Lenny has a major issue (which I think is a fatal flaw) which is that as soon as you go to the site you have to choose a server (of which there are hundreds) and you have no idea which to pick and then you don’t bother and leave the site.
No casual user is ever going to leave Reddit for Lemmy. Even for myself I’m probably not going to use Lemmy because it seems stupid to have to join multiple “Lemmys” and make multiple accounts, this isn’t a good user experience. People are supposed to have separate accounts for every Lemmy? All the communities are disparate and separated? It makes no sense to me at all.
It’s kinda like email. You wouldn’t create an account with Google and expect that login to work anywhere else, would you? But your Gmail email address can send and receive to anyone else from any provider.
As far as which instance to join, well, that’s kinda like email, too. Look at the instances that are out there (the email providers in this example, like Gmail vs Mailfence), see if you like their policies and moderation and community “vibe,” and join the one that suits you.
https://beehaw.org is a big one that I like very much. Not really any memes there, the user base tends more toward the mature and considerate, and overall the level of interaction feels much better than Reddit ever did, post Digg exodus.
Ok, that does not sound reassuring. What does that mean for my account if the server I am on disappears? Can I still login? Will my posts disappear? (probably not, but join-lemmy.org doesn‘t say if I am not mistaken)
My email provider has some way to make money. There is a good chance that it is around in 10 years. What about these servers? Who is running them and why should a single one still be around in 10 years?
If the choice of a server really is not important, why doesn’t join-lemmy.org have a "join random server" button.
Maybe these are non-issues. As a casually interested person I genuinely don’t know.
For the largest instances, as long as people are using lemmy in 10 years then they have incentive to exist... People will donate as needed; it isn't terrible complicated or expensive to run an instance.
IME the reason they don't have a "join random" button is that would be bad for smaller instances and a "join largest and most popular instance" would be criticized for showing favoritism and discourage adopting the entire point of decentralized technology. Matrix gets this criticism all the time because they push a default sever in their defacto standard app Element.
As a casually interested user? Just Google what to do because more users will trust the latest tweet or reddit thread more than a FAQ page. You most likely created an email account without going to "email.acme.org" and asking what provider to pick and probably have gone though a few providers without much loss.
... From a technical perspective. But most people don't care about that. It's a social network, and they want to use it as one. They already have the experience of reddit, where there's thousands of seamless communities and one account gives you access to all of them. Lemmy feels like a big step back for anyone who doesn't care about the technical details. Which is basically everyone.
The user base is largely techy (I think many came from a post from HN). There are a ton of bugs, and most were unnoticed until the users grew from 20k and now is 2M. Lemmy&kbin&mastadon and its associated FOSS android apps (other than browsers) have a lot of growing pains right now. Thankfully, growing pains do not include all 57M of reddit right now, but the users who did come are heavy hitters and power users (moderators).
I expect that Lemmy will grow and some of the frictions (bugs, unclear accounts, insane instance sysadmins, moderation tools at the community/magazine/subreddit level, moderation tools at the instance/server level, etc.) will decrease in time. The two biggest threats are
1) too many consuming-only users and
2) big-tech (im looking at you Facebook) deciding that they need to directly compete.
>But most people don't care about that. It's a social network, and they want to use it as one
I would honestly say: "Fuck them"
The Web was a better place before it was too easy to use and the unwashed masses entered. If they don't want to learn... let them stay in their walled garden.
I've seen plenty of extremely competenet tech people try out Mastodon and then quit because they couldn't bother with the UX and all the problems federation brings.
So no, it's not just "unwashed masses", it's people who value their time too much to spend it on some social media technical issues.
Why would I deliberately tie multiple logins to one credential, which may or may not go out of my control for any or no reason whatsoever? I'm not even talking about Google specifically here, I'm talking in general terms.
The more I hear about the federated multiverse, the more I see it as just another centralization abstraction layer on the decentralized network that is the internet.
If we want decentralization, why can't we just use the internet like ye olde days?
> The more I hear about the federated multiverse, the more I see it as just another centralization abstraction layer on the decentralized network that is the internet.
> If we want decentralization, why can't we just use the internet like ye olde days?
I'm not sure how you come to this conclusion. The internet is indeed already decentralized, yet connected, allowing you to traverse networks to reach resources that are more often than not outside your 'home' network.
Federated social media is exactly that, but for posting and interacting with content. Its killer feature is that you don't have to create an account everywhere, but are able to interact from your home instance with any other instance in the network. Exactly like the internet.
If we'd go back to ye olde days, it would be like pre-internet from a network perspective. Having to log in physically on a specific network to access its resources. Or when talking about the internet until ~2008 (and to some extent still true): creating a separate account for every forum you'd want to participate in.
convenience is the obvious one, normal people don't enjoy handling 50 different accounts. The less obvious but arguably more important one is safety. In ye olde days and still today random sites generally don't really know what they're doing and with OAuth you're not leaking your data to some server in a basement that get's pwned every few weeks. If you use Google or an equivalent service to login you retain control over your credentials.
Not it's not like email for the simple reason that instances can, and often do, block other instances.
When's the last time you heard of Fastmail saying that they were now blocking all emails from Zoho because they didn't like the way a single Zoho user was using Zoho?
Yet this is the sort of thing we see in the Fediverse when one admin takes issue with another admins attitude.
Your analogy happens quite often. Not specifically with Zoho, but if a specific domain is sending spam, your email provider will usually block it at the spam filtering end of it.
It can, yes, but it's invariably because of a usually valid business decision rather than an admin personal grievience.
