Reddit’s blackout protest is set to continue indefinitely(old.reddit.com) |
Reddit’s blackout protest is set to continue indefinitely(old.reddit.com) |
Across many subreddits, the announcements to participate in the blackout were highly upvoted (>90%), while announcements against participation were heavily downvoted.
Examples:
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/146xzgk/meta...
https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/145s613/rgames_and_t...
There were a lot of people protesting the protest in r/modCoord but they started banning them
Should librarians be allowed to close public libraries and make them an exclusive club because they work there and have been organizing the shelves?
I’m not having a fun time with this blackout, but Reddit will be effectively blacked out for me the moment old.reddit goes away. I might as well try changing my diet now, if I’m otherwise going to be forced to change it anyway once doing nothing different leads to diabetes in the near future.
I don’t own my contributions any more than the mods do. My contributions exist only in the context of moderated mass discussion, and in the context of mass audience participation. All broad changes to the context of this collaboration are abusive… and I’m throwing my lot in with the abuses of the mods doing blackout right now.
Haven't they? Isn't making the API economically unfeasible to use limiting access?
My personal plan is to delete all my posts and my account once Apollo goes down. I made most of that content using Apollo, so it seems fitting.
r/modCoord has negative comments minutes to days old. Criticism is not banned evidently. How did the banned protest the protest? Are the protesting moderators allowed any moderation of their coordination channels in your mind?
No idea it is their channel
The issue is, they should not be allowed to coordinate site-wide. The whole point of subreddits is to have separate competing communities, not to coordinate.
Who said this? And what made their wishes law?
You sign up to the read-only instance and can see the entire fediverse's contents and posts and when/if you wanted to comment, the app would let you know that you had to sign up to the instance the comment came from to post your own comment and take you that instance's sign-up page.
One of the biggest turn-offs for me was finding which ones to join and/or had content I was or might be interested in.
Haven't seen a decent sized one for r/NFL though
Point people to an alternative. Not just in the vague direction of The Lemmiverse or Squabbles or whatever; if your sub is going dark, you should have somewhere to receive all your refugees.
Even better if the mods coordinate so that all subs are pointing to the same place(s).
Even a shared Discord would have been a big step up imo.
This protest was just gone about the wrong way.
and removing those mods would/could/should be perceived as an escalation in this fight that could make the problem worse not better
The correct thing to do was to do a weekly blackout or similar. This would have affected the bottom line and hurt the experience of the website.
Instead, you are asking people to change their routines permanently. They will adjust.
Truth is, 99% of the user base doesn't care and hates the mods anyhow.
i see the arguments and i wonder why the way to protest is not to just stop participating, rather than taking down the subreddit. if moderation is hard without the third-party apps, stop doing it?
to my understanding, the mods want to preserve their powers and the subreddits' integrity. so prolonging the blackout does not seem much more effective to me than the initial publicity in tech media. especially if people running the site understand the above point.
If people blackout subreddits and Reddit continues to chug along nicely with ad revenue isn’t it just proving that Reddit doesn’t need the users who are upset?
By the way, which Lemmy instance is the HN crowd gravitating towards? Programming.dev?
That said, I could really give a crap if any of these sites goes away. I'm only here for the articles, and these sites aren't generating them, they're just linking them.
End of the day, reddit is going to have to figure out how many users are willing to boycott. Moderators are one thing. They are a minority. But if they remove the ability for /r/funny to be private, would users honor the protest?
The subs that have ended their blackouts are going on like nothing happened.
And really, whether or not the mods continue to moderate is the thing being tested with such a move. Reddit did the API thing, the mods responded by escalating to this. Reddit can either blink and walk back some of their choices, wait for the mods to blink and reopen (of which, some have already), or reddit can escalate further and see if that makes the mods blink.
I believe a non-zero number of mods will continue to moderate. I also believe there are more than enough people willing to moderate to replace any of those who refuse to return.
Then you have weird situations. Because I'm willing to believe that some people believe it is extraordinarily difficult to moderate a subreddit and that they are uniquely gifted at it. Some of these people will believe that they have to moderate the subreddit because they believe the community will go to shit without them. Others will believe that their replacements will cause the community go to shit and Tim Reddit himself will come begging them to rejoin the moderation team.
And neither of these things are true. Moderating a forum is mostly drudgery and the only real skill it takes is having the time to do so. This is a battle I don't think the current mods can ultimately win.
I know that Google search has gotten so bad in the last couple years that I normally have to add "reddit" to the search terms to get a good result.
If it was ChatGPT they could just manually approve api use for the few popular clients
Reddit really needs to stop this.
Building some community of 1000 people is a complete waste of time, if it starts to get traction the powerjannies will unlock their own communities and maintain their personal power/influence.
There simply is no circumstance where building a replacement community to bypass the powerjannies' control will be a worthwhile use of anyone's time.
If there is a feeling that this is a loud minority waving pitchforks and that subreddits that re-open largely go on unaffected... the move to bypass the minority has to come from reddit themselves, otherwise the powerjannies will just regroup and come at it a bit more subtly once they realize they're on the losing side. They ain't gonna give up that mod slot when they know how much personal power it affords them.
And people can say there isn't power in it, or they're in it for the community, but, this kind of "keeping it closed for everyone because some users don't want it to be open" is exactly the kind of thing that gets a powermod all bricked up. There's enough power for some people to get a thrill out of it.
The current protest falls into a perceived gap in the "inactive sub" rules - if a sub is inactive and the mods are gone, that sub can be reassigned to new mods and reopened. The mods are saying "no, we're not inactive... we're just not letting anyone talk, but, there's 1 post a week in a private thread, see?". And the reality is that even if you accept that's a valid gap in the rules (arguably this is already covered by mod reassignment rules) this certainly will not be allowed to persist forever, Reddit will simply change the rules around what constitutes abandonment. The pressure is already on from community members who don't feel represented and are willing to take over the mod work if the current mods simply no longer wish to mod under the new system:
https://old.reddit.com/r/redditrequest/comments/149z2nd/requ...
You can protest at the factory gate all you want, and shame people for "crossing the picket line". You can't obstruct the actual factory floor, and if that happens the cops will remove you. And that's what things are fast coming to with the whole situation.
Mods are free to not mod. Users are free to not post. That's the "protest at the gate" approach. You can't be disruptive on a commercial platform, or you're gonna get removed. If mods no longer wish to participate and abandon the platform, Reddit is perfectly free to execute its "abandoned subreddit" procedures and reopen the sub, or to alter those abandoned-subreddit procedures in any way they want. If users/mods wish to behave in a disruptive fashion because they don't want to be members anymore, they will be banned.
And yes, there are people willing to step in and do the work too. Powermods are not that special, actually they're kinda awful at times.
I think mods might be a bit like members of US Congress. I expect that if you asked redditors if they think the mods on reddit are good, they'd say no...unless you asked them if the mods of the subreddits they use are good, in which case they'd say yes. Not convinced that removing the mods and reactivating the subs will go as well as you seem to.
As many people have recently noted, Reddit quietly became an extremely important repository of text-based knowledge. Distinct from Wikipedia and Archive.org, but no less important, Reddit is full of valuable procedural (how-to) and consumer (product-related) knowledge. Reddit has countless small communities built around hobbies and other niche interests, which places it in the same role once fulfilled by Usenet and later independent web-based forums.
While those technologies still exist, they face enormous challenges with discovery (try to find a new forum on Google recently?), single-sign-on, and moderation. These were all solved by Reddit and I believe lemmy solves them too. The fediverse [3] truly has the potential to liberate small internet communities from the vagaries of Big Social Media, of which Reddit is only the latest example.
I'm a technical user, and I closed join-lemmy.org after ten seconds because it was too many clicks to get to an interface that looked like Reddit. I did manage to find a community by clicking "join," and arbitrarily picking one of the communities on the page (which were presented in random order on every page load). I was disoriented and didn't know what this community was - did I land on the equivalent of a subreddit? Or is this a federated instance that includes all "subreddits" the server is connected to? Then I saw an intimidating user interface with sparse activity and low numbers of comments. So I concluded that if that's how I felt as a technically sophisticated user, then Lemmy doesn't stand a chance of gaining traction with the average redditor. I went back to Reddit and noticed most of the subs I like are done with their blackout.
Lemmy can succeed, but it needs a usable client that abstracts away the complexity of federation and choosing which servers to join. It seems like a perfect opportunity for Apollo, RIF, and the other award winning Reddit clients that are about to shut down. Why not port their apps to point to Lemmy backend(s) instead of Reddit? They could bring their loyal userbase to Lemmy, solving the chicken-and-egg problem and helping to bootstrap activity. And they can keep their UI, solving the problem of the intimidating user interface that would otherwise inhibit adoption of Lemmy.
It seems like there is a relatively straight-forward path to integration, but the opportunity window is probably closing soon. They'd need to act fast. The first step would probably be for Lemmy contributors to build an open source interopability layer that implements the Reddit API (maybe this already exists?), and for the client apps to figure out how to add one more layer of indirection to their interface ("servers").
Lemmy - A link aggregator for the fediverse.
Join a Server - Run a Server - Follow communities anywhere in the world
Lemmy is a selfhosted social link aggregation and discussion platform.
No, no. You lead with the benefits to the user. This isn't Github.
It suffers from the same problem as Mastodon - "Join a server". But which one?
These federated things need to be set up so that there's "no wrong door". Enter anywhere, see the same stuff regardless of where it's hosted. Discovery and hosting may be distributed behind the scenes, but they have to have a unified user entry point.
USENET had that problem solved. It was federated, but it didn't look federated to the end user.
Honestly, I say this all the time but I think people just need to treat federation like it's email. The difference is that the "email threads" are public to all, rather than in your inbox.
This is what old reddit did so well. You just open reddit.com and you see a dense wall of stories, along with vote count, number of comments on each story, and which subreddit that particular story came from.
All in ZERO clicks. No images or graphics at all, aside from little thumbnails you can easily ignore. Minimal, dense, and clutter-free.
In terms of discovery, there is a centralised community browser of sorts... but you'll see it's got quite a way to go: https://browse.feddit.de
However, as someone willing to put the time in to learn something new I've found my efforts rewarded. It does take longer than 10 seconds to get used to Lemmy and the fediverse, but I'd say no longer than 15-20 minutes really. I enjoy being part of something new and I hope it lasts. Perhaps it won't hang on to many of the new users it has gained, but I expect this won't be the last time Reddit does something its users don't like and next time around more will stick, hopefully presenting a very good alternative.
My current list of grievances:
- No standards of any kind on sharing the same identity, e.g. between Lemmy and Mastodon.
- No support for any distributed multi-master database (I'm currently trying to see if I can hack Lemmy to work with CockroachDB, but I'm probably going to give up).
Is this actually an issue?
If you're looking for a straight up reddit alternative in all its scope, I can see it being an issue, but if we simply want a better iteration, then isn't one more catered to technical users, perhaps be a good thing?
To me this feels similar to windows vs linux. The pains you describe in learning to use lemmy reminds me of windows users who complain about linux not being exactly like windows, UI wise.
But for users like me, after having un-learned windows and customized my linux experience, the result is just downright better from any angle. Yes, it was a time investment learning the ropes, but it was worth it.
Perhaps the modern approach is to stop trying to be like the most populist standard, and embrace platforms that are midway between the social giants and obscure niches.
Thing is I _still_ closed the tab and will likely forget about it. Turns out that thousands of people posting nothing but complaints about "REDDIT EVIL", isn't that interesting to read.
Well, to be honest, that part does sound exactly like reddit.
But people fall on reddit by links to a public page somewhere, avoiding the empty page problem. After a short time on their site, I still don't know if I can link to a comment in Lemmy or if I can browse a community.
And edit: yes, each one of those servers has a web interface at their root that you can browse and link to. The link being name "join" doesn't make it obvious.
I find Lemmy frustrating to use and it isn't just growing pains: it's the same reason I find Mastodon frustrating. Do I care if username@somecommunity.infosec.somecommunity matters? Do I care if I use lemmy.world or do I have to find some server? Which server?
Centralization works. It's convenient. It doesn't require a user guide. It's approachable for laypersons.
This is just the reality. I wish people would focus on building services that meet peoples needs and not just as an expression of their idealogies.
That's kind of the point
Mastadon, Lemmy, Etc, they're not replacements for Reddit or Facebook. They're an alternative.
A social network doesn't require millions of users to be useful. It's okay that they're not for everyone.
> Centralization works. It's convenient. It doesn't require a user guide. It's approachable for laypersons.
For a technically inclined person on a largely technology focused forum, you sound an awful lot like a luddite.
There used to be a high barrier to entry for accessing the internet and making use of it. That changed over time. The same will likely happen for these types of non-centralised services.
It works until it doesn’t: when the host of a centralized community decides to make enemies with its users. This is an old story for many people who went through the Digg to Reddit migration.
Now people have had enough. Our communities are too important to leave in the hands of one company. It’s time for all the people who create 100% of the value on Reddit to have control over their own community’s future.
No what you are presenting is an argument for services that meet the needs of dumbest assumable users and centralization. It's the same unreflected argument as has been repeated over and over when it comes to Mastodon and it boils down to "everyone needs to be there or else it's a failure". Services like that obviously are fine too, but there is more than enough people that don't need or want that.
It speaks for a certain narrow mindedness that everything needs to be Silicon Valley's next big thing that will someday rock the stock market.
In reality Mastodon does not have the size of Twitter, and you might find it too difficult to use. However not everyone is that way, and it has over the last months proven to be a good alternative for users. It's potentially the same with Lemmy: It only needs to povide a cool alternative and enough users for meaningful interaction.
It does not need the popularity of reddit to be valid. And it does not need to be designed explicitly for the layperson. (not an excuse for a bad UI, but with new Reddit the bar is incredibly low there, and Lemmy seems fine)
> I find Lemmy frustrating to use
Well others don't, and that is fine. For me personally: not everyone needs to migrate to Lemmy (or another federated alternative), only the communities I care about. And the same can be true for other people as well.
Take a step back. What is social media achieving in its current state. If you only look at the shiny cat videos and dances and memes, that's not the purpose. The purpose is the mass collection of data.
If your only standard of "is working" is "it's what the majority uses", then yes, "it works". But do you really want that to be your standard? Just number of users, at any cost?
If you're competing against algorithms fine tuned to make people pretty much addicted, do you really want to play the same game? And is this mindset not fueled by ideology as well?
Of course, I doubt we could create email today, if it didn't already exist.
This is the biggest source of friction for Lemmy and the Fediverse. Non-tech savvy folks will not make the shift if it is such a pain to find the communities you want to join.
I’m hoping Lemmy has a cross posting function that will serve a similar use case. You start in a woodworking forum here and someone reveals the DIWhy forum to you organically. After six to twelve months you have your hands full.
Other than the "not a lot is happening there now", but there's some activity.
The most recent posts on the server I'm on:
The Lower Decks crossover to live action in Strange New Worlds
Star Trek Discovery Canceled
‘Galaxy Quest’ TV Series in Early Development at Paramount+
Jack Crusher is how old?
Star Trek The Lower Decks S03E09 was everything I wanted.
(spam - into the kill file that poster went)
TOS Film marathon
(crossposted trolling - more kill file material)
Captain Burnham mob/cops/big city episodes (Star Trek Discovery)
(crossposted trolling - figured out how to do more complicated rules - "cross posted to more than 3 groups and newsgroups match \.politics\." with this reader)
(crossposted trolling - even more kill file material)
Ode to Spot. (this post is from 2012)
When will the new Star Trek merge with the Twilight movies? (this post is from (2011)
Just text content.
edit: and as I write this, a new post just showed up in the past 2 minutes about Strange New Words S02E01.
So make of that what you will.
There are already 3D printing communities on Lemmy.
Lemmy as a user interface is not well designed. It wasn't made to be read on a web browser in a monitor. It was made to be read on a small smartphone screen.
Say "no new posts here, go there." Enforce that for one day and see what happens.
