13 ms·

Lemmy: A Federated Reddit Alternative

142 points by fintler 4y ago

djbusby 4y ago
> Note: Federation is still in active development And here's the repos https://github.com/LemmyNet https://github.com/LemmyNet It looks like ActivityPub
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
dewfaced 4y ago
"A community of leftist privacy and FOSS enthusiasts, run by Lemmy’s developers" Looks like a no for me. But I appreciate the effort.
- drbeast 4y ago
  So insufferable reddit moderators just moved to their own playground?
  - throwayyy479087 4y ago
    Sounds like hell
- Pr0ject217 4y ago
  Interesting choice by them... I'm tired of politics.
- r721 4y ago
  It's Mastodon-like, so there exist right-wing instances too: https://wolfballs.com/ https://wolfballs.com/ (possibly NSFW)
  - laputan_machine 4y ago
    Can't we just have a place where we discuss things without bringing in the latest political talking point? Maybe I'm mis-remembering, maybe it's rose-tinted glasses, but I honestly can't remember it being like this on forums back in the day. I don't remember _any_ political discuss on the various warez forums I was on (nxsecure anyone?). Flame wars were a thing, no doubt, but it wasn't this already formed opinion where you've picked a side and now anyone on the other side is a bad guy. It is completely bizarre.
    - dpkirchner 4y ago
      I think you can thank heavy-handed moderation for the lack of political discussions on forums back in the day.
      - superfrank 4y ago
        I don't think that's all of it. Politics has continually gotten more polarizing over the 20 or so years. I don't think this is the worst it's ever been in the US, but it definitely seems like the Trump era is the worst it's been since mass adoption of the internet. Because of things like 24 hour news networks and social media, we're also reminded of our differences much more frequently than we used to be. I think politics is just a bigger part of peoples' lives now and we're seeing that play out in real life as well as in internet communities.
      - josteink 4y ago
        I can assure you we had no moderators dealing with the kind of political nonsense we have today back in the days when I was a regular at the Something awful, Fark, Jpopmusic or XDA forums. People were just out to have a good time, have a laugh or get together over something they loved. People seemingly don’t seem to be as good at that these days.
        TylerE 4y ago
        Maybe because they finally realized that ignoring the unignorable is a losing strategy? It's like the people who bitch about their HOA all the time but never go to a meeting or even know who the board members are.
  - masterofballs 4y ago
    [flagged]
- mikae1 4y ago
  So pick another instance[1] or start your own? That's how federation works. [1] https://join-lemmy.org/instances https://join-lemmy.org/instances
- kelseyfrog 4y ago
  It's a great chance to step out of one's filter bubble. Take it as an opportunity to widen perspectives and exchange ideas that normally wouldn't be exchanged.
  - zmmmmm 4y ago
    yep ... I immediately saw about 5 articles that looked like straight up russian propaganda about Ukraine on the front page and was quite challenged about whether I wanted to read them or not.
  - SV_BubbleTime 4y ago
    Agree! Where else am I going to engage with far left moderators and tech people? I mean; there is only everywhere, but I’m already existing there.
  - least 4y ago
    The problem is that places that cater to a specific political demographic tend to not tolerate exchanges of ideas, even if they are civil. It's very difficult to intentionally create a community that allows for discourse from wildly varying viewpoints where people feel comfortable sharing their point of view.
    - kelseyfrog 4y ago
      Right, you're conceptualizing echo chambers as external. I'm conceptualizing them as internal. The hardest echo chamber to tear down exists in our own heads, but they are the most rewarding to dismantle.
s1mon 4y ago
Is there some connection to Motörhead or is that just in my brain?
- sidpatil 4y ago
  https://join-lemmy.org/docs/en/about/about.html https://join-lemmy.org/docs/en/about/about.html Bottom of page.
alexb_ 4y ago
The admins are literal marxists (I do mean literal, check the admin profiles), and have designed the technology wanting "to make it very difficult for racist trolls to use the most updated version of Lemmy." https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/622 https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/622 This of course is not necessarily a reason to avoid the underlying technology, but it may be something to consider.
- mistermann 4y ago
  Having ideological censorship baked into the base system seems like not an optimal approach.
  - serverholic 4y ago
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  - notsrg 4y ago
    Kind of a self report if your ideology depends on using slurs, don't you think?
    - YurgenJurgensen 4y ago
    - mistermann 4y ago
      Your comment itself is a slur (this is true by virtue of me saying that it is true (as with your comment), which is how things work here on Planet Earth, 2022), so should rightfully be censored.
- ttpphd 4y ago
  Why
2kwatts 4y ago
jsnell 4y ago
Previously on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28453165 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28453165 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31712332 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31712332 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33438493 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33438493
- dang 4y ago
  Thanks! Macroexpanded: LemmyBB, a federated bulletin board - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33438493 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33438493 - Nov 2022* (186 comments) Open Source federated link aggregator in rust - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31712332 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31712332 - June 2022 (37 comments) Lemmy – A link aggregator for the fediverse - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28453165 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28453165 - Sept 2021 (213 comments) (*Reposts are fine after a year or so but a major thread 13 days ago makes the current submission a dupe. This is in the FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html)
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
matai_kolila 4y ago
Not that I think these folks want mainstream appeal, but if you want mainstream appeal, stop federating stuff! Nobody cares about privacy and control over their own information nearly as much as privacy advocates think they do, and if even one thing is slightly harder as a result, people will simply never adopt your tool or technology.
- ryanianian 4y ago
  > stop federating stuff Another conclusion: Federation alone isn't enough of a selling point. Federation must also be a key unlocker of other features. Perhaps more branded/tailored sites for different audience segments but which can feed into each other in meaningful ways might be one way to pitch it. But dropping federation entirely is throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
  - ElemenoPicuares 4y ago
