I hope Lemmy does well, but I don't think it's going to replace Reddit (and that's likely fine in the eyes of the Lemmy team) Nobody wants a federated, slow, difficult to use version of reddit. Nobody wants to choose a server. We just want reddit without the bullshit.
It's the same issue with Mastodon. Mastodon is down over 1 million users since last December, and I bet that's related to how difficult it is to sign up and to find other users on the platform.
Maybe the modest technical hurdles are a feature, not a bug. From the (currently) top comment in the lemmy post you linked[1], which relates a story about alt.sysadmin.recovery in the 70's/80's:
>Which brings me back to my point. A few hoops to jump through and a few initial challenges to adoption can go a long way as a filter for who can show up and interact. Of course we would want Lemmy to be welcoming to anyone who will make the community better, brighter, more fun, and more useful… But we can take our time cracking open the floodgates. Maybe that’s for the best.
The problem is writers who don't focus In tech probably won't be in the app, history reddit, manga, bodybuilders are high Quality subrredits that can't translate so easy to lemmy
Yup, this is why Facebook groups still exist. My Gran can’t start a sewing subreddit but can click groups on Facebook. This is just the next level of that.
No one likes secret internet clubs, they're lame and end up as a circlejerk or a hugbox, much like early IRC servers and discord servers now.
Opinion: lobste.rs sucks because you need to be one of the chosen people to post there, and you're only chosen if you think like someone already in there. The posts there are very high quality, but it might as well be a hivemind's blog. Why would I read someone else's comments when I could make my own, on a different website with the same links posted?
But you don't want to end up like reddit, with their facebook tier front page and repetitive, bot(-like ?) comments. Reddit sucks now is because they let anyone post anything, and the admins want to capture the stream of quick, digital trash coming out of tiktok and the likes. That's what the shareholders want, more users to sell ads. Who cares what the peons babble about, make sure whoever visits the site doesnt have an ad blocker and stick around a long time.
Having a small community lets you specialize more and, in my opinion, specializing a website is much healthier. Discussions are much more pleasant when you go to traffic-forum or chair-forum dot com to discuss traffic tech or leather chairs. You go to reddit, or facebook, or whatever, and see mounds of unrelated videos and pictures flooding your screen. The moderators don't do their job because when you allow everything, you only have to do the bare minimum.
I think "circlejerks" and "hiveminds" are okay. Would you expect a church to defend their views against atheists every Sunday? Or vice versa? Like-minded people like to hang out and talk about like-minded stuff. That's fine.
It is quite ironic, that people flagged your post.
Meaning apparently, no your opinion, that people don’t want to be confronted with controversial opinions all day long was a unwanted opinion from the local hivemind. Or was I missing something here?
Because I also think, that it is fine, if people do their thing in their groups. There are enough other public (online) places, where you do get confronted with other peoples realities. Is that really a flagworthy opinion?
I suppose because of the words used, like "circlejerks"? Another "crude tool" then, I suppose .. as I think in this context the use of that word was alright.
Vouching somewhat works, though.
edit: confirmed, as this comment is now also dead.
Small suggestion: if a bad word is enclosed by "", it likely is not used in a bad way.
> It is quite ironic, that people flagged your post.
Flagged or downvoted? Downvoting stuff is fine; it's actually a bit more nuanced as I mentioned in my previous post because if you spend all your life in a "circlejerk" then that's perhaps a bit of an issue. That's been a concern with e.g. "The filter bubble" and things like "FOX News media bubble" and stuff. But none of that applies to e.g. Lobsters, so I didn't bother mentioning it.
Flagging would be a horrible abuse of the flag feature though.
I don't follow your last two paragraphs. If you unsub from the default subs and stay on smaller ones then you get exactly that small forum experience. The downvote system kills a lot of toxic arguments and insults that forums tend to be full of.
> lobste.rs sucks because you need to be one of the chosen people to post there, and you're only chosen if you think like someone already in there. The posts there are very high quality, but it might as well be a hivemind's blog. Why would I read someone else's comments when I could make my own, on a different website with the same links posted?
You should read some of the threads of lobste.rs users reacting poorly when a technical article happens to be posted by an author with a furry or anime avatar.
It's just like some Hacker News threads. Indistinguishable.
> Nobody wants to choose a server. We just want reddit without the bullshit.
* If you choose reddit you are choosing reddit's server.
* If you choose ycombinator, you are choosing ycombinator's server.
* If you choose facebook, you are choosing facebook's server.
Just because those are not federated doesn't mean the user doesn't have to deal with the bullshit of having to choose to create and manage an account in one (or more) of them. Or possibly having to look for other alternatives (like many are doing now apparently).
You can just enter lemmy.ml or mastodon.social in the browser, press "create an account" in each of them and you'd never even need to know or care whether those federate among themselves or not.
Federation is optional from a user perspective. You could still have separate accounts in beehaw.org, mastodon.org.uk, veganism.social and mastodon.social if you wanted. You are not forced to look for content outside your instance. The same as you can have an account in reddit, another one in facebook and another one in ycombinator without ever mixing them up.
The difference is that in the fediverse you can merge them if you want to. Even if all new users exclusively used mastodon.social resulting in more de-facto centralization, I still don't think that's a big deal, personally. Just the fact that federation is possible at all as an option still provides more software freedom than Twitter, even if you don't care for federation or even know what it is.
Do you think that email being federated makes it less attractive for the average user? do they find it more complicated? ...I don't think the average user cares at all, all they know is they have a gmail or hotmail account.
All of this is technically correct, but it's communicated really badly to the end user. If there is to be any success for Lemmy in the wake of Reddit shooting itself in the foot, it needs to make the federation part completely invisible and transparent, unless someone intentionally seeks it out. join-lemmy.org makes me choose from a list of servers before I can sign up (https://join-lemmy.org/instances). Without having a really solid understanding of how and why I need to choose a server, I'd be surprised if the conversion rate is higher than 5%.
Lemmy.ml is the largest instance, but it's already straining under the weight of a few thousand users (https://lemmy.ml/post/1147770?scrollToComments=true). I think what is needed now is someone with a big budget to purchase some server space and delete any mention of federation from the UX. It's just unclear how they will recoup their investment.
> Nobody wants a federated, slow, difficult to use version of reddit. Nobody wants to choose a server.
I want this. I want this because it's a sustainable way to have Reddit without the ads. The bad UX is an acceptable tradeoff for a platform that doesn't go to shit.
(2) if I am on one mastodon site, I can not just retweet that post, I have to go to my server and then cut-and-paste a link to that other site.
(3) no quote tweeting, important for vitality.
(4) and most importantly, no ranked/AI-managed feed. Thus it is filled with noise.
In many ways, Mastodon is a purposely janked product because people don't want to make things easy to go viral. But that reduces engagement and interest.
For a lot of us the lack of ranked AI managed feed is the feature. I was using Tweetbot on Twitter for that exact reason.
Most people consume Toots by going through their feed, retweeting is just a button away, just like on Twitter.
Quote tweet is definitely lacking, and thankfully is coming up soon according to their CEO and lead developer.
And yes, poor discovery, the search is awful. It's quite a lot better with hashtags and following hashtags in your feed (great feature IMO), but they need to work on that.
Personally I find that while there are flaws, they are smaller than having to endure the amount of spam, ads and garbage I see on twitter. Conversations with people are good and insightful. It's just better for my mental health as well, less of AI generated outrage takes showing up.
> 1. agree, discoverability can be difficult on small instances without being seeded with global follows.
> 2. & 3. Mastodon is just one implementation. It happens to be the most popular, but it isn't the most full featured. I use Misskey, another implementation, and it supports all of the things mentioned here. see below.
>4. This is the main reason i prefer "fediverse" to stuff like facebook. I don't want to be gamed, i just want to read stuff as it comes in. If someone seems interesting, or a thread seems interesting, i can just click and read their profile or the thread.
Misskey has some faults. The admin experience, at least to me, is opaque. Me and a few other Misskey admins are looking for alternatives that aren't GNUSocial or Mastodon. We're hoping that someone develops a compiled implementation of activitypub to link against or use with an API; barring that i think we were debating if plemora was a good one to try.
And additionally, on point 2 above, mastodon supports what you say, it just opens a small window, which you may be blocking - however i admit that i may be misunderstanding this part. The window that opens says "what account would you like to use to <...>?"
The thing is, I have the choice between following too few people to get enough of the stuff that really interests me, or having a deluge that I can't possibly get through, where most of it is not of interest to me, because of what the people I'm interested in seeing certain stuff from posts is stuff I'm not interested in.
Without a ranked/AI-managed feed I'm not truly in control of my feed - without it, I'm forced to curate who I follow based on different criteria to what I want.
It's a matter of perspective. In order to follow people I want to follow because I want to see a small subset of what they post, I also end up getting a boatload of crap in my feed I don't want to see. As such you can say I'm "in control" in as much as I did choose to follow them. But I'm also not in control in as much as I lack the tools to prune down what I see from them to the content I actually want to see.