The core problem with the migration is that the information on where to go EXACTLY is hosted on the platform being boycotted. I decided to not visit Reddit anymore and watch for instances to pop up on the fediverse. If others do the same, the migration will be slow. Don't be discouraged if it takes a few days to pick up steam. There's another 3DPrinting magazine that has some users already. https://kbin.social/m/3dprinting@lemmy.world or https://lemmy.world/c/3dprinting
That leads to the second problem of on-boarding migrating users to a highly distributed platform. I've mentioned in the boycott server the need for "racks" (the subjects within instances are called magazines, this would be a collection). These would be moderated aggregators of instances, like the invisible step between lots of disparate subreddits. There would be no limit of the number of racks, so technically you could have a permutation of every associated magazine-instance combination. The purpose would be to have a single link new users can click on to get subscribed to a set of magazines all at once, basically making the federation concept seamless to less technical users while still highly flexible on the backend. I'm going to shoot the suggestion up the chain for kbin.
We want to avoid leaving folks like this: https://lemmy.world/post/97417
That leads to the third problem, which is all these alternatives are new and going through growing pains. Trying to add features comes second to keeping the service stable. I'm hoping others with more coding experience can assist kbin devs.
And I wanted to mention that last I heard (and saw evidence of), some of the main Lemmy devs were kinda garbage people (Tiananmen Square massacre supporters, not just questionable opinions on government). The more controversial instances have been defederated from the primary/intake server, but it's still worth mentioning. Kbin doesn't have that baggage, but there are only a couple devs, and really only one main dev, last I heard.
Kbin users can see and respond to Lemmy and Mastodon instances that are federated, so it has been the migration choice for most of the Reddit boycott groups.
edit: btw - I just looked at the comments on the one post. If you want to run a poll, fine, but most of the people protesting won't be there to vote. I thought the 3D printing subs were largely positive and supporting, if those comments represent the community I was supporting, I now have zero qualms about deleting my comments on Reddit.
It’s possible that google is overtrained, that it got too good at finding things in the structures of the Internet (see: PageRank), and that structure collapsed because we have Google for that now, so why bother? And then Google couldn’t tell the Pulp from the Real, and SEO became far too powerful. I doubt that’s what happened, but I can’t rule it out.
In some of my hobbies, Co-ops are a powerful force for good (or at the very least, mediocrity++). These federations are just a fancy word for Co-op, IMO. If I can’t have Good, I’ll settle for mediocrity++ over mediocrity—-, which is the precipice we stand on with Reddit current events.
A poster came onto sh.itjust.works claiming responsibility for that. They described the very minor trolling they used to achieve it. They say they work for Reddit and are personally invested in proving that federation is impossible.
So hey, it's the internet, assume everything in that is a lie, but it shows that there's emotional resonance in the idea of preventing this shift.
There are a lot of malcontents and radicals in the lemmy sphere and many of them are very angry about the Reddit exodus invading their space. It will be a few months before these things settle out.
Reddit set such a high bar for API pricing that I think there’s plenty of room to support both front-end and back-end development as well as hosting for lemmy servers. We just need to work out a revenue-sharing model that gives everyone a piece of the pie.
Unrelated: is there a way to do `random search term site:reddit.com` for lemmy?
Once you've picked a server and signed up, you can access any community on any other server by just searching for the community url on your instance. If you subscribe, your instance will begin federating that community to your instance.
It's pretty well described here - https://join-lemmy.org/docs/en/administration/federation_get...
So far for me, I've noticed about half of my communities are instance local, and half are federated. The expectation I think is different communities in different instances will win and be the primary places for games, or technology, etc.
I think this is probably way harder/more annoying on lemmy, since if I have 1 user on abc.xyz, and I also browse and want to comment/upvote on qwerty.cxz and asdf.rocks
It does via websocket
I feel like that's a nice unorthodox way of making it not feel so viscerally "new and empty", which is usually what leads to a kind of inexplicable ick factor most people have when evaluating whether or not to join a community.
Technically speaking, this is mass copyright infringement, unless it happens to fall under fair use. Reddit wouldn't have standing (for content its admins didn't create), but every other user would. I can conceivably see a copyright suit being granted class action status, and Reddit (who does have a vested interest, even if they had no standing) bankrolling the whole thing.
I granted reddit the right to use my submitted content.
I never granted that to lemmy. Someone would sue, and they'd win.
there should be an aggregator for all of these instances: https://join-lemmy.org/instances
because my first instinct guess is, there's going to be huge overlap on submissions daily
there's only so much new news daily and a certain niche of people who read it/contribute
scattering them out to a bunch of obscure niche places probably doesn't help
there are even boring days on HackerNews. how many monthly active users does this site have roughly? 500k? 1m? way less?
I don't know why it took this long for moderators to quit.
What's going on? What's the bigger trend that's causing all these platforms to go so user-hostile?
https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/reddit-blackout-date-end-...
Just check r/India r/Mumbai r/Banglore r/Delhi r/Pune and other India subreddits and you will see.
Those dudes are legitimately insane
If the link is changed, it would be better to do it to an archive version. Here's one: https://archive.is/NcsuT
Any subreddits which had not been private previously will revert back to public and the ability to change from public to private will be temporarily disabled.
It's one thing for management to wait out 48h (doable), it's another thing to wait out something "indefinite".
However, the people that do care are the ones that moderate and contribute the vast majority of the content that the larger group enjoys.
I am pessimistic that the minority here will win out in the end, but the majority may begin to lose interest if the quality of new content drops.
At least for myself, the blackout gave me enough space away from the site to consider if my time on Reddit was valuable/enjoyable and basically I concluded it is not worth the time. I’ve uninstalled the app and I haven’t really missed a thing.
I agree. These protests have missed the point. There is a (very) loud minority raising hell right now, but spez is right, it's just noise. The silent majority is still hanging around.
When the 1% leaves the platform's quality will go down.
If I were them, I would rush to add some reddit features to Facebook group (reddit-like threads, upvotes/downvotes) or try to launch something new that’s more like reddit on top of the facebook/insta social graph.
Just call it “Groups”
why you guys think they're doing the unique usernames? because reddit with non-unique usernames would suck.
everyone has been talking about how much discord is a blackhole for content and it's unsearchable etc. And that's really fine for the chat side of things, but people hammering it into being a wiki/documentation/etc is a sign that there's a product need not being met. Discord almost certainly knows this, but, non-unique usernames for a global community doesn't work.
https://techcrunch.com/2023/06/15/instagram-is-rolling-out-i...
I don't really want my group activity to be linked to my Facebook identity for tracking/advertising purposes.
Are you serious? That is the most useful and well done function of Facebook! The accounts are all mostly real names so there is much less toxicity. Instead you get enthusiasts around a topic that can discuss issues in a constructive manner - or at least more constructive than Reddit.
Yet, addicted me still occasionally opens reddit. And all the content I see is from communities that did not black out, or returned, so all the content is from communities that at least a part of my says I shouldn't want to see.
Kinda kills the fun.
It's made me wonder why I've spent time shoveling engagement and words into the maw of a machine that didn't turn out to be the people I thought I was hanging out with. I spent a YEAR of my life traveling great distances to pursue a long-distance relationship I literally found on Reddit. That relationship turned out to not be as healthy as I wanted to believe it was…
…same with Reddit. More's the pity.
Not because I actively were using reddit but because all my search queries (not all of them with "reddit") went to one or another reddit post with the information not available anymore.
Even if reddit decides to comply, we have to change this for a better internet in the future.
Go lemmy guys.
Here at least there’s a chance Reddit will unblock the subs if this goes on too long.
Do prove me wrong, because I'd really like to see reddit die. But I'm not counting any chickens until they hatch.
It’s all the popular subs, and that’s the really low effort, frankly, basic bitch comments.
For me, in protesting they’ve improved it.
https://gist.github.com/hanniabu/6f96c6e820d58d8736f3c15d4c0...
There's also some notes above the linked table
I'm so sick of the smug ones, the people saying the protest is useless, the completely missing-the-point statement that most users don't care, and the near gleeful self abuse of people mocking others that don't want to keep using a proprietary platform being sold to china by a liar.
I'm done with Reddit threads on HN. I recommend folks interested in federated networks move these conversations there and let the rest enjoy reddit as it turns into digg.
r/politics
r/worldnews
r/movies
r/tech
r/television
r/news
r/technology
r/gadgets
r/sports
minor ones i've noticed:
r/indieheads
r/boxing
It's a pretty serious blackout, but it'd be even more serious if those went dark too (and stayed dark).
r/nba
r/nfl
r/formula1
r/mma
Those are some major ones still private.
Quite disappointing that r/soccer decided to re-open though. Would've made a significant impact.
The current options suck.
A proposal to address the failures of extant options:
Users hold their own data in the account they use for SSO
Every comment post etc is in your own account, with sites putting a request in the page from your SSO host
The front page is defined by your choice of site or SSO provider.
Eg I have a site and users can login with Google or make an account with my SSO provider, when they post a reference pointer is stored and the content is "reported" to the SSO provider by both the client and server with only those items reported by both being "validated" and stored. When site serves page with that content it puts in a js snippet that pulls the content item from the appropriate server.
This means users have full control over their content, sites don't have to host as much content, SSO services have better monetization options (Subs or Sales of Data Analysis) while sites don't lose thiers, etc
Subforums would just be different servers/sites, with your chosen frontend aggregating them all like a new age interactive RSS
What I DO care about is being able to browse without ads and recommendations I don't want shoved down my throat. They could have done things in a way that preserved 3rd party clients but required payment for an ad-free experience. People would be mostly fine with that I think.
There's also the other aspect of combining multiple forums into one cohesive website, which mostly isn't solvable by old school forum software. For that we need a federation scheme or even just old fashioned webrings to start with.
Large communities can't meaningfully migrate off it.
Small communities shouldn't migrate off it. (As they will lose discoverability.)
Yes they can, Digg migrated to reddit, Facebook migrated to Instagram. If Reddit becomes insufferable for most of their users to use they will migrate. Never forget the internet 1% rule [1], just the right set of users have to migrate to kill the site.
Just look at this poll for r/indiedev: https://www.reddit.com/r/IndieDev/comments/149uqfc/rindiedev...
Majority of votes want it closed down, and basically all comments want to keep it open.
You don't have to be a community member to vote, so this can mean only 1 thing: users from outside of r/indiedev are voting to close it.
edit: if you downvote, please solve the mystery of the disconnect between votes and comments.
Vs if you want the sub to stay open and are against the shutdown, your position is not obvious, and has value in explaining why you are against it.
But sure, keep dismissing it, enjoy not being able to google stuff I guess.
We could really use that right now.
I'll say it again, this is the equivalent of a change.org petition.
Unless all of say the top 10 (maybe more) subreddits completely, indefinitely went private - this will do nothing. There's not enough weight to it.
And even then, Reddit could just wait it out. People who really want X subreddit will just make a new one with a similar name. That happens regardless on almost a daily basis. Most of the major subreddits have a half-dozen alts.
As for alternatives to Reddit as a site, that's not going anywhere fast. What makes Reddit Reddit is not the tech, it's the content. Alternatives can exist that seem nearly as good on paper, but unless a sizable number of users go there, it means nothing.
And most users do not care about this API situation. It's a very vocal, very small minority.
Reading between the lines: Reddit is charging money for 3rd-party integration. The Reddit community has interpreted this as greedy (or, more specifically: the mods community has interpreted this as "We will have to start paying money to use services that are necessary for us to mod our subreddits"). But Reddit has not backed down. What if they can't? What if the problem is that the cost to provide the bulk-data API accesses is starting to add up for Reddit itself?
If so, then the problem is hosting Reddit has become too expensive and one solution is, indeed, to make it cheaper by having fewer high-traffic subreddits.
Live streaming, chat, avatars and NFTs are all features that should never have been built.
And yet in spite of this very thing happening, Lemmy and Mastodon remain largely unadopted.
Diaspora* existed during the Digg implosion and where did people flock to? No, not the decentralized Fediverse, but to another centralized service. Because it meets their needs. Their needs from a product _aren't_ that it be decentralized. Their needs are that it is easily accessible, that information is easily indexed and searchable, that interacting with users is obvious and transparent, etc.
These are all needs that Fediverse products have not met well because they're too focused on their agenda and their ideology, not their product.
It's based on a metaphor of the body in a physical place, that doesn't really work online. As I mentioned in another comment, this is like offering to give someone a ticket to an exciting foreign city, but before they can get the ticket they have to choose where they're going to eat lunch when they arrive. This alienates people because they have no context for choosing between instances so forcing this choice on them as a condition of signing up is good way to maximize your bounce rate.
So none of the things many people like. I loved usenet back int he 1990s, but the refusal to adapt to what users like to do is a large part of what killed it.
Yes, I acknowledge that not every service needs to be a mega service that everyone flocks to. Yes, I acknowledge that multiple products can exist than when combined replace a prior, larger service. Yes, I acknowledge that Lemmy, Mastodon, Diaspora or whatever else you like is great and fine for you and I'm happy for you and that's OK.
No, I don't think any of these services will realistically replace Reddit and I think that if Reddit dies then Digg 3.0 will spring up in it's place.
> It does not need the popularity of reddit to be valid.
I never said it was invalid. This isn't an attack on the technology. It's OK. You can calm down. It's my opinion that it isn't a drop-in replacement for Reddit and unlikely to see widespread adoption or prevent another Reddit from appearing.
It's like talking to Web3 zealots. I'm not attacking you, I promise.
> And it does not need to be designed explicitly for the layperson.
It does if it wants to be as useful as Reddit is today and Digg was before it or achieve the same popularity. You argue that we don't need a single service to be popular and that's OK but I live in reality.
You're comparing apples and oranges. You acknowledge that Lemmy does not attempt to be everything Reddit is today. I'm suggesting that that leaves a gap and people are interested in that gap.
People have become accustumed to having a single location to visit to obtain a depth of knowledge on a wide breadth of topics. I don't think, and I think you acknowledge, that Lemmy attempts to fill that need. And thus something like Reddit 2.0/Digg 3.0 will always exist.
Thats a horrible reason for users to go sign up on a completely new, unknown platform. Sounds less like a reason and more like a mandate.
Or something like that.
The interface is not up to old.reddit standards but better than the modern reddit interface. I like that because there many servers, any popular topic will have a bunch of subs to choose from. Seems a bit sparse with subscriber numbers per community but if that grows, I could see it scratching the reddit itch...
This type of design, jargon, style, is just anathema to a non-technical audience.
They don't wanted federated whatever, they just want reddit without the problems.
It’s so obvious that I guess someone must have done it and I just haven’t heard about it yet.
It was pretty painless, though I haven't tried actually posting anything yet.
Then, I stopped watching the walking dead
fear and denial will drive them to build garden walls when they should be transforming to stay ahead of obsolescence. turning into tiktok is fad chasing and a means to end of times, destruction, and relegation to has been status. myspace and tumblr realized too latomethi/ng e, and their transformations were never positioned to restore former glory.
what i would like to see is federation separate itself into three components. identify, client, server. the identity system should be divorced from the other two components and allow me to sign into any server. (as much as typing this next sentence will lose some people, public blockchains are a good way to store identity, where different servers can collaborate to host a unified identity database.) anyone should be able to use any client with any server. adding servers to my client should be no harder than an rss subscription. my configuration, my subscriptions should be stored with my identity, (not in an instance) and instantly portable to new clients. having an identity protocol, many client vendors, and multiple standardized server implementations will create something long lasting and resilient. the firms who choose that path will be the leaders.
how could reddit monetize this? run an identity server, have a direct messaging path to customers. fracture and make many competing clients for different peoplebases and community types. some free, some not. build an open source server backend and go the redhat model, selling enterprise support to large firms that want to host a community, and sell development services to honor feature requests from those customers.
(i know the fediverse is close to a lot of this, but the way identity is tied to instance isnt something i see as ideal. a lack of nomadic identity / identity portability makes the fediverse as fragile as any other centralized site. the fediverse being grafted onto existing dns, and having identity owned by a specific downstream host is problematic. identity should be distributed above the dns layer, not below cnames. the same applies to communities not being able to push themselves to new instances in an .. instant. serving of data is too centralized, and a p2p cdn layer /ipfs would help. the instance and the client seem too closely tied together as well. the way i see the current instances is the opposite of portability. im sure there is a lot of fast moving development going on, and hope someone can correct me. top answer here is a bit of a dealbreaker https://www.reddit.com/r/Mastodon/comments/134oud8/are_there... and where a blockchain ecosystem could help.)