    I agree that getting rid of federation is not the answer. However, it will be little more than a source of neato developer projects as long as new projects try to get users to think about it, let alone understand it, nevermind actually needing to understand it to use a product to its full potential. People who don't care about federation, conceptually, will never care about federation, even if it yields tangible benefits they care about otherwise. They will prioritize user experience, interface, branding appeal, reliability and speed of operations like finding people in-app, and all of that other stuff that FOSS social media, and many other types of FOSS projects, de-prioritize. That is why FOSS alternatives are still alternatives despite being free, and largely technically superior. The disconnect is rooted in differing perspectives. Developers, naturally, use more sophisticated means of evaluating software than end users, much the way nutritionists evaluate food. We consider interfaces and user experiences to be means of interacting with software, and consider the software on a whole, yielding only so much weight to usability. Since software plays such a huge part of our lives, spending a little time wrangling it doesn't seem onerous. To nearly all end users, the interface/experience is the software. Even people who do care about federation conceptually may not even be willing to deal with admin > 0 for their social media accounts. It's not ideal, but it's reality. Currently, federation hardly matters more to people than HTTP/2 does. Trying to use it as a selling point for general audience software is a failing strategy. So who cares? Social media is a hell of a lot more useful with a critical mass of users... other users are what make it "social," rather than merely "media." If developers are nutritionists, designers are chefs. Calculating proper nutrition to keep us alive and functioning is arguably more important to making food delicious and enriching our sensual lives. But if you take a large group of people and offer them their choice of food either constructed by nutritionists or constructed by chefs, the chefs will win every time. Many of the nutritionists will be mystified by people's lack of ability to prioritize critical body functioning over beautiful sensual experiences. (When I was in culinary school, a fellow student was a career-changing nutritionist saying she was becoming a chef because she was tired of "being the bad guy taking away all the things people loved.) The key is actively enfranchising people who specialize in knowing what users want. Spending an afternoon in Gimp making a punny logo is not branding. Customizable color themes are not UX. Deeply considering, and probably researching users needs and expectations and then trying to meet them is the only way forward for FOSS social media. People are willing to give up some flavor benefits for food that's significantly more nutritious, but we need chefs to help us make it as tasty an appealing as possible, and then spin the hell out of the benefits. It's the only way forward.
mikae1 4y ago
This post should be edited to link to https://join-lemmy.org https://join-lemmy.org
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
kmeisthax 4y ago
Aaand the first thing I see is a thread about Afghanistan full of tankies. God damn it.
- jevgeni 4y ago
  Also, russia apologists and very dubious sources. Weirdly, an experience that is very unlike Mastodon for me.
  - kmeisthax 4y ago
    Tankies are extremely pro-Russia. In fact, the term "tankie" was coined when the Soviet Union rolled tanks on socialist protesters that wanted to leave the USSR because it was clearly just another form of exploitation. Socialist movements in other countries split between pro-Russia, and anti-Russia. Or, more accurately, authoritarian left versus libertarian left. Russia today is an ethnofascist dictatorship, but most tankies don't care because America Bad.
    - _glsb 4y ago
      Most tankies are just LARPing as romanticized version of revolutionistas of the 50s and the 60s. They need a morally simple world view. Completely agree with you.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- 1MachineElf 4y ago
  I feel this sentiment, but I also hope that being federated means more instances will crop up that have different demographics.
ubertaco 4y ago
Genuine question about both this and Mastodon, since both have the same "decentralized, join/start the instance that fits your interests" fundamental principle: isn't this just exacerbating the filter-bubble effect that cranks up polarization? Like, is it really a great thing for mending societal bridges that folks can choose between a server for leftists or a server for hard-right folks and that split ensures that one never interacts with the other? Is it really no longer possible to have conversations happen between folks that disagree, to the point that we want to ensure that there's no chance for such conversations ever to happen, even by accident?
- pluc 4y ago
- gilded-lilly 4y ago
  It is only possible as long as one side is able to have civil discourse, without labeling/demonizing/name calling and violently attacking their opponents. It’s quite hard to have a debate when people’s views are not only completely entrenched, they are simply not willing to give respect at all.
  - rnd0 4y ago
    small correction; it's only possible if both sides are capable and willing to set aside heated rhetoric. At this point in time, I honestly question if any of the sides are capable of honest engagement.
    - gilded-lilly 4y ago
      I think civil discourse is possible if reasonable debate is allowed. Unfortunately, for one side, it appears that reason itself is problematic for them and they refuse it.
      - rnd0 4y ago
        That can describe both the left and the right. I'd be very surprised if you weren't alluding to SJWs; but at the same time you're describing Qanon folks as well. ...and that's why we can't have discourse. No one can agree on what constitutes "reasonable debate".
sedatk 4y ago
There's also a fully decentralized (P2P) Reddit alternative called Aether: https://getaether.net/ https://getaether.net/
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
joshlemer 4y ago
It's just too bad that the flagship instance of Lemmy (lemmy.ml) is full of literal hardline Marxists and Soviet Union nostalgics/apologists. Totally insufferable.
- kelseyfrog 4y ago
  Isn't the whole point of federation that you can simply spin up your own instance?
  - joshlemer 4y ago
    Yes, but all the non-communist servers, combined, have an active user base of like 100.
    - kelseyfrog 4y ago
      Um, recruit some more users? This is a good opportunity to take personal responsibility and individual accountability for a problem as you see it. The first thing people need to learn about stoicism is that you can't change other people as much as you want to. Make peace with this and do things that are in your control.
      - jevgeni 4y ago
        You must see the contradiction in this comment, no?
      - throwayyy479087 4y ago
        Why do I have to do that? How is that something I’m responsible for? I don’t own those instances and I don’t like the existing users. I’m going to just keep using Facebook, and this will die off
        kelseyfrog 4y ago
        I just think we're capable of opinions more mature than complaining about something and then expecting others to fix it for us. This is a social problem, not a technical, financial, or legal one. Recruiting and organizing people is a fundamental skill in the modern world. The only thing stopping one from doing this is merely saying the right things to the right people.
seanalltogether 4y ago
So is each lemmy instance just a full standalone clone of the full reddit feature set? And multiple instances will all have the same duplicate communities? For example. https://beehaw.org/c/technology https://lemmy.ml/c/technology Am I gonna just see a bunch of duplicate content if I've joined multiple servers?
- BeetleB 4y ago
  From the Lemmy docs: > On Lemmy you're able to subscribe to communities on any other server, and can have discussions with users registered elsewhere.
- least 4y ago
  If you're comparing it to reddit, it'd just be like subscribing to two subreddits with similar topics. It's moderated by different people so the rules change but the links might be about the same thing.
  - SV_BubbleTime 4y ago
    So, exactly how long before shills and bots are cross pollinating some paid for narrative on all the technology subs using the same script? “Hmm, almost all of r/technology is against nuclear, that informs my personal view point a little… “hmm, every one of these technology reddit-likes is against nuclear, I guess everyone agrees and I should too”. I am aware that this is not a bug to Reddit, it is the reason they are looking at an IPO, is a very in-demand feature to be able to shape narratives. I look forward to seeing how a federated Reddit deals with narrative pushing.
