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I hope Lemmy does well, but I don't think it's going to replace Reddit (and that's likely fine in the eyes of the Lemmy team) Nobody wants a federated, slow, di

by rjh29 3y ago

I hope Lemmy does well, but I don't think it's going to replace Reddit (and that's likely fine in the eyes of the Lemmy team) Nobody wants a federated, slow, difficult to use version of reddit. Nobody wants to choose a server. We just want reddit without the bullshit. It's the same issue with Mastodon. Mastodon is down over 1 million users since last December, and I bet that's related to how difficult it is to sign up and to find other users on the platform. https://searchengineland.com/mastodon-shows-declined-growth-despite-concerns-with-twitter-392787 https://searchengineland.com/mastodon-shows-declined-growth-... Don't take my word for it either: https://lemmy.ml/post/1149624 https://lemmy.ml/post/1149624

derbOac 3y ago
I don't know. I'm skeptical about lemmy taking off but for a different reason — there's a sort of chicken and egg problem with content. It's tough to attract users without attractive users. Bluesky has tried to address that with selective invites and whether or not it happens organically with lemmy who knows. Using lemmy though, it seems a lot more intuitive to me than mastodon. I can find topic communities on other servers easily, and the community-server match issue seems like a better fit than mastodon in some ways. Mastodon never has quite clicked with me, but lemmy does, maybe even more so than reddit itself. The limits to me using lemmy right now are content not ux. Mostly I use reddit for relatively obscure topics. But already I'm seeing cat photos of the sort I'd see on the main page of reddit so maybe it's a time thing.
freediverx 3y ago
> Nobody wants a federated, slow, difficult to use version of reddit Nobody wants a first party Reddit app with a terrible user interface, algorithmic timelines, and obnoxious advertising.
maltfield 3y ago
Because Lemmy is federated, it may be difficult for reddit users migrating to lemmy to find their subreddits. Here's a guide to help reddit users find popular lemmy communities and subscribe to them across different instances * https://tech.michaelaltfield.net/2023/06/11/lemmy-migration-find-subreddits-communities/ https://tech.michaelaltfield.net/2023/06/11/lemmy-migration-...
fortuna86 3y ago
[dead]
_8j50 3y ago
I keep seeing that pattern ,"we don't aim to replace (google|gmail|imessage|twitter|fb|reddit)" yeah and they won't. Waste of time unless you have a lot of time to waste.
yuck39 3y ago
Exactly. I always thought Mastadon could have been so much more successful if they had just proxied cached versions of the most popular instances through a single larger server. Sure it would give Mastadon the power to pick and choose who it wants to host, but if you want to go join a different instance you are more than welcome to. It would just substantially streamline the process for your mainstream user.
- sph 3y ago
  The problem with Mastodon is that some people still don't know how to spell it properly. It's not rocket science.
  - Macha 3y ago
    Not so sure about that, people unable to spell YouTube seemed to do more harm to Universal Tubing who owned utube.com than it did YouTube. If you hadn't heard of them before, how many ts in Twitter? Is TikTok spelt with the letter c?
    - bamfly 3y ago
      People who've seen YouTube written down a couple times tend not to get it wrong. Twitter is a common dictionary word and I'd bet had a pretty low misspelling rate, if you'd asked people to spell it before the service Twitter even existed. TikTok, I think most people get after seeing it a few times, at worst. Mastodon? It's a dictionary word, so it as that going for it—and yet, people see it a hundred times and still often misspell it. The pronunciation's just a bit too far from the spelling, at least in American English. Most folks say it as if it were spelt "mastadon", especially if they're not trying to enunciate carefully & precisely and (perhaps) don't know the correct spelling. (I'm not weighing in on whether that's some kind of serious problem for Mastodon, but I do think it's worse than all your other examples, as far as likelihood of misspelling even after significant exposure—then again, web search smooths over most of that, for anything sufficiently popular)
  - tester457 3y ago
    The name okay. The problem is the friction new users have understanding and joing the platform.
EamonnMR 3y ago
I've had a better time on Mastodon than I ever did on Twitter actually finding people to talk to.
- valine 3y ago
  The problem isn’t the platform, it’s the people. If mastodon got as popular as twitter the level of discourse would fall to the same level.
  - mschuster91 3y ago
    Popularity in itself is no problem for any platform, as long as it manages to scale up moderation together with growth. CSAM spreaders and ordinary spammers are the least of the worries thanks to AI and other automated detection systems these days, but warez/moviez are harder due to the DMCA and European fair use laws (e.g. German §51/51a UrhG), and stuff that veers into anything politics absolutely needs human intervention. HN is pretty decent at that, despite it (IIRC) being only Dan (u/dang) doing the moderation work. (Maybe it helps that both the HN tech and the general community itself don't make it easy to post dank memes like on the other social networks)
tayo42 3y ago
do a lot of people even want more social media and internet communities? i wasted an embarrassing amount of time on reddit in hind sight. this all reminds me of when i finally burnt out on wow. i quit, sold my account (at the end of wotlk, i think wow declined after that too?) and didn't play video games for years after. personally i feel the same way about reddit, do i really want this all again in my life? idk, im not searching for an alternative though.
- basch 3y ago
  A better way forward is to really take the design back to primitives. Reddit/NH/Twitter/Youtube/Google all default to favoring freshness. I believe this design assumption to be a mistake. A lot of what gets posted would be better served by some hybrid of a wiki+chatroom/forum. For example, Ill just pick a thread that gets posted every week. In the what else will I like subreddit, there is constantly a "post your best mindfuck movies". That kind of question and answer is best served by some kind of static wiki like page that allows voting on individual database entries. It is better served by someone bumping the topic, maybe creating a new chatroom for the day, having the best parts of the chat post to the forum, for archival and historical purposes. As new movies come out, they can be added to the list. Maybe filters exist that allow you to show the results only showing votes from the last year, to help rank newer entries against historical ones. In a TV/Speaker/Hometheater subreddit, constantly "what's best" belongs in the wiki. But the wiki is some singular document fairly separate from the discussion pages. Wiki page components dont rearrange by voting. The wiki is fairly well hidden in the interface. When some kind of funny video gets reposted, it shouldnt start a new conversation. The comments page needs a better design to combine/isolate old comments, with today's discussion. tldr: reddit, like a lot of social media, has a deduplication problem, that they choose to ignore in favor of focusing on "engagement" where engagement is just repetition and regurgitation. social media needs to rediscover bumping instead of reposting.
  - goplayoutside 3y ago
    You might like kbin.social and/or aether.app, both of which offer different takes on the concept of federated link aggregators.
ilrwbwrkhv 3y ago
It's like your local freemason lodge. The conversations will be much more interesting but they will never be as popular as meetup.
- PrimeMcFly 3y ago
  I dunno. I'd be pretty skeptical the conversations of some middle aged men would be that interesting at their LARP meetup.
bhouston 3y ago
Mastodon's issues are: (1) poor discovery (2) if I am on one mastodon site, I can not just retweet that post, I have to go to my server and then cut-and-paste a link to that other site. (3) no quote tweeting, important for vitality. (4) and most importantly, no ranked/AI-managed feed. Thus it is filled with noise. In many ways, Mastodon is a purposely janked product because people don't want to make things easy to go viral. But that reduces engagement and interest.