The latter point of view is the one that is actually useful to me, and so the one I choose to take: I want to be able to see limit subsets of content from people that they label poorly (so following tags is insufficient) and without having to see everything else they post.
I'm perfectly fine with people preferring chronological too - the two can coexist. It doesn't even require any changes to Mastodon to do what I want; just a tiny ActivityPub server that processes my timeline and emits boosts to an outbox that I can put in a list is sufficient.
Fediverse isn't just Mastodon. There are other implementations of ActivityPub compatible with each other. For example I can use Friendica and comment or retrweet posts from Mastodon and vise versa.
> if I am on one mastodon site, I can not just retweet that post, I have to go to my server and then cut-and-paste a link to that other site.
It was simpler in past versions of Mastodon but they removed that feature for some reason. https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/pull/19306 Previously it was "remote interaction" dialog. Other implementations like Pleroma may have kept it.
Re: #1 I see that as closely related to #4, so see my last paragraph.
To #2, a browser extension to help with this would be great, and wouldn't be hard. I'd expect that to come sooner or later.
I agree re: QT, and some Fediverse software has it already. It's coming.
Ranked/AI managed feeds are very much possible to do with Mastodon/Fediverse. You just can't expect it to get built into the main Mastodon UI. However you could do this w/external software that produces an ActivityPub actor that you can consume either by following it or by adding it to a list. It's on my list (sorry) of things to play with, but I hope someone beats me to it (and frankly, it's a space that's wide open for a variety of variations, going from shared up/downvoting a la reddit, to simple bayesian network over your own activity, to a more complex machine learning model or crazy stuff like asking the openai API questions about whether the content matches whatever profile you want.
Exactly. I always thought Mastadon could have been so much more successful if they had just proxied cached versions of the most popular instances through a single larger server.
Sure it would give Mastadon the power to pick and choose who it wants to host, but if you want to go join a different instance you are more than welcome to.
It would just substantially streamline the process for your mainstream user.
> Exactly. I always thought Mastadon could have been so much more successful if they had just proxied cached versions of the most popular instances through a single larger server.
Relays serve this purpose. I use one on my personal one-user instance.
Worked as an interesting relay solution to my small instance. I relayed most of the instances which contain profiles I've subscribed to and it filled out my timeline considerably. Replies to remote posts aren't downloaded by default and this solved that problem.
> if they had just proxied cached versions of the most popular instances through a single larger server.
I mean, isn't any instance in the federation already offering a proxied cache of the content of all other instances you access through it?
You can just register/login in mastodon.social website the same way you can register/login in Twitter, and then access cached copies of content from the entire fediverse compatible with Mastodon.
If you are gonna make new accounts connect through a global mainstream proxy, you might as well just let them connect through a global mainstream instance. I personally do not see the problem with one instance being more mainstream than the rest as long as federation is still respected. It's definitelly still an improvement over centralization and if it ever becomes a burden it'd be easier to migrate.
Not so sure about that, people unable to spell YouTube seemed to do more harm to Universal Tubing who owned utube.com than it did YouTube. If you hadn't heard of them before, how many ts in Twitter? Is TikTok spelt with the letter c?
People who've seen YouTube written down a couple times tend not to get it wrong. Twitter is a common dictionary word and I'd bet had a pretty low misspelling rate, if you'd asked people to spell it before the service Twitter even existed. TikTok, I think most people get after seeing it a few times, at worst.
Mastodon? It's a dictionary word, so it as that going for it—and yet, people see it a hundred times and still often misspell it. The pronunciation's just a bit too far from the spelling, at least in American English. Most folks say it as if it were spelt "mastadon", especially if they're not trying to enunciate carefully & precisely and (perhaps) don't know the correct spelling.
(I'm not weighing in on whether that's some kind of serious problem for Mastodon, but I do think it's worse than all your other examples, as far as likelihood of misspelling even after significant exposure—then again, web search smooths over most of that, for anything sufficiently popular)
You are being downvoted but I agree, what's with people spelling it mastadon? That's not even how it's pronounced (in my English but non American country, at least), so is it a language thing? Is mastadon a real word in some languages?
In America its pronunciation is closer to "Mastadon." The second syllable sounds like "tuh."
You see the same thing with other words that have "o"s that function similarly. You'll hear Americans turning "o" into "uh" in Tyrann-o-saurus, p-o-tato, etc.
But that's not how it's written, is it? Given that English pronunciation rules are very different than how words are written, I would have thought native speakers would learn to actually look at a word and imitate the order of graphemes.
Especially if we're talking about an Internet thing: you've seen it in written form more often than you have heard it enunciated out loud. And seems like the iOS text prediction is also able to spell it the right way.
I don't care honestly, but as a non native English speaker I've never understood why natives make an enormous amount of banal spelling errors.
We're still pretty alpha, but Sift is aiming to hit what you are looking for
https://sift.quest/about
We ended up launching sooner than we really planned after a reddit post last friday got more attention than we expected, so things are not polished and we are missing features, but we are developing quickly.
We're actually targeting something a bit different than reddit longer term with a more tag based curation system and a (medium term) reputation graph that we are hoping will give some new solutions to seeing things that are more trustworthy/relevant (helping with the eternal September problem, shills, and whatnot).
Check us out and tell us about post something good, let us know if you have requests or comments, we're actively integrating things people ask us for as fast as we can.
Will you be adding comments sections for each post?
Inline previews of the links, and usernames on each post, would be helpful.
What is the ellipsis to the right of each post for? It doesn't seem to do anything.
What is the integer to the left of each post? They don't seem to be in any apparent order.
I actually rather like the interface. I feel like a lack of shininess and rounded corners keeps away the 'unwashed masses' that tend to ruin forums. A different background color would be an improvement, however.
* Yes, we are working on comments sections for posts. Hoping to deploy this week.
* Usernames on posts are coming soon. They interact a bit with some things we are doing differently at Sift, so there's some complexity:
* Sift tries not to to show you duplicates (the same url maps to the same node in our database for all submissions), and we don't actually privileged "submission" relative to any other person saying it is good.
* We trying out a different privacy model where posts don't have to be publicly attributed. Right now we are effectively in the everything is anonymous world, we will be adding the option for public attribution (hopefully this week, maybe next) and at that point we will begin showing usernames of people who are willing to be shown.
* I've deleted the ellipsis. It was an artifact of us trying to communicate that you can click on posts to expand ui interactions, that looks like it was doing more harm than good.
* The integers next to the post are a score.
* They should be in descending order in the Explore tab.
* In the library tab things are time ordered by when you saved/preferenced them
* in the tag tab things are time ordered by their first submission.
We'll add more sorting options eventually but it's further down the roadmap. If given that understanding things still look out of order, that's probably a bug, please report it with the feedback button (which captures information about what you are seeing).
We've gotten a lot of feedback on reddit from people wanting a more modern interface, so we're going to have to make someone unhappy. We're planning on integrating tailwind css soon and doing a bit of ui uplift.
However, we're also racing forward on implementing our trust/reputation/"probability that this user will want to see that user's stuff" model that we are really hoping will allow you to keep your good community even as 'unwashed masses' descend. We'll likely post more about that before too long on sift and/or https://www.reddit.com/r/siftquest/
I mean, Voat was exactly that. The problem was they did nothing to moderate at all, so every sub was basically stormfront.
I'm ok with those people existing and even having their own lil sub, but not so much that if I'm just looking for news I get peppered with memes about jews being evil.
- Started out as peppered and then became nothing but, like an example of the "neonazis taking over a bar" story. It drove me into infrequently, and then never using it. The site's operators seemed to be on board with that though from what I remember.
It takes a person with an understanding of capitalist frameworks to notice that real user serving communities cannot truly exist for long inside a market.
Everything turns to crap when developed for profits. This happens all the time but no one realizes it because we're accustomed to think about the symptoms and not the sickness. "Micro-transactions this", "ads that", "censorship this", "privacy that", when in reality its just the natural development of platforms under capitalism.
It was real for many years. I doubt Aaron, kn0thing or even Huffman at the time considered it a bait with a long term plan to get to the current state.
I'm willing to donate to a site that offers the best parts of reddit with a fast, clean and usable interface. That might be lobste.rs in a few years.
Reddit was good for like 6-7 years (I was a member back when there was only one 'subreddit'). Turning point was the redesign into a web 3.0 mess that broke stuff like 'find in page' or the back button. Then the gradual monetization, app prompts and SEO that made the side less and less usable. I don't know if it was profitable, but there are definitely alternate paths they could have taken rather than completely gutting and selling out the site for maximum engagement and user figures.
Popularity in itself is no problem for any platform, as long as it manages to scale up moderation together with growth. CSAM spreaders and ordinary spammers are the least of the worries thanks to AI and other automated detection systems these days, but warez/moviez are harder due to the DMCA and European fair use laws (e.g. German §51/51a UrhG), and stuff that veers into anything politics absolutely needs human intervention.