- ranger_danger 4y ago
  this is basically how matrix's federation works. every homeserver has its own copy of any room that any of its users are on, regardless of what server owns/created the room originally, they all keep in sync with each other to merge messages in from the other homeservers. you can also create local-only, homeserver-specific channels if desired.
- Nutomic 4y ago
rootusrootus 4y ago
Does it have the same mastodon problem of separate namespaces? I'm having a tough time getting enthusiastic about federated social media that has disjoint namespaces. Is there no way to have a federated-but-shared namespace so I don't have to lose my username when an instance shuts down?
- pphysch 4y ago
  Isn't that the point of federation? That there is not a centralized (naming/identity) authority?
  - riffic 4y ago
    but I want everyone to perform the same landgrab for handles every time a new service comes along. Don't worry about where ambiguities exist, it'll be handled via first comes first serve, trademark law, or just by reselling names on the black market /s
- lifty 4y ago
  Unfortunately the only way to achieve that in the fediverse is by hosting your own instance, or at the minimum using your own domain and having someone manage the instance for you.
- riffic 4y ago
  that's a feature, not a bug! one shared namespace is problematic for reasons. You can figure email though, right? DNS is a solved problem and we're never going to see anything better come along because DNS has survived the test of time (see the Lindy Effect - DNS is old, crusty, and like the Art of War or Shakespeare, it's worth learning).
  - meltedcapacitor 4y ago
    That argument works better if 1 user = 1 domain rather the mastodon model where users are under a random domain they have no control of. (In passing, using top level domains as user id may be a good idea in some cases. In tech communities the friction may be bearable.)
twobitshifter 4y ago
Individual low-membership subreddits are usually much better than the frontpage, but for these subs - what's the benefit of federation? An obscure topic will need a large baseline community to pull from to get a quorum for conversation.
- forgotmypw17 4y ago
  I think the benefit is a preemptive transition onto a more consensual platform where you are the owner-operator who can adjust the rules and mechanics instead of a tenant to an exploitative behemoth who can ruin your community without even noticing it.
  - chrisan 4y ago
    is there an example of a low membership sub the GP was referring to thats been ruined?
    - forgotmypw17 4y ago
      Any good sub will grow with time. The bigger it is, the more difficult it is to move off your tenant platform. And as time passes, you are more likely to want something which your tenant platform does not offer. Maybe it is a different style of displaying images. Maybe it is a different way of defending against bots and spam. Maybe it is easier reporting of spam by users. Whatever it is, a platform with a user:operator ratio of over a million will probably not have the resources to accommodate you.
kuramitropolis 4y ago
Anyone got a standalone ActivityPub client? Couldn't find one. The protocol is intended to cover both server/server federation and client/server fetching of updates, correct?
scrumper 4y ago
Grumpy old man mode: we had this! It’s called Usenet.
- encryptluks2 4y ago
  I'd love for a revamped Usenet service for mailing lists but it really isn't a social media replacement.
fleddr 4y ago
One thing is for sure, it really is fast. My most fascinating discovery is the public Modlog: https://lemmy.ml/modlog https://lemmy.ml/modlog What a spectacularly bad idea to show it in the open, but educational nonetheless. It very much resembles Reddit moderation, on steroids. People are banned for typing 3 sentences (too long!), "repeated anti-communism", ....insert laundry list of other bullshit reasons...and get this: admins can simply wipe out an entire community at will. I'm not sure if that means it doesn't federate or simply stops working. In any case, massive power trip vibes.
- mariusor 4y ago
  > What a spectacularly bad idea to show it in the open, but educational nonetheless. It very much resembles Reddit moderation, on steroids. Why is that? Open moderation logs are, in my opinion, the corner stones of establishing trust between moderators and users on a discussion platform cum social network.
  - fleddr 4y ago
    I can think of a few reasons. First, it's a potential privacy issue. It effectively is a single place where all dirt is concentrated, open for all to see. In case violators leak personal info, willingly or not, their mistake might be used against them in the future. Second, it can be used to instantly find unpopular mods and mod decisions, and overwhelm them with more of the same, generating busy work or even harassment.
    - mariusor 4y ago
      OK, fair point, I keep forgetting that not everyone on the internet is a decent human being. :( However I think that for entities which are not global network levels of population, a public moderation log is good. If there are abusers, banning them is probably not a difficult proposition among numbers counting into thousands or less.
f38zf5vdt 4y ago
> Be HN user > Want alternative to Reddit that doesn't have the clout of centrist mainstream media influencing it > Find Lemmy, open source and free to use > Lemmy is developed by political extremists that operate outside of centrist mainstream media > Political extremists are on the wrong side > Exclaim "Looks like a no for me. But I appreciate the effort." FWIW There are a number of right wing extremist Lemmy instances (https://wolfballs.com/ https://wolfballs.com/, https://ovarit.com/ https://ovarit.com/, previously https://thedonald.win https://thedonald.win).
- rnd0 4y ago
  Pretty much what I see too -except that you forgot a step: "piss and moan about a content filter that was disabled a year ago even after it's pointed out that it's disabled" And HN is where the Smart People go! Meaning some of the brightest folks on the internet. If this is the best we can do, we're collectively fucked, y'all!
- masterofballs 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - minekpo1 4y ago
    Sorry but if you are nbfobic in the paragraph arguing you aren't bigoted, have a picture glorifying someone who broke into the government building of their own country because they couldn't believe their candidate lost as a banner and are spreading COVID misinformation, I doubt you are apolitical.
    - masterofballs 4y ago
throwaway8689 4y ago
'Federated Reddit' seems like a revival of the old BBSs. Hard-coding slur filters sounds like the work of Sisyphus though.
phailhaus 4y ago
It seems like a user's best move is to find the Lemmy instance with the most users and most active community, because nobody wants to deal with figuring out "which instance has the best subreddit for X". So this sounds like it just results in Reddit, again, with extra steps.
- anothernewdude 4y ago
  HN's continued existence argues against this.
  - phailhaus 4y ago
    HN is not attempting to replicate all of Reddit. Lemmy does, by design, in each instance.
yogthos 4y ago