- Nasreddin_Hodja 3y ago
  > Mastodon's issues are: Fediverse isn't just Mastodon. There are other implementations of ActivityPub compatible with each other. For example I can use Friendica and comment or retrweet posts from Mastodon and vise versa. > if I am on one mastodon site, I can not just retweet that post, I have to go to my server and then cut-and-paste a link to that other site. It was simpler in past versions of Mastodon but they removed that feature for some reason. https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/pull/19306 https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/pull/19306 Previously it was "remote interaction" dialog. Other implementations like Pleroma may have kept it. > no quote tweeting, important for vitality. Twitter can not do like this https://telegra.ph/file/9ea3a6f4f0e3a5c5fa06e.png https://telegra.ph/file/9ea3a6f4f0e3a5c5fa06e.png
- jeromegv 3y ago
  For a lot of us the lack of ranked AI managed feed is the feature. I was using Tweetbot on Twitter for that exact reason. Most people consume Toots by going through their feed, retweeting is just a button away, just like on Twitter. Quote tweet is definitely lacking, and thankfully is coming up soon according to their CEO and lead developer. And yes, poor discovery, the search is awful. It's quite a lot better with hashtags and following hashtags in your feed (great feature IMO), but they need to work on that. Personally I find that while there are flaws, they are smaller than having to endure the amount of spam, ads and garbage I see on twitter. Conversations with people are good and insightful. It's just better for my mental health as well, less of AI generated outrage takes showing up.
- icehawk 3y ago
  (4) and most importantly, no ranked/AI-managed feed. Thus it is filled with noise. If you're in control of your feed, and your feed is filled with noise, I wouldn't call that a Mastodon issue.
DANmode 3y ago
> We just want reddit without the bullshit. Rhetorically: What are you willing to do for it? How are you willing to change? The way reddit was offered in its early days was a bait and switch. It wasn't real.
- silisili 3y ago
  I mean, Voat was exactly that. The problem was they did nothing to moderate at all, so every sub was basically stormfront. I'm ok with those people existing and even having their own lil sub, but not so much that if I'm just looking for news I get peppered with memes about jews being evil.
  - monetus 3y ago
    - Started out as peppered and then became nothing but, like an example of the "neonazis taking over a bar" story. It drove me into infrequently, and then never using it. The site's operators seemed to be on board with that though from what I remember.
- yreg 3y ago
  It was real for many years. I doubt Aaron, kn0thing or even Huffman at the time considered it a bait with a long term plan to get to the current state.
- rjh29 3y ago
  I'm willing to donate to a site that offers the best parts of reddit with a fast, clean and usable interface. That might be lobste.rs in a few years. Reddit was good for like 6-7 years (I was a member back when there was only one 'subreddit'). Turning point was the redesign into a web 3.0 mess that broke stuff like 'find in page' or the back button. Then the gradual monetization, app prompts and SEO that made the side less and less usable. I don't know if it was profitable, but there are definitely alternate paths they could have taken rather than completely gutting and selling out the site for maximum engagement and user figures.
- Atlas667 3y ago
  It takes a person with an understanding of capitalist frameworks to notice that real user serving communities cannot truly exist for long inside a market. Everything turns to crap when developed for profits. This happens all the time but no one realizes it because we're accustomed to think about the symptoms and not the sickness. "Micro-transactions this", "ads that", "censorship this", "privacy that", when in reality its just the natural development of platforms under capitalism.
goplayoutside 3y ago
Maybe the modest technical hurdles are a feature, not a bug. From the (currently) top comment in the lemmy post you linked[1], which relates a story about alt.sysadmin.recovery in the 70's/80's: >Which brings me back to my point. A few hoops to jump through and a few initial challenges to adoption can go a long way as a filter for who can show up and interact. Of course we would want Lemmy to be welcoming to anyone who will make the community better, brighter, more fun, and more useful… But we can take our time cracking open the floodgates. Maybe that’s for the best. 1. https://lemmy.ml/comment/460031 https://lemmy.ml/comment/460031
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- imachine1980_ 3y ago
  The problem is writers who don't focus In tech probably won't be in the app, history reddit, manga, bodybuilders are high Quality subrredits that can't translate so easy to lemmy
  - dwayne_dibley 3y ago
    Yup, this is why Facebook groups still exist. My Gran can’t start a sewing subreddit but can click groups on Facebook. This is just the next level of that.
- LordShredda 3y ago
  No one likes secret internet clubs, they're lame and end up as a circlejerk or a hugbox, much like early IRC servers and discord servers now. Opinion: lobste.rs sucks because you need to be one of the chosen people to post there, and you're only chosen if you think like someone already in there. The posts there are very high quality, but it might as well be a hivemind's blog. Why would I read someone else's comments when I could make my own, on a different website with the same links posted? But you don't want to end up like reddit, with their facebook tier front page and repetitive, bot(-like ?) comments. Reddit sucks now is because they let anyone post anything, and the admins want to capture the stream of quick, digital trash coming out of tiktok and the likes. That's what the shareholders want, more users to sell ads. Who cares what the peons babble about, make sure whoever visits the site doesnt have an ad blocker and stick around a long time. Having a small community lets you specialize more and, in my opinion, specializing a website is much healthier. Discussions are much more pleasant when you go to traffic-forum or chair-forum dot com to discuss traffic tech or leather chairs. You go to reddit, or facebook, or whatever, and see mounds of unrelated videos and pictures flooding your screen. The moderators don't do their job because when you allow everything, you only have to do the bare minimum.
sudosysgen 3y ago
Lemmy really isn't slow (though this instance is definitely underspecced for a hug of death), and it isn't difficult to use either. The ease of use point is almost true. For the average user, you're not supposed to be manually subscribing to remote communities. You'd be expected to be exposed to communities you're already federated with and then just click subscribe.
typon 3y ago
> We just want reddit without the bullshit. And who's going to pay for it?
- goplayoutside 3y ago
  I'd be happy to pay $5 a month to a site that essentially "hosts subreddits" for niche communities. I think a lot of other people would, as well. I could spin up a bulletin board on a $5 VPS for a few thousand of my closest internet friends easily enough, but there's something to be gained from a single, well-known site with a well-designed interface (not reddit!), a large existing userbase, and useful discovery tools. I should probably stand up a lemmy instance.
amadeuspagel 3y ago
> slow There's nothing intrinsically slow about this model. There are some reasons a lemmy instance might be slow — like a prejudiced attitude to the best way to monetize such sites and hence not enough money for servers, but there's no intrinstic reason. > difficult to use The link complains about it being hard to follow remote communities. Of course, without federation, there's no way to follow remote communities at all. If you discover a subreddit you like you can't follow it from within HN.
- mattmcknight 3y ago
  But you can't follow anything from within HN. But you can follow a subreddit in a feed reader- even HN. https://www.reddit.com/r/hackernews.rss https://www.reddit.com/r/hackernews.rss
  - amadeuspagel 3y ago
    Same is true for lemmy: https://lemmy.ml/feeds/c/lemmy.xml?sort=Active https://lemmy.ml/feeds/c/lemmy.xml?sort=Active
- vidarh 3y ago