HN is pretty decent at that, despite it (IIRC) being only Dan (u/dang) doing the moderation work. (Maybe it helps that both the HN tech and the general community itself don't make it easy to post dank memes like on the other social networks)
as the overused quote goes, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.
If you join a platform that's run by a large profit driven entity you're going to get squeezed sooner or later. Another relevant example, Twitch today passed some rather draconic rules on branding and ads run by users.
You can say you're okay with the bullshit, but "we just want reddit but without the bad stuff" doesn't work. The bad stuff is baked in. If you want genuine control you're going to have to do some work.
>Another relevant example, Twitch today passed some rather draconic rules on branding and ads run by users.
Users? The user is the one watching. And from what I see Twitch is preventing people on their platform from making it a streaming billboard service.
I think this is a broken clock corporate policy. I only watch but one or two people on the platform and they don't really do ads, but something has to keep the cancerous adtech game in check.
This isn't keeping ad-tech in check. Twitch itself is an advertisement business. They continuously have increased the amount of ads they run. (for people who don't know what this is about, twitch has introduced rules that keep banners on streams to 3% of the screen size and banned 'burned-in', that is independent ads run by creators)
The entire point of this is the same as Reddit's, to take away direct revenue agreements between creators and third parties, so they can take a cut on every transaction made. How can anyone on earth hope that internet monopolists ban independent revenue channels for content creators? Google is also an advertisement business. They will never ban sponsorships, they will just force everyone to use their APIs.
There is no need for anyone to moderate this for the very simple reason that you, as the watcher, can simply turn the stream off if you don't like what the streamer shows you.
> You can say you're okay with the bullshit, but "we just want reddit but without the bad stuff" doesn't work. The bad stuff is baked in.
The concatenation of niche content markets that Reddit grew on is giving way to decision making that will favor the center rather than the edge. Almost everyone will buy vanilla and be satisfied. Very few will buy anchovy, and those that do LOVE it... but at scale you have to favor the vanilla buyer.
I don't know. I'm skeptical about lemmy taking off but for a different reason — there's a sort of chicken and egg problem with content. It's tough to attract users without attractive users. Bluesky has tried to address that with selective invites and whether or not it happens organically with lemmy who knows.
Using lemmy though, it seems a lot more intuitive to me than mastodon. I can find topic communities on other servers easily, and the community-server match issue seems like a better fit than mastodon in some ways. Mastodon never has quite clicked with me, but lemmy does, maybe even more so than reddit itself.
The limits to me using lemmy right now are content not ux. Mostly I use reddit for relatively obscure topics.
But already I'm seeing cat photos of the sort I'd see on the main page of reddit so maybe it's a time thing.
In addition to the UX of Mastodon/Lemmy, I also think the moderation or lack of it is a major issue. It would be nice if this got more attention, because it's even a weak point of places like reddit.
On the plus side, reddit does have some blanket site wide content moderation that targets some of the most egregious and illegal content. I think that's good, and I don't think "leaving it up to individual server admins to blacklist" is sufficient.
On the negative side, the way subreddits and mastodon instances are moderated is a huge problem. Being the first to create a community shouldn't necessarily give you 100% control over the content. That sort of thing can be an option, but to me reddit has made it clear that for major and large communities there needs to be some more democratically inspired form of governance.
Yes, this is a hugely difficult problem, but unless we want an endless cycle of new sites that become toxic or problematic once they grow to a certain size, it's a problem that needs a lot of attention.
Reddit useless to me, because I am either banned or shadowbanned in several of the subreddits dedicated to my interests or which are otherwise relevant.
r/Winnipeg, which is my hometown and still a city I drive into on the regular, is controlled as an echo chamber by a group of elite admins. It doesn't matter what kind of echo chamber, except to say, it's my viewpoint that dominates the echo chamber.
Nonetheless, my tone (which on Reddit was very similar to my tone on here) was enough to get me shadowbanned. If I have no voice in the sub dedicated to my community based on an arbitrary decision by an unknown admin and which I wasn't even supposed to know about, let alone appeal the decision... that's a garbage platform, you ask me.
r/GratefulDead is likewise run by a tiny dictator. In theory there's other admins that could take action, but they don't.
In theory this is all fine and within Reddit's rules, which are clearly garbage. If they are positioning themselves as the de facto public square, you can't have arbitrary and anonymous censorship.
I'm not necessarily looking for more things being outlawed, or less things being outlawed. Rather I'd like to see some system where subgroups can more fairly decide what gets outlawed or allowed, and mechanisms for transparency and accountability of enforcing such rules.
It may not matter that much for a sub dedicated to a niche topic, but hopefully its clear that subs that are supposed to represent cities, countries, and similar should somehow managed in a "democratic" like way. There is clear value in the names of these subs.
While mastodon doesn't have "subs" per-se, having some sort of moderation that is "democratic" and implemented by a diverse group of people would be good to see. Having each instance owner have ultimate moderation power is not a plus in my book. Why should moderation and choice of content be biased towards those tech savvy enough to setup an instance? That's not what I want in a social media platform.
Lemmy really isn't slow (though this instance is definitely underspecced for a hug of death), and it isn't difficult to use either.
The ease of use point is almost true. For the average user, you're not supposed to be manually subscribing to remote communities. You'd be expected to be exposed to communities you're already federated with and then just click subscribe.
I don't fully agree with your assessment. While it's true that very few people seem to "want" federation, I think a lot of people want smaller communities.
Many pseudo-redditors are only on the site because of its small communities. The niche stuff. What used to be forums dedicated to one craft, which have kind of re-gathered on Reddit because it's easier to just create a micro-community like this than to bother setting up your own forum/instance/whatever. Same reason Facebook groups are popular.
But also, smaller communities benefit from a much healthier signal-to-noise ratio. Tildes (https://tildes.net/) for example is invite-only and has remained a healthy, high quality discussion & content platform through the years because of exactly this.
HN is also kind of in that boat -- and people tend to complain how the HN community growing degrades the quality. I do see it as well, though the fact it has two full-time paid and incredibly dedicated moderators helps a LOT. I believe the rugged UI also helps.
Forgive my arrogance but how is it physically possible for Lemmy to be slow? It has 3.3k monthly users, you can probably fit the entire lemmyverse on a $10 vps.
Also they're holding everything in a single large SQL database which doesn't seem to scale great, and could do well to have some kind of batch queuing process (with some redis magic?) to handle multiple large requests
> Mastodon is down over 1 million users since last December, and I bet that's related to how difficult it is to sign up and to find other users on the platform.
How is it difficult to sign up? I signed up to mastodon.gamedev.place because i learned about it from someone else and the process took me a few minutes. After that i was able to follow people pretty much the same way as in Twitter and some of them are from other instances.
IMO the main reason Mastodon doesn't have as many users is because in practice there isn't much of a reason to switch to Mastodon when Twitter does the work good enough.
There's nothing intrinsically slow about this model. There are some reasons a lemmy instance might be slow — like a prejudiced attitude to the best way to monetize such sites and hence not enough money for servers, but there's no intrinstic reason.
> difficult to use
The link complains about it being hard to follow remote communities. Of course, without federation, there's no way to follow remote communities at all. If you discover a subreddit you like you can't follow it from within HN.
The "difficulty" here can also be improved significantly in many different ways. E.g. a browser extension that allows auto-filling a form field with webfinger id is all that's needed to build a better flow for a lot of these federated services.
There are ways which would work without extensions too. E.g. a DHT mapping <some fingerprint> -> instance url. It doesn't even need to be perfect. Worst case you need to fill in the correct instance hostname.
do a lot of people even want more social media and internet communities? i wasted an embarrassing amount of time on reddit in hind sight. this all reminds me of when i finally burnt out on wow. i quit, sold my account (at the end of wotlk, i think wow declined after that too?) and didn't play video games for years after. personally i feel the same way about reddit, do i really want this all again in my life? idk, im not searching for an alternative though.
These social networks are very addictive, you might start out with genuine interest but it becomes gamified social interactions pretty quickly. I bet you’ll go to a new site with the intention of commenting on a specific topic, but then get wrapped up commenting for points. That’s how I felt about Reddit at least, and realizing it is what made me quit.
I joined this site because I thought it would break that gamified social interaction loop by being tied to a particular topic. But actually, I’ve realized I speculate about my comment scores even here while making them. I think this one would have done well, it sort of begrudgingly admires Reddit while also saying negative things about it, and social media in general. People here like talk in the abstract about social media, I think because it plays into the hope that maybe we’re somehow outside it. This comment is also self-depreciating and, I think, fairly relatable (since I’m sure most of the commenters here have some history with using Reddit, and possibly quitting it). Of course, now that I’ve mentioned the points for this comment, it will almost certainly be downvoted to oblivion, because that’s like rule 0 of this game. Unless I can save it by being sufficiently meta, maybe…
>do a lot of people even want more social media and internet communities?
Not necessarily more, but I feel like I haven't truly found a community I am comfortable with for the specific kinds of topics I want to talk about. Most are too small, and the big ones are arguably too big (i.e. it becomes a lot of noise and not a lot of conversation). On one end I get no more discussion than me sitting alone in my room. On the other end I inevitably fall into pace with the anger and feel worse off as a result.