[reposted from the star trek thread, probably belongs in this one more]
I’ve been on Reddit since the digg migration and I’ve never felt the need for an app, old.reddit.com and Adblock works perfectly fine on the phone. Better than Reddit’s mobile site.
Maybe this issue only affects 0.1% of users, but those 0.1% of users do a lot for the site that depends on functionality that Reddit is unable or unwilling to provide.
It also seems as though a lot of moderators of larger subreddits are starting to see how little their users understand and appreciate the amount of work that goes into moderating a subreddit. When those mod tools are gone and their jobs get harder, they're going to get shat on even more than they already do by those users, because of the issue that those users said was just "a bunch of dorks with no lives getting worked up over nothing".
Curious to see how this all shakes out.
old.reddit.com may not be long for this world. i.reddit.com and reddit.com/.compact were both removed earlier this year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35283379
(The irony now of that top comment, "99.5% of my usage is through the iOS client Apollo"...)
This may be a case where certain people are more important than most people.
> looks from the outside like a bunch of dorks
It appears the "dorks" are the certain people who have been making Reddit work for most people.
What if I told you that Reddit is going to do away with 'old.reddit.com' next?
This is a fundamental issue with your analysis. Reddit mods are integral to the site’s operations, and they aren’t employees they can just order around.
It seems likely to me that the same factors that motivate Reddit to do away with high-quality, user-oriented third party frontends will also motivate it to do away with old.reddit.com and RSS.
I am really hoping the next Reddit is not some megacorp effort.
I think Reddit should be very worried. Federation works fine for a "forum-like" replacement that doesn't need to be super timely.
Yes, the federated replacement is currently half-baked. You're not going to pick up the unwashed masses this round.
However, more than a few technical sub-Reddits that have simply shut down and are not coming back. The technical users didn't care much for Reddit to begin with and don't mind putting in some elbow grease to permanently kick Reddit to the curb. Lots of technical people now suddenly know about Lemmy who didn't have any clue before.
I have no doubt that Reddit will win this round, but it's a Pyrrhic victory. A nice chunk of software development talent is now mobilized to build the thing to wipe them out.
To be fair, I don't think the CEO is actually wrong. The AI companies are absolutely free-riding on everybody and that needs to stop. However, the way it was done with the API was not kosher--I suspect had he just grandfathered everybody using the API prior to date <X>, everything would have been fine.
I have no skin in the game, and couldn't care less either way what happens to Reddit company, the subs, their third party apps, or the moderators.
Shameless plug, but that's been a focus of ours with the platform that I've been building (sociables.com). We are trying to create an all in one stop for people to create communities, and not just posts.
Here's an example of a community on the platform:
https://github.com/reddit-archive/reddit
Why not just do that? Sure, it's a lot of python, and probably full of security holes, but there are enough reddit users to fix that, and the risk that your reddit instance might be taken over by malicious people is lower than the risk that centralized reddit will (since it already has been...)
Anyway, each time I link to it, I get crickets in response. Not sure why.
It's a slow process that involves building up communities and trust to hit a critical mass.
Pure speculation, but I think Reddit will continue to decline, it'll just be a while longer before everyone migrates from it.
I don't think reddit needs to be replaced, but they need to change some things. All subreddits are replaceable, and so are mods so i don't see the point of this protest
There is Saidit https://www.saidit.net/ but it's not really a viable alternative.
Popular? No.
Viable? Yes.
Try https://zapad.nstr.no/ it’s my instance.
If even a handful of people would join I think that would be nice.
So for instance, using reddit terminology, if I subscribe to r/gardening on your instance, do I get the same thing as everyone else gets in r/gardening on all the instances you federate with?
I'm clear on federation in general but not how it works for link aggregation. I've been reddit-free for about a year now but I've been planning to check out Lemmy once the current wave dies down and I'm not contributing to load stress.
I will say that I haven't noticed a decline in quality of posts; not sure if that's due to a strong culture or strict moderation. I suppose most of the Reddit refugees only browse the HN homepage, so HN veterans still have an out sized impact on the New page, which in turn dictates what can reach the top.
Sorry, but digg died because they told their community in unmistakable terms (aka v4) that they don't matter. Reddit happened to be there to take the refugees.
I think even casual users understand this perfectly well. They don't use 3rd party apps for browsing Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or Tiktok (because those services also don't offer APIs). Why should Reddit be different?
I think the cause is totally fine. I think framing it as some social justice cause is incorrect though. People really liked a thing and now reddit is taking it away in the name of money. The most downvoted post of all time on reddit is an EA post responding to monetization concerns in a star wars game. Seems right in line to me.
A Reddit alternative is something every developer on here thinks they can crank out in a weekend and surely countless of them are actually trying that right now. But the reality is that reddit is a mess and nobody in their right mind wants to try to run a site like that.
Yes, this is exactly the same as the Netflix account sharing controversy. People who aren’t generating the company any profit are shouting the loudest. I don’t think there’s much of a loss here.
The era of free money was always going to end and now it’s over.
That said, the Reddit Web Frontend is not exactly the best. I've used - and paid - for a native Reddit client actually (Stellar). The app will be sunsetted though.
I deleted my account this week, being a monetizable person who is quite bothered.
The Reddit users that are bothered by this also include mods that use third-party tools for moderation activities. If those users leave, or are no longer about to function, that has potential long-term consequences for Reddit.
It will be interesting to see how things play out over time.
Edit: is interesting to note the knee jerk negative reaction to this comment. I don't think it contains anything controversial and is a simple statement of reality
1. Popcorn subreddits — r/pics, r/funny , r/twitterScreenshots
2. hobby & employment related
During my time modding, I viewed the subreddit I ran as being very thoroughly in the second group. All the users shared an interest in a particular game. Myself and all the other mods were people that enjoyed the game first and foremost. We did not accept any moderator applications from users that were the prototypical Reddit mods and no one ever went on to join other mod teams.
And I will say, it was honestly extremely fun. I got to build moderator tooling through the API that was interesting and had immediate real world use. Reddit moderation was the catalyst for becoming a developer myself and directly lead to my current career.
I met a diverse group of people from across the globe and formed many lasting friendships with people I would have never met otherwise. Beyond that, it also gave me opportunities to learn more about video game production, go on studio tours, meet game developers, and have experiences that few others ever will.
The mods on the team were not naive. We understood we were providing an extremely valuable service to both Reddit and the game developer for free— but for us, it was a mostly straight forward hobby that presented interesting logistical challenges. For years now, the status quo has been that Reddit may be making some obnoxious UX choices, but none of them had any actual affect on the moderator experience. Most mods were insulated from the changes because we used third party apps and old.Reddit.
I think it is deeply unfortunate that Reddit moderation does attract some of the worst internet users and many people have very negative experiences and opinions when it comes to mods —but for some corners of the site, Reddit moderation was a genuinely enjoyable hobby shared with like minded friends.
I was a mod for a while with /r/AskEngineers. It was never really that big of a subreddit, slowing crossing over 50K subscribers during my time there. And while small, we got to deal with all the usual issues any subreddit sees. In our case, it was conspiracy theorists "just asking questions" about the WTC tower collapse, school students asking people to do their school assignments for them, and stuff like that.
In my time moderating /r/aiclass, I also got the experience of interacting with someone with a genuine mental illness. :-/
I didn't become a mod to win Internet points or for some kind of social status. I was just there to facilitate good conversation between engineers, so that we can help each other. I didn't mind the labor involved, and I just wanted to promote engineering as a discipline.
There was just one active mod when I joined, and he started building up a good (if small) team. That continued through the years as people came and left, and we had a good crew when I resigned. I won't do it again anytime soon (maybe after I retire, who knows), but it was definitely worthwhile, and I hope I was able to make a difference for people.
Also the "power" users would probably be happy to pay reasonable prices to interact with it via app/api, so go ahead and charge something REASONABLE.
There's something nefarious going on behind the scenes and it's all very suspicious. I'm happy to go back to targeted forums if I need to.
They like the power of being a moderator and smacking down people who break the rules. Usually they also like to bend the rules themselves to push a personal agenda, promoting what they like and squashing what they don’t like.
It’s the same motivation people have to serve on HOA boards or elected government positions.
As the creator and moderator of a 100k sub these are the last things on my mind - and same for the other moderators. The whole point of creating and moderating that was because 13 years ago I thought it was the best place to build a community that I wanted to exist.
I have no idea if that's true for the moderators for /pics or whatever massive sub-reddits are, but I do know that for a lot, and especially the long tail subs and the folks I see in the /modcoord sub and discord, moderators are people who are interested in maintaining a community because they are interested in the affinity.
I know that when I've taken on unpaid positions of responsibility (not as a reddit mod but within my hobbyist community), it's because I cared about the organization and the people in it, and getting things right.
There are definitely power-trippers who are attracted to these roles. But there are also people who just want to facilitate a nice community and enjoy their little corner of the internet while making it enjoyable for others.
I think people who accuse mods of "just being on a power-trip" are the same people who get mad when their HOA tells them they have to trim the hedges so their neighbor can back out of their driveway safely.
It's myopic and doesn't give mods credit for seeing the bigger picture. This website, for example, is heavily moderated to keep protecting the feeling of "Reddit in the early days." If the mods here weren't on top of that, this place would be overrun by the type of stuff that is now on Reddit's front page.
The same reason you'd be a moderator for a non-profit, which is power.
With these changes not everyone is winning anymore.
I feel for moderators who have had to deal with crappy tools for so long and have had to rely on the API to get things done. I do question what Reddit has done with the VC money and the dev time they have put in. Their app is undeniably worse than the 3rd party alternatives, and the lack of decent mod tools that required the use of bots is something they should have sorted out YEARS ago. The lack of accessibility from their own app is also very questionable, and their response was to only allow not-for-profit accessibility tools to continue using the API for free. They should have addressed their shortcomings instead of features that have questionable utility, like real-time chat.
It's been known for ever, do prople think these guys just shit money? And the "sensitive" content deletes itself?
This is the sole, minuscule bit of power that most mods have in their lives. It’s sad.
I don’t know, it’s looking like most people prefer businesses that eschew profits.
Yea my business-101 textbook says businesses should run a profit, but my sociology-101 textbook says we should do things that are good for people.
Maybe Reddit (et al) should be recreated as non profits dedicated to community building… before Facebook becomes the sole source of internet social interaction.
Tech companies over hired for ~10 years wrt efficiency & sustainability, and few want to do layoffs necessary to get 'good' efficiency numbers, instead just close enough that they can maybe reach non-buzzy norms in a few years, and hope things change in the meanwhile to go back to setting money on fire.
It's natural: market funded inefficient growth for years, and tech people want to feel like they are succeeding, which headcount is a power-tripping and physical metric for, even if wildly inaccurate. Cutting isn't easy either. Losing headcount makes folks want to quit, slows growth, and if as deep as needed for efficiency (which the 'standard' 10-20% cut isn't enough for), loses revenue... Which can cause a death spiral.
We have been growing purely on revenue for awhile now, and we have to remind many of our customers that we need to get paid bc we aren't (currently) doing the VC thing. Many have been trained at this point to not think that way, it's bizarre.
I'm hopeful that if companies start making money, we will start seeing competition again.
The web is barren, the web 3.0 went nowhere and social media is an outrage machine. I'm sure it could be better.
Business types want you to think they're tidying up, but most are using this zeitgeist as an opportunity for greed and the chance to shift more power away from workers.
There may, however, be some underlying trend that's the reason why so many social media companies are pulling the bait-and-switch right now, simultaneously.
- The US government sets a base interest rate it will pay if you buy bonds from them
- Bonds are basically loans
- People with money want that money to make money so they buy bonds and invest in stocks/companies
- When bonds aren't giving any money rich people put more into companies
- When bonds are giving money rich people shift money into bonds, less money for companies
This is a gross simplification but hopefully gives the idea.
Roughly.. but more accurately even if they are profitable they are not profitable enough.
Its not just that Reddit (Twitter, Twitch[0], etc) needs the money, the investors likely also have loans that need to be repaid sooner-than-later (or just other places with better returns). As such there is a large push for higher short term profit, to get higher short term share price, to "diversify" some of their Reddit stock.
The reality is none of these people care about the long term of Reddit. They have effectively "pumped it", they now need a good way to quickly "dump it". I'm sure none of them have any explicit motivation to destroy Reddit's future cash flows in the process, but that long term health is definitely not their focus.
[0] Twitch as an Amazon subsidiary doesn't exactly fit this model. However, the execs within Amazon do have Profit targets to meet for their orgs. This directly reflects in their bonuses, size of orgs, etc. So likely a similar enough analog.
When you borrow money from the bank, i.e. to fund the operations of a money-losing site like Reddit, ultimately the interest rate you pay on that loan is affected by the interest rates set by the Federal Reserve.
While interest rates were near zero, investors in money-losing companies like Reddit could justify just borrowing more money to keep the companies going, as the money was cheap.
But now with higher interest rates, the investors in Reddit, and other money-losing ventures, can no longer afford to just borrow more money to make up for the money they lost last year, they actually have to show a return or at least cut the losses to a level that the investor will tolerate. That means monetizing everything they can.
Rates are low: I can borrow money at 1% interest and my bank pays me 0.1% interest on any money I leave in my account. I'm getting basically no return on my money in the bank, so it makes sense to start a project that might make me money. If I have to borrow money, I only need to make a 1% return for it to be worth it.
Rates are high: It now costs 7% to borrow money and my bank pays me 4% on any money I leave in my account. 4% is a decent return and if I borrow money I need need a project that returns >7% for it to be worth it. Leaving my money in the bank seems like a much better option now.
How this applies to Reddit: VCs and investors are trying to figure out which projects are worth putting more money into, but the bar to make an investment worth it is much higher. Reddit (and many other companies) now need to show that giving them money is more profitable than leaving money in the bank (or other "safe" investments).
Increasing rates will make people more risk aware.
A lot of replies to say "yes" lol
Well, if you were planning on buying a $1 savings bond at a 2% interest rate than x would have to be 1.02 or bigger. If the interest rate increased then x would need to increase as well. In other words, an increase in the interest rate is a decrease in the future value of money - it takes more future dollars to be worth the same amount of present dollars.
When interest rates are low, companies prefer earning money in the future. They prefer growth. When interest rates are high then companies shift their preference to present dollars. What we are seeing is companies choosing to pursue money now rather than money in the future because of what interest rates are doing.
when your customers start doing weird shit with your product, they're telling you what they want the product to be, and as a result discord is pivoting towards being a forum or at least having the option for communities to have public wikis/forums associated with them.
this is probably only intensified now that reddit is teetering in the middle of their own pivot and leaving this opening for low-friction community building. like why not have a reddit replacement for the public content, built on top of the discord communities that already exist?
but, reddit with non-unique usernames would kinda suck, wouldn't it? to make a global public forum work, you have to require that they're unique and migrate the existing usernames to the new schema somehow.
You don't have to use the new username, discord's legacy functionality isn't forcing you, but if you don't you probably won't get access to disreddit features when it launches, because replying to paulmd#0069 on a reddit-clone would be an awful experience.
but the reason the username change is happening "even though nobody asked for it" is very simple. nobody is asking for username changes, but lots of people are asking for discord to step into the gap that reddit is leaving, and provide more powerful public-facing tooling for non-ephemeral content that's searchable and discoverable. And unique usernames are kind of a mandatory part of that model.
I haven't really used Lemmy/Mastodon much but it seems like an inherent disadvantage of that model too. weedgoku69@mastodon.social is not the same user as weedgoku69@masty.me and people will have to get used to the idea of looking at the whole username rather than reddit's unique usernames.
It's also going to be tough when there's not a 1:1 correspondence between "subreddits" and the discords underneath them. I guess your discord.gg URL is now your canonical subreddit URL... hope you boosted your server and squatted that custom invite URL a couple years ago, because it's your "domain name" now!