  The "difficulty" here can also be improved significantly in many different ways. E.g. a browser extension that allows auto-filling a form field with webfinger id is all that's needed to build a better flow for a lot of these federated services. There are ways which would work without extensions too. E.g. a DHT mapping <some fingerprint> -> instance url. It doesn't even need to be perfect. Worst case you need to fill in the correct instance hostname.
erikpukinskis 3y ago
> We just want reddit without the bullshit. What is the Reddit bullshit?
- mschuster91 3y ago
  Constant A/B testing, insane issues with the 25 API calls each homepage load makes, stuff is constantly shifting around, it takes ages for feedback even from the mods of popular subs to be implemented, Reddit Corporate seems to be more interested in beancounting than transparency and product development...
- high_priest 3y ago
  By bullshit he means censoring, forced advertising and content filtration which is conducted by the administrators and owners. These things are necessary to run a centralised internet service and some people with idealistic visions are trying to find a more open and inclusive alternative. But we have many examples why this is difficult or even impossible, with examples of Usenet or the direction Mastodon has been taking recently. Cause in reality we want to be steered mindlessly, we want to be fed a consistently emotional and relatable story. It is peaceful and easy. This is where the Web3 Social Media thrive. There is no running away from reddit, facebook, twitter.
  - hutzlibu 3y ago
    "Cause in reality we want to be steered mindlessly" "There is no running away from reddit, facebook, twitter." Maybe speak for yourself? I rather see the problem with money. It costs a lot to develope a stable communication plattform and run it. Decentralizing is even harder to do right. But people expect things to be free on the internet and just working. Those who donate and put in effort are a small minority. So this is why reddit will only be replaced by the next reddit financed by ad tech, that will act exactly the same in a few years. Unless people will start to take the base of their communication and information flow serious. Maybe this is a good start, but lemmy really does not seem to be an adequate technical alternative in its current shape.
scrollaway 3y ago
I don't fully agree with your assessment. While it's true that very few people seem to "want" federation, I think a lot of people want smaller communities. Many pseudo-redditors are only on the site because of its small communities. The niche stuff. What used to be forums dedicated to one craft, which have kind of re-gathered on Reddit because it's easier to just create a micro-community like this than to bother setting up your own forum/instance/whatever. Same reason Facebook groups are popular. But also, smaller communities benefit from a much healthier signal-to-noise ratio. Tildes (https://tildes.net/ https://tildes.net/) for example is invite-only and has remained a healthy, high quality discussion & content platform through the years because of exactly this. HN is also kind of in that boat -- and people tend to complain how the HN community growing degrades the quality. I do see it as well, though the fact it has two full-time paid and incredibly dedicated moderators helps a LOT. I believe the rugged UI also helps.
unethical_ban 3y ago
This has nothing to do with the post.
tensor 3y ago
In addition to the UX of Mastodon/Lemmy, I also think the moderation or lack of it is a major issue. It would be nice if this got more attention, because it's even a weak point of places like reddit. On the plus side, reddit does have some blanket site wide content moderation that targets some of the most egregious and illegal content. I think that's good, and I don't think "leaving it up to individual server admins to blacklist" is sufficient. On the negative side, the way subreddits and mastodon instances are moderated is a huge problem. Being the first to create a community shouldn't necessarily give you 100% control over the content. That sort of thing can be an option, but to me reddit has made it clear that for major and large communities there needs to be some more democratically inspired form of governance. Yes, this is a hugely difficult problem, but unless we want an endless cycle of new sites that become toxic or problematic once they grow to a certain size, it's a problem that needs a lot of attention.
- vintermann 3y ago
  It seems to me that most popular Mastodon/Lemmy instances outlaw more stuff than reddit. How good they are at enforcing it is another matter.
  - tensor 3y ago
    I'm not necessarily looking for more things being outlawed, or less things being outlawed. Rather I'd like to see some system where subgroups can more fairly decide what gets outlawed or allowed, and mechanisms for transparency and accountability of enforcing such rules. It may not matter that much for a sub dedicated to a niche topic, but hopefully its clear that subs that are supposed to represent cities, countries, and similar should somehow managed in a "democratic" like way. There is clear value in the names of these subs. While mastodon doesn't have "subs" per-se, having some sort of moderation that is "democratic" and implemented by a diverse group of people would be good to see. Having each instance owner have ultimate moderation power is not a plus in my book. Why should moderation and choice of content be biased towards those tech savvy enough to setup an instance? That's not what I want in a social media platform.
- jtode 3y ago
Barrin92 3y ago
>We just want reddit without the bullshit as the overused quote goes, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. If you join a platform that's run by a large profit driven entity you're going to get squeezed sooner or later. Another relevant example, Twitch today passed some rather draconic rules on branding and ads run by users. You can say you're okay with the bullshit, but "we just want reddit but without the bad stuff" doesn't work. The bad stuff is baked in. If you want genuine control you're going to have to do some work.
- dontupvoteme 3y ago
  >Another relevant example, Twitch today passed some rather draconic rules on branding and ads run by users. Users? The user is the one watching. And from what I see Twitch is preventing people on their platform from making it a streaming billboard service. I think this is a broken clock corporate policy. I only watch but one or two people on the platform and they don't really do ads, but something has to keep the cancerous adtech game in check. Hopefully google bans sponsorships next.
  - Barrin92 3y ago
    This isn't keeping ad-tech in check. Twitch itself is an advertisement business. They continuously have increased the amount of ads they run. (for people who don't know what this is about, twitch has introduced rules that keep banners on streams to 3% of the screen size and banned 'burned-in', that is independent ads run by creators) The entire point of this is the same as Reddit's, to take away direct revenue agreements between creators and third parties, so they can take a cut on every transaction made. How can anyone on earth hope that internet monopolists ban independent revenue channels for content creators? Google is also an advertisement business. They will never ban sponsorships, they will just force everyone to use their APIs. There is no need for anyone to moderate this for the very simple reason that you, as the watcher, can simply turn the stream off if you don't like what the streamer shows you.
    - dontupvoteme 3y ago
PhilipRoman 3y ago
Forgive my arrogance but how is it physically possible for Lemmy to be slow? It has 3.3k monthly users, you can probably fit the entire lemmyverse on a $10 vps.
- tetris11 3y ago
  https://lemmy.ml/comment/453356 https://lemmy.ml/comment/453356 Also they're holding everything in a single large SQL database which doesn't seem to scale great, and could do well to have some kind of batch queuing process (with some redis magic?) to handle multiple large requests
timeon 3y ago
> slow Not sure if this is problem since Reddit's UI is massively laggin.
- yreg 3y ago
  Not old reddit, which is certainly included in "reddit without all the bullshit".
- llbeansandrice 3y ago
  I find old.reddit.com with RES to be one of the snappiest websites I regularly use and the 3rd party app I use (Apollo) is also a dream to use.
jamesdwilson 3y ago