Goldilocks issues, I suppose.
>do i really want this all again in my life?
If I could find suitable physical alternatives I'd never look back. But THAT search is even sadder and more embarrassing than a search for an internet community. I just accepted that making friends as an adult is extremely hard and you gotta rely on places you're forced to meetup at. i.e. Work.
A better way forward is to really take the design back to primitives.
Reddit/NH/Twitter/Youtube/Google all default to favoring freshness. I believe this design assumption to be a mistake.
A lot of what gets posted would be better served by some hybrid of a wiki+chatroom/forum. For example, Ill just pick a thread that gets posted every week. In the what else will I like subreddit, there is constantly a "post your best mindfuck movies". That kind of question and answer is best served by some kind of static wiki like page that allows voting on individual database entries. It is better served by someone bumping the topic, maybe creating a new chatroom for the day, having the best parts of the chat post to the forum, for archival and historical purposes. As new movies come out, they can be added to the list. Maybe filters exist that allow you to show the results only showing votes from the last year, to help rank newer entries against historical ones.
In a TV/Speaker/Hometheater subreddit, constantly "what's best" belongs in the wiki. But the wiki is some singular document fairly separate from the discussion pages. Wiki page components dont rearrange by voting. The wiki is fairly well hidden in the interface.
When some kind of funny video gets reposted, it shouldnt start a new conversation. The comments page needs a better design to combine/isolate old comments, with today's discussion.
tldr: reddit, like a lot of social media, has a deduplication problem, that they choose to ignore in favor of focusing on "engagement" where engagement is just repetition and regurgitation. social media needs to rediscover bumping instead of reposting.
You're definitely on to something, I overtime stopped contributing to those questions because i was annoyed I just wrote a thoughtful answer recently no one cares about now.
But i think this misses the point. Like MMOs around WoW there was a lot of small games, eve, everquest, runescape, UO etc... Each had it own special thing and small community. Just like how forums and other small communities existed online. WoW came and just swallowed up everything and then some, introducing tons of new people to the genre. This is what Reddit did to forums. We could make a better Wow maybe, but nothing happened after wow in MMOs. WoW slowly died off in popularity and people moved on to new genres or left entirely leaving a new generation to disover their own games. I guess I expect this to happen to Reddit, a slow death from now on from bad decisions and boredom.
In 5 years someone will come along and make reddit classic, we'll poke around a bit and get a kick out of the nostalgia and forget about it again.
My experience with php style forums has been that the communities frown upon bumping and necroposting. Rediscovering and commenting on an old thread is usually met with profanity from the forum regulars. If bumping creates a better social media experience, why is it condemned instead of commended?
Most social media has no concept of I already read this. When I read something with a bunch of comments and come back latter there isn't a good way to skip past the things I've already see to what is new (and of course go back if I don't remember the context). Because of this I don't want you to bump something old - I read it way back, and I no longer even have an idea of where I last read...
Traditional forms are linear. I’m describing something more branching, where a bump starts a new branch off a trunk, but still nested under the original post.
I see the netsplit issue caused by server level blocking to be the biggest issue with lemmy/mastodon.
Choosing a server wouldn't be a huge issue if you knew for certain you could still access the posts/content on any other server. Currently what you can access depends entirely on the whims of your (and their) local BOFH.
This is a problem. I can understand having server standards for groups operating there, but banning connections to other servers seems over the top. I can block users that I don't want to listen to in a group as it is.
The choice should be individual, I don't want them making choices for me of who I should or should not interact with.
you hit the nail on the spot. I tried to register, I didn't get how it works and I consider myself somewhat tech savvy. Closed and never opened again. Twitter is so much easier to use and it is all in one place instead of trying to find servers(?) on mastodon.
So clicking a registration button and filling out username and password is too challenging for you? How on earth did you manage to set up an email account, lot alone register on here?
I keep seeing that pattern ,"we don't aim to replace (google|gmail|imessage|twitter|fb|reddit)" yeah and they won't. Waste of time unless you have a lot of time to waste.
By bullshit he means censoring, forced advertising and content filtration which is conducted by the administrators and owners.
These things are necessary to run a centralised internet service and some people with idealistic visions are trying to find a more open and inclusive alternative.
But we have many examples why this is difficult or even impossible, with examples of Usenet or the direction Mastodon has been taking recently.
Cause in reality we want to be steered mindlessly, we want to be fed a consistently emotional and relatable story. It is peaceful and easy.
This is where the Web3 Social Media thrive. There is no running away from reddit, facebook, twitter.
"Cause in reality we want to be steered mindlessly"
"There is no running away from reddit, facebook, twitter."
Maybe speak for yourself?
I rather see the problem with money. It costs a lot to develope a stable communication plattform and run it. Decentralizing is even harder to do right.
But people expect things to be free on the internet and just working. Those who donate and put in effort are a small minority.
So this is why reddit will only be replaced by the next reddit financed by ad tech, that will act exactly the same in a few years. Unless people will start to take the base of their communication and information flow serious. Maybe this is a good start, but lemmy really does not seem to be an adequate technical alternative in its current shape.
Constant A/B testing, insane issues with the 25 API calls each homepage load makes, stuff is constantly shifting around, it takes ages for feedback even from the mods of popular subs to be implemented, Reddit Corporate seems to be more interested in beancounting than transparency and product development...
I'd be happy to pay $5 a month to a site that essentially "hosts subreddits" for niche communities.
I think a lot of other people would, as well.
I could spin up a bulletin board on a $5 VPS for a few thousand of my closest internet friends easily enough, but there's something to be gained from a single, well-known site with a well-designed interface (not reddit!), a large existing userbase, and useful discovery tools.
I moderate a few modestly sized subreddits for a niche hobby -- regular stuff, nothing that could be regarded as morally questionable or a ToS issue -- to the tune of 10k-15k active users on a busy day. My account was suspended for "suspicious activity" the other day[1], and some of my less active subreddits were also banned.
While extenuating circumstances (described in the post linked below) mean it's plausible this was an overzealous spambot, the timing is curious, as I had just added my subs to the protest, and was in the process of communicating with the mods of some fairly large subreddits about joining the protest.
It seems petty. That said this decentralization effort ( if users moving to other products can be called that ) may be good overall. I was getting weary of Reddit, Discord and few other entities owning nearly the entire market.
The real question here is this: What have reddit administrators done in the last 10 years that makes you the person reading this comment believe that they deserve the benefit of doubt?
On the off chance it was an overzealous anti-spam bot, but you accused them of dirty dealings anyway, is this a form of injustice so awful that you would feel remorse the rest of our life for the false allegations?
Let me guess; This is one of the accounts that was just posting the same "Migrate to lemmy!" message in every single thread talking about the protest next week.
Yeah, that's what I suspected. Not that Reddit hasn't been having shit moderation, but this looks like it makes sense to be flagged as spam. An overzealous misguided user who desperately looking to get involved. Intentions may have been good, but execution was poor.
IMO the better way to do the same thing would have been to write a post specific to each tool addressing how it could integrate with Lemmy.
Everything about this seems incredibly suspect. Reddit wouldn't ever ban anyone for suggesting an alternative (there's a whole subreddit dedicated to that). This just seems to be a shill capitalizing on the news, plain and simple.
But there's a difference between posting that once, or twice... or even thrice vs cross posting it a score or more ( https://i.imgur.com/scny5VP.png ) where it becomes problematic.
I've written one comment with a link to Lemmy on one of my alt, permanently suspended the next day, I appealed and they refused it without replying on why I was suspended.
There is a lot of spam on reddit that mods choose not to address. Political subs with a few accounts whitelisted for thread submission, posting the same agitprop, dateless twitter screenshots talking about how shitty Corp X or Politician Y is. Comment bots that will have entire conversations with each other with meme banter, building upvotes.
Then there are the less malicious ones, like the quote bots on Lord of the Rings subs.
If this person was banned for having a template message about migrating to a different site, it shows a priority by reddit admins to eliminate message spreading about a competitor. It's trash.
I just noticed that lemmy.ml has a 2 day old post saying they're overloaded with users, then the post links to an instance list which shows that lemmy.ml has "1.3k users per month", and the entire lemmyverse only has 3.3k users per month.
This makes me wonder:
1. Are those counters outdated/not live, or does the main lemmy instance really struggle with just 1.3k users per month?
2. Even if the counters are stale and the current numbers are much higher, the thought that a community with just 1.3k users will be able to handle a sudden influx of millions of new users without falling apart seems insane from a moderation/content point of view (even if the servers can handle it)
I don't use reddit, but I would love to see a mass migration away from them to a competitor, as that type of competition is the only thing that can prevent corporations from exploiting customers in the free market. But I have doubts about Lemmy being the answer here.
