Technology

That's certainly what it's feeling like to me.

I remember when I was a kid and the Web 1.0 stuff was popular, things like IRC chat and forums were too intimidating/confusing for me to get into. My introduction to being an internet "citizen" was Web 2.0 and the MySpaces/Facebooks/Reddits of the world, where I had a UX approachable enough not to intimidate my teenage self.

The shift towards the Fediverse feels like a blend of many of the best aspects of Webs 1.0 and 2.0 -- I have a UX that feels familiar, but one that comes with a bottom-up, decentralized grassroots feel that is reminiscent of the early internet.

I'm bullish for sure.

It'll be hard to get people to not only detach from something they're accustomed to, but also then attach to something unfamiliar.

I tried and am trying again with Mastodon, but a lack of users I wish to follow, a more confusing premise at times, and just overall more enjoyment overall (if that) with twitter as a platform makes it a challenge.

Lemmy however has checked all the boxes. It literally feels exactly like Reddit, and honestly like a fresh start to avoid the various decisions both Reddit admins and the community itself made along the way. I'm hoping more for the latter experience than forming when diving into the fediverse, but my above statement is most likely applicable for a wide sample of people out there.

Ab. So. Fucking. Lutely.

Agreed. Live chat has its place for certain things, but for other things a forum type interface is better suited.

that's my biggest pet peeve, too.

GloriousEggroll, the mastermind behind modified version of Valve's Proton, posts his code on GitHub, and then links to his Discord as a place for reporting bugs.

God I hope so. Discord works fine as a voice chat and groupchat for games. But it's insane to me that people use it as a replacement for message boards or websites and hosting files. It isnt indexed so you cant google it and a groupchat is a terrible format for this. Even as reddit dies you have some people acting like a glorified group chat is a good alternative. As an addition and supplement to a message board or website community sure this is how it's always been even in the old days there were boards with an active IRC chat. As the replacement? Awful.

I worry about Discord imploding because everything is behind the walled garden and difficult to extract unlike a forum board or playlist. The landgrab with account renames will be an interesting test for them.

Good news! Twitch is currently shitting all over itself with T&C changes around mandating exclusive streaming on their platform from their partners.

The hilarity is that some of the streamers are moving over to Kick, which is a platform that may or may not have been built from the stolen Twitch source code, which is just the most amazing drama possible.

Well, OwnCast exists.

They're the safest. It has the highest cost to run of any other site pretty much. The amount of data uploaded is staggering.

They may deserve to be replaced, but a competitor has the highest hurdles to overcome. You pretty much need to be another tech giant or the public needs to have a new perspective on how to pay for content rather than ads.

Gitlab's a great alternative too, it's definitely more resource intensive than Gitea but their community edition is packed with features. A federated Git platform sounds intriguing...

I honestly don’t think the fediverse will become nearly as popular as many seem to.think.

Probably not gonna get Twitter/Reddit-sized, no, as those platforms have userbases the size of a large country. It's mostly a question of "can we attract enough users for the ecosystem to be workable" and I think the answer is "yes." Hell, for me it already is.

I don't have statistics to back this up, but I'd be willing to bet an entire doughnut that most reddit users have never posted even a single comment. People with that level (dis)engagement aren't the type to seek out alternatives. They just kind of drift away.

Reddit started out with more tech-y users, then got more mainstream. Maybe the same can happen here.

I would love for something to replace YouTube, especially something in the Fediverse, but video unfortunately has much higher storage and bandwidth requirements, so it's hard to imagine that not being totally cost prohibitive at high levels of traffic, even if it's split across so many different servers. I'd love to be wrong on that, though.

YouTube has been upsetting its users for over a decade now and also needs to make more money. The only thing stopping it from being overtaken is the sheer amount of infrastructure required to host videos on that scale.

Matrix may be helping to dwindle IRC as well.

As OneRedFox says, it's all about the UX. From the perspective of your average gamer, IRC has awful UX. I know that speedrunning, romhacking, and other gaming subcommunities have used / still use IRC, but they're very much on the technical side of gamers. Discord is a lot friendlier to the average gamer (I know, I know, it's Electron and proprietary and shit for reasons besides those two, but consider your average console CoD player here). I still like IRC, too, though I'd love to see it evolve a little more quickly. IRCv3 is nice but my goodness, how long have they been working on it?

Matrix's client UX is improving a lot, there is the Cinny client that mirrors Discord's layout perfectly. The issue with Matrix is its protocol, which faces scaling issues because each instance joining the network is supposed to replicate the entire Matrix network, which will make it difficult for small hobbyists to add instances without crumbling under the load when the network gets too big. There is another Discord-like alternative, Revolt which is self-hostable and uses its own protocol but doesn't have federation yet.

If you really only want group calls for a handful of people I can only recommend Signal for that. Just create a group chat in there. You can start a call and select it to not ring on the other peoples end and then you can just hop in and out just like a discord vc. It has a desktop app for Mac/Linux/Windows too so you could use it while gaming too. The app is not pretty but it's minimalistic and it works. Everything is end to end enrypted even the calls and video calls.

You could even screenshare with it but i never tested how well that works. It's free and open source. It is not federated however. But still the most easy to use and best secure and private messenger out there.

Peertube is a thing. The problem with a platform like YouTube is that it's so dependent on its creators, which peertube just doesn't have. Although not FOSS, I am quite a fan of nebula since it is kind of a community owned project and many of the channels I was already subscribed to are on nebula too. I don't mind paying a few bucks a month to access ad free content while also supporting the creators.