Nobody wants it SO MUCH that Reddit has banned people trying to get people to go there.
cryptoegorophy 3y ago
you hit the nail on the spot. I tried to register, I didn't get how it works and I consider myself somewhat tech savvy. Closed and never opened again. Twitter is so much easier to use and it is all in one place instead of trying to find servers(?) on mastodon.
- zilti 3y ago
  So clicking a registration button and filling out username and password is too challenging for you? How on earth did you manage to set up an email account, lot alone register on here?
RobotToaster 3y ago
I see the netsplit issue caused by server level blocking to be the biggest issue with lemmy/mastodon. Choosing a server wouldn't be a huge issue if you knew for certain you could still access the posts/content on any other server. Currently what you can access depends entirely on the whims of your (and their) local BOFH.
- godshatter 3y ago
  This is a problem. I can understand having server standards for groups operating there, but banning connections to other servers seems over the top. I can block users that I don't want to listen to in a group as it is. The choice should be individual, I don't want them making choices for me of who I should or should not interact with.
a_random_canuck 3y ago
There's also the fact that it's filled with genocide-denying CCP-apologists, communists, etc. A bit of an ideological cesspool...
badsectoracula 3y ago
> Mastodon is down over 1 million users since last December, and I bet that's related to how difficult it is to sign up and to find other users on the platform. How is it difficult to sign up? I signed up to mastodon.gamedev.place because i learned about it from someone else and the process took me a few minutes. After that i was able to follow people pretty much the same way as in Twitter and some of them are from other instances. IMO the main reason Mastodon doesn't have as many users is because in practice there isn't much of a reason to switch to Mastodon when Twitter does the work good enough.
uncletammy 3y ago
> Nobody wants a federated, slow, difficult to use version of reddit. Nobody wants to choose a server. I want this. I want this because it's a sustainable way to have Reddit without the ads. The bad UX is an acceptable tradeoff for a platform that doesn't go to shit.
triplepoint217 3y ago
We're still pretty alpha, but Sift is aiming to hit what you are looking for https://sift.quest/about https://sift.quest/about We ended up launching sooner than we really planned after a reddit post last friday got more attention than we expected, so things are not polished and we are missing features, but we are developing quickly. We're actually targeting something a bit different than reddit longer term with a more tag based curation system and a (medium term) reputation graph that we are hoping will give some new solutions to seeing things that are more trustworthy/relevant (helping with the eternal September problem, shills, and whatnot). Check us out and tell us about post something good, let us know if you have requests or comments, we're actively integrating things people ask us for as fast as we can.
- goplayoutside 3y ago
  Looks good so far. Will you be adding comments sections for each post? Inline previews of the links, and usernames on each post, would be helpful. What is the ellipsis to the right of each post for? It doesn't seem to do anything. What is the integer to the left of each post? They don't seem to be in any apparent order. I actually rather like the interface. I feel like a lack of shininess and rounded corners keeps away the 'unwashed masses' that tend to ruin forums. A different background color would be an improvement, however.
  - triplepoint217 3y ago
    Thanks the feedback! * Yes, we are working on comments sections for posts. Hoping to deploy this week. * Usernames on posts are coming soon. They interact a bit with some things we are doing differently at Sift, so there's some complexity: * Sift tries not to to show you duplicates (the same url maps to the same node in our database for all submissions), and we don't actually privileged "submission" relative to any other person saying it is good. * We trying out a different privacy model where posts don't have to be publicly attributed. Right now we are effectively in the everything is anonymous world, we will be adding the option for public attribution (hopefully this week, maybe next) and at that point we will begin showing usernames of people who are willing to be shown. * I've deleted the ellipsis. It was an artifact of us trying to communicate that you can click on posts to expand ui interactions, that looks like it was doing more harm than good. * The integers next to the post are a score. * They should be in descending order in the Explore tab. * In the library tab things are time ordered by when you saved/preferenced them * in the tag tab things are time ordered by their first submission. We'll add more sorting options eventually but it's further down the roadmap. If given that understanding things still look out of order, that's probably a bug, please report it with the feedback button (which captures information about what you are seeing). We've gotten a lot of feedback on reddit from people wanting a more modern interface, so we're going to have to make someone unhappy. We're planning on integrating tailwind css soon and doing a bit of ui uplift. However, we're also racing forward on implementing our trust/reputation/"probability that this user will want to see that user's stuff" model that we are really hoping will allow you to keep your good community even as 'unwashed masses' descend. We'll likely post more about that before too long on sift and/or https://www.reddit.com/r/siftquest/ https://www.reddit.com/r/siftquest/
Ferkv 3y ago
> Nobody wants to choose a server. We just want reddit without the bullshit. * If you choose reddit you are choosing reddit's server. * If you choose ycombinator, you are choosing ycombinator's server. * If you choose facebook, you are choosing facebook's server. Just because those are not federated doesn't mean the user doesn't have to deal with the bullshit of having to choose to create and manage an account in one (or more) of them. Or possibly having to look for other alternatives (like many are doing now apparently). You can just enter lemmy.ml or mastodon.social in the browser, press "create an account" in each of them and you'd never even need to know or care whether those federate among themselves or not. Federation is optional from a user perspective. You could still have separate accounts in beehaw.org, mastodon.org.uk, veganism.social and mastodon.social if you wanted. You are not forced to look for content outside your instance. The same as you can have an account in reddit, another one in facebook and another one in ycombinator without ever mixing them up. The difference is that in the fediverse you can merge them if you want to. Even if all new users exclusively used mastodon.social resulting in more de-facto centralization, I still don't think that's a big deal, personally. Just the fact that federation is possible at all as an option still provides more software freedom than Twitter, even if you don't care for federation or even know what it is. Do you think that email being federated makes it less attractive for the average user? do they find it more complicated? ...I don't think the average user cares at all, all they know is they have a gmail or hotmail account.
- Gareth321 3y ago
  All of this is technically correct, but it's communicated really badly to the end user. If there is to be any success for Lemmy in the wake of Reddit shooting itself in the foot, it needs to make the federation part completely invisible and transparent, unless someone intentionally seeks it out. join-lemmy.org makes me choose from a list of servers before I can sign up (https://join-lemmy.org/instances https://join-lemmy.org/instances). Without having a really solid understanding of how and why I need to choose a server, I'd be surprised if the conversion rate is higher than 5%. Lemmy.ml is the largest instance, but it's already straining under the weight of a few thousand users (https://lemmy.ml/post/1147770?scrollToComments=true https://lemmy.ml/post/1147770?scrollToComments=true). I think what is needed now is someone with a big budget to purchase some server space and delete any mention of federation from the UX. It's just unclear how they will recoup their investment.