The last time I remember a mass migration was when Voat was a thing, although that was mostly nazis/assholes nobody wants to talk to anyways. Voat wasn't federated or anything, but IIRC they managed to scale up and survived for a couple of years. Idk if the site operators found investors or anything like that (unlikely due to the user base), but I think that centralized approach is the only way you'll be able to make a lasting dent on a site like reddit.
Imagine if Twitter decided to do a 180 and embrace third party apps and launch their own reddit competitor, to steal third party reddit app users. That would be awful and funny.
This has been fun to watch. Reddits been working to deteriorate its quality for a long time. The major disappointment is that they aren't a publicly traded company so there is no way to make money on their downfall.
The reddit redesign is still a marvel of technology, in a negative way. I can not comprehend how it is even possible to make a piece of software, be it online or offline, that mainly just has to display text (and the occasional video, thumbnail or image), so incredibly slow and bug ridden.
It's truly baffling. The editor for comments is buggy, regularly posts comments twice, can't handle copy/paste properly, "there was a problem" and "you broke reddit" error messages on refresh are a common occurence, and just opening a thread takes more than 5 seconds on average. The video player does not work most of the time.
Then I saw the official reddit app, and it manages to be low quality in all kinds of places the website redesign managed to miss. Being on the mobile web version constantly nags you to download the official reddit app, and the nagging popup causes the position you were in the comments to be reset, for extra annoyance.
Without old.reddit or 3rd party clients I find Reddit unusable.
My favourite bug there (unless it's actually a feature?) when people post links reddit will intentionally break urls by actually inserting "/" in the link url especially if the urls have "_" to separate words in it. so this_is_an_example becomes this/_is/_an/_example.
When you use their "app" it works, but if you use a browser it breaks.
As far as I know, that's because way back when they introduced "new Reddit" (the redesigned web UI) they made the bizarre decision to use a slightly different and incompatible Markdown parser. So ever since then, posts and comments have looked different depending on which version of the site you view them on.
The URL escaping syntax is one difference, but another one is that the two renderers support different syntax for monospaced code blocks. As you can probably imagine, that wreaks havoc on the formatting of posts in programming subreddits.
This is definitely a feature. It's intrusive, obvious, and has been around for a long time. It creates friction for users of old reddit with plausible deniability.
I would love to read an interview or AMA from the developers of Reddit's new site. Just to hear their side of the story. I also cannot believe how one could make a site so uniformly terrible in all ways, but I'm willing to at least give them the benefit of the doubt and hear them out. The top two explanations (to me so far) are either 1. the developers are totally incompetent or 2. they are deliberately sabotaging the site, possibly to dissuade users from using it. Nothing else makes sense, but I'm open to a logical explanation.
i'm baffled too. it's so slow and unusable in almost every way. old reddit is so much snapier and usable. It feels like reddit devs are "innovating" to justify their salaries imo.
I was checking the schedule for a local event. The website was designed so that the schedule items would appear as you scrolled. On desktop there were photos and stuff alongside it, but on mobile it was literally just text with some styling. The performance was sad for such a simple website. All jittery. If it had been plain text, CSS and images, it would've loaded and rendered just fine.
Also why does the mobile site try so hard to get me on the app? Why do they care? They have my eyeballs either way but they seem to take umbrage when I use my phone's browser.
If Elon had kept the company public, any one with two neurons able to fire would have been shorting it and would have cleaned up. With his leadership and decision making, Twitter would have gone to 0 by now.
Only one I can think of is Tesla that's public, and it certainly has its own issues.
SpaceX is private (and Shotwell seems to be running it just fine), Twitter is private, Musk is no longer involved with Paypal, Boring Co. is private... am I missing anything?
The short argument is so silly. Plenty of people were 100% right about what was coming in 08. 99% of them would've gone broke shorting it. Knowing it's fucked it's the same as knowing WHEN it will fall and having the money to hang in there while you get ripped apart as everyone pretends otherwise.
Looking at the most recent cases of Doge, Twitter and Tesla a while ago, I'd say that Musk is skilled in accumulating goodwill and capital.
Honestly, I think going public again with Twitter could be a smart thing. Not now, but later when more ppl dropped their grudge. Retails would probably be more inclined to buy Twitter stock rather than banks.
There are also rumours that Twitter will be cash flow positive by the end of the year.
Do we have reason to believe that's going to happen anytime soon? I was startled to hear an 80 year old elderly woman look at my car and then say "I'll never give that man any of my money." So it's pretty mainstream now.
Elon has always had a tendency to talk out of his ass, but mostly nobody paid attention. Now the whole world watches, but he doesn't stop acting out. He'd have to cut back on the nonsense before memories can start to fade.
Looking at how the banks who funded Elon's purchase are valuing their stakes, it looks like it would have gone to about $18.48/share by now. Fidelity is evaluating their shares on a $15B total value, so ($54.20 * ($15B/$44B))
Worth noting that CPM revenues on Facebook are down about 53% in that same timeframe, so it is possible that "most advertisers have returned" and that "Twitter ad revenues are down 59%" are both true statements.
I mean personally I have almost never used twitter and I wish it'd burn to the ground just on the principle that it creates trash content and arguments by design.
Still, for all the fire and brimstone predicted (and I was one of them) it's running, and probably capable of running at a loss for quite some time.
Except for reading thru some shared Reddit posts or Google search results, I find Reddit very unintuitive.
Maybe Reddit never put in many dopamine triggers like other social media (but Twitter is more than dopamine hooks). And maybe they didn't monetize hard also.
These days, building community is better in other tools now: eg. WhatsApp works (shrug). Knowledge-share type discussions is better even in google groups tbh. Maybe Reddit is a good place to vent haha?
I thought the whole idea of locking down the API, heavily promoting reddit awards + avatars and pushing of the official app is done to have growth and a better valuation when they go public?
You can have/ believe anything you like. If you think those things increase their value, and want them to go public, I want them to go public too. I just don't agree/ have the same thesis about their value and where it is derived that you do.
I do! But just the paper value. The maximum value for humanity would be if they would've just kept going like a few years ago, I guess? But I can understand if investors want ROI.
They've been permanently banning for bullshit for the last few years or so. Reddit is just a Tiktok sewer at this point. My 15 year old, probably would've been 16 closing on 17 year old account right now, account was permanently banned for "harassment" for asking a moderator which rule I'd broken in their subreddit. Of course, only one message was sent to them, and I was muted with no response. My post in question was contradicting another poster (or was it the mod themselves? who knows) and asking for sources for their assertions.
The administration sees niche communities as just an annoyance. They're currently exploiting non-English Language oriented communities and sockpuppeting accounts with poor machine translations to build language-specific communities around the Tiktok sewer subreddits.
Congrats to kn0thing, spez, et al. on your "community" "engagement" and good luck on the exit!
If you spend "countless hours of your personal time" working on a commercial web site for free, that just makes you a fool. Stop spending your life and time working for a corporation that couldn't care less about you and isn't compensating you. When that corporation decides it is done with you, you can't cry over it. You gave away your most valuable asset - time for free to a company that made money off of you.
The minute Hacker News starts to monetize I'm gone like a fart in the wind.
Installing Lemmy without Docker or rather their docker-compose has not been possible, despite it being reported since beginning of this year.
No matter what version, it doesn't compile because of some file not found error without additional info.
One of the maintainers just arrogantly wrote something like," only the official way is supported".
I was following what was written on their documentation.
But you can neither have a version installed and compiled by you, or a docker managed service without all the other services of compose. e.g. no local non-docker database.
For me that's a red flag. Ignorance and arrogance. But they want my resources so they can federate content in my hardware on their site.
I don't think so.
There's also some weird drama going on over a user complaining about Lyft's response to an issue, and then Lyft responding to the user's post with their real name (which was not attached to the reddit account). If Reddit removed the comment I haven't seen that yet, so the two stories feel vaguely similar in a way.
tangential, but that graveyard sort of reminds me why I left reddit. I understand that there are a lot of off topic comments, but surely there must be some better way to encourage proper moderation than having a mod delete 80% of the comments, remove the post (which in and of itself wasn't rulebreaking AFAIK), then lock the post. Then after all that have the mod speak from an ivory tower about how "Y'all can't behave". It just all feels a bit power-trippy in my eyes.
I can't particularly agree in this case. I don't think /r/legaladvice is better off having a thousand incorrect, off-topic responses to a question. It was locked when I saw it first and I didn't think that was weird- they usually do that once approximately correct advice has come in but people are still replying. The post being removed surprised me but then again, I don't know that there's really an actionable legal question here, so it was mostly just a lightning rod. And complaining about how people can't behave feels reasonable to me when people aren't following the rules. I got plenty of issues with reddit but I don't actualy agree with any of your complaints here.
> And complaining about how people can't behave feels reasonable to me when people aren't following the rules.
The customer service side of me wants to agree with you. But we both know in reality that yelling at customers never ends the way we desire. I guess that's the primary issue. It FEELS right but I have long since learned this isn't how you deal with people if your goal is a civil community. But ofc reddit does tend to strongly go off of gut feelings.
