Simple question: Will you go back to Reddit and other centralized social media platforms, if Reddit step back from the API changes? The benefits of Reddit are obvisiouly, it has million of users and even small communitys have thousands of users.
For me it's pretty clear, after deleting my Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Discord accounts, the decentraliced Fediverse is my future in social media. Even with an very much smaller community, i'm not willing to be treated as ad-cow for the big corps.
But what do you think about your future in social media? Fediverse or Reddit, Meta, Google and all the others? Or will you go safe and use both, to have an backup option?
(Image by Alan Frijns from Pixabay)
Most likely yes, I'll be sticking around. Something I very much appreciate about lemmy as an advantage over the big social media sites is that lemmy is set up such that you can be reasonably sure that there are many more human users than bots. On reddit you can mostly avoid the bots by sticking to the smaller subs, but I think lemmy may be able to grow larger than that and still avoid being overrun by propaganda and marketing bots due to the prevalence of manual approval for newly registered users.
I'm definitely hoping to see even more features that emphasize this advantage of lemmy. I'd like to try contributing some code for this myself, at a time when things feel more stable (i.e.ย no huge sweeping changes in the pipeline, like the HTTP client is now) and I can find some time for it.
For example...
One obvious improvement would be to add an invite system, where new user registration occurs via reputable users sending invite links to people they know.
And I envision a feature where one instance may mark some of the instances it federates with as low trust. Users on the instance would have the option not to see content posted by the low-trust instance's users, or the option to have their content explicitly marked in the UI. This could be used, for one thing, to still federate with larger instances that are less stringent about disallowing bot accounts, but provide a means to view only content where there is a higher degree of confidence that it was posted by a human, or to at least clearly mark low-confidence content.
There was a thread on lemmy.ml with somebody suggesting an invite system. One of the devs replied they didn't have the bandwidth to do it but invited others to look at implementing it, not sure if anybody's working on.
It's a good point that the current binary choice of federating vs. not federating isn't flexible enough. Mastodon has a couple of in-between options, not sure if they're the right ones, but at least points to some possibilities.
I don't think this place is inherently any more bot-resistant than reddit, it's just that bots haven't started to target it yet.