by rjh29 3y ago

derbOac 3y ago

I don't know. I'm skeptical about lemmy taking off but for a different reason — there's a sort of chicken and egg problem with content. It's tough to attract users without attractive users. Bluesky has tried to address that with selective invites and whether or not it happens organically with lemmy who knows. Using lemmy though, it seems a lot more intuitive to me than mastodon. I can find topic communities on other servers easily, and the community-server match issue seems like a better fit than mastodon in some ways. Mastodon never has quite clicked with me, but lemmy does, maybe even more so than reddit itself. The limits to me using lemmy right now are content not ux. Mostly I use reddit for relatively obscure topics. But already I'm seeing cat photos of the sort I'd see on the main page of reddit so maybe it's a time thing.

freediverx 3y ago

> Nobody wants a federated, slow, difficult to use version of reddit Nobody wants a first party Reddit app with a terrible user interface, algorithmic timelines, and obnoxious advertising.

maltfield 3y ago

Because Lemmy is federated, it may be difficult for reddit users migrating to lemmy to find their subreddits. Here's a guide to help reddit users find popular lemmy communities and subscribe to them across different instances * https://tech.michaelaltfield.net/2023/06/11/lemmy-migration-find-subreddits-communities/ https://tech.michaelaltfield.net/2023/06/11/lemmy-migration-...

fortuna86 3y ago

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_8j50 3y ago

yuck39 3y ago

Exactly. I always thought Mastadon could have been so much more successful if they had just proxied cached versions of the most popular instances through a single larger server. Sure it would give Mastadon the power to pick and choose who it wants to host, but if you want to go join a different instance you are more than welcome to. It would just substantially streamline the process for your mainstream user.

sph 3y ago
The problem with Mastodon is that some people still don't know how to spell it properly. It's not rocket science.
- Macha 3y ago
  Not so sure about that, people unable to spell YouTube seemed to do more harm to Universal Tubing who owned utube.com than it did YouTube. If you hadn't heard of them before, how many ts in Twitter? Is TikTok spelt with the letter c?
  - bamfly 3y ago
    People who've seen YouTube written down a couple times tend not to get it wrong. Twitter is a common dictionary word and I'd bet had a pretty low misspelling rate, if you'd asked people to spell it before the service Twitter even existed. TikTok, I think most people get after seeing it a few times, at worst. Mastodon? It's a dictionary word, so it as that going for it—and yet, people see it a hundred times and still often misspell it. The pronunciation's just a bit too far from the spelling, at least in American English. Most folks say it as if it were spelt "mastadon", especially if they're not trying to enunciate carefully & precisely and (perhaps) don't know the correct spelling. (I'm not weighing in on whether that's some kind of serious problem for Mastodon, but I do think it's worse than all your other examples, as far as likelihood of misspelling even after significant exposure—then again, web search smooths over most of that, for anything sufficiently popular)
- tester457 3y ago
  The name okay. The problem is the friction new users have understanding and joing the platform.

EamonnMR 3y ago

I've had a better time on Mastodon than I ever did on Twitter actually finding people to talk to.

valine 3y ago
The problem isn’t the platform, it’s the people. If mastodon got as popular as twitter the level of discourse would fall to the same level.
- mschuster91 3y ago
  Popularity in itself is no problem for any platform, as long as it manages to scale up moderation together with growth. CSAM spreaders and ordinary spammers are the least of the worries thanks to AI and other automated detection systems these days, but warez/moviez are harder due to the DMCA and European fair use laws (e.g. German §51/51a UrhG), and stuff that veers into anything politics absolutely needs human intervention. HN is pretty decent at that, despite it (IIRC) being only Dan (u/dang) doing the moderation work. (Maybe it helps that both the HN tech and the general community itself don't make it easy to post dank memes like on the other social networks)

tayo42 3y ago

do a lot of people even want more social media and internet communities? i wasted an embarrassing amount of time on reddit in hind sight. this all reminds me of when i finally burnt out on wow. i quit, sold my account (at the end of wotlk, i think wow declined after that too?) and didn't play video games for years after. personally i feel the same way about reddit, do i really want this all again in my life? idk, im not searching for an alternative though.

basch 3y ago
A better way forward is to really take the design back to primitives. Reddit/NH/Twitter/Youtube/Google all default to favoring freshness. I believe this design assumption to be a mistake. A lot of what gets posted would be better served by some hybrid of a wiki+chatroom/forum. For example, Ill just pick a thread that gets posted every week. In the what else will I like subreddit, there is constantly a "post your best mindfuck movies". That kind of question and answer is best served by some kind of static wiki like page that allows voting on individual database entries. It is better served by someone bumping the topic, maybe creating a new chatroom for the day, having the best parts of the chat post to the forum, for archival and historical purposes. As new movies come out, they can be added to the list. Maybe filters exist that allow you to show the results only showing votes from the last year, to help rank newer entries against historical ones. In a TV/Speaker/Hometheater subreddit, constantly "what's best" belongs in the wiki. But the wiki is some singular document fairly separate from the discussion pages. Wiki page components dont rearrange by voting. The wiki is fairly well hidden in the interface. When some kind of funny video gets reposted, it shouldnt start a new conversation. The comments page needs a better design to combine/isolate old comments, with today's discussion. tldr: reddit, like a lot of social media, has a deduplication problem, that they choose to ignore in favor of focusing on "engagement" where engagement is just repetition and regurgitation. social media needs to rediscover bumping instead of reposting.
- goplayoutside 3y ago
  You might like kbin.social and/or aether.app, both of which offer different takes on the concept of federated link aggregators.

ilrwbwrkhv 3y ago

It's like your local freemason lodge. The conversations will be much more interesting but they will never be as popular as meetup.

PrimeMcFly 3y ago
I dunno. I'd be pretty skeptical the conversations of some middle aged men would be that interesting at their LARP meetup.

bhouston 3y ago

Mastodon's issues are: (1) poor discovery (2) if I am on one mastodon site, I can not just retweet that post, I have to go to my server and then cut-and-paste a link to that other site. (3) no quote tweeting, important for vitality. (4) and most importantly, no ranked/AI-managed feed. Thus it is filled with noise. In many ways, Mastodon is a purposely janked product because people don't want to make things easy to go viral. But that reduces engagement and interest.

