RoundSparrow @ .ee

Stephen Alfred Gutknecht

Professional in social media since 1985, created / sold social media server apps at age 15. Traveled the world to study media ecology.

“Finnegans Wake is the greatest guidebook to media study ever fashioned by man.” - Marshall McLuhan, Newsweek Magazine

www.WakeIndra.com

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  • 14 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 29th, 2023

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  • RoundSparrow @ .ee@lemm.eetoFediverse@lemmy.worldLemmy is losing users
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    1 year ago

    Being open source won’t prevent this, sadly. 4 years is still young, but if a critical mass shifts back to Reddit then Lemmy will be considered a failure.

    you express very limited understanding of open source and how competition works. Just because Microsoft kept selling Windows and “Linux on the Desktop” never came to displace Windows by 2005, it doesn’t mean Linux on end-user machines was a failure. Android Linux came along and is the biggest Linux distro ever, defeating Windows CE / Windows Mobile.

    if a critical mass shifts back to Reddit then Lemmy will be considered a failure.

    Again, that is like saying “people looked at Linux on desktop in 2003 and went back to Windows, so Linux was a failure”. Trying to displace entrenched players is often not how it works, it is when people leverage the source code and some parts of the system in different ways - like Android did with Linux - that things often change.

    Regarding Reddit specifically, the Reddit code was open source for a very long time, nobody wanted to leave Reddit for different owner/operators… that changed in 2023 when every alternate to Reddit has seen a surge in developer interest (even non-federated apps like Tildes). That’s not really happened in the decades Reddit has been around before that specifically large groups of people and app developers have specifically expressed interest in moving away from Reddit in mass (Voat was the only prior big movement, but API apps were not really a focus in that movement).

    By “MySpaced” I mean “become irrelevant”.

    8-bit video games stopped selling in the 1990’s, but then in 2023 there is a huge “Retro gaming” and “retro computing” movement. Same with vinyl music records going out of style then coming back in as retro. Right now TikTok and video dominate Reddit front page - which Lemmy hasn’t even been taking on with video clips that reach Reddit’s technology level, let alone TikTok. There are trends of changes that are more than just one platform owners vs. another. Some of those may be in favor like federation/networked servers that Reddit does not have - that even drew the attention of Facebook.



  • How is the Fediverse privacy focused?

    Not only have there been major bugs with delete of comments not working on other servers, the whole idea of federation is that it gets sent out to any instance that wants a copy - with not even a ‘terms of service’ that is standard on Lemmy.

    For such a communist focus that the Lemmy developers have, I’ts so odd that they don’t emphasize that content is public and have it like Wikipedia content contributions. They use GPL license to force people to share their work of the code, but then they turn around and promise privacy that they fail to deliver on given that they don’t even warn newcomers how federation works.






  • If I tried to make reasonable points about anything, or god forbid, shared my experiences - I was downvoted into oblivion

    Introducing quotes from authors that were related to the subject would really show how people were locked in the context of media immediacy, the environment. Links to outside citations would almost always generate replies from people who obviously did not study the citation and just wanted to respond back.

    It used to be something people said ‘out loud’ about people not reading links and just commenting… then it just became normalized.