Social media has come to play an important role in our society. It's a way for people to get news and to discuss it with their peers as well as a tool for education. For better or worse, social media has become an invaluable tool and an integral part of our society. It's important to remember who owns corporate platforms and whose interests they ultimately represent. These are not neutral and unbiased channels that allow for the free flow of information. The content on these sites is carefully curated. Views and opinions that are unpalatable to the owners of these platforms are often suppressed, and sometimes outright banned. Some examples include Facebook banning antifascist pages[1] and Twitter banning left-wing accounts during the midterm elections in US[2]. When the content that the user produce does not fit with the interests of the platform then it often gets removed and communities end up being destroyed. Another problem is that user data constitutes a significant source of revenue for corporate social media platforms. The information collected about the users, and it can reveal a lot more about the individual than most people realize. It's possible for the owners of the platforms to identify users based on the address of the device they're using, see their location, who they interact with, and so on. This creates a comprehensive profile of the person along with the network of individuals whom they interact with. This information is often shared with the affiliates of the platform as well as government entities. It's clear that commercial platforms do not respect user privacy, nor are the users in control of their content. Users are just a product that the owners of the platform sell to their actual customers who mine personal data. Platforms like Lemmy and Mastodon are developed in the open making it possible to tell how they work internally. These platforms explicitly avoid tracking users and collecting their data. Not only are these platforms better at respecting user privacy, they also tend to provide a better user experience without annoying ads, analytics, and other garbage. Another interesting aspect of the Fediverse is that it promotes collaboration. Traditional commercial platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube have no incentive to allow users to move data between them. They directly compete for users in a zero sum game and go out of their way to make it difficult to share content across them. This is the reason we often see screenshots from one site being posted on another. On the other hand, a federated network that's developed in the open and largely hosted non-profit results in a positive-sum game environment. Users joining any of the platforms on the network help grow the entire network. Having many different sites hosted by individuals was the way the internet was intended to work in the first place, it's actually quite impressive how corporations took the open network of the internet and managed to turn it into a series of walled gardens. Only when we own the platforms that we use will we be free to post our thoughts and ideas without having to worry about them being censored or manipulated by corporate interests. No matter how great a commercial platform might be, sooner or later it's going to either disappear or change in a way that doesn't suit you because companies must constantly chase profit in order to survive. This is a bad situation to be in as a user since you have little control over the evolution of a platform. On the other hand, open source has a very different dynamic. Projects can survive with little or no commercial incentive because they're developed by people who themselves benefit from their work. Projects can also be easily forked and taken in different directions by different groups of users if there is a disagreement regarding the direction of the platform. Even when projects become abandoned, they can be picked up again by new teams as long as there is an interested community of users around them. It's time for people to get serious about owning our tools and start using communication platforms built by the people and for the people. Let's get back to making the internet work the way it was intended to work. [1] https://theintercept.com/2020/08/20/facebook-bans-antifascist-pages https://theintercept.com/2020/08/20/facebook-bans-antifascis... [2] https://www.wired.co.uk/article/twitter-political-account-ban-us-mid-term-elections https://www.wired.co.uk/article/twitter-political-account-ba...
brigandish 4y ago
> A community of leftist privacy and FOSS enthusiasts, run by Lemmy’s developers > Rules > No bigotry - including racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, or xenophobia. Code of Conduct. > Be respectful. Everyone should feel welcome here. > No porn. > No Ads / Spamming. And a look at the moderation abilities: > Can lock, remove, and restore posts and comments. Can ban and unban users from communities and the site. A quick search leads us to this issue thread[1], which starts with a very reasonable request: > It's generally not a good idea to hard code something like the slur filter because the needs of every instance is different. Instances in another language would need their versions, and cases where the slur filter over blocks need to be addressed by the admins. > A good idea would be to store the slur filter in the database and initialize it with a default when spinning up an instance, but make it editable by admins without changing source files. …which encounters, shall we say some resistance: > If you dont like it, fork it. Stop bothering us about it, we will never fully remove the slur filter. That's just one of the quite hostile responses of this <checks notes> group against hateful conduct. It seems that not only has "community of leftist[s]" given up on free speech (as is the vogue), they've given up on real federation too. We have other comments here asking for a centralised authority - we have it, it's the developers! [1] https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/622 https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/622
- Quarrelsome 4y ago
  > If you dont like it, fork it. Stop bothering us about it, we will never fully remove the slur filter. how is that a hostile response exactly? Its a fundamental premise of foss isn't it?
  - brigandish 4y ago
    If I ask you something nicely and you come back with "Stop bothering me about it", how do you think that would come off?
    - test098 4y ago
      Like someone exercising free speech?
flas9sd 4y ago
if I compare the one dimensional threads of twitter with tree-rendered threads, I find the conversations emerging to be different, on HN and reddit. Of course head topic/subreddit play into the nature of the discussion, my impression is I walk away with having consumed more voices. It's less personal in absence of avatar images, less face-to-face with the top-bottom reply view in twitter. Classical BBS forums have the same disadvantage. I'm intrigued by lots of users using a federated system and curious how it works out and I look forward to read activitypub distributed posts tree rendered.
yogthos 4y ago
Pretty hilarious to realize that even people on HN, who are supposedly technically literate, don't understand how the internet is supposed to work. Decentralization is the core idea behind the internet. Anybody arguing that we should prefer centralized platforms over decentralized ones displays stunning amounts of ignorance.
friend_and_foe 4y ago
There's also brutalinks/littr.me/littr.go (single community to more HN like) and lotide if you'd like a similar concept implemented differently and/or by different people.
- mariusor 4y ago
  Thank you for mentioning my project. I'm here if people have questions. The main difference between "brutalinks" (which is the official name of the software project) and lemmy is that in my opinion, grouping multiple "subreddits" on the same instance is a bad choice when designing federated discussion platforms. As some commenters have already observed, it raises the issue of which community targeting a niche interest is the best among the ones split on different instances. On brutalinks we made the explicit choice of treating the instance itself as a "subreddit" which targets a small/medium community that gather around this one shared interest. More details can be found reading through the online docs: https://man.sr.ht/~mariusor/go-activitypub/brutalinks/ https://man.sr.ht/~mariusor/go-activitypub/brutalinks/
Nutomic 4y ago
Lemmy maintainer here, its great that you are interested in our project. However it would be better if you linked to https://join-lemmy.org/ https://join-lemmy.org/ instead, which is the official project website and includes an extensive list of different Lemmy instances with distinct communities and rules. What you linked to is just one of these instances. I will try to answer any questions you have.