Nasreddin_Hodja 3y ago
> Mastodon's issues are: Fediverse isn't just Mastodon. There are other implementations of ActivityPub compatible with each other. For example I can use Friendica and comment or retrweet posts from Mastodon and vise versa. > if I am on one mastodon site, I can not just retweet that post, I have to go to my server and then cut-and-paste a link to that other site. It was simpler in past versions of Mastodon but they removed that feature for some reason. https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/pull/19306 https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/pull/19306 Previously it was "remote interaction" dialog. Other implementations like Pleroma may have kept it. > no quote tweeting, important for vitality. Twitter can not do like this https://telegra.ph/file/9ea3a6f4f0e3a5c5fa06e.png https://telegra.ph/file/9ea3a6f4f0e3a5c5fa06e.png
jeromegv 3y ago
For a lot of us the lack of ranked AI managed feed is the feature. I was using Tweetbot on Twitter for that exact reason. Most people consume Toots by going through their feed, retweeting is just a button away, just like on Twitter. Quote tweet is definitely lacking, and thankfully is coming up soon according to their CEO and lead developer. And yes, poor discovery, the search is awful. It's quite a lot better with hashtags and following hashtags in your feed (great feature IMO), but they need to work on that. Personally I find that while there are flaws, they are smaller than having to endure the amount of spam, ads and garbage I see on twitter. Conversations with people are good and insightful. It's just better for my mental health as well, less of AI generated outrage takes showing up.
icehawk 3y ago
(4) and most importantly, no ranked/AI-managed feed. Thus it is filled with noise. If you're in control of your feed, and your feed is filled with noise, I wouldn't call that a Mastodon issue.

DANmode 3y ago

> We just want reddit without the bullshit. Rhetorically: What are you willing to do for it? How are you willing to change? The way reddit was offered in its early days was a bait and switch. It wasn't real.

silisili 3y ago
I mean, Voat was exactly that. The problem was they did nothing to moderate at all, so every sub was basically stormfront. I'm ok with those people existing and even having their own lil sub, but not so much that if I'm just looking for news I get peppered with memes about jews being evil.
- monetus 3y ago
  - Started out as peppered and then became nothing but, like an example of the "neonazis taking over a bar" story. It drove me into infrequently, and then never using it. The site's operators seemed to be on board with that though from what I remember.
yreg 3y ago
It was real for many years. I doubt Aaron, kn0thing or even Huffman at the time considered it a bait with a long term plan to get to the current state.
rjh29 3y ago
I'm willing to donate to a site that offers the best parts of reddit with a fast, clean and usable interface. That might be lobste.rs in a few years. Reddit was good for like 6-7 years (I was a member back when there was only one 'subreddit'). Turning point was the redesign into a web 3.0 mess that broke stuff like 'find in page' or the back button. Then the gradual monetization, app prompts and SEO that made the side less and less usable. I don't know if it was profitable, but there are definitely alternate paths they could have taken rather than completely gutting and selling out the site for maximum engagement and user figures.
Atlas667 3y ago
It takes a person with an understanding of capitalist frameworks to notice that real user serving communities cannot truly exist for long inside a market. Everything turns to crap when developed for profits. This happens all the time but no one realizes it because we're accustomed to think about the symptoms and not the sickness. "Micro-transactions this", "ads that", "censorship this", "privacy that", when in reality its just the natural development of platforms under capitalism.

goplayoutside 3y ago

Maybe the modest technical hurdles are a feature, not a bug. From the (currently) top comment in the lemmy post you linked[1], which relates a story about alt.sysadmin.recovery in the 70's/80's: >Which brings me back to my point. A few hoops to jump through and a few initial challenges to adoption can go a long way as a filter for who can show up and interact. Of course we would want Lemmy to be welcoming to anyone who will make the community better, brighter, more fun, and more useful… But we can take our time cracking open the floodgates. Maybe that’s for the best. 1. https://lemmy.ml/comment/460031 https://lemmy.ml/comment/460031

deleted 3y ago
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imachine1980_ 3y ago
The problem is writers who don't focus In tech probably won't be in the app, history reddit, manga, bodybuilders are high Quality subrredits that can't translate so easy to lemmy
- dwayne_dibley 3y ago
  Yup, this is why Facebook groups still exist. My Gran can’t start a sewing subreddit but can click groups on Facebook. This is just the next level of that.
LordShredda 3y ago
No one likes secret internet clubs, they're lame and end up as a circlejerk or a hugbox, much like early IRC servers and discord servers now. Opinion: lobste.rs sucks because you need to be one of the chosen people to post there, and you're only chosen if you think like someone already in there. The posts there are very high quality, but it might as well be a hivemind's blog. Why would I read someone else's comments when I could make my own, on a different website with the same links posted? But you don't want to end up like reddit, with their facebook tier front page and repetitive, bot(-like ?) comments. Reddit sucks now is because they let anyone post anything, and the admins want to capture the stream of quick, digital trash coming out of tiktok and the likes. That's what the shareholders want, more users to sell ads. Who cares what the peons babble about, make sure whoever visits the site doesnt have an ad blocker and stick around a long time. Having a small community lets you specialize more and, in my opinion, specializing a website is much healthier. Discussions are much more pleasant when you go to traffic-forum or chair-forum dot com to discuss traffic tech or leather chairs. You go to reddit, or facebook, or whatever, and see mounds of unrelated videos and pictures flooding your screen. The moderators don't do their job because when you allow everything, you only have to do the bare minimum.

sudosysgen 3y ago

Lemmy really isn't slow (though this instance is definitely underspecced for a hug of death), and it isn't difficult to use either. The ease of use point is almost true. For the average user, you're not supposed to be manually subscribing to remote communities. You'd be expected to be exposed to communities you're already federated with and then just click subscribe.

typon 3y ago

> We just want reddit without the bullshit. And who's going to pay for it?

goplayoutside 3y ago
I'd be happy to pay $5 a month to a site that essentially "hosts subreddits" for niche communities. I think a lot of other people would, as well. I could spin up a bulletin board on a $5 VPS for a few thousand of my closest internet friends easily enough, but there's something to be gained from a single, well-known site with a well-designed interface (not reddit!), a large existing userbase, and useful discovery tools. I should probably stand up a lemmy instance.

amadeuspagel 3y ago

> slow There's nothing intrinsically slow about this model. There are some reasons a lemmy instance might be slow — like a prejudiced attitude to the best way to monetize such sites and hence not enough money for servers, but there's no intrinstic reason. > difficult to use The link complains about it being hard to follow remote communities. Of course, without federation, there's no way to follow remote communities at all. If you discover a subreddit you like you can't follow it from within HN.

