It does indeed look like the social media landscape is fracturing into separate tribes. Whether this is good, who knows.
One quote from the article is this: “X for the rightwing and the raging; centrists and policy nerds on Bluesky; people who hate politics on Threads or Instagram; Gen Z on TikTok; boomers on Facebook”.
What does that make us on lemmy? Not even an honorable mention. I guess we really are a fringe social media group.
Lemmy is a leftist echo chamber for computer nerds and people who can’t stand reddit anymore.
That’s pretty much it. Lemmy is just reddit lite.
Well, Lemmy isn’t really in the running since it’s a link aggregator, and not a microblogging platform.
But that said, it would be nice to see Fediverse platforms mentioned. Mastodon and dozens of adjacent platforms exist, too, but never see a mention in any articles.
I really wish somebody could get a decent, populated Misskey instance spun up. I think that would be more attractive to people, due to the features more closely resembling those on Twitter than Mastodon’s do. It seems to be doing pretty well in Japan, not sure why we haven’t picked up on it as heavily in the west.
For what it’s worth, they didn’t mention Reddit either
Or mastodon. But estabilished news media sites never mention non-VC backed solutions if they can help it.
You don’t exist on the news if you don’t have a stock market ticker.
Which is a good fucking thing. What’s the first rule of the fediverse? We don’t talk about the fediverse.
What’s the number of users on decentralized platforms? Fuck all compared to the centralized ones.
I see Lemmy and other fediverse platforms as pioneers for desentralized web which is still in its early stages. There are still problems to be solved and likely bunch of things that should be streamlined before bringing in the masses but there’s a lot of potential in desentralization even beyond social media.
It’s somewhat ironic that decentralized web is now considered a new concept, since that’s how the web started. Ultimately the problem is that not only does centralization have many benefits, it also aligns with human nature. The perfect system is a centralized one run by a benevolent entity, but the worst possible one is a centralized one run by a malevolent entity. Unfortunately as has been demonstrated time and again even if a company starts benevolent, given enough time and the corrosive nature of capitalism, it will eventually become malevolent (the so called enshittification). So we eventually arrive at a poor compromise, a mediocre distributed experience that struggles to attract and retain users, but which is resistant to the worst problems of centralized systems.
Lemmy and other federated systems will likely never be the platforms of choice for the majority of users, but what they’ll likely have is staying power. While centralized platforms rise and fall, decentralized platforms will just… keep existing. Nodes may die, new ones will rise, but the system as a whole will survive.
We are still building a strong foundation here. Our day will come.
And if X for the rightwing and raging - then what the hell is truth social?
Truth social is far far right-wing. X is just regular right wing ragebate now.
We needed a place for the people too belligerent for twatter
People who love or tolerate left populism.