Just a little storytime about Vinted.
I just wanted to register on Vinted to sell some second-hand stuff, because I haven’t had much success elsewhere. I would have never imaged that they will reject my addy.io alias. After a couple of annoying e-mails detailing how to register an account, I was left with the answer on the screenshot after trying to get an explanation why the domain I am paying for (not some random free gmail address) is not worthy of their services…
More and more sites are moving away from allowing users access when creating accounts with temporary or alias addresses, and usage with vpns. Identity based accounts can’t be tracked if they don’t know your true identity.
In the not too distant future, everything you do online and off will be connected to your real world identity.
That will drive so many people to IPFS and darknets like Freenet. And with population, businesses will come. You may never be able to access Wells Fargo from it, but there will be options.
Mastodon exploded with the Twitter drama. Lemmy’s grown substantially with Reddit fuckery. Neither are exactly mainstream, but you know what? I lived through the time when banks weren’t online, and shopping wasn’t online, and the internet and the web were much smaller: smaller is in many ways better. Sometimes having just enough, and not everything and everyone, is better.
Yeah there’s a beautiful size, Lemmy isn’t quite there yet, but it’s closer than Reddit is. And hopefully it’ll be way harder to enshittify.
“A beautiful size.” I like that. It describes the phenomenon exactly.
Like, Gemini (the protocol) is too small. It’s below the threshold is usefulness. I still cross publish (serve) my content in Gemini format, but I never actually browse it anymore.
(Tiny rant) That said, I think Gemini went too far; gmi is smaller than it needs to be, and it was locked down and made immutable prematurely. Client/server interactions need to be a little more complex; I think the extreme simplicity has contributed to its lack of adoption: it’s almost impossible to serve a functional and user-friendly search engine with, leading to what’s largely a dark network - not intentional dark, but filled with isolated, unreachable nodes and practically no discovery. And with its failure, it shut the door on that solution space. It was popular enough that early adapters who tried it are going to shy away from something Gemini-like, but a little more full-featured. I’m bitter about Gemini; if only Solderpunk had had a little more vision.
I just wish there were more communities that aren’t technology or politics.
Yeah, I still regularly visit Reddit because communities related to my specific games (GW2, Genshin) or countries (UK, Hungary) seem rather dead on Lemmy.
Also more story-based forums like AITA, TIFU or HobbyDrama, and of course my favourite, BestOfRedditorUpdates (whose Lemmy equivalent would need several active story-based communities to curate from).
Still a long way to go for Lemmy to completely replace Reddit for me 😮💨
Yeah. That’s a symptom of being small I guess. As it grows, the critical mass of others with your hobby will eventually be reached. But I totally agree.