mattmcknight 3y ago
But you can't follow anything from within HN. But you can follow a subreddit in a feed reader- even HN. https://www.reddit.com/r/hackernews.rss https://www.reddit.com/r/hackernews.rss
- amadeuspagel 3y ago
  Same is true for lemmy: https://lemmy.ml/feeds/c/lemmy.xml?sort=Active https://lemmy.ml/feeds/c/lemmy.xml?sort=Active
vidarh 3y ago
The "difficulty" here can also be improved significantly in many different ways. E.g. a browser extension that allows auto-filling a form field with webfinger id is all that's needed to build a better flow for a lot of these federated services. There are ways which would work without extensions too. E.g. a DHT mapping <some fingerprint> -> instance url. It doesn't even need to be perfect. Worst case you need to fill in the correct instance hostname.

erikpukinskis 3y ago

> We just want reddit without the bullshit. What is the Reddit bullshit?

mschuster91 3y ago
Constant A/B testing, insane issues with the 25 API calls each homepage load makes, stuff is constantly shifting around, it takes ages for feedback even from the mods of popular subs to be implemented, Reddit Corporate seems to be more interested in beancounting than transparency and product development...
high_priest 3y ago
By bullshit he means censoring, forced advertising and content filtration which is conducted by the administrators and owners. These things are necessary to run a centralised internet service and some people with idealistic visions are trying to find a more open and inclusive alternative. But we have many examples why this is difficult or even impossible, with examples of Usenet or the direction Mastodon has been taking recently. Cause in reality we want to be steered mindlessly, we want to be fed a consistently emotional and relatable story. It is peaceful and easy. This is where the Web3 Social Media thrive. There is no running away from reddit, facebook, twitter.
- hutzlibu 3y ago
  "Cause in reality we want to be steered mindlessly" "There is no running away from reddit, facebook, twitter." Maybe speak for yourself? I rather see the problem with money. It costs a lot to develope a stable communication plattform and run it. Decentralizing is even harder to do right. But people expect things to be free on the internet and just working. Those who donate and put in effort are a small minority. So this is why reddit will only be replaced by the next reddit financed by ad tech, that will act exactly the same in a few years. Unless people will start to take the base of their communication and information flow serious. Maybe this is a good start, but lemmy really does not seem to be an adequate technical alternative in its current shape.

scrollaway 3y ago

I don't fully agree with your assessment. While it's true that very few people seem to "want" federation, I think a lot of people want smaller communities. Many pseudo-redditors are only on the site because of its small communities. The niche stuff. What used to be forums dedicated to one craft, which have kind of re-gathered on Reddit because it's easier to just create a micro-community like this than to bother setting up your own forum/instance/whatever. Same reason Facebook groups are popular. But also, smaller communities benefit from a much healthier signal-to-noise ratio. Tildes (https://tildes.net/ https://tildes.net/) for example is invite-only and has remained a healthy, high quality discussion & content platform through the years because of exactly this. HN is also kind of in that boat -- and people tend to complain how the HN community growing degrades the quality. I do see it as well, though the fact it has two full-time paid and incredibly dedicated moderators helps a LOT. I believe the rugged UI also helps.

unethical_ban 3y ago

This has nothing to do with the post.

tensor 3y ago

In addition to the UX of Mastodon/Lemmy, I also think the moderation or lack of it is a major issue. It would be nice if this got more attention, because it's even a weak point of places like reddit. On the plus side, reddit does have some blanket site wide content moderation that targets some of the most egregious and illegal content. I think that's good, and I don't think "leaving it up to individual server admins to blacklist" is sufficient. On the negative side, the way subreddits and mastodon instances are moderated is a huge problem. Being the first to create a community shouldn't necessarily give you 100% control over the content. That sort of thing can be an option, but to me reddit has made it clear that for major and large communities there needs to be some more democratically inspired form of governance. Yes, this is a hugely difficult problem, but unless we want an endless cycle of new sites that become toxic or problematic once they grow to a certain size, it's a problem that needs a lot of attention.

vintermann 3y ago
It seems to me that most popular Mastodon/Lemmy instances outlaw more stuff than reddit. How good they are at enforcing it is another matter.
- tensor 3y ago
  I'm not necessarily looking for more things being outlawed, or less things being outlawed. Rather I'd like to see some system where subgroups can more fairly decide what gets outlawed or allowed, and mechanisms for transparency and accountability of enforcing such rules. It may not matter that much for a sub dedicated to a niche topic, but hopefully its clear that subs that are supposed to represent cities, countries, and similar should somehow managed in a "democratic" like way. There is clear value in the names of these subs. While mastodon doesn't have "subs" per-se, having some sort of moderation that is "democratic" and implemented by a diverse group of people would be good to see. Having each instance owner have ultimate moderation power is not a plus in my book. Why should moderation and choice of content be biased towards those tech savvy enough to setup an instance? That's not what I want in a social media platform.
jtode 3y ago

Barrin92 3y ago

>We just want reddit without the bullshit as the overused quote goes, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. If you join a platform that's run by a large profit driven entity you're going to get squeezed sooner or later. Another relevant example, Twitch today passed some rather draconic rules on branding and ads run by users. You can say you're okay with the bullshit, but "we just want reddit but without the bad stuff" doesn't work. The bad stuff is baked in. If you want genuine control you're going to have to do some work.

dontupvoteme 3y ago
>Another relevant example, Twitch today passed some rather draconic rules on branding and ads run by users. Users? The user is the one watching. And from what I see Twitch is preventing people on their platform from making it a streaming billboard service. I think this is a broken clock corporate policy. I only watch but one or two people on the platform and they don't really do ads, but something has to keep the cancerous adtech game in check. Hopefully google bans sponsorships next.
- Barrin92 3y ago
  This isn't keeping ad-tech in check. Twitch itself is an advertisement business. They continuously have increased the amount of ads they run. (for people who don't know what this is about, twitch has introduced rules that keep banners on streams to 3% of the screen size and banned 'burned-in', that is independent ads run by creators) The entire point of this is the same as Reddit's, to take away direct revenue agreements between creators and third parties, so they can take a cut on every transaction made. How can anyone on earth hope that internet monopolists ban independent revenue channels for content creators? Google is also an advertisement business. They will never ban sponsorships, they will just force everyone to use their APIs. There is no need for anyone to moderate this for the very simple reason that you, as the watcher, can simply turn the stream off if you don't like what the streamer shows you.
  - dontupvoteme 3y ago

PhilipRoman 3y ago

Forgive my arrogance but how is it physically possible for Lemmy to be slow? It has 3.3k monthly users, you can probably fit the entire lemmyverse on a $10 vps.

tetris11 3y ago
https://lemmy.ml/comment/453356 https://lemmy.ml/comment/453356 Also they're holding everything in a single large SQL database which doesn't seem to scale great, and could do well to have some kind of batch queuing process (with some redis magic?) to handle multiple large requests

timeon 3y ago

> slow Not sure if this is problem since Reddit's UI is massively laggin.

yreg 3y ago
Not old reddit, which is certainly included in "reddit without all the bullshit".
llbeansandrice 3y ago
I find old.reddit.com with RES to be one of the snappiest websites I regularly use and the 3rd party app I use (Apollo) is also a dream to use.

jamesdwilson 3y ago

Nobody wants it SO MUCH that Reddit has banned people trying to get people to go there.

cryptoegorophy 3y ago

you hit the nail on the spot. I tried to register, I didn't get how it works and I consider myself somewhat tech savvy. Closed and never opened again. Twitter is so much easier to use and it is all in one place instead of trying to find servers(?) on mastodon.

zilti 3y ago
So clicking a registration button and filling out username and password is too challenging for you? How on earth did you manage to set up an email account, lot alone register on here?