I get defederating from known bad actors, but these days it's not uncommon to lose access to an instance because admin don't like other admin policies (ergo some defederation over "The_Donald")
What I would love to see is a browser extension that recognises when you are browsing a Lemmy instance and allows you to seamlessly interact with it from your "home" instance.
It's not perfectly seamless, because I wanted to minimize the risk that it will redirect some non-lemmy site with matching URL structure/elements. However, I've tried to make it as seamless as possible.
Honestly what I'd like to see is a centralised reddit replacement that covers the majority of features and UX that old reddit had. I tried voat when it first came out and it seemed to work pretty well. Only issue is it was quickly overwhelmed by racists.
Lemmy is probably taking on too large of a problem. No one has got federated systems to work as nicely as centralised ones yet.
> No one has got federated systems to work as nicely as centralised ones yet.
They never will. Federated systems have certain advantages over centralised ones. One of the principal advantages is that it allows hosting costs to be shared more widely, which means you don't need a single entity with hundreds of thousands of dollars to maintain the thing. Another is that toxic communities can be more easily isolated from the rest (so that the communities you like don't become quickly overwhelmed by racists).
One of the disadvantages is that there is more friction than a single, centralised system. It is, by definition, not as seamless. The seams are the feature. It's just the trade-off you make.
The point is that it's distributed so no one instance can go power crazy and abuse a monopoly on the platform. If you want to keep using centralized services then the same cycle will happen again and again.
The comments suggest the API pricing was just a stunt to hide the fact that Reddit wanted to kill third party apps in general, and in particular the ability of third parties to use Reddit posts to train AI models.
That's not an option. Even if it was, reddit's tone deaf measures, such as undeleting accounts and threatening everyone and kicking out mods who protested, already killed the community and makes the decision of continuing to use Reddit as a questionable moral decision.
People seek a reddit alternative, and rewarding reddit for its bullshit stunts is not it.
The kind of email where I need to log in to multiple servers to find out on which server I sent a particular email? It's not like email at all from a user perspective.
I really like the GUI's (like wefwef) that are built around Lemmy, but the federation approach they chose now is not useful for users in any way. If you can't explain which server has what benefit (let alone the advantage of choice) then don't give users a choice.
>It’s kinda like email. You wouldn’t create an account with Google and expect that login to work anywhere else, would you? But your Gmail email address can send and receive to anyone else from any provider.
But it isn't. People aren't looking for an alternative to email.
No, you make a single account and subscribe to the communities across whatever servers you want. The exception would be if the server you registered and the server hosting your desired community had become intentionally unfederated/disconnected, but hopefully that doesn’t happen too much. The third-party apps (like Memmy) are making the UX more seamless with subscribing to communities across different servers.
I was having major issues getting federation to work while using the mobile web app. Now that I installed Connect for Lemmy (android) tonight, I finally have a seamless experience subscribing to and interacting with communities from all over the fediverse.
It's a brand new technology and system, for the most part. Give them time to make it more user-friendly. It's worth it joining and participating now IMO, but I think in 6 months or a year it will be MUCH more friendly to the average Joe.
Lots of the Reddit apps are being ported for Lemmy as we speak so it's about to get even better and easy to use.
At the end of this all, the biggest mistake that Reddit will have made may be sending all the most talented devs creating apps for their platform to their direct competitors.
The main difference appears to be random ideological shit. The instances I’ve heard of are Beehaw, Lemmy.world, Lemmy.ml, ShitJustWorks, and ExplodingHeads, and all of them have been involved in defederation because of trolls or fascists or tankies or something
Tbh I’m not sure what the main advantage of federation is if they all have the same subreddits (news, tech, pics, etc). It seems like it just fragments the userbase, I’d get it if each subreddit was one instance
I second the other comment just made in reply to yours. I also want to add that this would kind of happen on Reddit as well where occasionally there’ll be more than one community for the same topic. Sometimes it’s different themes (there’s standard mature f1 and there’s the f1 that just wants to shitpost and meme). Sometimes one community exists but hasn’t gotten enough attention or growth moderation so people join a more well managed one. Sometimes one community exists for general purpose discussion and one for more specific stuff (like cycling vs randonneuring)
I feel like similar things will happen in the forum fediverse (it’s what I call the fediverse alternatives to Reddit). There’s going to be a period of thrashing and churn. And then it’ll settle down with each community having its own vibe and we members get to try it out and settle where we want.
> I want a community for my football club, but there are already 3 across multiple instances - which one do I join?
I would use the community browser at https://browse.feddit.de/ to find the most populated and active community, and stick with that one. If the other 2 aren't very active, maybe make a post in those communities letting them know there's a more active community at X.
I'd try to join place that has lots of people, ignoring all the ideological fights or other kinds of backstage dramas and focus on football, people who like it.
Your second paragraph is exactly why i created programming.dev. Having general purpose instances really fragments the community and just makes things confusing. And putting the software name in the URL is just dumb, for many reasons. I will never need to explain programming.dev to a single person, it’s clearly there in the name.
- There are some ideas of "grouping" communities/subreddits to better dedup but still allow crossposting and discussion.
- There are some ideas of introducing moderation tools (currently the only tool is "defederation").
Most of this has not been developed as the 2 developers behind Lemmy were working on a "get paid to introduce milestone features" basis before the Reddit refugees came over. I expect this friction to iron out over time.
I think this nails a problem with federation more than the novelty of following communities from your instance. I was subject to these politics on Mastodon too. Politics hurt ActivityPub. There, I said it. It’s the elephant in the room.
The largest instances have a little duplication so there are something like 3 large gaming-related communities, 3 large world news communities, etc. This is not generally the case, for many topics communities on particular instances either "win out" so to speak in terms of subscribers or duplication doesn't exist.
