Oh, right. Like that’s gonna help. Pfft.

(How was that)

News, tech, left-wing politics, memes, anime, and porn are Lemmy's biggest community types.

I know a lot of different subtopics fit under each, and I'm sure I left a few top level subjects out, but my point is that there are a lot of mid-sized, and especially smaller (by Reddit standards), subreddits that Lemmy is no where near being remotely useful as a replacement for yet.

I have community subreddit collections that I don't see Lemmy replacing anytime soon. I mean, I hope they do. I still check every so often, and yes, communities for them exist and they have maybe a few dozen users, but not enough to even try to just suck it up and deal.

I don't think this is true, maybe not at all.

Academia, by its nature, is socially exclusionary. So what they want/need is the ability to have flexibly closed spaces as well as very public spaces. Big-social never really provided that and in many ways I think academia is being kinda left behind by social media.

The best we can do with current tools is just trying to tie multiple platforms/views together I think. Programming.dev runs a bunch of different services under the same umbrella like that, and I’ve setup something similar on bestiver.se / xxxiver.se

I think having communities that consist of a group of fediverse services like that are probably the way forward in the short term. I kinda want to package that up as a ‘Verse as a Service sort of thing, but I’m still not sure if anybody will be willing to pay for it.

Definitely interesting idea (I hadn't really quite seen it formalised like this)! I've kinda had vague similar-ish thoughts along these lines too.

Any chance you'd be willing to go into any more detail, or point to specifics? I'm not familiar with what's going on over on bestiver or programming.dev in the way of service-type things.

In general, this is true of the broader population as a whole. Mastodon got the size that it's an actual place (and I think this applies to lemmy/threadiverse too). But it's by no means "THE place" or even categorically a big public place. More like old-school forums that have a particular user base and vibe that you visit from time to time.

For the fediverse, the "migration" was exciting and successful, but compared to big-social, a drop in the ocean. And the biggest clue for that is that the people most excited about Threads joining the fediverse are Evan (author and lead "advocate" of ActivityPub) and Gargron (masto CEO/founder) ... they want to taste that big-social scale and know that they don't have it and likely never will.

As much as people around these parts despise algorithmic feeds, I suspect an algorithmic feed would've worked far better in this situation to feed all academic based content to someone immediately on account creation if they show interest/ follow peers in the field.

This would've helped the migration since they most likely don't know the accounts of the Twitter accounts posting academic content as that was algorithmically fed as well. I'm really doubtful it's a problem with decentralization, seems to me mastodon had a problem with both not having a critical mass and the content that was there wasn't easy enough to find.

I don't have experience with Twitter or Mastodon but it reminds me of time when I quit drinking.

When I quit drinking and tried to stay around people I used to drink with, I realized really fast how pointless this "engagement" (really just two people speaking past each other, and feeling like they have deep conversation) is. It's almost insulting what a waste of effort such an "engagement" can be.

Just feels like every attempt at alternative social media is dying as the internet shrinks to a few corporate websites that control everything.

Yea ... it's sort of a lens for me as I view/critique the actions and decisions of people building alt-social ... this stuff is hard and fragile but also important ... so not fucking around with it kinda matters (to me at least).

The hate toward BlueSky from mastodon/AP people, for example, is misguided I think. The, IMO, general lack of concern for inter-platform interop across the fediverse bothers me too, where I ask whether a platform is being a good "fediverse citizen". And some of the "cultural purity through vigilance" culture out of the mastodon/microblogging crowd is, IMO, short sighted.

A common thread being a readiness for negative behaviour and effects rather than building and supporting.

I think alternative social media needs to be decentralized. There's just no other way it can be sustainable. Cohost was centralized - of course it couldn't stand a chance. Never mind all the other issues, which are obviously equally important.

For me, the fact that we are having this conversation on the social web is solid evidence pointing in the opposite direction of your concerns. I counted contributors from eight different websites and at least three different software platforms only in this comment section of twelve comments.

Alternative social media platforms have never looked so healthy!