I snagged a four letter username that was my username without the number so I'm happy about that.
The economy has changed and now they actually have to try to make money.
These companies need/want to start making money. Either due to investors wanting a return on their investment (Reddit IPO, Amazon buying Twitch), or poor decisions which have lead to lots of debt (Elon buying Twitter). Companies can't get free/cheap loans any more since interest rates are high.
Many of these social media companies all followed the tried-and-true "embrace, extend, extinguish" methodology... Offer a free/cheap product until you gain the network effect that kills your competitors, then crank up the prices to turn a profit.
But Twitter is an especially interesting piece of that puzzle. It seems to be immolating itself in a deliberate enshitification, closely mirroring every other mega site - yet I doubt it can be related to debt in any way.
I don’t think we can just shrug and chalk it up to a poor decision by eccentric Elon, either. There are only a handful of mega sites. Some (Meta) have had bots between users for a long time. Some (TikTok) were born that way. The rest, including Twitter, seem hellbent on racing to get bots between us as fast as they can.
I think this undermines the debt-urgency argument. I suspect it, instead, highlights a recent growth spurt in the market value for mega sites with bots between users. We’re getting bots everywhere, not because time’s up and bots were the best idea they had, but because bots are exploding in value. We might even look back and shake our heads because Elon so clearly underpaid for Twitter.
economy has changed to where money is harder to get, and investors are probably much more skeptical now. and in order to get profitable, they have to start some user-hostile practices.
No, the __mods__ of __some__ of the biggest Reddit communities are in rebellion. Of the top 20 subreddits by subscribers, only 6 are currently closed. For the most part, the users of those subreddits dgaf about this issue, and even if the mods hold these subreddits hostage forever, the users will just move on to some similar subreddit that will take its place. The only loss here will be in smaller subreddits where some mod takes their toys home and nobody cares enough to start up something similar, and in that case, it's honestly not a big loss to reddit.
> it's honestly not a big loss to reddit.
Even though there are some giant subreddits that will probably all return, those are the least interesting part of Reddit. I feel like even the people who just want to scroll memes and rage content on the big subreddits still get a lot of value out of a few smaller subreddits related to their hobbies.
I feel like that’s what made Reddit special compared to TikTok or others, was that you could join those niche areas that were specific to you. Reddit still has the same garbage as other internet sites, but you could also find the really interesting and insightful content related to your hobbies.
And in many of my niches specifically, almost entirely the mods have resigned from those smaller communities. And since I’m not interested in the rage memes of the major subreddits, Reddit has nothing for me at this point.
But even the people who do like that stuff, I would guess also have their own niche hobbies that they enjoy, and if that part of Reddit goes away then they might as well just be on TikTok or whatever. And then why would they stay on Reddit when it’s so similar to those others?
To phrase more elegantly: the big subreddits may have the bulk of content, and will probably still be around. But the long tail of tiny subreddits is what made it interesting, and it would take a gargantuan effort for Reddit to restore the community of all of those little subreddits that are individually only valuable to a few, but everyone has some tiny subreddits that are really important to them.
VC money is drying up and these companies need to turn a profit now finally
Even if reddit forces subreddit's public, the auto-mod script to remove all new comments and posts is 2 lines of YAML. Having a public site with a bunch of upset and unaccountable mods is only inviting them to become bad actors and actively sabotage the site, which will do much much more damage than going private
I don't think Reddit cares about appeasing moderators. Though with or without this move it will be very interesting to see what will happen to Reddit if there is a mass exodus of moderators. Moderation is IMO the hardest problem in social media, all other platforms (Twitter, Facebook, etc) are objectively terrible at it. Reddit on the other hand with moderation at the micro level vs macro level seems to work. But its 100% on the backs of charitable time from unpaid users. If that falls apart, I can see it having a devastating effect on Reddit as a whole.
Once you've chosen Exit as your protest strategy, you lose Voice.
There's no universe in which Reddit allows subreddits to go permanently dark. Not gonna happen.
All recent evidence to the contrary
The actual creators of content are different from the drones.
What is a better alternative to Reddit from the point of view of a community mod? Self-hosting a phpBB forum isn't it, it's way too much work.
reddit became substantially better when digg ruined their product. actually, digg didn't work at all when they rolled out their new version, so it was (approximately) infinitely better.
What are you describing? Email? The Web? PGP?
It took ONE MONTH of AOL users to be unleashed upon Usenet to obliterate it as a discussion platform for all time. First, it was loaded up with stupid, low-content posters. Then the spammers came to throw dirt on the casket.
Years ago, when announcing the new website, he said "the API is not going anywhere"
old reddit is 100% on the chopping block
I keep hearing this repeated by people who use the site. Honestly, no they won't. At least the vast majority of them. There's literally no viable replacement.
I honestly wonder why this is even a feature they support, but it should absolutely be defaulted to mute and/or have a checkbox for it in the new server join banner. They force collect phone numbers while highlighting the fact that they will spam the ever-loving fuck out of your notifications.
This is what I don't get. Isn't this the obvious compromise to make all parties happy? Third Party apps can only be used by Premium members. Moderation tools are explicitly exempted until their functionality is rolled into first-party tools. Reddit adds new tools to block scrapers and institutes API rate limits for things they recognize as LLMs/negative bots and instead offer an "enterprise" tier for those that is much more expensive. Something along those lines would likely meet the needs of everyone and wouldn't piss anyone off. Reddit users continue our doom scrolling on Relay and Apollo, Reddit monetizes previously-unmonetizable users.
For the usual cases the normal UI should work fine.
I only take exception with the idea that mods are doing their jobs thanklessly.
Which regulations specifically are you talking about and what makes it “near impossible technically to fulfill” them?
Already, life changes, new places, people, appear interesting. Won't be long and it will be just like before I used Reddit.
Completely fine for reading purposes and mostly free of all the UX "optimizations" for ads and such.
Have similar feelings about old reddit on mobile.
What it comes down to is that yeah they're better than new reddit, but that's not much of a bar to clear and if I'm going to be spending extended periods of time using a site/service the experience needs to be good not just passable.
It works, but it's not a good experience, nor is it on par with HN.
Maybe I'm in a reverse sub-bubble, but outside of the tech circles complaining, the protest still seems to be "what protest?"
My wife noticed day-1 of the protests (I know because she asked me for the TL;DR of WTF is happening) and she doesn't move in tech circles, and the subs she likes (liked?) are all pop-culture stuff. Pretty sure she's just not been using reddit since then, as all of what she cared about is gone. Other non-tech friends of mine also noticed within 24 hours of the protests starting, with similar "well, damn, guess I'll find somewhere else to waste time" reactions.
But, all of the people I know who use reddit use it only for a few subs, and hardly ever visit the site's front page except by accident. I don't know anyone who's like "I'll just go to the Reddit homepage and look for something interesting that it's decided to promote", though I'm sure such users exist (and may even be the majority, for all I know).
maybe you're just really into meme/imgur post type stuff that doesn't have nearly the dedicated user base as other, more text-heavy subreddits?*
* this isn't a read; the example you gave (a picture of a weird looking fish) seems like the kind of content I described
I found this
The issue with "Fediverse" technologies is not dissimilar from crypto: it's designers care more about the ideology and the concept of being in the fediverse than they do meeting an actual product need.
In spite of a _dire_ gap in the market place and a substantial marketing opportunity to pick up market share, Lemmy and Mastodon remain largely unadopted by the masses and will likely remain in a similar market place as Diaspora*.
You are forced to, every time you have to write the bit after the @ in an email address, though!
> The issue with "Fediverse" technologies is not dissimilar from crypto: it's designers care more about the ideology and the concept of being in the fediverse than they do meeting an actual product need.
I think the trouble is that they're still trying to be too centralized(!) and keep too much control over content on the side of the various federated servers. Email defers to the client far more than these systems do. Gmail's not going to cut off "federation" with @microsoft.com because some of its users are sending solicited racist newsletters and MS refuses to ban them, for instance (if they become a spam farm and a huge proportion of Gmail's users complain about it? Yeah, then, maybe). Fastmail probably won't ban you because you're receiving racist newsletters. There aren't content moderators, just mostly-automated responses to user reports of abuse. The user is in control, and the servers don't try to proactively police or curate content that users want to read (they filter spam, sure).
(I mean, there's the further problem that it's nearly impossible to create a new open protocol of any kind and get any notable adoption these days, but that's not the fault of the federated model)
[EDIT] To be clear, I'm not advocating for racist newsletters in the above, that was just an unambiguous example of the kind of thing that'll draw swift and harsh moderator action on a lot of federated servers but that can (I assume—admittedly, I've not tried) get passed around via email without problems—my point is that the issues with "drama" and network-churn and such in federated networks, that may disrupt the usage patterns of ordinary users, is connected to how much control the server operators have. More fundamentally, this is connected to making the activity of these communities public on the Web by default—which I think is largely a mistake, I think it's really weird that it's become common for groups of people chatting about whatever to put everything they say on billboards in flashing lights all around the world.
Reddit is more akin to Wikipedia than it is to Facebook at this point for many people. Yes, much of the popularity comes from interacting with others but it's also become a hive of up-to-date information and opinions for hobbies, for trades, etc.
If I start a new hobby I don't need to go find the 10 year old abandoned page or the SEO manipulated AI generated summary. I just go to /r/hobby. New espresso machine? /r/espresso. I want to know what 3d printer to buy? /r/3dprinters. Damage to my roof? /r/roofing. I don't know how to do some maintenance on my house? /r/homeowners. I need to buy a new car but I don't know how to get a good deal? /r/askcarsales.
There's a lot more at play here than the stale "social media bad, algorithms manipulate society" take.
I hate facebook with a burning passion, but on “ultra niche groups” front it can actually be surprisingly good. What most big social media networks lack though is the very simple upvote-downvote mechanics, and proper comment trees. That enables reddit (and Hn also) to have truly great discussions from time to time. Facebook instead optimizes for rage by showing the shittiest possible take at front and no amount of explanation could de”platform” a low effort take under a news article for example.
While reddit is not immune to that, you will often find a great comment chain within the top 3 ones that calls out the stupid takes and actually has proper factual knowledge.
Other wise I just, use the search bar. I just tested it with the goal of finding a photography related community. Found it with the first search result from "photography". [1]
Another example, I wanted to find a risc-v related community, one simple search [2], boom, I found one [3]
[0] e.g.: https://feddit.de/communities/listing_type/All/page/1
[1] https://beehaw.org/search/q/photography/type/All/sort/TopAll...
[2] https://beehaw.org/search/q/riscv/type/All/sort/TopAll/listi...
Edit: Also, idk how I missed it, but the communities tab [0] also has a search, so there you go, I don't even know what else you'd want.
Here's a big list of servers (and their countries) sorted by MAU [1]. Note that the MAU data is out-of-date now that there's been a huge spike in the past few days.
It’s possible you’re seeing a bug, and it’s also possible that The System is Working.
I can tell you that the login link takes me to a form on Safari. When did tech people stop stating which browser they’re using and what quirky tools they have installed?
Another feature that would help with bootstrapping would be something like a "Reddit bridge," i.e. a Lemmy instance that proxies requests to Reddit and allows you to authenticate your Reddit account so you can read it and post comments to it like any other Lemmy instance.
Now (here in Canada anyways), a few giant corporations, in theory, do all the growing for the legit market, and need to handle a lot of large-scale problems, like big central grow ops requiring 1.21jigawatts instead of a bunch of houses using a bit of extra hydro each, security, pilferage, all the big problems of scale. These are problems of growing at scale, though, not problems inherent to growing weed.
We didn't have the problems of scale as a community of indepdendent growers. We had other problems: cops, filtering the smell so as to be good neighbours, larger ops had to deal with moisture, the reputation brought on by low-rent gangster scumbags who rent houses, setup and then threaten the landlord. We had the problems of an unregulated market, and the quality of our product as well as knowing a dealer determined our success, but basically anyone with basic competence and the ability to keep their mouths shut (ie. the barest of street smarts) could make an okay living back then.
I would say that Silo/Fedi is going to have a similar dynamic, minus the cops. Moderation happens by volunteers because people want to have a voice in determining what rules make the most sense for the communities they participate in, it's a non-issue in either world. Smaller instances will have smaller moderation loads, larger instances will either get supported by their users (money, work, whichever) or break up, or whatever, but it's going to settle into a congenial equilibrium in which the community of operators and users all look out for each other. We have seen the alternative, and we do not care for it, so we are going to put in the effort.
Also, in the 90s and early 00s, game servers cost money for many online FPS games - people hosted long running communities. Sometimes surviving via donation, sometimes just the benevolence of a person into the hobby with money. Community finds a way.
So there will be several r/games, r/videos, r/gifs, [...] on the Fediverse? This seems like a big hassle, no? Is there a built in solution to aggregate these?
One could argue that on Reddit subreddits also competed against each other, but in reality most of the time, the subreddit with the most approachable name always won. r/godot is obviously going to be the main Godot subreddit, even if there is a r/godot4coolkidz "competing" with it.
Having an instance attached is great imo, because it doesn't allow name squatting, anyone can make a cars community on their own instance now and grow it.
For the fediverse the large instances will probably have a lot of the generic popular communities, but it also allows groups to host their own instance for their niche. I think this is awesome, because those small niche communities are the best, and finding them is actually fun.
For example there's now a programming.dev instance that has the best programmer humor community, there's also a good rust community there. But there's also now a lemmyrs.org instance picking up steam and may take over. I'm subscribed to both, there isn't a limit.
As for finding community, there's a bunch of ways. Sidebars of your current favorite communities may link out to others; the communities tab of your instance, with All selected, will show any community any other user of your instance has subscribed to. But a good place to start looking for communities is https://browse.feddit.de
available under server.tld/instances
You also get empathy for anyone who does have to deal with arbitrary internet commenters and posters
There are literally thousands of small subreddits run by people who actually care about their communities. I feel most of the hate here for all moderators is coming from people who believe there should be no moderation at all.
I'm not sure if this is meant to be some kind of childish insult or gotcha but no: I'm talking in representation of luddites.
> A social network doesn't require millions of users to be useful. It's okay that they're not for everyone.
That might be true if you only ever want to read technical things with a technical audience in a technical forum. But that's not why Reddit is valuable or popular. Lemmy is an alternative to Reddit like water is an alternative to beer. Sure, they exist in the same kind of universe, but no sane person would tell you to switch from water to beer because they don't meet the same needs.
Reddit is popular because I can read /r/netsec one day and /r/lawncare the next. Because when I wanted to learn to make my own coffee at home I knew I could just go to /r/espresso and get a 101. When my 3D printer broke, I knew I could go to /r/bambulab and ask for help. When the historic winter we just had in NorCal ripped shingles off my roof, I knew I could go to /r/roofing to ask for advice.
Sure, you might want to live in a world where you only talk to software engineers about software and maybe Lemmy is a good fit for that.
That wasn't my point, though.
No, it's an observation.
You're insisting things have to work a certain way in order for them to have value and be usable. Things don't have to operate in a specific, fixed way.
Saying decentralisation will never catch on because it doesn't fit your description of accessibility is like saying someone won't be able to operate in society without knowing how to read or write cursive.
Things change. How people learn about stuff, how they use technologies, how they think about them, it all changes. It was once a widely shared opinion that computers would never catch on. Or that the internet wouldn't catch on. Or any other number of things wouldn't catch on. And they did, despite anyone's objections that it would.
As people's mindsets change, as technology advances, so will how it's used. And you don't seem to be open to that idea. Hence the luddite comparison.
No, I'm not. I'm staying on the topic of the thread you're posting in: Reddit's future and where people may or may not migrate to. You're doing exactly what I accused the creators of Fediverse technologies are doing: fixating on the ideology and taking an opportunity to preach.
I see the value of the Fediverse. I see the intent. I understand it. It's not complex.
But it isn't a replacement for Reddit. I don't even think you're arguing that. I think you're trying to get me to debate some strawman. I never said the Fediverse has no value. I said it has no mainstream appeal so long as people prioritize the ideology of the technology over the use case.
