4 ms·

One of the interesting thing about the open source federated alternatives (like Lemmy) is that each instance can run their own version of the UI. So even if the

One of the interesting thing about the open source federated alternatives (like Lemmy) is that each instance can run their own version of the UI. So even if the maintainers decide to completely redesign everything, nothing is stopping instances from staying on the old design forever.

esskay 3y ago
The only major downside (and the one that will ensure Lemmy doesn't gain any significant traction after this) is that its incredibly underdeveloped and nowhere near as close to being able to replace Reddit as Mastedon was for Twitter.
- politelemon 3y ago
  Isn't there also the issue of federation itself, if users have to understand federation they'll just stick to regular Reddit. Going by the principle of "don't make me think", that is
  - sunaurus 3y ago
    In my experience, people understand federation quite easily if you just use the e-mail analogue. Even completely non-technical folks understand that regardless of whether they are on Gmail or Outlook or iCloud mail, they can send e-mail to users of other platforms.
    - Gareth321 3y ago
      IMHO the federation aspect needs to be completely hidden from users unless they go out of their way to search for it. 99% of users don’t care about it, and offering instance options at signup must be killing conversion. As with all FOSS projects, it’s built by developers, for developers. The project badly needs a UX person streamline things.
    - goykasi 3y ago
      But they dont care about how email works. Type 'mom' in to, type message, hit send, call mom to let her know you sent an email. Same with reddit/others. Most users dont care about how it works or what makes it special or what the tech stack is. They want content: fast, easy, not crashing and in one spot.
    - esskay 3y ago
      The email analogue doesn't really work for your every day person. They dont know, or even want to know how it works. When people visit a Mastedon site and see something like this its an instant turn off: > mastodon.social is part of the decentralized social network powered by Mastodon. Nobody cares, or wants to care that its decentralized. They just want a social network. When you've got to screw around with 'picking a site' to sign up on its hassle. When you've got to mess around to find something because its on a different node, its a hassle. As someone else said, they need to shut up and stop the key point being that its a fediverse - the average user has no idea what that means, nor should they need to. There's also the woefully underdeveloped user experience aspect of things, and overexplaining. On the signup page for example you see this: >With an account on this Mastodon server, you'll be able to follow any other person on the network, regardless of where their account is hosted. I dont care. I dont need to know that, if its a given that I can talk to people on other instances then I dont need to be told. It's got a long, long way to go before its even close to gaining critical mass.
- Root_Denied 3y ago
  I would agree that that's currently true, however now there's suddenly a lot of pressure to get a viable alternative up and running at the scale necessary to absorb a critical mass of redditors. At the time when reddit absorbed digg users after the redesign it had a fair amount of downtime as part of its growing pains, I'd expect to see the same for all the proposed alternatives in the next few months. With how thoroughly reddit is screwing the pooch here though I think it's a matter of if and not when.
  - dredmorbius 3y ago
    Having been through a few large community migrations ... sudden pressure is a very poor stimulus for an effective transition. Good and viable platforms tend to already exist and be highly stable. What I witnessed most especially as Google+ shut down is that a number of options were floated and promoted. Some were largely vapourware (e.g., TBL's Solid), there were any number of opportunistic sites which emerged, and often fringe and distinctly problematic services (e.g., MeWe) were strongly advocated by a small but vocal contingent. What is most effective is to plan ahead, communicate clearly, maintain a diverse set of online presences, and to spec out possible migrations in detail. If subreddits started making such plans, their bargaining power over Reddit would be much, much stronger. For online presence, major online services (FB, Twitter, Instagram, and these days probably TikTok etc.), a dedicated and fully-controlled website, and an email list (or lists) would be a very good starting point. Good discussion sites are surprisingly difficult to find, and the basic options are fairly thin pickings. Old-school forums (e.g., phpBB), blogs (Wordpress, Dreamwidth, Drupal), and several of the federated platforms are probably the strongest options. I've helped curate a selection here: <https://social.antefriguserat.de/index.php/Platforms_and_Sites https://social.antefriguserat.de/index.php/Platforms_and_Sit...> Attempting to migrate to a not-yet-developed / early-beta project ... tends not to go very well.
- dredmorbius 3y ago
  Mastodon grew from earlier tools (ActivityPub, GNU Social, StatusNet) dating to the early aughts. I'd joined in 2016, kicked tyres for a bit, and increased my own usage around 2018. By the time Twitter's October Revolution arrived in 2022, the platform was sufficiently well-developed to both accommodate a substantial new influx and appeal to at least some of those new participants. And Mastodon and the Fediverse had seen previous waves of adoption, often led by drama, dissatisfaction, or shutdowns at or of other networks (Twitter, Facebook, Google+, etc.). What tends to occur is that systems evolve and develop over time, as do the communities making use of them. It's less that there's One Big Event than there are a succession of smaller ones ... until a tipping point is reached. Where the Fediverse is in terms of the long slow implosions of Twitter and Reddit remains to be seen, but don't discount long-simmering discontent and the emergence of new options. As a podcast noted recently: even power users of Twitter refer to the service as "Hellsite", and that's a very unstable situation. People remain out of inertia and lack of alternatives, not from some deep and abiding love of the service. Reddit increasingly seems to be in a similar place.
progval 3y ago
I run a Mastodon instance. I strongly dislike the v4 redesign, so I stick with the v3 branch for now. Unfortunately, there will be a day they stop maintaining v3, so I'll have to update to v4 if I don't want to be stuck with known security vulnerabilities. Maintaining a fork isn't an option because even a small patchset like glitch-soc takes a lot of work to keep updated.