>you have no idea which to pick and then you don’t bother and leave the site. No casual user is ever going to leave Reddit for Lemmy.
This is a feature in my opinion. Mass adoption has ruined so many sites (including reddit). It's taboo, but gatekeeping communities is absolutely required to stop mass adoption and the downward spiral. Reddit was better in 2010 than in 2020.
Went through a long list of them. I was confused on which to pick, and if that decision mattered, and what would be the security implications of it.
I finally picked one reluctantly. The server was down.
Not a great feature. Feels more like a bug.
> Mass adoption has ruined so many sites (including reddit).
Nonsense. Mass adoption means it's the place to go to consume and produce content.
If the feature of Lemmy you single out as being better is that no one uses it then I'm not sure what would be the point of joining, or why are you promoting the service so that others join.
> Reddit was better in 2010 than in 2020.
No it wasn't. At best, it was different.
And people like me are leaving 2023 Reddit, not 2010 Reddit. What we want is an alternative to today's service, not nostalgia.
This is already a failure. There is no need to join unless you find a topic you want participate in. And you event don't have to, you can even use a mastodon (pleroma, friendica, e.t.c.) account if you already have it if you just want to leave a comment in a thread.
Creating accounts on multiple websites is something we all do all the time. It’s better than staying with a single rent-seeking site that’s getting increasingly aggressive about monetizing the content provided for free by its users.
Everyone should be furious that Twitter was purchased by a billionaire to basically promote his own tweets and other viewpoints he agrees with. Reddit users shouldn’t be happy about a site (and app) that has only gotten worse over the years.
It has also never been easier to replace Reddit and Twitter technologically.
This is a key opportunity to fight against the enshittification of the internet and you’re on here complaining about creating multiple accounts… Ugh
>Everyone should be furious that Twitter was purchased by a billionaire to basically promote his own tweets and other viewpoints he agrees with.
1. Twitter was and still is a commercial product, not to mention publicly traded. Buying and selling it is completely fine and ordinary. It's nothing to feel furious about, especially if you aren't going to put up a competing offer.
2. Wouldn't you (and 99% of people) also spend money to amplify your opinions far and wide if you had such money? Hell, the entire reason most people use social media is because they want to amplify their opinions far and wide.
I will criticize Musk for lying about free speech on Twitter, but that is beside the point.
Twitter is a commercial product, it is a private square to use your analogy. It can be and is bought and sold on the open market. If you don't like it, come on up and put up an offer like Musk did. If you don't have the money, tough luck; nothing to get furious over. If you do have the money but lose to another buyer, touch luck; nothing to get furious over.
Lest we forget, it's not like Twitter before Musk was about free speech either. In fact, it came to light that Twitter was, as previously rumored, manipulating things behind the scenes to promote certain topics of discussion above others. Musk coming in put a stop to a significant portion of that, which some regions like Japan especially appreciate to this day.
I don’t have to buy Twitter. I can just vote with my feet and start using a few Lemmy/Mastodon instances. I’m fine with creating multiple accounts. I’m not fine with what is being done to Twitter and Reddit.
>Wouldn't you (and 99% of people) also spend money to amplify your opinions far and wide if you had such money?
No, I'd have much loftier goals to amplify my opinons than microblogs if I had $80b in my pocket. I could fund my own movies, games, TV series, etc. I could lobby congress to change laws on a worldwide scale. I could fund my own educational systems and shape minds the way I want to.
Using it to own a blogging platform for power's sake is absurd and also small-minded. I argue Trump did a good portion of damage to the modern discourse and he just had to be a user.
>the entire reason most people use social media is because they want to amplify their opinions far and wide.
I don't use Twitter, but my goals online are to communicate with like minded people. Not literally everyone. I don't need nor desire a soapbox, because it implies my ideals and methodologies are novel and capable of change. Not really.
The second point is just confused. It isn't about if people would do it, it's on if Musk should be doing it. His antics include boosting misinformation like vaccine skepticism and fringe political theories, that's obviously wrong and worth criticizing.
From the perspective of Musk doing whatever he wants with his money: It's his money, it's none of our business what he does with it. If someone has a problem, he can compete against Musk in getting the deal instead.
From the perspective of free speech and expression: He and everyone should be able to speak whatever he and they so desires.
This is the United States of America, not Russia or China. Even if you argue it's merely ostensibly, we espouse freedom around here.
It very much is our problem what he does with/on Twitter because it affects us, it's one of the largest social media platforms, it's not a new yacht he bought.
One of the valuable aspects of freedom of speech is ideas can gain traction because of their virtue and not e.g because of force. Musk has no expertise in most of what he talks about. Yet he uses reach he has purely because of his wealth to spread misinformation. The marketplace of ideas is a complete joke if ideas spread just because of money.
I predict that not everyone will be furious, even if they should, and that the barriers to entry that GP mentions will indeed be an obstacle to mastodon’s growth, even if you think they shouldn’t.
inevitably. But it's not about dethroning Twitter/reddit, it's about making an active alternative. Will that barrier be too large? I guess history will tell.
no need to make multiple accounts, who told you that? You need one account and then can contribute to all Lemmy communities on all servers.
The flaw of lemmy's design is that communities reside on a single service, so you will end up with multiple "Science" communities, because in the founding phase several people created such a community of the same name on multiple servers. They should instead have used a hashtag-based approach (granted, problem then is the tight-knit moderation that makes subreddits like AskHistorians so valuable), or implement something like communities subscribing to other communities (like a community-ring) etc.