> Things change. How people learn about stuff, how they use technologies, how they think about them, it all changes. It was once a widely shared opinion that computers would never catch on. Or that the internet wouldn't catch on. Or any other number of things wouldn't catch on. And they did, despite anyone's objections that it would.
This is an argument that things _can_ change not that things _will_ change. Plenty of things never caught on. On that note, Diaspora existed as a widely available alternative to Digg when Digg died.
But people ended up on Reddit anyway.
While this was a bit before my time, I can definitely relate to spending hours or days to get something to work that I want to use. I think the difference is just that all the fediverse services don't really seem all that useful. If I open the frontpage of any "reddit alternative" right now, the top posts have a few hundred votes and a few dozen comments at most. There is simply too little activity here (that I care about) that would make it worth it for me to really get into it. I browsed reddit for entertainment and discussions and right now, none of the fediverse services I've looked at actually provide that.
Well unless you want to cover some only some very specific niches, yes it very much does.
It's not the best experience and it's not obvious or intuitive. A browser extension could simplify it substantially, at least. As could new features in lemmy itself, but you want to be careful about every lemmy instance consuming the content from every other one, as that won't scale easily for the average lemmy admin.
I assume the Enterprise is on its way to resolve the issue diplomatically
OT but what pains did you experience with matrix / what would you have done differently? this'd make a good blog post/HN article at this moment imo.
The issue with Synapse is the same as I currently have with Lemmy - lack of HA. One particular machine goes down and the system is 100% unavailable. And most of my machines are hardware I own, located at homes (mine, parents, etc) in different countries, so they're slightly more prone to random power or uplink outages than AWS' us-east-1. Hobbyist-grade geo-distributed cluster, hah :)
I've solved this for my email (two mailhosts on different continents, Dovecot dsync replication for mailboxes) and my storage (Minio works, and I'm slowly experimenting with Tahoe-LAFS), but I haven't solved it for Matrix.
Dendrite supports distributed deployments and reportedly works with CockroachDB (albeit not officially supported). Not sure what Conduit supports (last time I've checked it was all about embedded databases like sqlite, rocksdb, sled and persy), but it has pluggable database backend architecture so when I'll finally decide I want to fix my stuff, I'd certainly check it out as well.
We’re also working on account portability (MSC4014) that would eventually support active/active at the matrix layer, but it’s not ready tet.
So yes, there is certainly at least a vocal subset of people who believe that "finding information is bad actually" and deliberately building tech along those lines.
So https://zapad.nstr.no/c/rust is distinct from for example https://programming.dev/c/rust
I have added some other instances to my list of allowed instances and these are now showing up as linked instances in https://zapad.nstr.no/instances
I have seen other people leave comments on posts across instances but I have not yet figured out how I can use my user on my instance to leave a comment on another instance
According to https://join-lemmy.org/docs/en/administration/federation_get... whole communities are able to federate as well. But I have not yet understood how this works, heh.
Edit: Same page has some more details:
> One way you can take advantage of federation is by opening a different instance, like ds9.lemmy.ml, and browsing it. If you see an interesting community, post or user that you want to interact with, just copy its URL and paste it into the search of your own instance. Your instance will connect to the other one (assuming the allowlist/blocklist allows it), and directly display the remote content to you, so that you can follow a community or comment on a post. Here are some examples of working searches
> !main@lemmy.ml (Community)
> @nutomic@lemmy.ml (User)
> https://lemmy.ml/c/programming (Community)
> https://lemmy.ml/u/nutomic (User)
> https://lemmy.ml/post/123 (Post)
> https://lemmy.ml/comment/321 (Comment)
and
> If you search for a community first time, 20 posts are fetched initially. Only if a least one user on your instance subscribes to the remote community, will the community send updates to your instance. Updates include:
> New posts, comments
> Votes
> Post, comment edits and deletions
> Mod actions
> You can copy the URL of the community from the address bar in your browser and insert it in your search field. Wait a few seconds, the post will appear below. At the moment there is no loading indicator for the search, so wait a few seconds if it shows "no results".
Here you can see a post from a different instance, shown on my instance:
There have definitely been cases where I did attend multiple forums of the same format and same topic, but generally because I was in transition from one to the other, such as when alt.music.ween was dying and I started trying out the popular Web Forum of the time. In the end I gave up the community of Internet Ween fans, because coming from Usenet, which was absolutely beautiful if viewed using a good client program, web forums were like trying to write a business letter in crayon.
For me, it was actually the first round of enshittification, and we did it without any VC help at all; fact of the matter is that the web forums were easier to use, and so more people came to them, and up to a point, that does result in better community, particularly with non-technical subjects like obscure bands with cult followings.
But, it really did boggle my mind that anyone could use those things without going completely insane at the terrible bad and no good interfaces with no filtering or thread view etc etc (especially early on), but it was an important lesson in psychology for me: they did not have the context of the only-a-tiny-bit-harder, but galaxies-better thing that already existed, they only saw "here is a thing I can use to talk to people about a thing I like, which never existed in my world before," and from there they can tolerate any shortcoming, because it's all novelty. People thought Pong was mindblowing.
Eventually, as the ever-growing blob of spam goo make the Usenet landscape radioactive and impassable, and there was clearly a huge party going on in the forums, everyone just left, other than the diehards that always stay out of some misplaced stubborn urge. A lot of those forums hadn't even figured out how to pay for themselves, and in many cases never did, they just did it so that something would be there where before there was nothing.
All in all, things are really starting to look like the old internet, and it warms the cockles of my heart, truly it do.
I mean, yeah, I thought I made that clear in my post. I see words to that effect, certainly.
And I was responding to your anecdote. So. Did you ask yourself these questions before posting, or was that different somehow?
They presumably know this or if they don't, they soon will. To avoid allowing app devs to run around the API changes they have to either continue maintaining the front end or cut the dead weight. Given their decision making lately, I'm going for the latter.
And yet, every single one of these fediverse discussions is full of people basically saying "This doesn't spoonfeed me with zero effort, I turned it off after ten seconds!"
I have had my Mastodon account since 2017, I posted once and then never really looked again, and then after Twitter imploded and people started using it, I came back. I was an active Twitter user at the time as well, and I just stuck with it for a while, but eventually I just quit using it because there was just no quality interaction on it at all, with people I agree with or otherwise.
I also had kind of a boring Masto feed at first, until I figured out to subscribe to hashtags, and now I have several quality conversations a day about things I'm interested in, with congenial strangers who are also just there to talk about cool stuff. You have to change your habits a bit, it's fine and it's better.
I have also identified a strong tendency in this forum to do very well-outlined explanations of what is difficult or inefficient about federation, but invariably, the problem they're describing exists in a much worse form on the silo'd alternative they are implying we should stick with.
The fediverse (and decentralized social media in general) breaks the mold of extreme ease of use and therefore subverts the cultural expectations, thereby violating one of the ways a user would establish if the application is "good", and thereby it looks "bad".
It's like, technically X algorithm is a superior algo to use. But I can import Algo Joe's library that's 50 years old and already integrated into every language I know, so I'll do Joe.Sort().
Anyways, I see zero evidence that Reddit will come back from this conflagration in any sort of good shape, and I see even less evidence that the VC business model is going to do any better with anything else.
Edit: Just sitting here thinking about this. Who exactly gets any benefit from low-effort users of a system?
The members of the community? Absolutely not.
The mods? F%@k no.
The site operator who makes money from attention. Get this guy out of the equation and we can have nice things again.
And instead of relying on servers to federate with each other (which basically just shifts the problem, replacing one centralized walled garden with a patchwork of smaller gardens), why not let the client decide which servers to subscribe to? In an ideal world, the client could even merge comment threads when the same story is posted to multiple servers that the client subscribes to.
Without the centralization, why bother? Without the monolithic environments it's all private gardens. There's no point going and standing in someone's private garden while they're away.
It's seeking of the public square that is generating this situation, over and over and over again. This mess IS the territory. Either there's a way to have best of both worlds, or some kind of 'both worlds, in a compromised way', or this will always happen and this, too, is the territory: all public squares will be bombed for one reason or another until they're gone.
'Documentation? Just learn programming and it will be obvious.'
Is it both of these factors combined? Is it more one factor than the other?
The money you get lent at the bank is the money people are investing.
Both of the things you describe in this comment are two halves of a market. There's someone borrowing money and someone lending money. The borrowing becomes more expensive because the lender has better alternatives.
All this stuff I've tried to learn a few times and it's just so open ended, my mind is very more technically oriented and vague hand-waving statements on investopedia drives me crazy. Other people seem to understand it so easily but after the multiple attempts that I have made, I just have given up.
Front end that works with feeds from multiple sources, like RSS, and permits comments, posts etc using SSO, with all interactions logged centrally in the SSO account (for later edits deletes etc).
Sound about right?
Because you me it seems like every provider in that list should be able to make a profit off the data and interactions... With users who want increased privacy able to pay for an SSO subscription to prevent the sale of data on that end.
And we already have all the parts to make it work...
So there's more subs participating than just the popular ones.
You're right about the era of free (well… really, really cheap) money being over. I think we're going to see that social media as we know it (which has _only_ existed in the era of cheap money) isn't nearly as sustainable without a bunch of VCs willing to shovel money into a furnace in hope for unknown future returns. There's going to be a contraction.
My own speculation is that a majority of the content is produced by people using Reddit in a browser on a laptop/desktop machine. It's much faster and easier to produce content in this mode.
One note: the return on some companies may be higher and others lower, the issue is that the risk for money in companies is higher.
Very simplistic example: the US government can offer you a flat 5%, a company investment offers 10% half the time, 0% the other half.
One is a sure thing, one is a gamble. The more the 'gamble' the more risk and that is a driving factor in investments. People are willing to take huge risks if the payoff is very large (Look at Michael Burry and the big short)
Of course this is a gross oversimplification: earnings can grow, stocks can pay dividends, companies can go bankrupt, and companies have to pay their own bondholders as well as stockholders. But hopefully it shows that a tradeoff between stocks and bonds does exist.
Now, bonds are guaranteeing a 5%+ return, so a non-profitable business is much less attractive as a proposition.
I believe that U.S. bonds are priced at the market.
For example I might not have time to watch Twitch streams or Youtube videos from a creator over a couple months but I would still be able to go to a weekend event in my city or buy some some new merch that he announced. In general I would need to use another platform to not miss out (Twitter, Instagram).
If I controlled a client capable of aggregating all types of content I could decide to filter things out according to my immediate needs.
Content creators would own their own platform or choose a generic service provider and have freedom about what to make (video, image or text posts) and how to monetize.
The problems are who pays who, content discovery, and a decently sized userbase.
But yes, what you say is exactly the point of what I'm talking about.
Some sites would focus on being the universal front end for casual browsing while others would focus on niche purposes such as moderation or unique content types/presentations.
The data would be stored with the user by default in my model, ensuring they have control of their content, and offloading a bunch of the delivery work from the front end site (essentially every users SSO becomes the cdn for their chunk of the content).
It has some problems but it's really not much different than now except it's easy as pie for people to get eyeballs on their content (does mean monetization has some issues, as it does now).
Imrambling.....
Though it would look like /all what it would really be is more like an RSS reader aggregating multiple sources according to your preferences.
A Reddit alternative would naturally form in this ecosystem, with smaller alternative front ends abounding, and take dominance just as Reddit did, but unlike Reddit it would not be able to screw over sub mods etc.
Subs would be truly independent of the front end site, even if they are themselves also front end providers.
It's Distributed Reddit in a sense.... Though in my view it'd be best to make it content agnostic, so it can be adapted to other uses, specifically for a YouTube clone and such.
Really, there's a model where for most it's essentially a Facebook alternative that integrates into thousands of third party forums seemlessly...
Essentially, Reddit Appollo and all the others are the front ends, with the subreddits being independent back ends (which would certainly also have their own front ends, even if restricted to their own sub).
Thus, the most popular front end would almost certainly just be a clone of old.reddit with the /all and /popular being made of the aggregate communities that front end has selected for default inclusion (with the most inclusive front end almost certainly "winning").
Tldr - SSO only matters for commenting/posting, lurkers would/could get literally the exact same experience as Reddit...
I had the same thought, there must be many smart programmers with some good UX skills who must have done this (I hope)
There are those hidden gems on Reddit though that aren't the typical response, replies that suggest that your plastic filament has absorbed too much moisture and that you need to dry it in an oven.
Use the smaller sized office clamps to hold it in place. These can be placed on a few sides. Check that they do not collide with your printhead.
Then, prep it with a light ScotchBrite scrub. Just enough to see the light abrasive marks and a bit of texture in the surface. Finish with high purity isopropyl and a dry cloth buff. If you want, you can do prep away from the machine. I do because I disturb the level less. You can use a fresh, green type found in the grocery store for cleaning dishes, and or the more industrial purple. Just need to scuff the surface a tiny bit.
That gets rid of dust, oils and such. And the light abrasive gives the polymer a better mechanical bond.
Set your bed height to about one half of your nozzle diameter.
0.4 nozzle = 0.2mm bed to nozzle tip distance. Ordinary weight printer paper is about this amount.
Level your bed using the paper at all four extents. You should feel just a bit of drag resistance between nozzle and paper.
For most PLA, heat the bed to 65, maybe 70C and set your first layer height to half your nozzle diameter. 0.2mm again.
I like to print a skirt around the part to let flow settle before the first layer is made.
No glue stick, hairspray or anything needed.
Gatolite grips many other polymers when warm, releases nicely when cool.
I prefer G10 type.
For glass, do all the same things, skip the scotchbrite and add pvb gluesick in an even coating in the region your part will be. Let it sit a bit with bed at temp, then kick off your print.
Regarding wet filament, it can cause some problems. If you doubt your filament, you can quick dry some. Unspool a few meters, turn your bed heater on, set to 50C and lay it on there. Cover with light foil, put a small hole in the middle, wait an hour, then try printing with it. You want the foil just sitting over the filament, but not tight. Some light airflow is good to carry moisture away. It will come in through the sides and out the hole.
Use exact same settings to troubleshoot this moisture idea. If it sticks, dry your filament. If no change, your problem is not moisture.
That same idea applies to everything. You need to isolate problems to materials, settings, machine, environment, etc...
All this assumes some open bed type home machine, like a Prusa, or Creality type.
Once you do get adhesion, archive that gcode and process. When you have trouble again, pull that filament out, repeat exact process again to baseline your setup.
Always baseline when introducing a new idea.
I like to use some little cubes, say 9 of them, spread across the build surface. Run that job, make sure it sticks, then run parts. A good baseline takes roughly an hour, maybe a bit less once you have done it a few times.
I live in a very humid state, but I wouldn't expect my PETG to reabsorb moisture in the 2ish days after I dried it, can't print a Benchy or even just one of those single layer square tests you use for testing your leveling.
I just soaked basically my entire printhead/extruder/nozzle in acetone to clean it out, I tried doing cold pulls with all 3 materials, but the filament would just snap off instead of give me that clean nozzle shape you are supposed to get.
All that info. doesn't really inform my question for you, but I kind of wanted to rant a little bit :)
Is G10 better than say a textured PEI sheet for first layer adhesion? Ideally I would like to primarily print everything in PETG for its physical characteristics (heat, water, strength). Is it true that G10 can easily be gouged by the nozzle? I am a bit worried by that considering the cheapest I can find a G10 sheet for on amazon is $30.
To your point about paying full price —- it would be interesting to have a breakdown of the number of “evergreen subscribers” vs “fair weather subscribers,” but I’m not sure Netflix would be willing to share such a breakdown. This would tell us whether a majority of its subscribers think of the basic value of the service.
The problem with doing things for the good of people in a general sense is that you still need to have a functioning economy where scare resources are allocated somehow.
This entire thread is proof. The entire thread is platforms that people liked started to suck as soon as they decided to make a profit.
Sure theoretically profitable businesses can be good for people, but I’m not holding my breath for an example.
> The problem with doing things for the good of people in a general sense is that you still need to have a functioning economy where scare resources are allocated somehow.
Scarce resources is a cute textbook term but very few things in society, especially on the internet, are scarce. Profits must come from somewhere, and that somewhere is your customers. So it’s almost tautological that profits are bad for customers.