In addition, many of reddit's moderation tools are designed to be hostile to the user, and only got more hostile overtime. It's not made with the intention to clean up spam and ignore the trolls, but to chastise others at large and belittle them. The old trick where you punish the class because the class clown acted up... except you may never even see the clown in this case. Some troll in some subthread in a 1000 comment post acting up? Better lock the entire post so no one can discuss.
It's no wonder it becomes so easy for users to disdain the moderators when they use those tools.
> The post being removed surprised me but then again, I don't know that there's really an actionable legal question here, so it was mostly just a lightning rod.
I imagine that's why that user made the post there. If you were punished for not knowing your legal rights in your area than I question why the sub exists.
Granted, I'm also biased in that I feel the internet is the worst place to get legal nor medical advice, and any legal/medical issue should be answered with Contact a Lawyer/Doctor.
It's terrible. It's like forums, except there are bots doing it now and things don't disappear, instead they flood the field with automod comments and empty spaces so the thread is useless.
The part that gets me about this one is that doxxing is a bannable offense on reddit, but they're clearly not banning the lyft corporate account that did the doxxing.
On my end, they have removed the offending comment (finally) but it's pretty clear that they have different rules for corporations and people, since the account is not banned.
I think the voting system on reddit confuses users into thinking it's a democracy. It's a business owned by Tencent and Fidelity investments with a valuation of over $10B.
Is Musk running Reddit, now, too, as a hobby? This all feels oddly reminiscent of Twitter at the end of 2022, when you could briefly be banned for merely uttering the dread word 'mastodon'. Reddit seems to be doing a mistake-for-mistake replay of Twitter's recent API restriction/protectionism screwups.
I think it's similar, but this time it's to take a private company and do an IPO. Bean counters hate when a corp provides a free service, literally -hate- it, as it's hard to quantify except as a loss in the loss column. It's even harder to justify with the quarter-to-quarter management style of public companies. Thus free APIs for 3rd party apps had to go. And here we are...
It is a federated piece of software with an instance whose admins clearly didn't realise they were going to get the HN hug of death and an exodus of reddit users today. The application's architecture, as I understand it, is largely horizontally scalable but I'd guess its operations team for the main instance either doesn't have a bottomless pit of money, or hasn't had to deal with user floods of this scale before.
The software is fine, it can handle a few thousand active simultaneous connections on a fairly standard machine, and is indefinitely horizontally scalable (limited of course by whatever DB you use). I'm pretty sure the admins just haven't specced it for more than the low loads they normally get.
That should be within what it can scale to with donation-level support, given some optimization. As it is right now, there are live updates via websockets for all active users, some queries can be optimized dramatically, and there is no sharding - the running costs are 30EUR/month. With a few thousand a month and some smart optimization, 2k requests/s is not out of the realm of possibility.
I was banned for saying that Marvel movies were boring in /r/movies. The mods of Reddit are absolutely why it's not an investable company. You can't express an opinion that they disagree with or you're at the whim of totally arbitrary gatekeepers.
The funny thing is that the reaction of these platforms when someone advocates for communications elsewhere is to ban those people rather than try to improve their system so that people don't want to leave (reddit is hardly the only platform to act this way). Personally, I'd rather try to build something so excellent that if someone proposes an alternative, most people wouldn't want to leave because I am meeting their needs so well. If the platform is so sclerotic that it can't be meaningfully improved and people are clamoring to leave, there is little they can do prevent an inevitable mass exodus anyway.
Funny to see people quick to make fun of a project for not being able to instantly handle a spike in requests, which most of their own apps wouldn't either!
Reddit has been around nearly 20 years to harden their infrastructure. Relax and give them a minute. Their page loads for me now that I've typed this out, anyway.
Let’s be real here this system is flawed at its core though. This can’t even handle the load of some moderately popular PHP forums with simple deployment or even this site nothing took decades to harden. And this is due to gross flaws in architecture, IMNSHO.
Comparing it to Reddit is silly. And yes I’m sure there are more than a few here that can honestly say their servers could handle this load - it isn’t much.
As far as I'm concerned there aren't any core issues. There are a lot of queries to a single DB which is one the same server, but there's nothing preventing you from running the DB on another server and sharding it if need be. I wouldn't call that a core architectural issue because the way you set up your DB is not core to the architecture.
It’s a federated system without any of the affordances that would make it usable (or particularly interesting to me). Literally load balancing by going to a long list of alternate instances.
The sites own documentation just says, find one that works, and if that shits the bed find another. This is a UX agreeable to a very tiny and idiosyncratic group (as evidenced by Mastodon once the Elon is evil hype died.
Yes of course in theory you can beef up any instance, and shard, and add a caching and queueing layer while you’re at it. And tada you’ve just redid Reddit.
> Sharding, caching and queuing doesn't break federation. That's not a core flaw.
I didn’t say it did, but it doesn’t enhance it either.
> As the ecosystem grows, a shortlist of popular, robust, federated instances will crop up
How short is a shortlist? When does that mean just new Reddit?
I suppose I would be more enthused if at the least the basic design eased standing up high traffic (or let’s be honest even mild traffic) instances. The performance story right now is: it’s written in rust - which is not nothing but it would be more interesting if supporting even a moderate amount of traffic on minimal hardware was an architectural priority. The flaw as I see it is that this is just not a design goal.
Even just two-three large and popular instances is enough to make a Reddit impossible, so that's how short it can get.
The performance story isn't just that the backend is written in Rust. It's also that the front is very lightweight (80kB), that the architecture is horizontally scalable, etc...
I don't see in any of those links a core flaw, a problem in the initial engineering that makes it impossible for the architecture to scale. All I see are some poorly written queries, for which the main devs made a root cause analysis and described how it can be fixed. Is that evidence that the inherent design isn't capable of adequate performance? No, it isn't. It's evidence that there are some small performance gotchas that can be fixed easily, and this is normal for an ambitious project.
But even as it is, yes, it can handle mild traffic. lemmy.ml runs on potato hardware, hexbear.net is an example of an instance which has ~3'000 comments a day, which is roughly the scale of this website, and it runs fine on a single dedicated server.
I dunno maybe I’m wrong about the technical stuff. My minor point is that this software has some technical flaws today - forums and link aggregators are solved problems over and over again so implementation excellence is at least a unique value proposition.
I’ll quote the top-voted thread here
>> Nobody wants a federated, slow, difficult to use version of reddit. Nobody wants to choose a server.
> I want this. I want this because it's a sustainable way to have Reddit without the ads. The bad UX is an acceptable tradeoff for a platform that doesn't go to shit.
I’m just not buying how a federated system of isolated instances solves this. What fundamentally prevents the dominant oligopoly or monopoly server(s) from just being Reddit running on Lemmy? Lemmy doesn’t dictate how things are run - so why won’t a major funded instance just evolve to a new Reddit?
How does Lemmy decisively get you to a Reddit without the ads? What stops a major Lemmy instance going to shit?
Just having federation as an opt in feature doesn’t force the system to evolve in a particular way.
If a “Voat” equivalent pops up it’s not like the dominant instances are going to federate with it.
> I’m just not buying how a federated system of isolated instances solves this. What fundamentally prevents the dominant oligopoly or monopoly server(s) from just being Reddit running on Lemmy? Lemmy doesn’t dictate how things are run - so why won’t a major fu.nded instance just evolve to a new Reddit? How does Lemmy decisively get you to a Reddit without the ads? What stops a major Lemmy instance going to shit?
A federated system of isolated instances doesn't solve it, because that's not a federated system. The point of federation is that the instances aren't isolated, and they're highly interchangeable. No major instance has the incentive to become a new Reddit, because it's so easy to switch instances at every level that they just don't have the moat to make that happen. It's exactly the same thing as an email provider going to shit, but even less problematic.
If a Voat instance pops up, sure, dominant instances won't federate with it. That's perfectly fine. It doesn't mean that the inter-federated dominant instances can get away with pulling a Reddit.
Federation is an opt-in feature in theory, but in practice, what's the value proposition for an instance to turn off federation today?
It's really quite simple. Without federation, there is an incentive to pull a Reddit. With federation, there is no longer an incentive to do so, because you don't have a moat. What do you think would happen if Reddit only had 1/2 of the subreddits anyone used and if you could keep access to all the same communities on a competitor?
> With federation, there is no longer an incentive to do so, because you don't have a moat
Domination is orthogonal to a technical federation feature. Once there is enough imbalance you defederate and that’s that. There’s nothing that inherently prevents gross imbalance from forming and the natural forces favoring centralization - such as funding one beefy instance - still apply.
> value proposition for an instance to turn off federation today?
Maybe not today, but it would be the same as any historical netsplit.
> What do you think would happen if Reddit only had 1/2 of the subreddits anyone used and if you could keep access to all the same communities on a competitor?
I think that puts them still in a fucking dominant position. And why automatically assume competitor vs cabal?
Anyway good luck with your project.
I’ve been using the internet since IRC and Usenet - both federated in their own way - both completely marginal.