There is actually a ticket on github and is getting some attention now that would allow to combine multiple communities to make them seen at one (kind of like multisubreddits)
> You need one account and then can contribute to all Lemmy communities on all servers.
That's not entirely true, some of the larger instances have no open federation policy, meaning the owner of the instance you are on has to get itself allowlisted in order to federate.
In practice this means that you can follow _some_ communities on _some_ other servers, but not all, and not every popular server.
Add that to the fact that some larger instances have stopped federating with each other and you have the current state; a minefield where your average user tries Lemmy, pastes a link into it's search box as instructed, nothing shows up and goes back to Reddit.
It's always the same comment: X is different from A, therefore X is not a good replacement for A.
The whole point of federation is to avoid the problems we're seeing with Facebook, with Instagram, with Reddit, with Twitter: control over your internet content. Not having a mega-corp bent on maximizing profits and using you as a milking cow, but instead have a say and have actual power in how communities are built and managed. It is 100% expected that Lemmy or KBin is different from Reddit. You say that's not a good user experience, but I challenge that assertion: I say it's not a bad UX, but it's a different UX, and you don't want to change. Well, if you don't want to change, stay on Reddit, that's not a problem. But if you're going to investigate what the fediverse is, please learn what it's about, how it's built. Don't expect to find the same old world you know, that's on purpose !
> It makes no sense to me at all
You're on HN, a forum where members pride themselves in being intelligent enough to dig around, learn by themselves, be different, hack around. You haven't made efforts understanding how the fediverse works, or why it's different, and your conclusion is _not_ that you should investigate, but that you should complain that it's too different. I don't understand this reasoning.
I think an issue in the mentality in this forum is that people mostly expect products, ie a package that is made by an entity and that is served to users. The package is expected to be complete, shiny, wonderful, the entity is expected to do whatever it takes to convince users. It's an asymmetry that is completely opposite to the whole concept of being a hacker, which is supposed to be the H of HN.
Yea, I agree. Lemmy isn't getting the casual user because the casual user isn't leaving reddit. So why bother?
This isn't to be gatekeeping, but I think trying to hope for some magical, identical reddit but without reddit's BS is both a fever dream and shortsighted. Do you believe Reddit2 to not fall into the same trap as reddit?
We'd need something different to prevent that, and different is going to be less intuitive than the familiar. It's fine if you don't want to be in that firsr wave of figuring out how to make different work, others will figure It out and communicate their findings.
Federation is its own thing. I use Lemmys and Kbins but I follow the communities from my Mastodon account, so the number of extra accounts I created is zero.
Ah yes, the forever cry of fascism. 'Only centralized winner take all systems can ever win. Anything else is surely too difficult & could never ever possibly get anywhere. Because that's what my very important opinion says. Get used to hearing this call friends, it will be repeated verbatim forever, for surely your attempts are futile!'
Change doesn't have to come overnight, or even soon. Better is not on a deadline. Society can adapt & improve slowly too, in difficult not easy win struggles. This article is about 0.025% of the planet signing up, mostly within a couple months. To me, one that that ain't bad! The growth trend isn't likely to continue apace but this like critical mass, like a seed successfully germinating, for a long life, that can bring who knows what.
But of course overwhelmingly negative doomsaying 'it'll never work' is the tried & true forever response to all efforts to do anything other than a couple centralized megaproperties. Everything is too hard for users at scale. Only bad can win. Resign. Give up. Don't try. Unless you have 3b+ users you shouldn't even try.
This is just going to be the same point forever & ever, anytime anything good might possibly happen.
>No casual user is ever going to leave Reddit for Lemmy.
From the point of view of active Lemmy users, this is not a problem. Casual users don't contribute, so they're essentially just leeches from the point of view of the overall service. Kinda same thing as with pure FOSS. Non-contributing users are tolerated, but they are not really useful in any way.
> Non-contributing users are tolerated, but they are not really useful in any way.
Not at all. In fact it is the non contributing users that give value to your product. Imagine Firefox but without any end users. Similarly, reddit is valuable mostly because of the massive number of people viewing content on it. Youtube is valuable because of the huge number of people who just watch videos, never make anything.
The content creators, or contributors, will flock to wherever the non contributors are.
As a FOSS developer, i must say that for me, users as a whole (in contrast to a community around the project) are the primary purpose of developing FOSS.
And even if i just looked on non-contributing users in a utilitarian way, they are still useful for project brand recognition.
I know this point was already made but it really is just email but with your email provider also offering public mailing lists. It kept feeling super complicated until I realized that's all it is.
Don't overthink which instance to choose. Just sign up for Lemmy.world or any of the other "general purpose" instance. It's not terribly important.
The one caveat to that is that you may want to choose beehaw instead if you strongly value a more heavily moderated experience. As I understand it, Beehaw intends to refederate once there are better moderation tools available on Lemmy but for now they are separated.
> Lenny has a major issue (which I think is a fatal flaw) which is that as soon as you go to the site you have to choose a server (of which there are hundreds) and you have no idea which to pick and then you don’t bother and leave the site.
This is an outstanding advantage. Let Reddit be Reddit with its eternal September and easy access for everyone. Lemmy could build smaller and much more useful and expert communities.
If one has something important to share, then finding an instance is no obstacle. If one just wants to mindlessly shitpost, then maybe it's good some social media sites will be worth too much effort for them to sign up.
Personally, I would like paid and privacy-respecting social media sites focused on experts in their fields. Much like academic journals, but with modern social media features and for industry experts and enthusiasts as well as academics in a wide variety of fields traditional and not - everyone who is willing to put some effort into what they spend time on. I think that 0 price of entry is unnatural. No one accepts people in their social circles who spend 0 effort on participating in a mutually-beneficial way. And yet on the internet, that's the only kind of social networking most of us can do.