Reddit was built on free content from unpaid users being moderated by unpaid mods for the benefit of the community. Reddit is discovering that they can’t charge for a scarce resource they don’t own. The scarcity wasn’t internet bandwidth or servers or engineering efforts. The scarce resources were community contributions by users and mods.
hmm... if only there were... I don't know... some way to offer users to pay for a quality experience and subsidize that income with advertisements and reasonable API usage fees?
no, that couldn't possibly work! I mean, look at Wikipedia...
oh. right.
At Facebook, users from Asia Pacific region monetize at around ~1/15th of US&CA users. The costs to serve those users remains relatively fixed on a per-user basis, so expect those costs to inflate by 10-15x to earn the same revenue. Will Reddit drastically change their business model to appeal to Asia Pacific users and advertisers? It's possible but extremely unlikely and pivoting your business model months from IPO isn't a good plan.
A flood of India users to a western-centric platform is how you kill that platform (see Quora).
Indian users cost the same as US users in operational load but are worth a fraction of the advertising revenue.
As long as they are net positive it’s good for reddit, but the fact that reddit was struggling to make money on the biggest margin users does not bode well.
we either need to start paying for stuff instead of the bullshit invasive Display Ads model (half measure), accept the death of Adblock (I imagine I’ll get HN hate mail for even suggesting such a thing), or nationalize/otherwise remove the profit motive from these companies. I don’t see “the two main online forums for public discourse randomly decided to a) lurch towards far-right Russian propaganda and b) change everything in their push to get their VC investors some ridiculous return on investment, respectively” as an acceptable thing. Sadly my preferences aren’t exactly big news, and I assume the reaction from society at large will continue to be “oh no! Anyway…”
While it is possible to run a company at a loss with extremely high revenue, contextually, you're making excuses for a company that could easily keep running with 2.8 Billion dollars yearly.
It's likely that after they extract more money from creators they will increase their spend more to maintain operating at a loss. At what point does it end?
Otherwise it's just wild speculation.
PostgreSQL replication is hard for me. I know how to set up "classic" replication, but automatic failover and recovery that can solve split-brain issues is, sadly, not something I've figured out. And if it's not the machine, but the network that goes down (which happens few times a year on consumer-grade connections), it's a problem that happens in practice. I have learned how to repair nodes by hand, but I don't want to do this.
So far, I've managed to avoid thinking much of it by using distributed databases (CockroachDB and Consul, in particular) that already have all the magic built-in, so I just have to be careful with the settings.
Maybe I just need to learn how to deal with PostgreSQL...
(if you have a third-party commercial PG extension with clustering, like EnterpriseDB or CitusDB, ask them, they'll tell you what they want you doing.)
there is no inherent clustering support in postgres. You can't scatter tables across servers/etc. It's not supported. Always one master server - if you need more storage you can use SAS/fibrechannel/etc of course but there is one postgres instance that's in charge.
All of the postgres replication idioms rely on that model: the WAL is reliable up to the point it's been received/verified. If you've faithfully played out the WAL throughout your existence, everyone's storage instance is at the exact same state and the only thing that matters is who's got the most recent timestamp from the host.
This also includes bringup strategies: if you have an atomically checksummed snapshot of the datasets (all storage, and pg_wal, at the same instant) then you can also spawn new nodes. ZFS can do that. And with an incremental copy-on-write you can replicate the base state, then replicate only the changes (which is much faster) and then fail over quickly. That's popular for other applications that don't have sophisticated ACID stuff, the higher-layer stuff at the PG app level probably makes more sense if it fits your usecase.
Anyway short version is, I'd think about a simple blue-green system (or round-robin system) where you can set an environment flag, and blue frontend nodes can simply choose to direct traffic to green backend's pgbouncer or similar when they see that. Then you flip web traffic over. Then you shut down the blue pg instance, and stuff fails over gracefully. The "healthy", "progressing", and "migrated" states, if that makes sense. And there is always one healthy node, even if you need to bring it up from backups. Yes, you have to look whether the other side is still healthy but that is now a k8s/pod problem and not an app one.
If you can live with an instance in the US and one in Europe or similar, and perhaps a few occasional seconds of "they're down?"/"i'm down?" failover downtime, a simple blue/green failover is probably easiest. Someone is master until they're down for 30+ seconds, the other server tries to notice failover failure and tests whether it's down to a couple canary servers via ping/etc, and if they realize they're offline still then they shoot themselves in the head and let the succession happen. As soon as any other server is aware a failover happened (header announcement from appserver instances) then shoot yourself in the head. It's just a "make sure there's no split brain" procedure, trading some availability. That's the tradeoff RDBMS makes, it's atomic/consistent and partition-proof, it's just not available.
Cassandra is a fantastic match for your problem though, especially if you can define availability zones ("I want each of these regions to be self available") but then you have to deal with split brain. And queues/kafka can potentially solve that if you want or can prove some lower bound on queue iteration position (globally or per-follower).
It's all about what parts of your system you want to be unreliable. Using signatures is an interesting crutch over "availability" though - proving a key was issued by a trusted server is fine, and you can propagate revocations (session and cert) relatively quickly and hopefully trust the revocation. And that cert tree doesn't require a lot of deterministic state, if your PKA structure can scale and issue certs regularly. Rolling server cert issue/revocation (as a liveness check) is an interesting model imo. It's all stateless but you can check that (short-term/ephemeral) cert X was actually signed by keyserver Y and cert X signed Z etc, but we know X was actually revoked at time T before that etc. That's always seemed like a reasonably decent "best-effort" propagation, have stuff like revocation handled through redis sync/etc and just check the state for inconsistencies with the known state of the world.
It’s only starting to matter now because those fictional numbers are starting to become very real, very fast, given the current state of interest rates.
If you do it, please keep in mind merging submissions and their comments, 6 separate entries for the same thing each with a couple of comments is a much worse experience than a single entry with a dozen comments. You can start by simply using the URL as a grouping key and try more sophisticated things later.
I look at my fun Quora keepsakes and sigh... brutal.
Selective low effort is what those professors exhibit. But their ideas are valuable and worth publicizing.
Twitter is an example of many low-effort scientists writing some good content.
Twitter is also the current textbook example of the problem with low-effort platforms that are controlled by capital. Like, do I even need to explain this to anyone? Are there still any Musk fanboys in the room who think he's playing 4d chess?
But while Twitter circles the drain and the world scrambles to figure out what to use instead, and Mastodon steps up as a competitor which cannot be seized and ruined by capital, ever, Reddit stands firm as the one true platform that got it right! Everyone gazes in awe at the one last hope for the capitalist internet, which seems to be doing just fine.
And Reddit looked over at Twitter, and then Reddit looked down like Rorschach, and said... "Hold my Over 8000 beers..."
Also, reddit’s value is exactly that you have very different demographics on each subreddit, and “hearing the voice” of people is the whole point.
> Centralization works... It's approachable for laypersons.
You are arguing that things will not change because it doesn't work in a very specific way. I'm replying to what you said. This isn't a straw man argument.
There doesn't need to be a direct replacement for Reddit. Things don't have to continue to work like that. Your assumption of what's difficult to do isn't an absolute. People have shown they're able to adopt new ideas, new ways of doing things.
> I'm talking in representation of luddites.
You're not giving enough credit to society. They're not cattle. They don't just sit in a field and chew cud.
Mindsets and ideologies change. How technology is used changes. Your insistence that there has to be a direct, fully equivalent replacement for Reddit to be successful is incorrect.
I don't think people are cattle and I think that is a deliberate attempt to misrepresent my position. I don't think people are cattle. I think they are anything but: I think they have made a conscious decision about what they want and value.
What I think is that people have become accustomed to having a wide array of information on a wide array of topics easily indexed and accessible. What I think is that people value that accessibility of information. And I think that products like Lemmy don't meet that requirement and so something like Reddit will always exist, regardless of the centralized corporate ownership.
I'm not attempting to misrepresent you, that's just how you're coming across. You're effectively saying that people are either too lazy or not competent enough to use services that aren't packaged up and served directly to them. Hence the analogy.
> something like Reddit will always exist, regardless of the centralized corporate ownership.
Maybe, but that's not the point. You're claiming that decentralised services won't see wide spread adoption because it doesn't conform to how things work on Reddit. My point is it's narrow minded to have that mindset.
On the bright side, avoiding reddit this week has shown me just how much time I waste on the site.
this is explicitly blocked by TOS. You can notionally do it by taking a "RedditIsFun" APK and injecting your own API key and then sideloading, but they'll do app store takedowns for any third-party app that supports it natively (because it's a TOS violation).
They're probably tracking revenue and engagement metrics. This happens in a lot of places. Everyone knows there's important infrastructure that keeps things working, but new user-facing projects are always more exciting. Even with physical infrastructure, it's more exciting to build new roads than fix potholes.
I have some ...doubts about how well something like this would work in practice. Burning large systems down and starting over is generally not more efficient than tweaking the system you have.
I realize giving reddit mod advice on HN is a bit weird, but here is what we've done that has significantly helped
1. Operate off a white list for links instead of a blacklist -- allow posts from domains like twitter, github or whatever is a normal for your community. Set up auto mod to filter any domains outside of the whitelist so mods can review and approve the appropriate ones
2. No URL shorteners at all. There are very good anti-url-shortener scripts for automod. Adding this cut out 90% of the spam we got
Those are two suggestions that i would give to any subreddit. Here are some that you should carefully weigh before you implement
1. Set up automod to filter a post / comment if it gets to a certain threshold of reports. 2. Enforce a minimum karma amount & age to post w/ automod 3. Enforce a minimum karma amount to comment with a link w/ automod
To give you a starting point -- even our large subreddit, our requirement to post is an account older than 6 hours and >0 Karma. For comments with a link, we do >25 karma
I had a BLTouch for a few months, but I found it to be way more trouble than it was worth (probably mostly due to its temperature sensitivity and the heated enclosure). I ended up switching over to a Klackender probe, which has been more reliable to me.
And I should have added some cutoff there. It's mods of large enough subreddits.
But why else would the mods be so up in arms?
I checked yesterday and some widely used mod bots are already down. https://www.reddit.com/user/Blank-Cheque took all their bots down 10 days ago until the third-party apps change is reverted.
• AssistantBOT, AssistantBOT1 - This was broken by the Pushshift API cutoff. It's widely used for tracking sub usage statistics. The author is working on fixing it, but the last update was three weeks ago.
• Flair_Helper (Blank-Cheque) - This makes removing posts easier, especially on mobile. I haven't used it in anger.
• FloodgatesBot (Blank-Cheque) - This applies posting limits for users. There are a couple competitors, but I'm not sure how many are still running.
• Quality_Vote (Blank-Cheque) - This is used to allow users to remove unpopular posts. It can save a lot of moderation work in the right kind of sub.
• SafestBot (Blank-Cheque) - This is widely used by subs to ban spam and troll accounts. SaferBot, it's only alternative, was closed to additional subs some time ago.
I made one comment on an anti-parent hate subreddit to try and explain why I thought they were wrong to automatically hate people for having kids, and then the subreddit for new parents automatically banned me. I tried to ask the mods on the subreddit for parents to unban me, and they muted me, and then Reddit gave me a temporary ban from the entire site for "harassment" of the mods
So far as I'm concerned, I'm happy to see the end of the little pocket dictator mods and the admins/Spez. It'll be a lot nicer if I can keep completely separate throwaway identities for talking about diapers and talking about philosphy
The thing about the work mods do is that it's mostly invisible. If mods are doing their job, spam is getting deleted, reports are being serviced, and no one notices a thing. The subreddit seems to be working fine without them! It'd be easy to trick yourself into thinking they provide no utility. Even worse, since you don't notice the good work being done, all you do notice is the bad work (i.e. power tripping). Which, don't get me wrong, can be bad.
But tbh the complaints I've heard about "Orwellian" mods are completely overblown. I've used reddit for over 10 years and subscribed to hundreds of subs. I've had my posts removed by power tripping mods maybe a handful of times. The number of times I've seen a subreddit go to shit due to lax or nonexistent moderation is much much higher.
I'm sure there are some small subs where the mods aren't huge jerks and benefit from usable tools to fight spam and deescalate flame wars, but I think we'll all be a hell of a lot better off with a bunch of unaffiliated or loosely-affiliated topical forums than we are with this current panopticon. The mods will be better off too: A guy moderating his own website will have better tools to combat spam and punish whatever he defines as trolls within his own kingdom.
I thought this too until I went to Reveddit one day and WOW there was a lot of stuff silently removed without disappearing from my user history.
Users in a well behaved system never notice the fantastic amount of work that goes into keeping the system well behaved. If you do your job right as few people as possible know you exist. It's the dilemma of the maintainer: extremely vital component of the system who everyone thinks does nothing in the best case and enraged at when something breaks in the worst case.
Why should the users care? Less moderation and more open speech would drastically improve most subreddits. This seems like it’s more and more just tantrum throwing from mods who almost feel embarrassed they’ve devoted thousands of hours of free work to a corporation that literally doesn’t care about them at all.
This just isn't true. Subreddits without moderators get buried in spam (both thinly veiled self-promotion and outright unrelated spam link dumping).
(I've both moderated a small subreddit and tried to participate in subreddits with absent moderators.)
You can even see this with smaller active subs that only have one moderator. The sub doesn't fill up with spam when the moderator is sleeping.
For example, /r/ExperiencedDevs is one of my favorite subreddits. They have rules around the types of questions you can ask. These rules are put into place to prevent the subreddit from becoming like /r/CSCareerQuestions, or to prevent an influx of memes.
Without these tools or these moderators, I have a feeling some subreddits will become more generalist and possibly drop in quality.
I go to /r/ExperiencedDevs (and other subreddits moderated in a similar fashion) for a very specific set of posts and expectations for questions. I don't really want to see memes, jokes, etc. in the subreddit, as I have other ones to go for that.
"We will ensure existing utilities, especially moderation tools, have free access to our API."[1]
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/141oqn8/api_update...
Reddit's CEO has also publicly lied about discussions with Apollo's developer (https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/144f6xm/apollo_w...). Their credibility with developers is almost nonexistent.
An additional factor is that the third-party app cutoff cost Reddit a lot of goodwill. Many mods reply heavily on third-party apps; they're much easier to use for moderation. Some subs such as r/traaaaaaannnnnnnnnns (393k users) have announced that they'll shut down because of this (https://www.reddit.com/r/traaaaaaannnnnnnnnns/comments/144tn...). Some popular bot developers such as u/Blank-Cheque have already taken their bots down. My other comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36343447) lists some of the affected bots.
There is a balance struck by any business when setting prices, and I would wager that every one of these app developers put a lot of thought into it based on Reddit's broken commitments. The mod userbase is not enough to support a single app, so this is just forked tongue doublespeak in the final analysis.
Last month Reddit cut off the Pushshift API (https://www.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/134tjpe/reddit_dat...). It was widely used by moderation bots such as AssistantBOT. Pushshift will supposedly be restored (https://www.reddit.com/r/pushshift/comments/13w6j20/advancin...), but access must be approved by Reddit and is only open to mods with a Pushshift account; there are also additional usage restrictions. IMO it's an open question whether Pushshift or most of the services using it will ever be restored. Pushshift is now owned and managed by NCRI (Network Contagion Research Institute), which is based around selling the data to intelligence agencies (https://networkcontagion.us/technology/). Access for moderation tools isn't really part of their business model.
Accessibility apps are exempted only if they're free and noncommercial; they also can't access NSFW content. Many popular third-party apps that blind users rely on (https://www.reddit.com/r/Blind/comments/1447ibp/what_apps_me...) are commercial and will either be shutting down or have an uncertain future. It's unclear how many apps will make the transition; they weren't given anywhere near enough notice.
Reddit's CEO has publicly lied about discussions with Apollo's developer (https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/144f6xm/apollo_w...). Their credibility with developers is almost nonexistent. The Verge reporter may be taking their word for it, but few moderators and developers are.