There actually is something preventing gross imbalance from forming. Slightly different choices in federation for large instances with regards to extremists are a big one, and since power-users tend to be central to the content and won't move instances from the beginning too easily, there is strong inertia against communities forming exclusively on one instance.
IRC was never federated. Usenet was, and it did die out - but so is email and it's working far longer than it had any right to.
What? What do you think the term “relay” in IRC means? The jargon term netsplit used even for newer federated networks (even used in these comments elsewhere) comes from IRC. There is literally an entire network named after a defederation event.
Now we sort of take for granted that IRC is basically a closed federated system - but the original design of the network was one dominant set of relays - EFnet is a direct descendant of this network after all - if anything it’s just a specific example of politics and network evolution.
There are technical reasons as well - but at the time of the early splits of the 90s (EFnet, Undernet) it was not primarily technical problems.
Anyone involved in a fediverse I think would do well to learn some lessons from IRC even if their system is technically superior.
> but so is email
As a federated system barely - go try to stand up an email server on your home network or VPS and see how well that works. It’s run by a cabal of large providers.
Do you know a good writeup about him? Everyone in the know feels very differently about him than I do so clearly my opinion is wrong, but I haven't been able to find out why and change my mind.
It would be really nice if an Exodus could be started before their IPO. That would really kick them in the nuts. Maybe they'd even sell it to a party that cares about the users.
They always try to say that it's the big bad guy vs the good little guy, but a lot of the time it's not true. One comment said the user posted a lot of spam that they didn't mention in their post.
The author addresses that comment in an edit - seems like the commenter stretched the truth a bit. Manually cross-posting shouldn't be a suspendable/bannable offense
One of the more irritating things the crypto people did was to convince the general public that federated services were something they'd come up with, or even that they were only possible through the good offices of The Almighty Blockchain.
In practice, federated services that people actually use are generally not crypto-y.
They do have crypto donation links (alongside a bunch of others), but the main devs seem to have more communistic tendencies (what with the big Che github avatars).
Redditors: The more you tighten your grip on third party apps, the more users will slip through your fingers.
Reddit: Not after we demonstrate the power of this ban hammer. In a way, you have determined the choice of the alternative platform that'll be censored first.
I don’t know who/what Lemmy or “LemmyMigration” is. I don’t know if they share the same values as me or if I would find them abhorrent.
But if what they were saying was legal, then I am strongly opposed to social media having the right to silence them.
Reddit in particular has less of an argument to support such censorship since no “off-topic” argument applies. If you don’t like what’s said on a particular subreddit, don’t go there. Start a new one with a topic that takes the diametrically opposed position.
Section 215 assumed good faith on the part of internet companies. We’ve seen now that they will manipulate content visibility for ideology and profit; i don’t give them the benefit of the doubt anymore. F** them.
Seems like reddit really wants to kill their IPO. People are getting banned left and right and I have a ton of bots flooding my friend requests. A part of me thinks it's all scripted to boost user numbers and engagement.
I signed up for Lemmy and was approved. Then I tried to create a community. It never worked. I tried numerous times on different computers, but it just spins and spins after clicking the create button. I have no idea why since there are no error messages. If they really want Lemmy to succeed, they need to do a lot more work to make it user friendly.
IMO if Reddit manages to bring itself down with all of these actions it will be a net good for society.
Somehow, it's always skipped when people discuss the evils of social media referencing Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and TikTok but IMO Reddit has been just as bad if not worse for misleading information.
Note: If you actually agree with the OP, you should put your money where your mouth is and edit your Reddit history with this tool, to point to OP's post.
When Elon did this it did seem to work and it crushed the migration to Mastodon. Elon seems to be inspiring other tech CEOs which is worrying as a SWE since Elon is explicit about thinking that SWEs are pampered and need to be knocked down a few pegs.
> Elon seems to be inspiring other tech CEOs which is worrying as a SWE since Elon is explicit about thinking that SWEs are pampered and need to be knocked down a few pegs.
Can confirm first-hand that this is not merely a "seems to be".
Nothing to see here, just platforms naturally developing under capitalism.
Just like the development of any other industry their purpose gently transforms into maximizing shareholder value and not to provide equal value to the consumer, this, contrary to a superficial analysis, does not contradict the existence of the industry itself.
Because in order to contradict the industry there must be an equal amount of power on both sides (of consumer and supplier) which we would use to prevent the use value drop to us. But that's the thing with capitalism: they own the far reaching platforms themselves, the live at the forefront of capabilities. So where is power left?
Any resistance must occur "underground" where there is usually very little exposition.
This is akin to wanting powertool manufacturers to standardize some battery interfaces. While it may be convenient to us, they have no incentive to do that and we have no power to force them besides boycott, which in a world with millions of people with millions of needs, is impractical unless you have mass media support, which is in itself almost an impossibility.
This will happen to any popular platform that maximizes profits; this happens to every popular platform with private ownership where private owners are (legally/existentially) incentivized to maximize profits.
This cannot happen in popular platforms whose aims are not maximizing profits; this cannot happen in popular platforms that have no individual owner. But a time where this is feasible has not arrived yet. I think a good example of this is standards, which can allow individuals to get rich, but not an individual. This can be leveraged even more to prevent mass users to suffer from capitalizing of the ones with capital.
gonna be hard going mainstream with a name like "phuks", unfortunately. i.e. "i posted on reddit" "i posted on lemmy" ... "i posted on phuks" sounds a little nsfw.
People might want to avoid having the same thing happen with a reddit clone 10-20 years in the future. Federation allows communities to decide their own fate instead of having decisions handed out from on high
Sure, but only nerds will use them (not necessarily a bad thing) and will never go mainstream because of the difficulty to set up and search. Monolithic site like Reddit don't have that issue at all, you log in and away you go. Until someone makes federation that easy, I only see a Reddit replacement being of similar design and composition to Reddit.
Throat looks okayish but rDrama has the same issue that multiple reddit clones have, in that it cloned the godawful negative-space nightmare new layout instead of the classic, functional one.
I know in the context of Lemmy this is an unfair criticism, but for the 99.99% of Reddit users not technical enough, or technical enough but not motivated enough, to run this software on their own any replacement needs to be an actual running site and not OSS that helps you set up a site.
Gotta ask the users who decided on it. It could be as simple as "it popped up first on google".
FWIW, I heard of Lemmy loosely before this (But I have spent a lot of time looking at alternatives to reddit). I heard of Throat as well be never browsed it. Never heard of rDrama.
Reddit is also basically hard down right now and has been for 30+ minutes and not a peep from their status page. Trying to impress investors by lying about their shitty site.
At the end of the day people want to move to something that works with Apollo or RiF, and that's something Lemmy lacks.
Best second alternative I come across is Tildes, is invite only and is like how Reddit was few years ago, without the memes, AI bots, astroturfing and glowies.
There is an alternative being developed in nostr worth keep an eye.
Does Lemmy allows the same behaviour of moderators if they want to be such?
I am searching a Reddit alternative with no ability to delete anything. The only acceptible for me censoureship is having a special forum branch with spam, trolls, nsfw and any other unwanting behaviour with no rights to write anywhere else for those who get banhammered.
Then CSAM point becomes kind of a religion for social networks. Either a social network is able to resist government's urge of terrorism prevention and child protection (I am referencing to some famous meme on censourship) or its moderator's ego is going to have an endless growing exposed in banning some users with some fancy excuses. Now try to convince me that Lemme is not a spam from Reddit's PoV.
How do you stop your website from being filled with CSAM? “Religion” aside, what do you actually do with your mouse and keyboard when you see CSAM pop up on a website that you pay for?
>I am searching a Reddit alternative with no ability to delete anything.
Good luck with that: between libel and illegal pornography whoever operated such a service would very quickly be inundated with legal woes. The fact is community standards exist for a reason: they don't need to be absolutely permissive, only permissive enough
If you don't want to post porn, Gab allows all legal speech otherwise.
> We strive to ensure that the First Amendment remains the Website’s standard for content moderation. We will make best efforts to ensure that all content moderation decisions and enforcement of these terms of service does not punish users for exercising their God-given right to speak freely.
> As a general rule, written expression that is protected political, religious, symbolic, or commercial speech under the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution will be allowed on the Website. User Contributions absolutely must in their entirety comply with all applicable federal, state, and local regulations in the United States.
You know how people in California claim that the homeless problem there is due to them having programs to support the homeless, and that if other states did a better job their state would have less of a problem? Well if you are basically the only website that allows all legal speech, you are going to see a lot of stuff that was censored elsewhere. I'd love to see a version of this created by a more left wing group of people to balance things out, and whouldve recommended it here if it existed, but they seem to have abandoned free speech as a concept entirely.
I'm leftist (moderate by European standards, probably radical by American standards) and I would never want to be on gab. It's a toxic cesspool. Sorry I just have no other words for it.
This is not about free speech anymore, it's really just a bunch of hate speech.
I checked it out recently and among the first 5 top posts was one claiming Hitler was a great leader. I wonder if they remember how many patriotic Americans lost their lives getting rid of that insanity.
