut Down in 7 Days.
Which other big social media platforms are left?
The problem with anything video is still that it costs way too much to host, unless you’re a giant who already has their own data centers and massive data pipes. You can’t just throw it on a cheap VPS like text-based services
Are you thinking of it as a centralized replacement to YouTube? If you’re centralized, yeah, you probably need a data centre the size of Malta. There are decentralized alternatives (like PeerTube) where the cost is also distributed. If you’re using PeerTube, you literally can “just throw it on a cheap VPS”, and lots of people do, with no problems.
I think the real reason decentralized video isn’t going to catch on is because video (and YouTube in particular) has not been a community thing for many years now. There are very few YouTubers who make videos to build a community or connect to a community. YouTubers are on there for money, and there’s really no alternative that can both host the videos and pay out big cheques to content creators.
@duncesplayed @kalleboo tbh most of YTs I know either run sponsor ads, or have Patreon/paid for community. It is already slowly moving away from ads system in YT, which simply does not work.
That is a good point actually! That means they would have the freedom to move over to a new platform.
@duncesplayed imho making PeerTube or other Fediverse video service very good at UX and easy to use will allow these communities migrate when they feel like it.
I think biggest issue might be running video service like this and having running costs for video storage, etc. As always, communities might be willing to factor those costs in their pledges.
I think PeerTube needs easy to use setup / reliable network of hosters, and good UX to manage community, live streams, chats, etc.
I don’t really see YouTube failing anytime soon. They have such a massive userbase, it’s hard to imagine any other platform taking over anytime soon, regardless of shitty UX decisions. Creating a successful video platform like they have is an enormous challenge, the only reason they succeeded is because they were early.
@hampter @noodlejetski @Nankeru *cough* TikTok *cough*
In all seriousness, Google does not know what to do with YT. It is very hard to monetize. They tried to do whole TV thing, which fell flat on it’s face. it keeps being huge money sink, and moderation is nightmare and algorithms seems to fucking up constantly.
They can’t get rid of it, because it is huge, but it is not fire sure profit.I don’t know about YouTube not being profitable, but even if they aren’t, you’d be hard pressed to find a company better equipped to handle a money sink that Google. In 2022, they had a gross profit of 156 billion… I don’t think they are panicking, scrambling to monetize YT at Alphabet HQ.
Tiktok, Snapchat, OnlyFans
Signal would actually be a decent Snapchat replacement since it can do both disappearing messages and stories. now if only they’d finally release usernames and phone number privacy.
Tiktok is Chinese military funded. It’s not going away.
Even though Tiktok isn’t a one-to-one equivalent of youtube, I wouldn’t be surprised to see a closer youtube equivalent come out of China, Russia, or even North Korea (the people are poor mainly because the country puts all its wealth in the military, and it already has extensive foreign espionage and media manipulation arms - if it wanted to, it could pour a lot into controlling a major video platform to get ahold off all that data).
In a more hopeful world, maybe a different small country might invest in it on a governmental level, similarly.
Saudi Arabia is already heavily investing in the gaming industry, in an attempt to diversify their economic reliance away from just their oil.
Qatar already has a lot invested in, and profit from, aljazeera (state-owned news) poking at all its neighbors’ human rights abuses, too.
Saudi Arabia - or another, unexpected country - could absolutely do the same with English-language social media, especially given the current lack of competition for youtube. Government funding could scale that barrier and snag a source of income and an espionage advantage for the host country.
Especially since Saudi Arabia, though rife with human rights abuses, is allied with the U.S. and thus less likely to become the target of a “ban tiktok specifically” push.
(sidenote: the “ban tiktok” bills would ban a lot more than tiktok, including VPNs - that subject’s a whole can of worms too).
Edit: especially now they’ve seen Tiktok as a template for this.
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Matrix synapse and dendrite aren’t great implementations of the protocol so people probably won’t host them, but conduit is 90% of the way there. Another 5% and I bet discords start to drop like flies.
Conduit looks very interesting. Synapse is way too bloated to run and dendrite is way too buggy in my experience. Maybe conduit will become a better home server? I feel like the matrix devs just keep adding more and more features to their protocol, but they fail to implement usable servers and clients. IMO they should’ve kept things more simple.