The changes they've already made have led to many popular bots being shut down. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36343447) lists a few of them. u/SafestBot, one of the affected bots, is widely used to ban spam and troll accounts. It's a moderator at 342+ subreddits. If brigading is a serious problem in your sub, then your life has gotten a lot harder.
The official mobile app is hot garbage and uniquely poorly suited to moderation. Third-party apps save much of the work and are much easier to use. Some subs such as r/traaaaaaannnnnnnnnns (393k users) have announced that they'll shut down because of this (https://www.reddit.com/r/traaaaaaannnnnnnnnns/comments/144tn...).
We’ve learnt a lot about the necessity for institutional knowledge and continuation over the years.
Reddit with a whole new set of mods will be a worse experience overall. The largest and most general subs will probably be alright but good luck finding mods for the more focused and specialist subs.
Google has a similar policy in general but sideloading makes it relatively pointless.
There is a PTFE tube in there that's supposed to help guide the filament and it is damaged. If you can't do a cold pull nothing will work because the shape of the filament will change inside the feed path and it will bind up.
Some hot ends do not have the PTFE tube, but they have metal parts that must be mated together precisely in order for the polymer to flow through. If there are gaps the polymer flows into those forms little nuggets and it can't work.
If I were you I would replace your hot end, and make sure your feed path is factory spec all the way through and try again. Clean the feeder gears, make sure you got nice Boden tube on there, the whole thing.
Pet polymers take on water very slowly. And many plas will work whether they're wet or dry. I do not believe that's your problem. If you've got super aggressive Snap Crackle Pop when purging some material through maybe. But I would look elsewhere first.
If I were you, I would also get a known setup that just prints a 1-in cube. And work that until it's perfect.
The Telltale here is the curling up around the nozzle and the clogging. Your machine can't sustain a flow rate. Once the filament is moving it's okay but once it stops part of it is solidifying in there and preventing movement from then on.
Once you get it all working, if you have replaced your hot end, you can then compare that one to the one you have now and probably fix it.
I would run it bog standard. Use the nozzle it ships with, or add a simple brass one and assemble it with care.
Once you have it working, it will probably work a long time.
I have a CR-10 machine mostly running PLA, HIPS and PETG. I never change anything.
The secret is warm up hot end, push filament through by hand, until flow is straight and clean. Then print.
On material change, I do it hot. Pull one, insert the other, push by hand until flow is good.
The garolite and the Pei are similar. I prefer the G10 because it's stiffer and it doesn't wear away as easily and it seems to be a little more consistent in how it behaves. But either can work.
Why not publish some stats every week/month about what kind of content/users were banned/suspended etc.
To further my point, I just looked myself up (same as my HN handle), and I only found 7 comments removed by mods. Most of which were honestly fair to remove, in my opinion.
That is explicitly not what I said. What I said was:
> What I think is that people have become accustomed to having a wide array of information on a wide array of topics easily indexed and accessible. What I think is that people value that accessibility of information.
A replacement doesn't have to work how Reddit works. It just has to provide some of the same value.
The following are your words, not mine, although the emphasis is:
> > Federated services will never become mainstream. This is just the reality that people need to come to accept. I find them heavily talked about in circles with my colleagues and in my profession but the attraction of decentralized services just isn't there for the vast majority of people.
> > I'd take a wager that we'll see Digg 3.0/Reddit 2.0 before we'll see widespread adoption of the Fediverse.
It does for some people -- some people value the fact that it's decentralized over other needs -- but my point is the vast majority of people don't care as long as the information they need is there and accessible. The fact that it's decentralized is, in itself, not enough.
EDIT: And to be clear: I think the fact that it's decentralized doesn't preclude it from having those other properties that users value just that the developers of Fediverse applications don't seem to realize that they need to do something more than make it decentralized. That's the entire essence of my post.
Seriously. Have a default server (or set of defaults) newbies dump into after completing a simple sign-up flow. Then let them move it as they benefit from the product and gain an incentive to learn about it.
Reddit is up in arms about API pricing and mods. Do you think the average Reddit user would have signed up if they had to first jump through hoops to prove their respect for community-based architecture? No! An infintessimal fraction of users care about philosophy or architecture, even when those values and decisions directly cause effects they follow. Users came for their cat pics. Give them their cat pics. Pitch them on the back end afterwards.
> An infintessimal fraction of users care about philosophy or architecture [...] Users came for their cat pics. Give them their cat pics. Pitch them on the back end afterwards.
I'm afraid you don't understand the concept of the fediverse. The philosophy is the point. Making reddit2 is completely useless. This is not a product, it's a vision of how we manage communications as a society. It implies involvement, because in a democracy you are part of the decision process, and you act as a community. Your egocentric, utilitarian, self-obsessed mindset is the complete opposite.
I can't be really surprised to see this on hn, but oh well.
Nothing about cleaner onboarding requires anyone to compromise principles. And nothing about a guiding philosophy requires you constantly evangelize. Let the merits of the system speak for itself.
> implies involvement, because in a democracy you are part of the decision process, and you act as a community
Then the sign-up page is a poll test. Democratic ambition strives to make participation easy. That doesn't mean the act of participating is easy. Just that we identify needless barriers and ideological tests as undemocratic. As a result, democracies--time and again--outcompete their centralized peers.
What I'm seeing is not competitive, and it is not democratic. It's closer to theological. I'm hopeful that someone will embrace these principles more productively so we have middle ground between Huffman-Musk and crypto/web3.
- Servers choose what they want to host and what their personal bandwidth limit is
- A user visiting a specific subforum automatically downloads from whatever servers are currently available to serve it
Then you’d never have to manually choose a server.
Similarly, you need to join a Lemmy server to have an identity there, or anywhere on Lemmy. Unlike private torrent trackers, you only need 1 Lemmy identity, and you can subscribe to other servers' communities from your original server.
This has to be parody.
USENET also had the "chose the wrong server" problem.
If I chose my ISP (e.g. Verizon) as my USENET entry point, then I would miss out on many newsgroups that Verizon didn't have. Or, Verizon had the newsgroup but had extremely short retention of old messages history.
So, I paid $12.99/month for GigaNews to get all the newsgroups with months-to-years retention.
Lemmy/Mastodon/etc replicate the same federation issues as USENET because running servers costs money and different people have different thresholds of spending. This independence/freedom of the admin running the server the particular way they want is touted as a positive but it also has inherent disadvantages.
The contemporary situation of Beehaw instance defederating lemmy.world -- is replaying the same tradeoffs that USENET went through. (E.g. similar to an ISP's USENET service choosing not to carry alt.binaries.* or whatever.) Beehaw explains they have limited resources and can't handle the influx from lemmy.world. Yep. Very understandable.
Regardless, if I was able to capture 1% of the net, that's not a failure by any stretch.
How did IRC succeed here? Have any hard evidence as opposed to intuition or speculation?
IRC, like e-mail, is grandfathered in. There wasn't a centralized alternative that worked when they were born.
It didn't help that the protocol evolved at an absolutely glacial pace with very uneven support across various networks, and doing anything but the most trivial sorts of channel management had to be done through a bot. Matrix seems like the obvious IRC successor due to its seamless two-way interoperability with IRC networks, but I suspect that it won't hit critical mass until Discord starts causing problems for its userbase.
I think there were many options at the time.
Maybe the DCC transfer and easy scriptabilty thanks to Khaled Mardam-Bey's mIRC might be a valid claim.
Perhaps also the impermanence of the history of the channels afforded certain types of interactions that you wouldn't do with you know, theoretically forever scrollbacks.
I guess this brings us back to classical marketing about how you can't have a sustainable differentiated product based on negatives. (as in, this is not the bad guy). You need to have something in the affirmative
The nostr community right now mostly want to replace twitter rather than reddit, but in principle it would be possible.
Now that I've been on Mastodon and Lemmy, it makes more sense, but this is a HUGE barrier to adoption.
The mega pun is that if you are hard working, intelligent and reasonable this is going to be incredibly hard for you. You are going to need help from someone who is non of those things.
I would argue they are. Any of the servers will work fine. There needs to be a paradigm shift that only things that are centrally managed and have a profit motive are good.
It creates the possibility for a business model where subscribers pay for access to a big news spool and lots of groups. Just like USENet.
There will be some growing pains, but there will eventually be a continuum of "free" lemmy servers, for pay premium ones, and lemmy servers where the front end is only an app on your phone.
And they'll all see the same messages.
I think you should re-evaluate that assumption:
https://www.google.com/search?q=mastodon+instances+blocks+ga...
https://www.google.com/search?q=mastodon+blocklists
https://www.google.com/search?q=mastodon+blacklists
https://www.reddit.com/r/Mastodon/comments/kw8jht/how_do_i_s...
Also, expand the ">Moderated servers" heading and scroll down through the instances they block:
https://mastodon.social/about#unavailable-content
Why do different Mastodon instances decide on not federating some of the other instances?!? It's because the owners pay money for running their particular server which makes them feel entitled to run it the way they want.
The "pick any server, it doesn't make any difference, you'll see _all_ messages anyway" -- is not realistic given that each fediverse node administrator can exercise their freedom to choose what messages their server accepts.
It sounds like that trans sub just needs to farm out some of the moderator tasks rather than one person doing it all. If they have that many subscribers then they presumably have a lot of people who can help moderate.
If your subreddit is being brigaded, then eventual bans don't help. It took years for r/The_Donald to be banned and over a year for r/NoNewNormal to be banned; meanwhile their users were trolling and brigading all over Reddit.
> It sounds like that trans sub just needs to farm out some of the moderator tasks rather than one person doing it all. If they have that many subscribers then they presumably have a lot of people who can help moderate.
They have 393k users, but how many are both interested and suitable for moderating? It's not easy to find good people, especially on a sub like that where mods are regularly harassed. Here's a concrete example (https://www.reddit.com/r/ModSupport/comments/14a5lz5/mod_cod...).
That is true, but most Mastodon apps make multi-accounting a breeze, and I imagine the Lemmy ecosystem will provide the same functionality.
It also helps that Lemmy is trying to court the userbase of Reddit, who are already a pseudo-anonymous lot and in my experience don't seem to have as much of an attachment to their old content as Twitter users, deleting their old posts and accounts on a regular basis.
Originally, Google was pure discovery. There was no Google content, just links. That's pure discovery. A standalone blog is pure content. Together, you have a social system.
Separating those is a step to freedom from oppressive service providers.
> Most people only care about the end product, the end experience.
Because that's what we keep telling them: don't think, let me take care of this, CEO knows better. That is how we arrive at this crooked situation where sharholders come first, business partners second, and users last.
And yet:
> > Federated services will never become mainstream. This is just the reality that people need to come to accept
> > Centralization works. It's convenient. It doesn't require a user guide. It's approachable for laypersons. This is just the reality
> > Lemmy is an alternative to Reddit like water is an alternative to beer. Sure, they exist in the same kind of universe, but no sane person would tell you to switch from water to beer because they don't meet the same needs.
And then there's this:
> > I find Lemmy frustrating to use and it isn't just growing pains: it's the same reason I find Mastodon frustrating. Do I care if username@somecommunity.infosec.somecommunity matters? Do I care if I use lemmy.world or do I have to find some server? Which server?
> > I see the value of the Fediverse. I see the intent. I understand it. It's not complex.
Which one is it? Complex or not? Do you need a user guide? No? Which one?
You're all over the place. Saying centralisation is required for mainstream adoption which means decentralisation isn't, but somehow decentralisation isn't the problem that the fediverse has?
One thing that I haven't pointed out in all of this is that signing up and using reddit might have been easy for you, but that isn't the case for every body. I'd wager for most visitors to reddit, whether or not they have registered an account, they simply consume the content there like they would a Facebook wall. Many users don't understand the concept of subreddits or fine tuning their account to their interests. They aren't getting the same value out of it that you place so highly on it.
Centralization does not necessarily make things user friendly. Nor does decentralisation make things less user friendly. You have implied both to be true and then contradicted yourself.
I'm content in my belief that we won't see a mass adopted Fediverse technology replace Reddit in my lifetime. I think theres a variety of reasons for this but the people involved in the development and advocacy of the products and their inability to listen to any feedback are the biggest one. They think they've got this _allllll_ figured out and it's just humanity that needs to evolve to meet them.
I'll come back here and apologise if I'm wrong. I don't see that happening, though.
If anyone here has been hyper fixated on technology it's you. I haven't been heralding the Fediverse. I haven't been waxing poetic about decentralisation. I've only been responding to the things you've said about how the centralised nature of Reddit is why it's successful and that decentralisation will never successful, which is something you said.
> > Federated services will never become mainstream.
As for this:
> I'm content in my belief that we won't see a mass adopted Fediverse technology replace Reddit in my lifetime. I think theres a variety of reasons for this but the people involved in the development and advocacy of the products and their inability to listen to any feedback are the biggest one. They think they've got this _allllll_ figured out and it's just humanity that needs to evolve to meet them.
It's not like those products can't evolve. The developers and communities behind these products can, and most likely will, do things to help with adoption of the services they've created. This isn't like the book of Genesis. Just like how some deity didn't create the earth in six days and then rested it's not like new features won't be added or different federated offerings won't appear.
> I'll come back here and apologise if I'm wrong. I don't see that happening, though.
Nah, that's okay. It's just a chat on a web forum. I imagine we'll both forget about it in a few days.
What happens here is that we have the occasion to take control of our community gatherings. How do you take control if you don't even know what you're talking about ? How can you discuss the form of society we're building if you don't want to discuss and be told how to think ?
Now, I understand that what I'm asking for is out of the norms, because we're not used to decide collectively and run our own lives, the entirety of our education and our lives happens with someone else taking decisions for us. It's comfortable, we don't need to think too much, especially when we agree with the decisions. Here is the occasion to do it differently. Why not do it ? And if picking an instance is too hard, why not pick a random one ? We want to have the best thing for us individually, but we want to be told what it is. We want to not be subjects to the whims of the owner of a platform, but we don't want to understand where we're setting foot and prefer a generic instance that will be for everyone. Hust lite reddit, but different. That's not building, that's consuming, and if you're only there to consume, do you really want a democracy ? It sounds like a benevolent dictatorship is better.
In short, I don't believe actual democracy can happen without understanding the situation.
So if I buy the philosophy (which I do), how do I (practically) get started? Let's say I want to use the internet to actually interact with people in my community. Is that even possible anymore? Do I just download Mastadon and start wandering the dark? I've wanted to penetrate this "intellectual" space but I just do not know how, and I am a software architect of 20 years.
Then when you want to participate, that's your starting point. Lots of people are lurk-centric, but you are already in the comments section here, so moving your posting probably will not be the issue so much as contextualizing it, which the different software and instances do help with.
A lot of "community" is in having some ritual, some events to show up for, or some events you organize yourself. It doesn't take a lot of those to fill up a calendar, but it definitionally needs to be non-zero.
This isn’t how actual democracies form. Solon and Cleisthenes didn’t gingerly nudge their ways towards democracy; that would have been a gift to Athens’ elite to stymie them. They put forward swooping reforms that changed who held power and brought everyone* into the tent at once. They told people why their ideas were better, because they were. (There is actually a great analogy here in the tribes. Tribes were assigned. You could later change them, but there wasn’t a giant before we start being useful we have to put on these hats process.)
Providing a simple path isn’t the same as taking away the difficult one. You can deal with a newbie pool from which one must “graduate” in some amount of time, for instance, thereby giving nobody a default bias advantage in users.
Systems compete. Ideas compete. I think the collective ideas the internet were founded on were strong. And not every one of them need be a cultural force—it’s fine for e-mail to be practical even if it’s in practice controlled by a few companies. But this actually has that opportunity to create a new culture, and it’s throwing it away by telling the curious it’s too good for them.
I think there are going to be incredibly valuable lessons-learned from these federated models, and interesting things will happen there. However, all of that will be capitalized by a nimble, forward-thinking, idealistic-yet-centralized model that gets rid of all the ideological cruft and polishes a real, useful, and engaging product.
The "product" mentality is the cancer that led us to where we are. We must get rid of it.
> I think there are going to be incredibly valuable lessons-learned from these federated models, and interesting things will happen there.