Banning nazis and other hate speech isn't "abandoning free speech", the right has just lost their collective minds. Literally banning books from schools and pretending its the liberal mainstream (which isn't even remotely left in reality btw.) who are against free speech.
I'm reminded of a Rage Against The Machine lyric from back when public schools were mostly controlled by the religious right: "They don't gotta burn the books they just remove 'em"
Back then they didn't need to ban books, they just didn't order them to be placed in the library in the first place. I'd be curious to see how much of the work of authors like Thomas Sowell is available in these libraries, I suspect very little but without all the tears about it being banned.
This is a great explanation as to why "free speech" websites always have the worst people. The people that believe you should be able to say whatever you want have to rub elbows with the people that believe you must say the n-word in every comment.
Left wing free speech groups exist on Matrix and Telegram.
Everything in the feed is coming from a right wing perspective. May I re-state that Gab promoted a hitler themed novelty account named Kitler?
On a free speech absolutist website I'd expect to see some of my fellow leftoids calling for the slaughter of landlords, but I didn't see that anywhere; only rightoids calling for the slaughter of jews and homosexuals.
> Left wing free speech groups exist on Matrix and Telegram.
I'm not familiar with any of those, care to link one?
> fellow leftoids calling for the slaughter of landlords, but I didn't see that anywhere
You can find that sort of
content with ease on Reddit. Those people are probably mostly over there or in similar places. Gab has less users and engagement so only the people prohibited from speaking elsewhere find themselves there.
While Gab has lots of ideas I disagree with it was the only place I found that I could discuss things like the Wuhan lab leak theory or the contents of Hunter Bidens laptop. Twitter and Reddit both banned me for discussing those topics.
Calls to violence are not legal speech and if you see some you can report it and it should be removed. Andrew Torba (the owner) frequently makes this stance clear.
IMO the FTC and courts (supreme?) should be stepping in here, and more generally, stating that communications platforms must not censor freedom of speech, nor censor in an anticompettive way.
If I want to talk about Hondas on Twitter, Elon should be barred from censoring that.
If I want to talk about Bitchute on Youtube, Alphabet must allow that.
If I want to use my macbook pro to write windows software, Apple must not block it.
Doing so would impugn the free speech and property interests of the server owners.
Why does Reddit have to host speech that it doesn’t want to? Why does anybody? Why is their right to exclude subject to limitations on the government of the United States when they are a private corporation? If the FTC wants to bring that suit, they can try, but that’s a lot to prove and I don’t think they’ll be able to count to 1, let alone 5 if they somehow make their case all the way to SCOTUS.
> Why does [should] Reddit have to host speech that it doesn’t want to?
For the same reason that landlords have to continue housing people doing things that the landlord disagrees with. Because they took what was their private dwelling, offered it to the public as housing, and invited in a new party that has their own rights.
I don't really have a dog in the "deplatforming" fight, because I think the sooner we move to decentralized protocols the better. It's just utterly disingenuous to pretend that corporate property deliberately employed to perform services for customers is exactly the same as individually owned private property.
The right to exclude is the same in both instances but the facts of each individual case matter. In the case of a landlord-tenant relationship, the landlord’s rights are still dominant but the tenant also has rights which compromise the landlord’s rights to a certain extent by a contract agreed to by both parties. Some jurisdictions may also have additional tenants rights enshrined in law, but generally speaking, if a landlord wants to evict, he is going to be able to evict. If you buy a house you intend to move into from someone who has rented the property out, barring some contractual reason you can’t that would be disclosed in the purchasing process, you’re going to be able to evict that family and move in once you own the house.
Social media companies don’t lose their right to exclude by having allowed you to sign up and use their services. They can still exclude you (read: ban you) pretty much at-will subject to their terms of service (so pretty much always at-will) and it’s not disingenuous to point out that yes, this is in fact their right as the owners and operators of the service.
Other service providers the facts may be different. If you have a contract with a service provider, you have a lot more in your favor under a negotiated agreement than the people that clicked “I Agree” the last time a social media company changed their TOS.
In the long term, a landlord can always take back possession from a tenant, sure. But in the short term, there are many ways tenants can retain possession of their home in spite of landlord wishes, backed up by valid public policy interests in having the financial details of people's homes not result in the elimination of people's rights.
You're talking about what is currently, I'm talking about the philosophical foundations of what could be. Analogous reasoning could be applied to SaaS (Software Augmented with Arbitrary Surveillance). Even if we were to consider individual private property sacrosanct, this doesn't need to extend to corporate property employed providing public-facing services.
That's not how freedom of speech works at all. These are not publicly funded platforms. They are businesses and as such need to censor speech in order to maintain relationships with businesses. Twitter is a great example. They start to loosen up on the hate speech and advertisers flee while simultaneously clamping down on anti government speech. I do not support free speech absolutism for private businesses because of this. It just doesn't make good business sense.
Multiple people saying the same thing so I guess I'll reply to yours.
However these are communications platforms. So is it clear that if AT&T wanted it could say I cannot talk about my silly hats only club, they could intervene to block my communications?
Or if my landlord felt I shouldn't have a specific sign (not signs in general), or even to just say words they dont agree with, they could bar that from their property?
Or if I wanted to wear a democrat colored pair of shorts to a (business owned) pool they could bar that dress code?
These are all business contexts in which I'm using the business owners property as a customer/consumer and hypothetically being barred from an action. I dont see how it's so different for communications platforms like Reddit/FB/YT
Or the facts of every circumstance matters a lot more in how the law is applied than you are willing to give it credit for.
A telecoms company like AT&T is subject to common carrier provisions and regulation by the FCC under the Communications Act of 1934.
If a landlord wanted to prevent you from putting up signs on the property, they probably can put that in the lease agreement but their free speech interests and property interests while still dominant are compromised to an extent as well by having rented the property out to you, but not to the extent that your free speech and property interests (like your personal property) are entirely compromised either. Their ability to evict is dependent on jurisdiction, but such a case would likely turn a lot on the facts depending on the jurisdiction.
Dress codes however can be arbitrary. You can be excluded from a club because the owner doesn’t like your shoes, and yes, that’s legal. Their property interest in this case entirely trumps your free speech interest. Having strong property rights is in part why we are a free nation, but sometimes when there are clashing interests, someone’s interests are going to win out and 9/10 it will be in favor of the property owner’s interest.
What you are asking for is a new law. There is nothing wrong with that! Just important to understand that the FTC and the courts don’t make laws. They only work with the existing laws. If you want new laws the legislature is the proper place to ask for it.
There is an other problem. What you are asking for is probably going to have issues with the first amendment. This might sound weird, and you probably will feel something is off about it but as it is most often interpreted Twitter or Alphabet censoring stuff on their own platform is their right to free speech. If there would be a law like what you are asking for that would constrain their right to free speech. As you can guess it becomes complicated from there.
There's been discussion of applying Common Carrier protections and limitations to ISPs, why not to places that host public discourse?
I agree though, a new set of laws that govern online spaces is probably needed (despite my trepidation of the current crop of legislators and their general/basic understanding of tech).
The "why not" would be because in some cases the outcome is worse. I agree that ISPs should be common carriers. I disagree that social media sites should be. To me this is analogous to "everyone should be allowed to travel on public property, not everyone should be allowed in my bar".
If you want to make the case, you have to make the case that it’s within the FTC’s wheelhouse under the statutes it is authorized to enforce. It might be anticompetitive, but if it’s not anticompetitive in a way that’s also illegal, then it’s outside the FTC’s jurisdiction. They can try it anyway under some novel legal theory or reading of the statute, but without being able to make a good case they would just be wasting everyone’s time including their own.
I don't think it's legal issue so much as a violation of their own contract (and no, I don't think "we reserve the right to remove anything for any reason" is very binding. Just a CYA for if/when they DO actually break the law by removing content that could get them sued).
There's nothing saying you can't talk about other communities, and there is in fact an entire sub focused on "reddit alternatives" (guess the name). So for them to ban accounts for this without a clear change in rules violates that trust. But ofc coporate interests and trust are nearly parallel at this point.
I think most people would not agree that "private freedom of association" has ended in the US. There are protected classes, you're not allowed to discriminate against someone for their existence as a member of a protected class, but there are definitely still plenty of ways in which I'm allowed to bar people as I see fit (in my locale, "no Biden/Trump supporters allowed" would be legal).
Are you referring to the Civil Rights Act? freedom of association is a construct made up by modern nation states and people.
It was never truly freedom. Classes, hierarchy, power, in the modern world order led by the US and western Europe. Fred Hampton was murdered by the racist capitalist government after the CRA passed. Before one can get to any sort of freedoms, one must not be killed by the same state bestowing such freedoms.
It's the same issue with Mastodon. Mastodon is down over 1 million users since last December, and I bet that's related to how difficult it is to sign up and to find other users on the platform.
https://searchengineland.com/mastodon-shows-declined-growth-...
Don't take my word for it either:
https://lemmy.ml/post/1149624