So I say it's good we have a tiny test of effort for people who sign up to Lemmy. Socializing with 0 skin in the game is very unnatural and even if it's better in some philosophical way, the human brain hasn't evolved to deal with a massive amount of garbage that this kind of social networking brings. If you want to communicate something to a lot of people, the price of entry should be at least a modicum of effort.
And this is not some far-out untested idea, it worked very well in the 90s.
Except when other instances defederate your instance... like happened with lemmy.world (where I am) for some very stupid reason... the worst thing is that it still looks like you can see and interact with other instances! But when you make a comment, for example, in a post from the other instance, only you and people from your instance will see that :D. It's kind of ridiculous, really.
I like Lemmy in general, it's what you would expect from a Reddit clone... but because of this kind of stuff, it's really going to be a hard sell for anyone who's not fundamentally a "fediverse" fan who wants Reddit to burn.
Haven't used lemmy in particular. But in theory defederation exists to block bad actors. Since anyone can host a server themselves and no one can stop the servers outside some kind of government intervention, each server needs the ability to block a spammy or even illegal content filled server.
In reality, it is used for that and the censorship of ideas server owners don't like... or even just blocking a server because the admins of each server had a spat. It has been likened to little fifedoms each with their own flavor of tyrant, a little drematic imo but not wholely wrong either.
Another use is if you want to use the software, but don't want/need connections to the greater network. So you fully defederate and only allow your friends to have logins to your isolated server.
I agree with you. I was happy to jump to Lemmy right away then after only a few days they were talking about the defederation of some of the biggest instances. I originally liked the idea of federations since it allow a way to deal with problematic instances, let the steam blow temporarily. Then, I followed some of the discussion and was appalled by how folks some folks were using federations as way to curate their echo chamber and censor political idea. This is just what we need, another social media that shows recomforting opinion and demonize anything else.
I personally don't have the time or the energy to follow stupid turf wars and trying to find out who is federated with who.
If you're referring to Beehaw defederating Lemmy.world it's because beehaw has a pretty strict content policy (you even have to write a little essay about why you want to join and what value you'll bring to beehaw). Lemmy.world had open sign-ups without much in the way for preparing its users for what was expected of them on beehaw communities so there was some culture clashes and beehaw decided to temporarily defederate until Lemmy has better moderation tools in place.
Tbh, beehaw should better defederate from all other instances to spare us the pain of interacting with its users. They can live in their high horse-land themselves (until a subgroup declares themselves to be higher horses and kick out the others)
It being distributed is the whole point. I think the whole thing is intended to slow you down and be more considerate about being a part of a community. Many servers require you to fill out a form explaining why you want to join the server. I think that's a good thing. People online need to slow down and think more deeply before posting and any community that promotes that I'm all for.
Presumably once the network has good replication there will be a number of good ones with all of the content, like newsgroups? They just seem really immature and definitely imperfect.
- No, you don't need to create a separate account for every Lemmy. Federation means you create an account on one instance (that is federated with a lot of other instances) and you can interact with those other instances.
- Yes, it takes five minutes of research to figure that out. It might also take another five minutes of research to ensure you don't choose an extremist or troll instance that will get defederated from all the others. Yes, there is friction that wasn't there with Reddit. Convenience is not what Lemmy is optimised for. If you value convenience above all else then it's probably not for you.
I’m a technical user and the hoops and quirks in eco system put me off. The solution I’ve been left with is just to quit entirely. I’ve also ditched other social media while I’m at it. My life is better.
It's technically trivial to join lemmy. It would be more accurate to say you're not motivated enough. Which is fine, lemme has a lot of issues and it needs users who are invested at this point.
Op made the distinction that non technical users are put off, my position was that it doesn’t matter, I’m technical and I still don’t want to. The user experience and understanding the proposition are barriers to entry, of course the vast majority of people could sit down and “get it” after not long.. I’m at a point where if it’s not a website and it’s trying to be something more, I just really don’t care.
My instance had 5 users after a few days, two of which were my own.
Then one day later there were over 600 users registered on my instance.
All of those 600+ new users were spam bot accounts.
Lemmy is sorely lacking the tools for dealing with that kind of thing.
So in order to avoid that the spam accounts that were created could cause problems for other instances, I temporarily shut down my instance until there are tools that I can use to deal with the spam accounts.
I don't really have any reason to doubt you, because I am not involved in admining any Lemmy isntance.
But on the other hand, in my casual use of Lemmy.world I have yet to encounter any spam at all. So either the mods there are really incredible, or the spam problem isnt so bad
They can easily prevent spam accounts by requiring captcha and a sign up application. I do so on programming.dev and I haven’t seen a single spam account.
To be fair to the Lemmy devs, they couldn't have predicted Reddit deciding to implode itself and haven't had a ton of time to respond to the new reality.
I'm excited by the idea, but I'm honestly pretty confused by Lemmy & Kbin. Reddit accounts and subreddits give an incentive to protect the account and "build up a history". My Reddit account is 13+ years old, and I don't want to sign up on the "wrong instance" of Lemmy/Kbin.
1. Will apps like Liftoff, Boost for Lemmy, and Sync for Lemmy support Kbin instance accounts? Should I be signing up for Lemmy instead if I want a familiar mobile app?
2. If I register a Kbin account, can I register with the same username on a different "home instance"? Can you login (not federate) to a different instance with a Lemmy/Kbin account? e.g., if I sign up for an account on kbin.social, can I login to lemmy.world with the account since most apps currently only support Kbin instances?
