ZeldaFreak

But there is no big movement away. Yes creators do get less views and money, but I don’t see a big movement of creators, nor viewers. Some big creators try to get the viewers back, that they lost because of the algorithm. They do create and use platforms like Floatplane or Nebula. Here in Germany some do go to the streaming sites of TV Networks. This isn’t really solving the problem, as you switched from shitty YouTube to streaming fragmentation.

Bilibli apparently tries to go international and they do have the infrastructure to be an alternative. I use YouTube since 2008 and there was always people saying that their peak was a few years ago. I saw one try to move away from YouTube here in Germany. A lot of creators rushed to a platform, took viewers with them and started to upload their stuff there. The site couldn’t handle the demand, quickly bought new hardware and what happend next? A lot of people walked back to YouTube. Creators didn’t wanted to double upload and manage 2 sites and from a viewers perspective, not everyone switched, so they stayed where everyone was.

I saw so much the last years. People are always upset about changes and they always say they move but in the end, not much happens. People forget and with the next change, the whole thing repeats. There are no worthy alternatives. Some companies do try it, but it doesn’t quite work out. Do you remember Facebook Gaming/Live? Do you remember Mixer? Both platforms that tried to replace twitch. Even YouTube tried to focus more on Game Streaming but failed. You still can stream on Youtube, but the whole YouTube Gaming thing is dead and never really took off.

To be honest, currently is a good time to try again to switch away from YouTube, as it really messed up a lot of stuff, because they focused more on short videos, than long videos. The other question is how long long videos do exist. Do they move more towards other platforms, like more classic vod streaming services (Netflix, Prime, Paramount, Disney, Discovery or streaming platforms of local TV stations) or do they try to fit more in the short video sector?

Different countries, different laws about free speech and expectations of free speech. Also different countries, different propaganda and their leaders/governments pushing certain agendas. Within their country, they are not wrong. A lot of centralized websites are US based and do follow US laws but you can’t expect that the Internet follows US or EU laws and their culture. Obviously this creates problems and the thing is, that every country tries to fight it their own ways and try to push their agenda. One example would be the GDPR. Some US sites just geoblocked EU IPs, because they didn’t want to deal with these laws, that aren’t even from their country.

Calling them dead or about to be killed, is a wide stretch. All of them do got some dips and people leaving these sites, but I don’t see a big rush away, as the content is still there. With YouTube you don’t have an alternative. With Twitter some went to Mastodon, some to Bluesky and some to Trump Twitter. Reddit is still doing good and Facebook… The whole concept is not doing well.

For all it’s important, including fediverse is the content. Let just focus on Lemmy and Reddit. With Reddit you did have communities splitting of abusive mods. With Lemmy you suddenly have some general purpose communities on different instances and you need to figure out which one is worth following. Some communities quickly die off and they go back to reddit, as there are more users for that community. This alone is hurting whole Lemmy. When you then have somewhat active communities across different Instances, because they think, their instance is better or the other instances sucks, then you split the community more.

To survive you need content and active communities. Reddit still has a lot of that and Lemmy is trying to get more, but their design makes it hard to keep it together. Lemmy has just a few options to survive long term. Get more people and content, so the fragmentation doesn’t play a huge role. Change the design, to prevent fragmentation or the users stop fighting and stop fragmenting the content and try to agree on one community and the others get deleted.

Stuff like Mastodon/Bluesky don’t have such a huge problem, as it’s about a single person and not a community.

In my opinion this is what kills the fediverse. When instances block other instances, you just fragment the whole thing. I think what is needed is a Proxy. What do I mean with that? I can host a read only instance. This way I can control what instances I want to access and which I want to block, but this instance doesn’t host accounts or posts. I would still need an account with a regular instance. The proxy instance would allow multiple accounts at the same time, so you don’t need to worry about to change accounts or URLs, just to see a few other communities.

The whole federation thing is quite neat, but you need so much information beforehand, to choose your “right” community. Of course there are some very isolated instances, that do get blocked by most regular instances, but between the regular instances, there are quite some differences. For example some instances forbid NSFW. Hetzner (server hoster) does not allow NSFW in their ToS and a while back, a lot of instances used Hetzner. Some instances got surprised by that, because they didn’t read the ToS.

Also I have the fear that when some governments could make the life worse for instances and make them accountable for other instances, that you can access through their instance. As an example could be the age verification, that some countries do require now.

The question is how complex your personal website should be and how frequently you want to update it. A CMS gives you comfort in editing it, but you need to babysit the hell out of it, especially Wordpress.

I did my personal website just by myself. My both css files (regular and imprint) are together around 600 lines. It includes custom fonts (Google Fonts locally hosted), some animations and responsive design for smaller screens. My JS is 70 lines long and handles highlighting of the current site and an accordion. My site does work without JS. I do use PHP, mostly for including footer and header to each site. I did some crazy stuff as an experiment to protect my email and stuff, but it didn’t worked.

Lets be honest, with AI you could create a site with ease and without using a CMS and other fancy stuff, this will be safe. Just look what JS and other things do get included and be sure it’s nothing external. When you really want it to make it yourself, I would say learn the basics and copy stuff from themes and stuff like bootstrap.

Honestly though, I would say in these days, you don’t need a flashy theme. My theme is very simple. I have alternating light and dark backgrounds, to separate sections. Some good placements of objects, a different font and an accent color. The only thing I really don’t like is how much I wrote. But when I did it, there was no AI. But I must mention, that the leading dev of my company actually looked at my site and mentioned it that he liked it. I’m not sure if other companies where I applied, really looked at my site. The companies who did invite me only invited me to basically say that they have no room for an inexperienced dev. The company that took me said to me, I know the basic stuff and the rest I will learn.

I didn’t drank it at a bar. First one I drank at a birthday party and afterwards also always at home.

I don’t get hard liquor. Some are drinkable mixed, but it’s like you just made the mixed drink a bit worse. So far I only had one liquor, which did benefited the mixed drink. Licor 43 with milk, but I guess you could just make this without alcohol. Of course I didn’t drank all types of liquor and I never tasted premium stuff. I don’t even like wine. The only thing I do actually enjoy is beer. There I do like the taste. With mixed drinks, it looks to me that they just wanted a version that is drinkable, so you can get drunk. To me loosing control from alcohol is not fun. A bit light headed is fine, but for me beer does this as well.