I want a centralized megaforum. I don't care about federation or what technology it uses. I just want easy access to everything
The magic of the internet, once upon a time, was discovering content in your own time. You stumbled into that cool niche forum, found someone’s personal blog, a flash game page. It didn’t need big centralised services to be fun.
Internet users have become consumers and want to be fed content. I do not understand this sentiment at all. It feels like we are all addicted to the easy dopamine kicks of scrolling Reddit/Facebook/Twitter now.
There is no way to discover content anymore, long gone are the days where some expert's blog would appear prominently when searching a topic. Now all the results are people trying to sell you something. Reddit has replaced google (more or less) for a lot of people.
The only functional search engine nowadays is marginalia.
5 years ago even the internet as a whole at least felt functional. Today everything feels like a giant scam.
Also, don't know why no one remembers RSS feeds if they want an aggregator anyway. Even Reddit and YouTube have RSS protocols (for now). I never used them but it's nifty for the best of both worlds.
* What we want is high signal/noise ratio.
* In the magic old internet, the bar for signal was relatively low, because it competed with books, and TV.
* The competition over attention has raised the bar over what "good content" looks like.
* Content like that don't materialize out of thin air, but needs an audience to keep it alive, and to grow, and select, and feedback
* The re-fragmentation of internet communities risks loss of economies of scale for the content creators to create or maintain high-quality gems.
Let's take something specific, say furry artists. Their content loop for reddit was: post cute pics on r/furry, if it hits quality bar, gets upvoted, and seen by ~1000s of people; 0.1% of those will commission a new drawing, draw the thing, get paid, post it on reddit, close the loop.
In a re-fragmented Internet: 1, a lot less people will be able to find those "gem forums" focused around a topic, and they won't browse it daily; and 2, the artist needs to spam their stuff to all the communities to get the fraction of traffic they have on reddit.
The outcome from this re-fragmentation _in our present time_ will be the "hallowing of the middle", the "hobbyists scaling towards professional", and people who are just really into the thing, and make some money on the side. In a re-fragmented Internet, you are either a fully professional -with competent marketing team- or you're doing it for the ~20 people sharing the same forum.
I understand that many people are expressing explicit preferences for there to be only that 20 people they chat with, or only the hobbyist / geeks to participate and _I'm happy for them_. What I'm claiming above, is that this will kick the professional ladder out for upcoming people to build - show - get attention for their stuff. And that creates a less magical Internet.
Ofc you exploit it anyway, but Reddit was never truly good for professionals unless they were eternally on reddit to begin with.
After you sign up you don't have to care much about servers or instances, just tap "all".
I don't think it will be long before someone comes into this space with a good UI and the community that reddit just marooned and turns it into gold.
It’s a pretty good replacement for Reddit, and the community that’s forming seems good so far.
You're going to have to stick with reddit and give replacements a dew years for the dust to settle before asking that question.
Heh as if it ever stopped...
I’d also not exactly how fediverse works except for direct links. You read posts/comments from your instance.
Mastodon should figure out an extension to simply redirect links to your instance. It would remove a lot of confusion.