142 points by fintler 4y ago

> Note: Federation is still in active development And here's the repos https://github.com/LemmyNet https://github.com/LemmyNet It looks like ActivityPub

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

dewfaced 4y ago

"A community of leftist privacy and FOSS enthusiasts, run by Lemmy’s developers" Looks like a no for me. But I appreciate the effort.

drbeast 4y ago
So insufferable reddit moderators just moved to their own playground?
- throwayyy479087 4y ago
  Sounds like hell
Pr0ject217 4y ago
Interesting choice by them... I'm tired of politics.
r721 4y ago
It's Mastodon-like, so there exist right-wing instances too: https://wolfballs.com/ https://wolfballs.com/ (possibly NSFW)
- laputan_machine 4y ago
  Can't we just have a place where we discuss things without bringing in the latest political talking point? Maybe I'm mis-remembering, maybe it's rose-tinted glasses, but I honestly can't remember it being like this on forums back in the day. I don't remember _any_ political discuss on the various warez forums I was on (nxsecure anyone?). Flame wars were a thing, no doubt, but it wasn't this already formed opinion where you've picked a side and now anyone on the other side is a bad guy. It is completely bizarre.
  - dpkirchner 4y ago
    I think you can thank heavy-handed moderation for the lack of political discussions on forums back in the day.
    - superfrank 4y ago
      I don't think that's all of it. Politics has continually gotten more polarizing over the 20 or so years. I don't think this is the worst it's ever been in the US, but it definitely seems like the Trump era is the worst it's been since mass adoption of the internet. Because of things like 24 hour news networks and social media, we're also reminded of our differences much more frequently than we used to be. I think politics is just a bigger part of peoples' lives now and we're seeing that play out in real life as well as in internet communities.
    - josteink 4y ago
      I can assure you we had no moderators dealing with the kind of political nonsense we have today back in the days when I was a regular at the Something awful, Fark, Jpopmusic or XDA forums. People were just out to have a good time, have a laugh or get together over something they loved. People seemingly don’t seem to be as good at that these days.
      - TylerE 4y ago
        Maybe because they finally realized that ignoring the unignorable is a losing strategy? It's like the people who bitch about their HOA all the time but never go to a meeting or even know who the board members are.
- masterofballs 4y ago
  [flagged]
mikae1 4y ago
So pick another instance[1] or start your own? That's how federation works. [1] https://join-lemmy.org/instances https://join-lemmy.org/instances
kelseyfrog 4y ago
It's a great chance to step out of one's filter bubble. Take it as an opportunity to widen perspectives and exchange ideas that normally wouldn't be exchanged.
- zmmmmm 4y ago
  yep ... I immediately saw about 5 articles that looked like straight up russian propaganda about Ukraine on the front page and was quite challenged about whether I wanted to read them or not.
- SV_BubbleTime 4y ago
  Agree! Where else am I going to engage with far left moderators and tech people? I mean; there is only everywhere, but I’m already existing there.
- least 4y ago
  The problem is that places that cater to a specific political demographic tend to not tolerate exchanges of ideas, even if they are civil. It's very difficult to intentionally create a community that allows for discourse from wildly varying viewpoints where people feel comfortable sharing their point of view.
  - kelseyfrog 4y ago
    Right, you're conceptualizing echo chambers as external. I'm conceptualizing them as internal. The hardest echo chamber to tear down exists in our own heads, but they are the most rewarding to dismantle.

s1mon 4y ago

Is there some connection to Motörhead or is that just in my brain?

sidpatil 4y ago
https://join-lemmy.org/docs/en/about/about.html https://join-lemmy.org/docs/en/about/about.html Bottom of page.

alexb_ 4y ago

The admins are literal marxists (I do mean literal, check the admin profiles), and have designed the technology wanting "to make it very difficult for racist trolls to use the most updated version of Lemmy." https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/622 https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/622 This of course is not necessarily a reason to avoid the underlying technology, but it may be something to consider.

mistermann 4y ago
Having ideological censorship baked into the base system seems like not an optimal approach.
- serverholic 4y ago
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- notsrg 4y ago
  Kind of a self report if your ideology depends on using slurs, don't you think?
  - YurgenJurgensen 4y ago
  - mistermann 4y ago
    Your comment itself is a slur (this is true by virtue of me saying that it is true (as with your comment), which is how things work here on Planet Earth, 2022), so should rightfully be censored.
ttpphd 4y ago
Why

2kwatts 4y ago

jsnell 4y ago

Previously on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28453165 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28453165 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31712332 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31712332 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33438493 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33438493

dang 4y ago
Thanks! Macroexpanded: LemmyBB, a federated bulletin board - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33438493 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33438493 - Nov 2022* (186 comments) Open Source federated link aggregator in rust - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31712332 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31712332 - June 2022 (37 comments) Lemmy – A link aggregator for the fediverse - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28453165 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28453165 - Sept 2021 (213 comments) (*Reposts are fine after a year or so but a major thread 13 days ago makes the current submission a dupe. This is in the FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html)

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

matai_kolila 4y ago

Not that I think these folks want mainstream appeal, but if you want mainstream appeal, stop federating stuff! Nobody cares about privacy and control over their own information nearly as much as privacy advocates think they do, and if even one thing is slightly harder as a result, people will simply never adopt your tool or technology.