RobotToaster 3y ago

I see the netsplit issue caused by server level blocking to be the biggest issue with lemmy/mastodon. Choosing a server wouldn't be a huge issue if you knew for certain you could still access the posts/content on any other server. Currently what you can access depends entirely on the whims of your (and their) local BOFH.

godshatter 3y ago
This is a problem. I can understand having server standards for groups operating there, but banning connections to other servers seems over the top. I can block users that I don't want to listen to in a group as it is. The choice should be individual, I don't want them making choices for me of who I should or should not interact with.

a_random_canuck 3y ago

There's also the fact that it's filled with genocide-denying CCP-apologists, communists, etc. A bit of an ideological cesspool...

badsectoracula 3y ago

> Mastodon is down over 1 million users since last December, and I bet that's related to how difficult it is to sign up and to find other users on the platform. How is it difficult to sign up? I signed up to mastodon.gamedev.place because i learned about it from someone else and the process took me a few minutes. After that i was able to follow people pretty much the same way as in Twitter and some of them are from other instances. IMO the main reason Mastodon doesn't have as many users is because in practice there isn't much of a reason to switch to Mastodon when Twitter does the work good enough.

uncletammy 3y ago

> Nobody wants a federated, slow, difficult to use version of reddit. Nobody wants to choose a server. I want this. I want this because it's a sustainable way to have Reddit without the ads. The bad UX is an acceptable tradeoff for a platform that doesn't go to shit.

triplepoint217 3y ago

We're still pretty alpha, but Sift is aiming to hit what you are looking for https://sift.quest/about https://sift.quest/about We ended up launching sooner than we really planned after a reddit post last friday got more attention than we expected, so things are not polished and we are missing features, but we are developing quickly. We're actually targeting something a bit different than reddit longer term with a more tag based curation system and a (medium term) reputation graph that we are hoping will give some new solutions to seeing things that are more trustworthy/relevant (helping with the eternal September problem, shills, and whatnot). Check us out and tell us about post something good, let us know if you have requests or comments, we're actively integrating things people ask us for as fast as we can.

goplayoutside 3y ago
Looks good so far. Will you be adding comments sections for each post? Inline previews of the links, and usernames on each post, would be helpful. What is the ellipsis to the right of each post for? It doesn't seem to do anything. What is the integer to the left of each post? They don't seem to be in any apparent order. I actually rather like the interface. I feel like a lack of shininess and rounded corners keeps away the 'unwashed masses' that tend to ruin forums. A different background color would be an improvement, however.
- triplepoint217 3y ago
  Thanks the feedback! * Yes, we are working on comments sections for posts. Hoping to deploy this week. * Usernames on posts are coming soon. They interact a bit with some things we are doing differently at Sift, so there's some complexity: * Sift tries not to to show you duplicates (the same url maps to the same node in our database for all submissions), and we don't actually privileged "submission" relative to any other person saying it is good. * We trying out a different privacy model where posts don't have to be publicly attributed. Right now we are effectively in the everything is anonymous world, we will be adding the option for public attribution (hopefully this week, maybe next) and at that point we will begin showing usernames of people who are willing to be shown. * I've deleted the ellipsis. It was an artifact of us trying to communicate that you can click on posts to expand ui interactions, that looks like it was doing more harm than good. * The integers next to the post are a score. * They should be in descending order in the Explore tab. * In the library tab things are time ordered by when you saved/preferenced them * in the tag tab things are time ordered by their first submission. We'll add more sorting options eventually but it's further down the roadmap. If given that understanding things still look out of order, that's probably a bug, please report it with the feedback button (which captures information about what you are seeing). We've gotten a lot of feedback on reddit from people wanting a more modern interface, so we're going to have to make someone unhappy. We're planning on integrating tailwind css soon and doing a bit of ui uplift. However, we're also racing forward on implementing our trust/reputation/"probability that this user will want to see that user's stuff" model that we are really hoping will allow you to keep your good community even as 'unwashed masses' descend. We'll likely post more about that before too long on sift and/or https://www.reddit.com/r/siftquest/ https://www.reddit.com/r/siftquest/

Ferkv 3y ago

> Nobody wants to choose a server. We just want reddit without the bullshit. * If you choose reddit you are choosing reddit's server. * If you choose ycombinator, you are choosing ycombinator's server. * If you choose facebook, you are choosing facebook's server. Just because those are not federated doesn't mean the user doesn't have to deal with the bullshit of having to choose to create and manage an account in one (or more) of them. Or possibly having to look for other alternatives (like many are doing now apparently). You can just enter lemmy.ml or mastodon.social in the browser, press "create an account" in each of them and you'd never even need to know or care whether those federate among themselves or not. Federation is optional from a user perspective. You could still have separate accounts in beehaw.org, mastodon.org.uk, veganism.social and mastodon.social if you wanted. You are not forced to look for content outside your instance. The same as you can have an account in reddit, another one in facebook and another one in ycombinator without ever mixing them up. The difference is that in the fediverse you can merge them if you want to. Even if all new users exclusively used mastodon.social resulting in more de-facto centralization, I still don't think that's a big deal, personally. Just the fact that federation is possible at all as an option still provides more software freedom than Twitter, even if you don't care for federation or even know what it is. Do you think that email being federated makes it less attractive for the average user? do they find it more complicated? ...I don't think the average user cares at all, all they know is they have a gmail or hotmail account.

Gareth321 3y ago
All of this is technically correct, but it's communicated really badly to the end user. If there is to be any success for Lemmy in the wake of Reddit shooting itself in the foot, it needs to make the federation part completely invisible and transparent, unless someone intentionally seeks it out. join-lemmy.org makes me choose from a list of servers before I can sign up (https://join-lemmy.org/instances https://join-lemmy.org/instances). Without having a really solid understanding of how and why I need to choose a server, I'd be surprised if the conversion rate is higher than 5%. Lemmy.ml is the largest instance, but it's already straining under the weight of a few thousand users (https://lemmy.ml/post/1147770?scrollToComments=true https://lemmy.ml/post/1147770?scrollToComments=true). I think what is needed now is someone with a big budget to purchase some server space and delete any mention of federation from the UX. It's just unclear how they will recoup their investment.