I totally agree with that. The control an admin has over an instance is still problematic, and someone shared something about confederated protocols (https://nexus.blacksky.network/zine/00000001/confederal-prot...) and that is an interesting way forward.
You could just bruteforce IPv4 until you hit a peer that will give you a set of known peers.
1988 versus 1996 and 1997, respectively. AOL proper was an IRC competitor, as was CompuServe, but their definitions of working weren't different from IRC's.
That same argument didn't save WAIS, Fido, or Gopher. Nor did it keep Tymnet or Bitnet around and didn't give Compuserve and The Well a seat at the winners table. It also wasn't a saving grace for Friendster, MySpace, or LiveJournal.
Magnavox putting out the first home gaming console in 1972 hasn't made them a gaming juggernaut nor does Xerox run the desktop. Neither Palm, Go or IBM makes my smartphone nor is my laptop by Grid Compass, desktop by MITS, spreadsheet by VisiOn or my pants from Arnold Constable. I don't fly Western Air Express, drive a Rickett, subscribe to RealNetworks Rhapsody for music nor am I posting this on slashdot.org.
Citing an early creation date is a survivorship fallacy here.
The real question here is why didn't it die like everything else. Why is it one of the few legacy survivors?
Separate problems: getting off the ground versus surviving.
IRC got off the ground because it didn't have centralized competition with a capability advantage. Why it persisted is a deeper story. Lemmy is still trying to get off the ground. It, unlike IRC, does have such competition. As such, the old playbook is obsolete.
Text only, transient/short life data, is a lot cheaper to process and serve than images, permanent posts, etc.
It won the initial buy-in of us geeks/nerds/hackers/whateverthephraseofthedayis who gave it a rather solid base.
It’s a very personal type of communication. Real-time, immediate, and to a lot smaller audience (more intimate) compared to web forums, Reddit etc.
And finally, I would posit that it did actually die. What remains now is small, compared to how popular the likes of Reddit Twitter etc are, vs how popular IRC was in its heyday.
Lemmy existed before the Reddit exodus. It will exist when they all go back.
IMO, this will be the future of high quality interaction. Either small communities that are federated to prevent the same issue forums had, or places that charge a monthly fee for entry.
The _entire_ point of my first post was my finishing sentence:
> I wish people would focus on building services that meet peoples needs and not just as an expression of their ideologies.
Put more plainly: these services have been around for a decade (diaspora* was a viable alternative to Digg before Reddit) without meaningful adoption _or_ evolution in spite of that lack of adoption. I surmise it's because the folks developing them are more interested in the ideologies than building communities.
Obviously they can change. Obviously they can become a better fit with a bigger focus on UX. But they haven't in the last decade and I'm not seeing any indication they will this one, either.
Seriously, the concern trolling around here regarding federation is almost comical. Apparently when major private corporation admins or volunteer mods arbitrarily intervene in the functioning of a platform it's totally fine, but when local server admins do it by moderating locally or de-federating from problem instances (whether temporarily, to deal with a flashpoint problem, or permanently in the case of problem servers), suddenly it's a huge problem and an indication of "drama".
Federation is confusing and alienating to non-technical users, and nerds who love federation tend to have a mediocre grasp of social dynamics and gloss over the inevitable abuses. Federation stans need to grasp the fact that nobody who is not a full time nerd cares about how federation works at the technical level, they just want a place to socialize with the assurance that they won't be overrun by assholes. All the Federation stans go into it the idea that 'you can just defederate' whereas non-technical users go into it with the idea that they don't want to get raided in the first place.
The existing model of federation is not working. Users don't want to know about the infrastructure any more than people going into a coffee shop want to looka t the architectural blueprints of the building, and federation is clearly unable to pre-empt raiding behavior automatically.
I clicked, excited. I closed the tab when it required me to select a server. I don't want to read up on what rights server admins have over my account, why I should choose one versus another, which servers are de-federating which others, et cetera.
This is a real and recurring hurdle to the adoption of these technologies.
Governance is up to individual instances/communities rather than one faceless megacorp.
It’s a feature not a bug.
If the fediverse is like email, then filtering should happen on the client. It's not like I expect gmail to "defederate" an email server that's used by people I don't like. I expect it to facilitate my emails with anyone else, regardless of which mail server they use. And I want gmail to do some spam filtering for me, but I expect that I can see the filtered messages and show the filter what it missed or wrongly labeled as spam.
If we leave the federation up to the servers, we'll just get a "fragmentverse" of walled gardens instead of a single big one.
The instance I use hasn't defederated them yet, but I've already had to block most of lemmy.world's communities from appearing in my feed.
Nah, just kidding, it's a good point. But it's a good starter server, and once people get used to the idea, I think they'll naturally gravitate to other servers.
Let developers create each "source" of content or discussions, packaged into a module ("NYT article fetcher," or "Reddit discussion fetcher"), and let me choose which modules to install. Then delegate the infrastructure for executing scrapers or curating feeds to a set of federated servers that I can opt into. Or better yet, execute the scrapers in a local sandbox on my own device, so that the NYT can't block me because my requests are my own. You could argue it's just another form of a web browser.
I think what we are seeing is a taste of what could be, as the technology improves and the UIs of the clients become more friendly and add features to leverage the tech.
We are watching it all happen in real time. Problem is everyone wants a polished experience day one. It’s going to turn a lot of people off, but I’m not sure there’s anyway around it. Once refined, this is the kind of tech could be key to the people controlling the future of social media.
> I can log into Mastodon and search and find the user I created on lemmy. I can also search, follow and look at the posts @technology@beehaw.org. All from my Mastodon app/account.
So is your user registered at lemmy? Or at lemmy.world? Is there a difference?
And you can view the posts at @technology@beehaw.org - but do you have to have a separate beehaw account to post?
The fediverse is set up kind of the same way. You can interact with people if you know how to find their account, the address of which is formatted similarly to an email address. You and whoever you're interacting with don't have to have accounts on the same server to communicate with each other.
It's like if you opened up a reddit thread while logged into your hacker news account, and decided to respond to a comment in the reddit thread. Federation would give you that ability. Your username, in that thread, would be something like "cdelsolar@news.ycombinator.com" or something like that, to show that you were posting from a different server.
You have an account on one server eg. foo@bar.com. People on example.com smallreddit will see you're posting from bar.com (ie. your username will look something like foo@bar.com). The bar.com server's UI may expose stuff from other servers to bar.com users, and the reverse.
Defederation means severing those visitation rights and other interop between two small twitters or two small reddits, something Mastodon servers use rather liberally.
In practice, what ends up happening is that at least Mastodon has hideous degrees of ideological conformity via defedding and general woke modding, and there's essentially standalone dissident "witches' covens" and an archipelago of servers whose maintainers tend to think different politics are de facto evil. I could hardly use the same account to see what progressives, gendercrits and various strands of the right are talking about the way I can on Twitter, for example, because of the defederation moats that have been erected.
most every client comes with a list of 'bootstrap peers' for dht though.
I'm going to disagree. The old playbook is to empower users in unique ways that at the time feel almost forbidden and magical and to competently execute that.
You could claim all those avenues have been explored but I disagree there as well. The surrounding context and possibilities are always on the move so the underlying potential is always changing.
That's why say, YouTube, the 40th or so on-demand video company, which happened to launch when digital cameras and broadband internet were becoming widely used, was the first successful execution or why smartphones didn't take off until the rollout of 3G or, looking into the future, VR might finally take off at attempt 50 after some related thing changes.
This is an interesting question. Wikipedia claims 230,000 users at peak times which is still quite a bit more than say, gopher. A 98% drop is real but you'll still see IRC occasionally for software purposes (like say, Debian)
Maybe it was a coalition of people there for different purposes and some of those groups have fallen away for different places.
For instance, people were doing dating and sextalk on irc back in the day along with file-sharing. Those applications have been superseded by many other places. I don't expect to see anyone sincerely asking "a/s/l?" in modern IRC chatrooms.
Well, you could, but Beehaw basically blocked Lemmy.world. But otherwise the metaphor holds true. If you make an account on some other instance, you can subscribe to communities on Beehaw, post on Beehaw, and reply to users on Beehaw posts. When doing so your username, instead of being e.g. "mahogany", changes to "mahagony@[LEMMYSERVER]". That's how you can tell who is a user of that particular server.
I'm pretty sure gmail defeds email servers all the time. IP blocks are the oldest tool in the toolbox
With forums there are arbitrarily many recipients of any message. A lot of people may not like furries or communists or what have you, but demanding that every other instance ban them as a prerequisite to interoperability is how you kill the network by suppressing everything but the lowest common denominator.
This problem is created by tying accounts to instances. Because then other instances, instead of banning the accounts they don't want from only their own instance, can try to get them banned from everywhere by threatening any instance that allows them with disconnection. Which is poison.
That's a huge issue. My identity should not be tied to anyone but me. This has to be one of the biggest things that scares (admittedly more knowledgeable than average) people off early when they're required to pick a server. Mastodon's "don't worry you can move servers later" is better but still not frictionless, and does not work unless your source server is still online.
Boom, you have just reinvented usenet.
Philosophically, no. Practically, yes. Because it actually delivers the product. Creating an ideological and technical filter at the mouth of the funnel is absurd.
This is heading straight for either Reddit getting its act together or one of Facebook, Twitter or Substack taking the prize. Because they spent two seconds thinking about onboarding. Perfect is the enemy of good.
So then just pick a large, popular instance and be done with it. You've already made it clear you don't care what the platform's policies are, so why are you pretending this is a barrier?
Blindly clicking through a ToS while chuckling that 'nobody reads that shit lol' is in fact a better user experience for almost everyone. If your approach were so great, there would be physical cities whose population consisted entirely of architects and engineers.
the analog to a digital federation in the physical world, is literally just that, an actual federation. People making choices about what community they participate in isn't technical, it's social. Everyone who lives in a democratic society does in fact participate in how their city is run and governed or understands how to move from one state to another.
You do not need to understand the technical details of federated systems, but it is absolutely infantilizing to pretend that people are unable to choose or build the communities they want, and take some responsibility in maintaining them. This 'consumer' mentality needs to die, people need to learn to be proper citizens on the internet. We ask it from people in the real world, so we can do it online. Why are we pretending the online version of some 19th century company town is inevitable?
So my appeal to join lemmy is not aimed at Joe Blow, it’s aimed at the actual contributors who make communities possible. If enough of them switch over then lemmy will gain critical mass, and the rest is history. Joe Blow can go wherever he wants. I doubt he’ll stick around at Reddit when the content stream disappears.
Contributors generally create content because they want it to be seen by more than a handful of nerds and don't want it to disappear within weeks because their instance has ran out of money.
Those contributors will either stop contributing for good, go back to Reddit (because it's still a better experience than any of the "fediverse" bullshit) or jump ship the second an actually competent company builds a centralized alternative that just works.
So no, I reject the premise.
People absolutely do care about governance. They care if they're getting spammed by crypto scammers or getting targeted by abusive trolls. They care if their political views are being censored or things they find offensive are being promoted.
The difference is, on a traditional, privately owned platform, the users have limited choice and no say, and they've gotten used to that as the status quo.
And if you're a user who really doesn't care, cool, just join mastodon.social or lemmy.ml and move on. Problem solved.
As for complaints about onboarding, the official Mastodon app already drives people to mastodon.social (much to the chagrin of some folks in the community), so I have no doubt those issues will smooth out with time.
Not only is it infantilizing, it's wrong.
People create communities online all the time. Whether it's Facebook groups or subreddits or Discourse forums or Discord groups and on and on and on. That's literally how the internet has always worked.
Going back to the Reddit example, it's easy to browse Reddit for [whatever]; when a person decides to create and account, they become part of the u/* supercommunity, and from there can start posting/voting in the particular subreddits that interest them. The fediverse does this backwards, equivalent to making people choose a default subreddit as a condition of becoming a user. It forces people to pick a home community which will shape their whole experience of the fediverse and how they will be perceived by other members of the fediverse before they have a chance to explore the system in a noncommital way.
it is absolutely infantilizing to pretend that people are unable to choose or build the communities they want, and take some responsibility in maintaining them
It takes time for people to figure out what communities they want to inhabit within a new protocol, which is why the perception of locking them into a single originating community is an antipattern. People don't necessarily want to be judged by their originating instance, because it reduces them to a one-dimensional caricature of themselves. You could join a general-purpose instance, but there are multiple general-purpose isntances, what makes one better that or differnt from another? There's no way to tell.
Critics of the fediverse model have been pointing out this rather obvious stumbling block since it was established, and fediverse stans just keep sticking their fingers in their ears going 'la la la can't hear you.'
This 'consumer' mentality needs to die, people need to learn to be proper citizens on the internet.
It has nothing to do wish consumption vs citizenship. You're demanding people tie themselves to a point of origin as a condition of existing in the fediverse, which is one of the worst aspects of meatspace. If you join a general server and then start participating in some niche topic (idk, fursuits), people in the niche instance are likely to write you off as a tourist. Conversely, if you decide to join a furry instance but then participate in discussions about sports, a lot of your interactions are going to consist of 'go away, furry weirdo'. You could create multiple acconts for your different interests, but now you have the headache of maintaining multiple accounts.
There just isn't a good reason to lock people into a particular instance in order to sign up. It's just reproducing nationality, a concept that many of us would like to dispense with altogether.
If enough creators move over then the lurkers will follow. But attracting lurkers at this stage is pointless if there isn’t any content for them to look at.
Neither does Reddit. Have you not heard of brigading?
When I show a site like Lemmy to my non-technical friends, their eyes glaze over and they are confused by the necessity to choose an instance and the inability to make any kind of meaningful comparison between them. This is the exact same reason that Mastodon has never really taken off.
That's quite understandable actually, the Lemmy UX sucks. Try showing them fedibb.ml instead. It's Lemmy under the hood, and federation works perfectly - but you'd never guess that!
Doesn't this also describe Reddit mods?
Federation might run 100x better if instances were suggested based on geographic proximity rather than semantics, a concept which makes intuitive sense to people. 'Pick from a random and inconsistent list of servers in no particular order' is like demanding that people who are considering taking a holiday decide where to eat lunch after they arrive before they buy the plane ticket.
I'm not. Absolutely the onboarding experience can be improved.
The problem is you're losing the plot, here.
The original commenter complained about having to "read up on what rights server admins have over my account, why I should choose one versus another, which servers are de-federating which others, et cetera."
But you don't have to do that if you don't want to. If you're already willing to blindly join Reddit, you can blindly join mastodon.social.
And the app is already now driving people to do that if they really don't care (which is what the OP claims).
So this is already being improved (and yes, can absolutely be improved further).
Forced choices drive away users. People don't like making decisions without context because they feel like scams. That's why uptake is slow almost a decade into federation. The UX model is bad.
.world is having technical issues. (I could sign up. But first login spawns an infinite spinny. The only reason I know that's one of the larger servers is because of this thread.)
I'm doing it. But it's tedious, and the hacker in me sees an opening for a competitor to scoop out the 90% of users who don't care about federation, they just want it to work.
> you don't care what the platform's policies are, so why are you pretending this is a barrier
You really don't see the barrier?
It will end up like Reddit. But right now it isn't, and that's good enough to make a play for the users. Given a choice between that and choosing a server, signing up, finding its log-in unresponsive, looking for another server, signing up... (I haven't gotten further than this) who do you think wins?
By the way, we agree. I want a federated system to work. But simple sign-up fuck-ups, where even someone who's curious for curiosity's sake has to spend half an hour figuring out which servers even work at the moment,
Ah, cool, so you just wanna complain. Got it. Carry on!
I think that you're right in that the sign up UX is not great - there are also serious performance concerns, and in many ways the platform isn't ready yet. But I don't think that's going to persist for too long. I think some kind of "I don't care" instance (probably lemmy.world) will emerge, and the UX will improve. Perhaps it won't be in time, though.
Power users' power is users. We've frequently seen the celebs-first gambit by new social media entrants, most notably Clubhouse, and while it can generate hype for a bit, it's far from a proven strategy. It's frustrating to watch a re-play of Mastodon's fumbles, particularly since this time the protest is actually semi-organized.