ryanianian 4y ago
> stop federating stuff Another conclusion: Federation alone isn't enough of a selling point. Federation must also be a key unlocker of other features. Perhaps more branded/tailored sites for different audience segments but which can feed into each other in meaningful ways might be one way to pitch it. But dropping federation entirely is throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
- ElemenoPicuares 4y ago
  I agree that getting rid of federation is not the answer. However, it will be little more than a source of neato developer projects as long as new projects try to get users to think about it, let alone understand it, nevermind actually needing to understand it to use a product to its full potential. People who don't care about federation, conceptually, will never care about federation, even if it yields tangible benefits they care about otherwise. They will prioritize user experience, interface, branding appeal, reliability and speed of operations like finding people in-app, and all of that other stuff that FOSS social media, and many other types of FOSS projects, de-prioritize. That is why FOSS alternatives are still alternatives despite being free, and largely technically superior. The disconnect is rooted in differing perspectives. Developers, naturally, use more sophisticated means of evaluating software than end users, much the way nutritionists evaluate food. We consider interfaces and user experiences to be means of interacting with software, and consider the software on a whole, yielding only so much weight to usability. Since software plays such a huge part of our lives, spending a little time wrangling it doesn't seem onerous. To nearly all end users, the interface/experience is the software. Even people who do care about federation conceptually may not even be willing to deal with admin > 0 for their social media accounts. It's not ideal, but it's reality. Currently, federation hardly matters more to people than HTTP/2 does. Trying to use it as a selling point for general audience software is a failing strategy. So who cares? Social media is a hell of a lot more useful with a critical mass of users... other users are what make it "social," rather than merely "media." If developers are nutritionists, designers are chefs. Calculating proper nutrition to keep us alive and functioning is arguably more important to making food delicious and enriching our sensual lives. But if you take a large group of people and offer them their choice of food either constructed by nutritionists or constructed by chefs, the chefs will win every time. Many of the nutritionists will be mystified by people's lack of ability to prioritize critical body functioning over beautiful sensual experiences. (When I was in culinary school, a fellow student was a career-changing nutritionist saying she was becoming a chef because she was tired of "being the bad guy taking away all the things people loved.) The key is actively enfranchising people who specialize in knowing what users want. Spending an afternoon in Gimp making a punny logo is not branding. Customizable color themes are not UX. Deeply considering, and probably researching users needs and expectations and then trying to meet them is the only way forward for FOSS social media. People are willing to give up some flavor benefits for food that's significantly more nutritious, but we need chefs to help us make it as tasty an appealing as possible, and then spin the hell out of the benefits. It's the only way forward.

mikae1 4y ago

This post should be edited to link to https://join-lemmy.org https://join-lemmy.org

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

kmeisthax 4y ago

Aaand the first thing I see is a thread about Afghanistan full of tankies. God damn it.

jevgeni 4y ago
Also, russia apologists and very dubious sources. Weirdly, an experience that is very unlike Mastodon for me.
- kmeisthax 4y ago
  Tankies are extremely pro-Russia. In fact, the term "tankie" was coined when the Soviet Union rolled tanks on socialist protesters that wanted to leave the USSR because it was clearly just another form of exploitation. Socialist movements in other countries split between pro-Russia, and anti-Russia. Or, more accurately, authoritarian left versus libertarian left. Russia today is an ethnofascist dictatorship, but most tankies don't care because America Bad.
  - _glsb 4y ago
    Most tankies are just LARPing as romanticized version of revolutionistas of the 50s and the 60s. They need a morally simple world view. Completely agree with you.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
1MachineElf 4y ago
I feel this sentiment, but I also hope that being federated means more instances will crop up that have different demographics.

ubertaco 4y ago

Genuine question about both this and Mastodon, since both have the same "decentralized, join/start the instance that fits your interests" fundamental principle: isn't this just exacerbating the filter-bubble effect that cranks up polarization? Like, is it really a great thing for mending societal bridges that folks can choose between a server for leftists or a server for hard-right folks and that split ensures that one never interacts with the other? Is it really no longer possible to have conversations happen between folks that disagree, to the point that we want to ensure that there's no chance for such conversations ever to happen, even by accident?

pluc 4y ago
gilded-lilly 4y ago
It is only possible as long as one side is able to have civil discourse, without labeling/demonizing/name calling and violently attacking their opponents. It’s quite hard to have a debate when people’s views are not only completely entrenched, they are simply not willing to give respect at all.
- rnd0 4y ago
  small correction; it's only possible if both sides are capable and willing to set aside heated rhetoric. At this point in time, I honestly question if any of the sides are capable of honest engagement.
  - gilded-lilly 4y ago
    I think civil discourse is possible if reasonable debate is allowed. Unfortunately, for one side, it appears that reason itself is problematic for them and they refuse it.
    - rnd0 4y ago
      That can describe both the left and the right. I'd be very surprised if you weren't alluding to SJWs; but at the same time you're describing Qanon folks as well. ...and that's why we can't have discourse. No one can agree on what constitutes "reasonable debate".

sedatk 4y ago

There's also a fully decentralized (P2P) Reddit alternative called Aether: https://getaether.net/ https://getaether.net/

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

joshlemer 4y ago

It's just too bad that the flagship instance of Lemmy (lemmy.ml) is full of literal hardline Marxists and Soviet Union nostalgics/apologists. Totally insufferable.

kelseyfrog 4y ago
Isn't the whole point of federation that you can simply spin up your own instance?
- joshlemer 4y ago
  Yes, but all the non-communist servers, combined, have an active user base of like 100.
  - kelseyfrog 4y ago
    Um, recruit some more users? This is a good opportunity to take personal responsibility and individual accountability for a problem as you see it. The first thing people need to learn about stoicism is that you can't change other people as much as you want to. Make peace with this and do things that are in your control.
    - jevgeni 4y ago
      You must see the contradiction in this comment, no?
    - throwayyy479087 4y ago
      Why do I have to do that? How is that something I’m responsible for? I don’t own those instances and I don’t like the existing users. I’m going to just keep using Facebook, and this will die off
      - kelseyfrog 4y ago
        I just think we're capable of opinions more mature than complaining about something and then expecting others to fix it for us. This is a social problem, not a technical, financial, or legal one. Recruiting and organizing people is a fundamental skill in the modern world. The only thing stopping one from doing this is merely saying the right things to the right people.

seanalltogether 4y ago

So is each lemmy instance just a full standalone clone of the full reddit feature set? And multiple instances will all have the same duplicate communities? For example. https://beehaw.org/c/technology https://lemmy.ml/c/technology Am I gonna just see a bunch of duplicate content if I've joined multiple servers?

