Very nice 👌 I hope we will see more applications for these protocols as time passes.

One issue for me, and this is also true of Mastodon and by extension Mbin, is that I greatly prefer the voting and focus on a topic area rather than person. X / Twitter / Mastodon / Bluesky is where celebrities go to increase their profits, fame, and relevance, while Reddit / Lemmy / PieFed (/ + nodeBB + flarum + others) are where we discuss matters of import. I’m not criticizing your post here - this is definitely the correct community to discuss such matters:-) - just interjecting my personal preferences into the conversation, to disclose my own biases.

If Lemmy.World went away, then correct you would not “lose” the users as, well you said it, they would simply move to another instance.

But if Lemmy.World remained and you blocked it (if you had a method to do that - it’s not easy at all using base Lemmy but it is doable with some older apps or like Ublock Origin filter rules and such), then in that context you would indeed “lose” all of that content. Or like if you got banned from that instance then that’s another way that you could “lose” access to engage with communities located on it.

The more centralized something is, like Reddit, the more damaging it is to lose access to it, while the more decentralized, as you pointed out, the less overall effect that perturbations have upon the network.

That seems a very good way to phrase it.

The next issue then becomes cost. Which affects Lemmy as well: first there is the requisite effort to set up and self-host even a tiny instance (especially as it relates to potential spam and CSAM attacks), and second the network traffic costs. The latter may be tiny for a single user who only subscribes to a handful of communities, but someone trying to browse All and wanting everything to be available for their perusal (even if deleted soon-ish for storage reasons) will bear a much higher burden. Which depending on local costs may be trivially easy… or prohibitively expensive, but in either case the more data that someone wants to pull in the higher the cost.

And I imagine that Bluesky is either similar, or significantly worse.

Bluesky is decentralised in theory, but in reality it is not.

I loved how you phrased it here:-).

Looking at your other comment on this thread, thank you - that kind of breakdown was precisely what I was hoping to see!:-)

So Bluesky is more decentralized than Reddit (or Facebook), but barely, and far less so than any Fediverse platform currently.

I think what OP was trying to convey was less the current state of affairs and more the underlying protocol itself, which they re-released now under a separate post.

Nice. I remember when it was 80%, then it fell to half, 40%, and apparently now is closer to a third than half. Excellent decentralizing!:-)

I hope I am not adding to the problem here as well. It seems that obviously Bluesky is neither fully centralized nor fully decentralized. Is there a statement about just how much of either it is?

Although that might be complicated - like someone could say that Lemmy is fairly centralized, bc if you block Lemmy.World then you lose half the users and perhaps half the communities (and PieFed even more so, with PieFed.social representing an even higher fraction of users and communities on it).

So there is a distinction between Bluesky the service as it currently is implemented and Bluesky the protocol, the former of which is fairly centralized but the latter is more expandable?

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2+2=4

2+2=3 is too small, i.e. wrong in the direction of being too small

2+2=5 is too wrong in the direction of being too large

Likewise, optimism is wrong in being too hopeful, pessimism is wrong in being too fearful.

What you said though is that:

Pessimism is a vital component for any healthy society

So being wrong is a vital component of being right? It is an issue with the phrasing. It is not “pessimism” that is necessary, but a willingness to look at the things that may cause us fear - though your phrasing indicated that pessimism itself was the necessary component, which is what I disagreed with.

I would argue that pessimism, like optimism, is too hobbled by an inability to see clearly the arguments of the other side. Realism seems a better way to go, and if that happens to look bleak then well, that still does not make it actual pessimism.

You have the identical power.

It kinda does though. i.e. form your own community, put in the effort to keep it neat and tidy and make it how you like it, and then fend off people who want to come in and shit all over your parade without bothering to follow or likely even read the rules.

The very fact that you desire to post something to someone else’s community in the first place is evidence of how much more their opinion should matter, by virtue of their hard work put into it. No we are not all the same at all.

Or wanted!? 🤪

t.lemmy.world

The Threadiverse is terrible when it comes to news, and niche content. Though as you say Reddit is terrible to actually try to converse with someone on, or even to read through the comments section is like listening to eight year olds (of whatever physical age).

I too go back to Reddit when needed lately, though in read-only mode.

There really is no comparison, Tildes has a few hundred to thousand active people (looks like about 20 posts a day… across the entire site), and is run by a single guy with very particular ideas about what people are allowed to say and do on his site.

Lemmy meanwhile has roughly 50k users and I would guess hundreds to thousands of posts per day, even if not millions like Reddit that allows more niches to develop.

I dunno… every mainstream normie I’ve ever told about Lemmy gets enormously turned off by the tankie content here. Yeah you can block it, but why should they when Reddit caters to a more centrist audience, they seem to think. We are a Nazi bar here and that’s going to be a problem for a long while.

It didn’t help that I did not realize that a Google search pulls up Lemmy.ml as the top instance, and that it shows only Local content by default to a guest user. Thus it substantially helps to point to a specific Lemmy instance rather than tell people to check out just “Lemmy”, although lemm.ee was one of the top recommendations there so now that’s going to be confusing when people read old posts and comments.

Not really: the Export+Import feature should make migration a breeze this time, and you’ll still see all your old posts and stuff (you won’t be able to edit them anymore though).

Switching from centralized Reddit to decentralized Threadiverse will never need to happen again - I even switched away from Lemmy to PieFed (when the Import feature hadn’t been implemented yet) and it was still much easier.:-)

Mods especially had a harder time with the official app, so a lot of us left in solidarity with them & the app devs. :-)