It isn’t perfect. It doesn’t support spaces well, and sometimes it’s chasing the latest standard, and there’s still a lot of missing stuff with respect to admin features. OTOH, it is incredibly light. I run it on an Atom D2550 alongside ejabbered and lotide, and that box basically idles.
There’s only a few projects I personally donate to.
I was already able to deploy it on my Raspberry PI 4 without any issues. It was using a lot of CPU when joining large rooms, but now it seems to have calmed down and it’s using 1-2% CPU, which is very reasonable. In comparison, home assistant runs at around 2-3% idle, and lemmy fluctuates between 4% and 10%.
Thanks for bringing this up, this is great! It’s also written in Rust, and I love Rust, so I might contribute this summer. I’ll add it to my list of potential project to contribute to, along with Lemmy.
YouTube has been enshittified long ago, especially after the Adpoclaypse
I honestly don’t think the fediverse will become nearly as popular as many seem to.think. It’s still complicated to use/understand for many non-tech enthusiasts, and in the case of Reddit, while people are angry, I doubt most of their users are going anywhere any time soon. Some will leave, but it’s not going to be a small number.
We keep going on about how Reddit relies on it’s “creators”, without whom they’ll die. Frankly, a lot of the highest rated content is just repost of old videos or tiktok videos. A lot of that stuff isn’t original, and the deep conversations are, in my opinion, few and far between. Sure there are some communities whi h have this, but they’re not exactly over represented.
I don’t have statistics to back this up, but I’d be willing to bet an entire doughnut that most reddit users have never posted even a single comment. People with that level (dis)engagement aren’t the type to seek out alternatives. They just kind of drift away.
Reddit started out with more tech-y users, then got more mainstream. Maybe the same can happen here.
We may be few, but I’m proud to count myself among those who quit Reddit because of this. (Not that I wasn’t looking for a good reason for a long time).
As long as there’s enough of us to maintain a community here, then we’re golden 🙂. And I’m definitely under the impression that we’re getting there.
Imo Reddit is dying, and while I’m sure some people will get confused by the way it works at first, i think people will stick around
I hope so.
A lot of that stuff isn’t original, and the deep conversations are, in my opinion, few and far between. Sure there are some communities whi h have this, but they’re not exactly over represented.
If you get the deep conversations and the conversationalists the fluff will follow.
I honestly don’t think the fediverse will become nearly as popular as many seem to.think.
Probably not gonna get Twitter/Reddit-sized, no, as those platforms have userbases the size of a large country. It’s mostly a question of “can we attract enough users for the ecosystem to be workable” and I think the answer is “yes.” Hell, for me it already is.
It’s mostly a question of “can we attract enough users for the ecosystem to be workable” and I think the answer is “yes.” Hell, for me it already is.
And this I completely agree with.
I knew about Lemmy, Mastadon, and PeerTube before this this latest mess with Reddit, but this finally gave me the push to come over as I’m sure it will for many.
@alehel @noodlejetski I’ll add that when Twitter first hit the fan there was a large influx of Mastodon users, but it quickly fell off. Perhaps there are more tech-savvy Reddit users who will dive into the Fediverse than did with Twitter/Mastodon, but for your average user we’re not approachable enough yet to overcome the inertia of familiarity.
Even if it quickly fell off, I think approximately 70-80% of current Mastodon users came from Twitter, and a big reason for people leaving (after poor onboarding experience) was the small size of the Fediverse. There just weren’t enough people in the Fediverse for the network effect to take hold. With each influx of users I expect to see a slightly higher proportion to stay, although I don’t see this influx (from Reddit) as being particularly large in the first place.
What about YouTube?
I looked online and there seems to be PeerTube at least.
I would love for something to replace YouTube, especially something in the Fediverse, but video unfortunately has much higher storage and bandwidth requirements, so it’s hard to imagine that not being totally cost prohibitive at high levels of traffic, even if it’s split across so many different servers. I’d love to be wrong on that, though.
Yeah, thats why strata like peertube reducing costs with p2p sharing helps, or lbry (rip, I think) attempt to put in donations and tipping directly in was key for those to gain any traction.
