Technology

I don't really understand what's going on yet.

It's great to see decentralization in action to foster a thriving community, not just to make/gamble money.

Havn't tried Lemmy yet... does my comment show up alright coming from fedia.io? The fediverse is neat.

I like the being here. A bit part of it is my desire to host my own stuff. I've never been much of a contributor on Reddit, but now that my instance is reporting to have some actual users it just feels so rewarding! Love the sense of the earlier decentralized internet.

Honestly, I kind of hate it, but since Reddit is unusable, considering all the subs that have gone dark (presumably permanently).

I'll be honest. I don't like the Fediverse concept - the fatal flaw of decentralized systems is that sometimes centralized systems are great. Basically, reddit was ONE BBS style forum for everything, which was the killer convenience. Similarly Twitter was the ONE microblogging platform for everybody, which was the killer convenience.

Because the moment anybody can operate a service, everyone does.

Right now, I need to buy a car, I can't find a good Lemmy community to get advice from. Searching for 'cars' in all federated communities returns:

Fuck Cars@lemmy.ml - 3.41K subscribers
Cars@lemmy.ml - 104 subscribers
Fuck Cars@lemmy.ca - 56 subscribers
Self Driving Cars - 19 subscribers
IdiotsInCars@lemmy.world - 11 subscribers
Electric Cars@lemmy.ca - 4 subscribers
RC Cars@lemmy.world - 4 subscribers
Cars@lemmygrad.ml - 3 subscribers
Fuck Cars@lemmy.world - 2 subscribers
Cars@lemmy.world - 1 subscriber

Leave aside for a moment that "Fuck Cars" has 34x more subscribers than the biggest Cars community - there are two different "Fuck Cars" communities, and three different "Cars" communities. It's great that you have subscriber numbers, but there's no definitive place to find out information on cars. Reddit's CEO is right that Reddit was organized like a landed-gentry where a first-come-first-serve approach to the most popular forums was done, but that landed-gentry system solved this problem, whatever new problems it may have introduced.

Now, you could look for a technological solution to solve this problem: For example, you could have a centralized server for all federated Lemmies, some sort of "lemmyhub.com"

We'd all have to agree on it. People could set up alternatives, but we'd all have to basically coalesce and say: Yes, this is the thing we want. Maybe it'd use blockchain, I don't know. Point is, it's centralized and easy to find information. It would work "just like Reddit" where you would have ONE authentication/authorization that works seamlessly across all instances (the current system is anything but seamless), and there would be ONE key/value combo for keyword. So, instead of going to Cars@lemmy.ml & Cars@lemmygrad.ml & Cars & lemmy.world, you just go to cars.lemmyhub.com.

If you want to post, you just use your lemmyhub account and your post appears on the "default" community. You can still post on individual lemmies by going to the individual lemmy page as well, or by specifying which of your Lemmy instance accounts you want to post as.

Here's the problem with the merging all the cars communities together, though: There is nothing to prevent someone from creating Cars@NeoNaziHeartsFascism.com and spamming the community with bile or trolling. Lemmyhub could operate a blocklist for troll and hate communities and instances, but once you're doing that, you're making editorial decisions. And forget all the nasty ethics problems around "what's free speech/what's hate speech?" "what's acceptable to view/what's not?", you have legal liability problems if anything slips through the cracks.

Reddit wasn't perfect, and certainly they could have been more proactive with shutting down hate speech, and more speedy with shutting down illegal content, but by and large reddit worked. Reddit's authoritarian approach worked because it was mostly benevolent -- right up until the point that it wasn't.

So I don't think Lemmy can technologically make it's way out of the situation.

I think what needs to happen is a solution like the Wikipedia foundation; we establish a non-profit designed to create a centralized server which may choose or not choose to incorporate Lemmy instances. It runs on donations, not advertising, and it's not designed to maximize profit, only to keep the servers running. It would borrow heavily from the Wikipedia model in organization and structure.

Because I'll be honest - Lemmy and Mastodon are okay, but there's really nothing in them improving on the old Newsgroups system of the late 80s and 1990s. Reddit captured the market for forum discussions because it was simply a better solution, there's nothing in Lemmy that makes it better - for the user - than Reddit.

Should we then abandon Lemmy and go back to Reddit? No, of course not. Reddit, if anything shows us that eventually all authoritarian systems, no matter how benevolent they start, always eventually turn tyrannical, and can do so on a whim, and once they do so, it is impossible to get back to benevolence.

But I've been a redditor for 15 years - I predated subreddits, if you can believe that. And I'm not finding the things I used to go to Reddit for here on Lemmy - information, expert and informed discussion, and niche topics. Maybe that's an adoption problem that will be solved with scale (and I hope it is), but right now, I feel like my luxury Bently sedan got totaled and I'm driving a 20 year old Honda Civic with manual transmission. By all means I'm grateful for the tent, but I still miss my Bentley

What perhaps will be the final nail in the coffin for Reddit is working here perfectly! Mobile apps! Jerboa is perhaps lacking some features, but works like a charm.

I think its a little rough around the edges, but thats to be expected given that its less than a year old. The big hit for me is the mobile app which just isn’t that good. This will come with time. I’d rather have an half-baked implementation thats showing promise over what Reddit is doing. I like decentralized social media because you can pick and choose what communities you interact with. If lemmy.world decides to go full enshitification (although I can’t figure out how they would monetize), you can just pack up and going to another community.