3. What happens if your home instance goes down temporarily? What happens if it goes down permanently? What if there is drama and suddenly many instances stop federating with your home instance? What if my instance stops federating with an instance I participate in? Do you need to start over somewhere else?
4. Are there multi-reddits to combine the same topic from multiple instances? What happens if multiple instances each have their own version of a community?
5. How do you moderate a community on Lemmy/Kbin? How do you deal with spam?
6. How do I link to or save a post? How do I search?
I want to sign up, contribute, and give the best chance of it taking off. But I don't understand the future implications of which instance I sign up on.
> centive to protect the account and "build up a history". My Reddit account is 13+ years old, and I don't want to sign up on the "wrong instance" of Lemmy/Kbin.
This is scary. With that much public information all of your accounts are surely pwned and you'll be a prime target for AI based scam attacks. It's probably enough data to build an AI profile that'll be more real than real YOU to other people and all it takes is couple of API calls/scrapes of your reddit account.
No one should ever have a personal reddit account that is older than a year.
> With that much public information all of your accounts are surely pwned and you'll be a prime target for AI based scam attacks. It's probably enough data to build an AI profile that'll be more real than real YOU to other people and all it takes is couple of API calls/scrapes of your reddit account.
What? So? How does the age of the account imply that they’ve stored anything remotely useful/identifiable?
People have different standards for privacy and different needs and desires for identity. Just because you disagree doesn’t mean that you should push people in a direction baselessly.
> How does the age of the account imply that they’ve stored anything remotely useful/identifiable?
Simple probability. More posts, more data, higher likelyhood of data point leaks. Keeping extensive post history for some vanity points seems like a very high risk/low reward scenario and people should be discouraged from doing this.
Don't forget that it's also possible to find you using the one year's worth of data. Your interests, the way you talk, what you talk about, etc, can always be learned and compared to other users. There's just no way to stop persistent attackers.
> It's probably enough data to build an AI profile that'll be more real than real YOU to other people and all it takes is couple of API calls/scrapes of your reddit account.
Human has been reduced to a series of API calls ever since the rise of smartphones. AI doesn't change that.
I agree. Just saying "it's Reddit but federated" doesn't answer any of the obvious questions about how it works. E.g. how do user bans work? How do they prevent spam? How does moderation work? Who controls who gets to be a moderator? What are the implications of choosing a particular instance? Etc. etc.
If I want to be a moderator, sure, some of those specifics matter because they're the "levers" I'll be operating (if they exist).
As a participant, one doesn't need to know any of that before choosing a new platform; the evidence for that is all the previous times one has participated on a platform without that knowledge (or without knowledge of how the specifics have changed over time). To a participant, the outcome is what matters, i.e. one's own participation does not feel constrained while also having the rest of the content seeming mostly devoid of spam and other undesirables.
I view it like picking a forum in the old days. It does force you to slow down and be more considerate of what community you're joining and how you interact with that community, but personally I view that as a good thing.
It's different than a forum in that all the instances can be connected to each other, so that's an improvement over a standard forum in that you can still interact and get content from outside of your silo.
I do agree it's hard to get an idea of what an instance is all about and I think there could be better and more detailed descriptions to help people decide what community they want to be a part of.
Why did Lemmy migration fail? (65 comments)
(dead) I'm leaving Lemmy (0 comments)
The social website without users and content (128 comments)
Yeah, I'm snarky. All of Bluesky's, Lemmy's, Mastodon's (etc) only appeal seem to be that they are not BigCorp, but without any of the benefits (and content) of the existing platforms. They flare up quickly before users go back to their origin. Hard to see how Lemmy is different at this time.
That isn't at all true for Mastodon. Despite a very significant drop a while after the influx from twitter, looking at a few different sources it has twice as many monthly active users now (~600k before influx to hovering around ~1.2M for a few months now after the slump.)
I hope it will be different with Lemmy (it won’t) but on Mastodon I see very specific type of users, mostly activists and hackers. There are
no normies at all. No Kpop stans. No football fans. No gamers arguing which console is the best etc.
I follow /r/soccer which has not just the userbase but people posting goals in _real time_ a lot of times even before happened on your regular broadcast. There is no replacement for that.
You're probsnly stuck in a buble. Maybe you just don't know how to find other people. Discovery is a problem. Follow hashtags. There are a ton of serious scientists and other academics.
From my PoV so far it looks that subs which decided to join lemmy or fediverse did not become active in same way as on reddit. I'd guess that these communities are rather a 'rogue' spin-off of subreddits created by people who didn't like mods and how they ruled subs. It's also possible that only more tech-aware enthusiasts moved over while those who mainly provided content and activity didn't bother themselves with "alternatives" and exodus. They decided to stay (or don't do anything) and join the blackouts or whatever else these protests took form.
Overall, I'm not surprised with what happen to reddit or even twitter. This crawling enshittification driven in most cases by the greed and power lust; I've seen this happen many times in the Polish part of the Internet and it looks like it's an inevitable stage in platform's life.
It's hard not to feel helpless when it comes to dominant sites (monopolies), like Reddit or YouTube. There doesn't seem to be any real alternatives.
I'd encourage people not to give up hope. You don't have to give up using Reddit and YouTube, but instead you should find other sites that match your values and give them preferential treatment.
I signed up for a Lemmy instance. I took 10 minutes and logged into it on all my devices and removed all the quick links to Reddit. During my 10 minutes of discipline I made it as easy as possible to use alternatives during my times of low-discipline. I did whatever I could to redirect my "I'm bored, I'm going to click on something for entertainment" energy towards Lemmy instead of Reddit.