BeetleB 4y ago
From the Lemmy docs: > On Lemmy you're able to subscribe to communities on any other server, and can have discussions with users registered elsewhere.
least 4y ago
If you're comparing it to reddit, it'd just be like subscribing to two subreddits with similar topics. It's moderated by different people so the rules change but the links might be about the same thing.
- SV_BubbleTime 4y ago
  So, exactly how long before shills and bots are cross pollinating some paid for narrative on all the technology subs using the same script? “Hmm, almost all of r/technology is against nuclear, that informs my personal view point a little… “hmm, every one of these technology reddit-likes is against nuclear, I guess everyone agrees and I should too”. I am aware that this is not a bug to Reddit, it is the reason they are looking at an IPO, is a very in-demand feature to be able to shape narratives. I look forward to seeing how a federated Reddit deals with narrative pushing.
ranger_danger 4y ago
this is basically how matrix's federation works. every homeserver has its own copy of any room that any of its users are on, regardless of what server owns/created the room originally, they all keep in sync with each other to merge messages in from the other homeservers. you can also create local-only, homeserver-specific channels if desired.
Nutomic 4y ago

rootusrootus 4y ago

Does it have the same mastodon problem of separate namespaces? I'm having a tough time getting enthusiastic about federated social media that has disjoint namespaces. Is there no way to have a federated-but-shared namespace so I don't have to lose my username when an instance shuts down?

pphysch 4y ago
Isn't that the point of federation? That there is not a centralized (naming/identity) authority?
- riffic 4y ago
  but I want everyone to perform the same landgrab for handles every time a new service comes along. Don't worry about where ambiguities exist, it'll be handled via first comes first serve, trademark law, or just by reselling names on the black market /s
lifty 4y ago
Unfortunately the only way to achieve that in the fediverse is by hosting your own instance, or at the minimum using your own domain and having someone manage the instance for you.
riffic 4y ago
that's a feature, not a bug! one shared namespace is problematic for reasons. You can figure email though, right? DNS is a solved problem and we're never going to see anything better come along because DNS has survived the test of time (see the Lindy Effect - DNS is old, crusty, and like the Art of War or Shakespeare, it's worth learning).
- meltedcapacitor 4y ago
  That argument works better if 1 user = 1 domain rather the mastodon model where users are under a random domain they have no control of. (In passing, using top level domains as user id may be a good idea in some cases. In tech communities the friction may be bearable.)

twobitshifter 4y ago

Individual low-membership subreddits are usually much better than the frontpage, but for these subs - what's the benefit of federation? An obscure topic will need a large baseline community to pull from to get a quorum for conversation.

forgotmypw17 4y ago
I think the benefit is a preemptive transition onto a more consensual platform where you are the owner-operator who can adjust the rules and mechanics instead of a tenant to an exploitative behemoth who can ruin your community without even noticing it.
- chrisan 4y ago
  is there an example of a low membership sub the GP was referring to thats been ruined?
  - forgotmypw17 4y ago
    Any good sub will grow with time. The bigger it is, the more difficult it is to move off your tenant platform. And as time passes, you are more likely to want something which your tenant platform does not offer. Maybe it is a different style of displaying images. Maybe it is a different way of defending against bots and spam. Maybe it is easier reporting of spam by users. Whatever it is, a platform with a user:operator ratio of over a million will probably not have the resources to accommodate you.

kuramitropolis 4y ago

Anyone got a standalone ActivityPub client? Couldn't find one. The protocol is intended to cover both server/server federation and client/server fetching of updates, correct?

scrumper 4y ago

Grumpy old man mode: we had this! It’s called Usenet.

encryptluks2 4y ago
I'd love for a revamped Usenet service for mailing lists but it really isn't a social media replacement.

fleddr 4y ago

One thing is for sure, it really is fast. My most fascinating discovery is the public Modlog: https://lemmy.ml/modlog https://lemmy.ml/modlog What a spectacularly bad idea to show it in the open, but educational nonetheless. It very much resembles Reddit moderation, on steroids. People are banned for typing 3 sentences (too long!), "repeated anti-communism", ....insert laundry list of other bullshit reasons...and get this: admins can simply wipe out an entire community at will. I'm not sure if that means it doesn't federate or simply stops working. In any case, massive power trip vibes.

mariusor 4y ago
> What a spectacularly bad idea to show it in the open, but educational nonetheless. It very much resembles Reddit moderation, on steroids. Why is that? Open moderation logs are, in my opinion, the corner stones of establishing trust between moderators and users on a discussion platform cum social network.
- fleddr 4y ago
  I can think of a few reasons. First, it's a potential privacy issue. It effectively is a single place where all dirt is concentrated, open for all to see. In case violators leak personal info, willingly or not, their mistake might be used against them in the future. Second, it can be used to instantly find unpopular mods and mod decisions, and overwhelm them with more of the same, generating busy work or even harassment.
  - mariusor 4y ago
    OK, fair point, I keep forgetting that not everyone on the internet is a decent human being. :( However I think that for entities which are not global network levels of population, a public moderation log is good. If there are abusers, banning them is probably not a difficult proposition among numbers counting into thousands or less.

f38zf5vdt 4y ago

> Be HN user > Want alternative to Reddit that doesn't have the clout of centrist mainstream media influencing it > Find Lemmy, open source and free to use > Lemmy is developed by political extremists that operate outside of centrist mainstream media > Political extremists are on the wrong side > Exclaim "Looks like a no for me. But I appreciate the effort." FWIW There are a number of right wing extremist Lemmy instances (https://wolfballs.com/ https://wolfballs.com/, https://ovarit.com/ https://ovarit.com/, previously https://thedonald.win https://thedonald.win).

rnd0 4y ago
Pretty much what I see too -except that you forgot a step: "piss and moan about a content filter that was disabled a year ago even after it's pointed out that it's disabled" And HN is where the Smart People go! Meaning some of the brightest folks on the internet. If this is the best we can do, we're collectively fucked, y'all!
masterofballs 4y ago
[flagged]
- minekpo1 4y ago
  Sorry but if you are nbfobic in the paragraph arguing you aren't bigoted, have a picture glorifying someone who broke into the government building of their own country because they couldn't believe their candidate lost as a banner and are spreading COVID misinformation, I doubt you are apolitical.
  - masterofballs 4y ago

throwaway8689 4y ago

'Federated Reddit' seems like a revival of the old BBSs. Hard-coding slur filters sounds like the work of Sisyphus though.

phailhaus 4y ago

It seems like a user's best move is to find the Lemmy instance with the most users and most active community, because nobody wants to deal with figuring out "which instance has the best subreddit for X". So this sounds like it just results in Reddit, again, with extra steps.

anothernewdude 4y ago
HN's continued existence argues against this.
- phailhaus 4y ago
  HN is not attempting to replicate all of Reddit. Lemmy does, by design, in each instance.