This honestly reminds me of when I was growing up in the early 00s, I was part of several different community forums that I loved dearly. There were other groups I looked into, but some were just toxic and unappealing, so I left after a while. I feel like Lemmy gives us the same freedom. I really hope to meet some awesome people here. Right now it’s just big enough to still allow meaningful dialogue and create cool relations. I felt like Reddit was too big for its own good even with niche subreddits; it didn’t feel like posting was worth it as it would get buried or just get a low effort response.

He was the best frontman motörhead ever had

Lemmy's UI on desktop is... dogshit and really needs some love. Some web designer could volunteer for a better desktop theme? But thanks to the Jerboa app it looks amazing on Android!

Only issue right now with Jerboa is that it allows very long images to occupy a large space on your frontpage, I think it should show them as thumbnails instead.

Obviously not enohgh content or communities here, but the bones here seem good and that is what's important starting out.

The Software lemmy+jerboa does the job. It's basic and misses a lot of features that one would ideally want, but it's good enough.

I'm enjoying the back-to-the-roots vibe of early reddit or early internet that comes with lemmy.

Now, it's ask about content and how the communities will form in the ecosystem. Federation is nice, but wilm people actually find the communities relevant to them.

it needs time and more users, but I think it's alright so far.

I had looked into a couple other decentralized or federated services in the past and they seemed like kind of a pain or they were poorly explained. until now, all of it also seemed too obscure to have any kind of notable traffic. if this isn't temporary and the reddit api controversy actually did something meaningful, then I look forward to seeing how the federated service ecosystem grows and changes.

reddit's dethroning was a long time coming in my eyes. it's just not going to be as smooth as the digg -> reddit pipeline years ago.

I think there may be room for another couple million users spread across a ton of communities. wishful thinking, but maybe that would keeps thing toned down with the bots and other shady shit.

lots of polish and QoL needed both on the main site(s) and the mobile offerings out so far. all in all, pretty good start.

Enjoying it so far but there's a lot of posts about reddit and not much else for the time being.

It seems fine. Basically like reddit before it got all corprate

I'm easing into it. With more usage, more content, more users, and more updates, it'll be like I never knew Reddit. Growing pains, whatever you want to call it, just makes me happy to be part of a new adventure for sharing and consuming content.

I'm no UX/UI expert, but I hope Lemmy makes it easier to filter content on the main page, collapse comments, and find specific subcommunities and users.

The learning curve is steep but I'm feeling very optimistic and excited to be a part of a new community. Reddit had been going downhill for years ( I joined in 2010).

I plan to stay no matter what reddit does next.

Testing a lemmy instance to see how it might work for the r/blind community. There will be a bunch of accessibility issues fixed in the next release it looks like, so it's a bit early to judge. Also, it's pulled me, personally, into the world of being a sysadmin for other people. Now I get to figure out why email doesn't work and why when you search for a community you need to press search nine times before anything shows and all kinds of other niggles like that before I feel ready to open an instance to the general masses.

It's buggy, but I'm managing. Weird things like having to press the "Subscribe" button twice. I'm assuming most will be solved when traffic stabilizes.

The federation is.. strange. Confusing when I click a link to another instance when trying to subscribe to a community, but also kinda cool how it works. I'm not sure federation should really be a concern for users, but time will tell. I'm sure it will only improve.

So far it's not too bad. I'm still not sure I really understand the whole fediverse thing, but it'll make sense with a bit more usage I'm sure.

I very much like the oldschool feel, and the fact that we have more control over our communities without having some admins with ultimate power.

I dislike the idea of multiple communities for the same topic spread across multiple instances. Sure, you can subscribe to multiple communities, but that's just extra overhead. I'm hopeful reddit backs down after the protest (as unlikely as it may be), but either way I will probably go back to using it regardless. Social media is about content, and unless there is a dramatic shift away from reddit being the content hub that it currently is, nothing else will be as useful.

I really like it, but I'm concerned for rough times ahead.

Running instances is hard, thankless but necessary work. A for-profit company like Reddit can afford to pay engineers to do it. A lot of open-source / free software things survive because people are generous and donate their time, creativity, expertise and often even money to keeping them running. But when it's a hobby not a job, it gets to a point where people often have to think of their own sanity and step away.

The fediverse design seems well suited to handle that without major disruption, but there will definitely be some disruption.

I'm also hoping that people are tolerant of design quirks. Design by committee is often seen as one of the worst ways to do things, and FOSS is nothing but committees. Reddit's design obviously influenced Lemmy (as Slashdot influenced Reddit, and so-on). But, while I wasn't a fan of the new Reddit design, at least it was a unified view. I'm incredibly impressed at how smooth Lemmy has been so far, but again, I expect it's just a matter of time before there are some controversial choices in what new features to add, how to expose them, what defaults to choose, and so on. I hope people are tolerant of the churn that that might cause.

Basically, I just really hope that whatever controversies and rough periods are ahead, that the communities I care about choose to weather the storm and stick around. If we can survive that, social media that isn't owned by any company, and that isn't part of the "surveillance capitalism" world is very promising.

Google Power Delete Suite. Don't leave your content there for them to use.

I think it will take time to smooth few rough edges but already now it's usable.

However I have big concerns on his this structure can scale, it already suffers with few thousands users. Plus security, privacy and sustainability of the fediverse is still a big question mark to me.

But it's exciting and I hope it will be the future of socials.