Going further in cost reduction is what I am hopeful for. Better AV1 support and IPFS support are two develops I am following. A more radical approach may be using latent space generation from AI models like stable diffusion to generate frames locally instead of storing and transmitting perfect copies.
The other problem with YouTube/twitch alts as opposed to reddit/twitter is that a lot of the creators people like the most actually rely on those platforms to serve ads in order to make a living. That content can’t exist on FOSS systems unless they somehow manage to attract advertisers, which seems next to impossible
Yeah, that’s definitely a good point. Even the creators that do get sponsorships also get money from the ads.
I feel like the trend is going towards serving ads in stream anyways, the twitch ad/ad blocking war is/(was?) ongoing last I checked.
I don’t see why that would be impossible in a federated setting.
While some streamers could get direct sponsors, that option is really only available to a select few of the most popular ones, and would still deprive them of the extra income they currently get from ads served by the platform. You’d have to convince advertisers to trust that each instance is going to serve their ads fairly and not additionally host content they don’t like. A system to distribute ads between instances would be complicated enough to write in the first place; these sites have a lot of QoL updates to push before they even think about doing something like that.
Hm true, if you are not well known enough to negotiate ad revenue with advertisers directly that won’t work.
Yeah, video is just that much more expensive to store. I am sure a lot of current Lemmy instances are still lighter that some “cat meowing for 3 hours” video. And let’s not talk about all of those channels that upload dozens of gigabytes of data on a daily basis. I fear we may never have a suitable replacement to YouTube (that it’s not just another asshole mega corporation).
Fair point. I hadn’t thought much about the bandwidth and storage stuff. Reddit and co. are comparitively cheaper.
YouTube has been upsetting its users for over a decade now and also needs to make more money. The only thing stopping it from being overtaken is the sheer amount of infrastructure required to host videos on that scale.
There’s also ‘Indivious’, which they’ve been trying to sue (it’s just a FOSS alternative, not federated)
I just hope this is the start of an internet renaissance with less corporate control.
It’ll be hard to get people to not only detach from something they’re accustomed to, but also then attach to something unfamiliar.
I tried and am trying again with Mastodon, but a lack of users I wish to follow, a more confusing premise at times, and just overall more enjoyment overall (if that) with twitter as a platform makes it a challenge.
Lemmy however has checked all the boxes. It literally feels exactly like Reddit, and honestly like a fresh start to avoid the various decisions both Reddit admins and the community itself made along the way. I’m hoping more for the latter experience than forming when diving into the fediverse, but my above statement is most likely applicable for a wide sample of people out there.
I had the same issue with Mastodon when I tried to get into that, although perhaps worse because I was never into twitter either (thank goodness, honestly).
Lemmy though feels like old reddit from before the Digg exodus, if anything, or like other old forums that reddit drove either out of business or at least out of sight. It feels familiar and nostalgic and fresh at the same time, and there’s an element of hope to it to because it’s not just another corporate monster.
I’ve been having trouble getting going with Mastodon. But I’ve also had issues with Twitter as well. Lemmys been great so far.
I doubt it, things cost money, that’s how we got in the corporate trap originally. If you invest a ton of time and money into something sooner or later you need to get something back.
I’m not convinced you need corporate money though. I think grants/user contributions (add the awards concept like Reddit has?) can get you pretty far a la Wikipedia.
You are right, it could work but it is in no way certain.
yeah the corporate greed is at its peak lately…
That’s certainly what it’s feeling like to me.
I remember when I was a kid and the Web 1.0 stuff was popular, things like IRC chat and forums were too intimidating/confusing for me to get into. My introduction to being an internet “citizen” was Web 2.0 and the MySpaces/Facebooks/Reddits of the world, where I had a UX approachable enough not to intimidate my teenage self.
The shift towards the Fediverse feels like a blend of many of the best aspects of Webs 1.0 and 2.0 – I have a UX that feels familiar, but one that comes with a bottom-up, decentralized grassroots feel that is reminiscent of the early internet.
I’m bullish for sure.
I always like to hear about when internet was at its early stages. I’m born in 2001 so never got the chance to live through that era, but to me it always feels so much better than what it is right now.
Hearing you say that we are experiencing a moment similar to those is making me so happy.