Basically, just make sure you put alternatives first on your list and Reddit and YouTube come last. I wont visit Reddit for entertainment unless I've first read through a bunch of posts on Lemmy. If a specific search directs me to Reddit, so be it, but I wont post there for fun; not unless I have to, not unless I've tried the alternatives first.
Remember how easy it is to type another URL into your address bar.
A lot of people whine about Lemmy and federation. They can't see how it works? What happens if the server closes down? Which instance do I choose. All of this is answered with some reading.
If picking a server and understanding how it works is too much effort for you, then don't use it. You have had to put effort into understanding every single service you use. Lemmy, Mastodon, Kbin and other federated services are no different.
If it's too much, stay with Twitter or Reddit. It's okay.
People question the user numbers yet ignore the rising number of instances which is non-trivial and hard to fake. The usual bots dont (yet) set up new instances. Its not that easy and it costs real money.
It wasnt quite clear how serious the reddit event but it seems now more than a blip. Many subs still silent or disable comments because they cant moderate without the tools.
The fediverse platforms and overall design have still some way to go but those inroads are vital validation and testing at scale.
Remember these are still tiny teams with very limited funding. When the history of social platforms is written they will be hailed as heroes and visionaries long after the lazy comments on HN are forgotten.
While it has a long way to go I am very hopeful for the fediverse. Got the Memmy app via Test Flight and got signed up to lemmy.world in like 2 minutes. Was a lot simpler than I realized and honestly I am giddy with excitement. So long and thanks for all the memes.
Also, bravo to that dev. Seriously, v0.0.2 and you are killing it mate. You should be proud.
I'm astonished that the Memmy app is this good after just a week or two of development. Very curious how the dev will monetise eventually; as far as I know, they don't have significant overhead costs beyond an Apple developer account and their own dev work. Ought to end up somewhere like Apollo.
With the recent surge in discussion around Lemmy, I decided to spin up an instance and give it a go. It seems to have a lot trouble syncing up with other instances making for a very disjointed experience.
For example, I commented on one post, which added that community to my instance, but then my instance never did sync up with any new comments from that post so I just thought there was no activity on it until I went to the original instance and saw all the new comments.
To be fair, it could be on me and my configuration. I'm not really sure, but it makes it difficult to keep track of moving discussions and will probably drive me away from it eventually.
HN is very tech startup focused, so I think people here view Lemmy through that lens. Everything is a product, the goal is always to maximise market share so that you can then hopefully figure out how to monetise it and become a billionaire. These people don't understand that technology could have a different purpose.
HN is negative to everything. There are catalogues of "what HN got wrong" and it's honestly embaressing to the point of cringe. I think in this case though at least a few people are shilling for the dying services, which nakes it look a bit worse than it usually is.
Because it, like Mastodon, is a usability nightmare and literally nothing is being done to address it. All criticism falls on deaf ears and the community is hell bent on pushing their flawed vision through
There is plenty being done to address usability issues. Development activity exploded when Reddit announced the API changes (https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/graphs/commit-activity) and usability issues are discussed daily. Reddit's usability issues were (and are) glossed over by third party apps to this day.
So much of a nightmare that millions of people are using it, right ? Despite the dozens of alternative clients, not a single one of them deserves to not be called a nightmare right ?
Literally just made his point. Every single person keeps repeating it’s like email, as if email is a fantastic place to go get your news and interact with others.
But that's not email's use case at all. It's not being compared to email because they serve the same function otherwise there'd be no need for Lemmy. It's being compared as a distributed and open protocol, and where the comparison is important is in adoption, and email proves out that an open distributed system can achieve not only strong, but universal adoption. We pulled it off in the 80s on ridiculously weak hardware and snail pace internet, I'm sure it can be done again.
It's not like e-mail. It already fixes the things you're complaining about, while the things OP was complaining about will be fixed eventually. The point of bringing up e-mail is that a) federation does work and b) that usability is not a hindrance by itself.
What is really interesting to me is Sync for reddit (arguably the best of the Android 3rd party reddit offerings) is back in 2 weeks with Sync for Lemmy.
If he can use his UI skills to give the level of quality that Sync offered, packaged with Reddit users in mind, I think this will absolutely solve this.
I imagine most of the ui code is fully reusable. The fact it's even possible to port it so quickly I think practically confirms it. Most of the changes are probably just on the API side. The biggest impact of Reddit attacking the 3rd party apps will be that they just sent almost all the best app developers on their platform to their direct competitors.
It’s great, but imho activitypub is kinda of a flawed protocol it won’t THE ever changing thing but actually the first step, creating an account anywhere from one different host defeats the purpose why social media is very unique and why hardly are there duplicates of the same kind of niche, secondly activitypub is a heirloom of confusion I do wonder how get information faster or at an equal speed of r/technology, third whose gonna take responsibility? Is it jack?, or the server, when something become part of the lifestyle they’ll always be someone to blame trust me even tho I do not like musk or mark I still use Facebook and Twitter, Reddit is here to stay no matter how we hate Steve people will still use it
I have no idea what I am supposed to see on this link. It is completely unreadable, with green text overlapping each other and green icons and no zoom. But I suppose that the UX is a good indication of the overall Lemmy experience.
The problem with these Reddit alternatives is that just like 99% of Reddit, they're a complete waste of time. There's nothing of substance, no real community, and no value add to anyone's life. I just opened lemmy.world and I don't see anything of substance, just posts talking about Lemmy and how Reddit is dead.