yogthos 4y ago

Social media has come to play an important role in our society. It's a way for people to get news and to discuss it with their peers as well as a tool for education. For better or worse, social media has become an invaluable tool and an integral part of our society. It's important to remember who owns corporate platforms and whose interests they ultimately represent. These are not neutral and unbiased channels that allow for the free flow of information. The content on these sites is carefully curated. Views and opinions that are unpalatable to the owners of these platforms are often suppressed, and sometimes outright banned. Some examples include Facebook banning antifascist pages[1] and Twitter banning left-wing accounts during the midterm elections in US[2]. When the content that the user produce does not fit with the interests of the platform then it often gets removed and communities end up being destroyed. Another problem is that user data constitutes a significant source of revenue for corporate social media platforms. The information collected about the users, and it can reveal a lot more about the individual than most people realize. It's possible for the owners of the platforms to identify users based on the address of the device they're using, see their location, who they interact with, and so on. This creates a comprehensive profile of the person along with the network of individuals whom they interact with. This information is often shared with the affiliates of the platform as well as government entities. It's clear that commercial platforms do not respect user privacy, nor are the users in control of their content. Users are just a product that the owners of the platform sell to their actual customers who mine personal data. Platforms like Lemmy and Mastodon are developed in the open making it possible to tell how they work internally. These platforms explicitly avoid tracking users and collecting their data. Not only are these platforms better at respecting user privacy, they also tend to provide a better user experience without annoying ads, analytics, and other garbage. Another interesting aspect of the Fediverse is that it promotes collaboration. Traditional commercial platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube have no incentive to allow users to move data between them. They directly compete for users in a zero sum game and go out of their way to make it difficult to share content across them. This is the reason we often see screenshots from one site being posted on another. On the other hand, a federated network that's developed in the open and largely hosted non-profit results in a positive-sum game environment. Users joining any of the platforms on the network help grow the entire network. Having many different sites hosted by individuals was the way the internet was intended to work in the first place, it's actually quite impressive how corporations took the open network of the internet and managed to turn it into a series of walled gardens. Only when we own the platforms that we use will we be free to post our thoughts and ideas without having to worry about them being censored or manipulated by corporate interests. No matter how great a commercial platform might be, sooner or later it's going to either disappear or change in a way that doesn't suit you because companies must constantly chase profit in order to survive. This is a bad situation to be in as a user since you have little control over the evolution of a platform. On the other hand, open source has a very different dynamic. Projects can survive with little or no commercial incentive because they're developed by people who themselves benefit from their work. Projects can also be easily forked and taken in different directions by different groups of users if there is a disagreement regarding the direction of the platform. Even when projects become abandoned, they can be picked up again by new teams as long as there is an interested community of users around them. It's time for people to get serious about owning our tools and start using communication platforms built by the people and for the people. Let's get back to making the internet work the way it was intended to work. [1] https://theintercept.com/2020/08/20/facebook-bans-antifascist-pages https://theintercept.com/2020/08/20/facebook-bans-antifascis... [2] https://www.wired.co.uk/article/twitter-political-account-ban-us-mid-term-elections https://www.wired.co.uk/article/twitter-political-account-ba...

brigandish 4y ago

> A community of leftist privacy and FOSS enthusiasts, run by Lemmy’s developers > Rules > No bigotry - including racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, or xenophobia. Code of Conduct. > Be respectful. Everyone should feel welcome here. > No porn. > No Ads / Spamming. And a look at the moderation abilities: > Can lock, remove, and restore posts and comments. Can ban and unban users from communities and the site. A quick search leads us to this issue thread[1], which starts with a very reasonable request: > It's generally not a good idea to hard code something like the slur filter because the needs of every instance is different. Instances in another language would need their versions, and cases where the slur filter over blocks need to be addressed by the admins. > A good idea would be to store the slur filter in the database and initialize it with a default when spinning up an instance, but make it editable by admins without changing source files. …which encounters, shall we say some resistance: > If you dont like it, fork it. Stop bothering us about it, we will never fully remove the slur filter. That's just one of the quite hostile responses of this <checks notes> group against hateful conduct. It seems that not only has "community of leftist[s]" given up on free speech (as is the vogue), they've given up on real federation too. We have other comments here asking for a centralised authority - we have it, it's the developers! [1] https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/622 https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/622

Quarrelsome 4y ago
> If you dont like it, fork it. Stop bothering us about it, we will never fully remove the slur filter. how is that a hostile response exactly? Its a fundamental premise of foss isn't it?
- brigandish 4y ago
  If I ask you something nicely and you come back with "Stop bothering me about it", how do you think that would come off?
  - test098 4y ago
    Like someone exercising free speech?

flas9sd 4y ago

if I compare the one dimensional threads of twitter with tree-rendered threads, I find the conversations emerging to be different, on HN and reddit. Of course head topic/subreddit play into the nature of the discussion, my impression is I walk away with having consumed more voices. It's less personal in absence of avatar images, less face-to-face with the top-bottom reply view in twitter. Classical BBS forums have the same disadvantage. I'm intrigued by lots of users using a federated system and curious how it works out and I look forward to read activitypub distributed posts tree rendered.

yogthos 4y ago

Pretty hilarious to realize that even people on HN, who are supposedly technically literate, don't understand how the internet is supposed to work. Decentralization is the core idea behind the internet. Anybody arguing that we should prefer centralized platforms over decentralized ones displays stunning amounts of ignorance.

friend_and_foe 4y ago

There's also brutalinks/littr.me/littr.go (single community to more HN like) and lotide if you'd like a similar concept implemented differently and/or by different people.

mariusor 4y ago
Thank you for mentioning my project. I'm here if people have questions. The main difference between "brutalinks" (which is the official name of the software project) and lemmy is that in my opinion, grouping multiple "subreddits" on the same instance is a bad choice when designing federated discussion platforms. As some commenters have already observed, it raises the issue of which community targeting a niche interest is the best among the ones split on different instances. On brutalinks we made the explicit choice of treating the instance itself as a "subreddit" which targets a small/medium community that gather around this one shared interest. More details can be found reading through the online docs: https://man.sr.ht/~mariusor/go-activitypub/brutalinks/ https://man.sr.ht/~mariusor/go-activitypub/brutalinks/

Nutomic 4y ago

Lemmy maintainer here, its great that you are interested in our project. However it would be better if you linked to https://join-lemmy.org/ https://join-lemmy.org/ instead, which is the official project website and includes an extensive list of different Lemmy instances with distinct communities and rules. What you linked to is just one of these instances. I will try to answer any questions you have.