People do remember it with rose colored glasses - there were fewer niche communities, fewer lgtbq+ communities, slower connections, 240p video at best (so much anime I somehow watched like that… Sorry anime), sexism and racism in a more general way vs now as like society and particularly techie culture at the time in general, not being able to use the internet when someone needed to use the phone, and so on - but while we gained a lot with time that we take for granted now, we did lose stuff, too.
I hope we can bring back something of the good that was lost, now and in the future, as well as find new good things.
At least, surely, there will always be cat pics.
I was absolutely amazing!
complete wild west. only limit was your mind/imagination.at least it felt like that, when I was young ;-)
The other limit was the speed of your dial up modem.
Discord:
They started the software as a light weight voip solution for gamers. And imo they kinda lost focus a long time ago. It is now a sluggish, bloated, messy piece of electron software that has privacy issues and runs very poorly. They keep adding new features that are all paywalled and the pricing is just unreasonable. I’m not against paying for a service at all especially if it is free of ads but i feel like 10$ a month is just way too much for a chat app.
Discord still runs way better than Slack though.
well…idk. I didn’t use slack in years but it’s not really a good point for discord.
It’s like advertising Chlamydia with the slogan "It’s not nearly as bad as Sysphilis! Give it a try!
What does that make Teams? 😛
It’s a microsoft product. So it’s definitely the worst kind of infection
And unlike Chlamydia I’m not having nearly as much fun getting it.
probably some kind of autoimmune disease without any cure
Stackoverflow (not quite a huge tech company) is edging.
Discord might be it but not for a while. Right now they’re one of the places people are flocking thanks to their forum channels.
I’m 90/10 on it being YouTube. I mean, they’ve already shit the bed plenty in the past. But with all the fediverse stuff picking up steam, Peertube is just sitting there waiting to enter the discourse.
Man it would really suck if we ever lost the backlog of YouTube videos
That would be awesome.
But video traffic and storage is so much higher than text and images (like Lemmy or mastadon).
The cost of running it would be pretty hugeTrue. It does look like Peertube has some instances with videos hosted on them. But yeah, storage and bandwidth costs would be much tougher problems to solve than for lemmy as soon as it started to scale up.
Matrix, what seems to be the most ovious replacement to Discord, is an incredible piece of software from a technical point of view. It have Conflict-free Replicated Datatype, which give an hard guarantee that no message will be skipped over and old message will also be fetched. Something that ActivityPub doesn’t permit, and is quite a problem with Mastodon at times (much less on lemmy, given you follow communities, and so everything on these communities will be synced, thought not backfilling)
Github, but Gitea’s not yet federated, though they’re working on it.
That’s big, I’m stoked for that if it happens.
Gitlab’s a great alternative too, it’s definitely more resource intensive than Gitea but their community edition is packed with features. A federated Git platform sounds intriguing…
I have been on/off gitlab for a few years but they do sometimes weird things that drive me nuts. For example last time i check you cant search a repo issues without logging in.
One of main things i use repo sites for is to troubleshoot and searching issues is a great way. Why put a barrier to that? I cant imagine it is a big server load. Just dickish.
You can search issues without being logged in, but that setting has to be enabled in a repo or group’s permissions (Settings > General > Visibility, project features, permissions). Project visibility has to be Public, and issues should be set to Everyone with Access. I think tissues are defaulted to private or internal by default.
Discord is not a bad bet, but I think they still have like 2-4years in them.
but that i think would rather make matrix servers go boom … literally i am afraid when i look at the various bugs and performance bottlenecks of synapse, which at least right now is the most popular server
Absolutely, I tried switching to it using bridges for all my messaging accounts and the performance was abhorrent, mind you just me, a single user on a self hosted instance.
I think it would take a while for any social media to have one, then again I didn’t expect Reddit to shit the bed the way it has. If there’s any that I think will be specifically fast, it would be Twitch.
Youtube is the least likely, no matter how many times it shits the bed, people stick to it because all the other video sharing services simply aren’t supported by the big content creators.
i would never watch youtube if i cannot use newpipe : as soon as youtube blocks newpipe, exodus to peertube may happen
as soon as youtube blocks newpipe, exodus to peertube may happen
I’m willing to bet that the percentage of people watching Youtube via Newpipe is at least an order of magnitude smaller than of people browsing reddit through third party clients.