For me personally to use any of these sites, it has to at a minimum be a place where one can learn and have stimulating conversation. Reddit was like that in 2008, and it stopped being that way when memes, marketers, and political correctness took over. HN is the only site of this style that I regularly frequent because the quality is relatively high. Without keeping a high quality bar, I don't see why anyone would care to use any of these sites unless there's enough of a differentiating factor, and I don't think fediverse is an attractive enough of a feature to attract any serious users long-term. I mean look at Mastodon - it peaked when Elon took over Twitter, but has just been in decline since then.
I built my own HN/Reddit alternative [1] with the sole mission of retaining a high standard of quality. Will it work? Doubtful without at a minimum getting the ball rolling seeding it with content, and marketing is not my forte or interest. But in any case I hope we'll see more competitors trying to build a "better" Reddit than attempt to replicate the cespool that is Reddit (outside a few high quality niche subreddits), that persists not due to any superiority but simply just from network effects at this point. We don't need more of the same, we can do better.
> I mean look at Mastodon - it peaked when Elon took over Twitter, but has just been in decline since then.
It's probably reasonably expected to get a surge of new sign-ups when a competitor does something controversial, then drop back down to a more natural rate (but hopefully still higher than pre-surge). I don't think this on its own indicates failure.
> I built my own HN/Reddit alternative [1] with the sole mission of retaining a high standard of quality. Will it work?
At the risk of being snarky myself, I'd claim the mission is a failure right from user #1: https://i.imgur.com/57BhkkJ.png - the quality standard of ad-hominem soapboxing is already near rock bottom.
You're kind of proving my point here. On Reddit this would get downvote censored with no one even attempting to come up with a coherent counterargumemt, just people using downvote as a disagree button, squashing out all unorthodox views, and breeding the hivemind.
To the positions within the screenshots ("the Matrix" targeting Andrew Tate, "woke bullshit", etc.), or the discussion here on whether your site has/will retain a "high standard of quality" in its discussion?
The latter was what I'm commenting on, by implying that the site's owner posting a ragebait bias-affirming Youtube video followed by a comment repeatedly calling the other side "idiots" is already a very low bar.
> no one even attempting to come up with a coherent counterargumemt
I wouldn't be opposed to a debate on one of the former if there's something concrete to argue against, but I don't think debating the former is necessary for the latter point (people against trans women in women's sports can still see that this in particular is low-quality discussion) and here probably isn't the place to do so.
I was referring to this statement you'd made: "I'd claim the mission is a failure right from user #1: https://i.imgur.com/57BhkkJ.png - the quality standard of ad-hominem soapboxing is already near rock bottom."
You seem to be claiming that the quality is low, so I was wondering if you had any specific counter-arguments to anything stated in those two comments/articles you referenced in your image. Or did you just want to criticize the 1,800 word and 540 word articles because you found the language not to your taste? Personally I'm more interested in the content of one's arguments rather than simply the presentation, but to each their own.
> I was referring to this statement you'd made: "I'd claim the mission is a failure right from user #1: https://i.imgur.com/57BhkkJ.png - the quality standard of ad-hominem soapboxing is already near rock bottom."
> You seem to be claiming that the quality is low, so I was wondering if you had any specific counter-arguments to anything stated in those two comments/articles you referenced in your image.
I try not to determine quality of an argument by how much I disagree with it. E.G: Many high-quality papers have thorough rebuttals, and many rants flaming the other side will happen to agree with my stance, or alternatively have no clear argument structure and nothing much concrete to refute.
What's in the screenshot falls towards the latter. Possibly I could take the repeated "idiots" as an attempt at a point, and so reference papers generally finding correlation in the opposite direction [0][1], which can in turn be refuted (hopefully with sources), but again I don't think this is the place for that argument - make a post on your site with opening statement or something.
> because you found the language not to your taste
If you're aiming for high quality discussion, I'd claim throwing around ad-hominems does run counter to that aim, and that debate (for which you'd need to attract people you disagree with to the site) is generally more productive when civil.
> Personally I'm more interested in the content of one's arguments rather than simply the presentation, but to each their own.
For the argument itself, ignoring discussion quality, you can in theory still present a strong argument in addition to insulting the other side, but not just have a string of insults in place of making a good argument. This is about it's content.
You could improve the argument, for example, by offering sources/statistics, having a clear argument structure, or making a sincere attempt to engage with material on the other side (plenty of accessible feminist literature exists).
You literally have addressed nothing in the comments/articles you criticized, and are simply dismissing a combined 2,340 words across two articles as "ad hominem". Just admit that you aren't interested in debating any of the points raised, and are simply offended by the aggressive language. That's fine, but you're not refuting anything or engaging in any form of debate.
> you can in theory still present a strong argument in addition to insulting the other side
There is clearly an argument here in addition to the use of the word "idiots". 2,340 words of ad hominem would be pretty boring and meaningless.
> You could improve the argument, for example, by offering sources/statistics, having a clear argument structure, or making a sincere attempt to engage with material on the other side (plenty of accessible feminist literature exists).
I'm not asking for generic feedback on writing a research paper here. You posted a screenshot of some comments/articles claiming they were low quality, and have failed to demonstrate how any of the points made in the articles were incorrect.
In any case I appreciate the feedback. It doesn't surprise me that aggressive language is polarizing and turns some people off. I personally don't have a problem with that though so long as one also presents an argument. I personally think intensity can actually be a positive because it's more entertaining. For example had the comments/articles instead been written in a more dry and neutral tone, I highly doubt you would've bothered to comment at all.
No casual user is ever going to leave Reddit for Lemmy. Even for myself I’m probably not going to use Lemmy because it seems stupid to have to join multiple “Lemmys” and make multiple accounts, this isn’t a good user experience. People are supposed to have separate accounts for every Lemmy? All the communities are disparate and separated? It makes no sense to me at all.