esskay 3y ago

The only major downside (and the one that will ensure Lemmy doesn't gain any significant traction after this) is that its incredibly underdeveloped and nowhere near as close to being able to replace Reddit as Mastedon was for Twitter.

politelemon 3y ago
Isn't there also the issue of federation itself, if users have to understand federation they'll just stick to regular Reddit. Going by the principle of "don't make me think", that is
- sunaurus 3y ago
  In my experience, people understand federation quite easily if you just use the e-mail analogue. Even completely non-technical folks understand that regardless of whether they are on Gmail or Outlook or iCloud mail, they can send e-mail to users of other platforms.
  - Gareth321 3y ago
    IMHO the federation aspect needs to be completely hidden from users unless they go out of their way to search for it. 99% of users don’t care about it, and offering instance options at signup must be killing conversion. As with all FOSS projects, it’s built by developers, for developers. The project badly needs a UX person streamline things.
  - goykasi 3y ago
    But they dont care about how email works. Type 'mom' in to, type message, hit send, call mom to let her know you sent an email. Same with reddit/others. Most users dont care about how it works or what makes it special or what the tech stack is. They want content: fast, easy, not crashing and in one spot.
  - esskay 3y ago
    The email analogue doesn't really work for your every day person. They dont know, or even want to know how it works. When people visit a Mastedon site and see something like this its an instant turn off: > mastodon.social is part of the decentralized social network powered by Mastodon. Nobody cares, or wants to care that its decentralized. They just want a social network. When you've got to screw around with 'picking a site' to sign up on its hassle. When you've got to mess around to find something because its on a different node, its a hassle. As someone else said, they need to shut up and stop the key point being that its a fediverse - the average user has no idea what that means, nor should they need to. There's also the woefully underdeveloped user experience aspect of things, and overexplaining. On the signup page for example you see this: >With an account on this Mastodon server, you'll be able to follow any other person on the network, regardless of where their account is hosted. I dont care. I dont need to know that, if its a given that I can talk to people on other instances then I dont need to be told. It's got a long, long way to go before its even close to gaining critical mass.
Root_Denied 3y ago
I would agree that that's currently true, however now there's suddenly a lot of pressure to get a viable alternative up and running at the scale necessary to absorb a critical mass of redditors. At the time when reddit absorbed digg users after the redesign it had a fair amount of downtime as part of its growing pains, I'd expect to see the same for all the proposed alternatives in the next few months. With how thoroughly reddit is screwing the pooch here though I think it's a matter of if and not when.
- dredmorbius 3y ago
  Having been through a few large community migrations ... sudden pressure is a very poor stimulus for an effective transition. Good and viable platforms tend to already exist and be highly stable. What I witnessed most especially as Google+ shut down is that a number of options were floated and promoted. Some were largely vapourware (e.g., TBL's Solid), there were any number of opportunistic sites which emerged, and often fringe and distinctly problematic services (e.g., MeWe) were strongly advocated by a small but vocal contingent. What is most effective is to plan ahead, communicate clearly, maintain a diverse set of online presences, and to spec out possible migrations in detail. If subreddits started making such plans, their bargaining power over Reddit would be much, much stronger. For online presence, major online services (FB, Twitter, Instagram, and these days probably TikTok etc.), a dedicated and fully-controlled website, and an email list (or lists) would be a very good starting point. Good discussion sites are surprisingly difficult to find, and the basic options are fairly thin pickings. Old-school forums (e.g., phpBB), blogs (Wordpress, Dreamwidth, Drupal), and several of the federated platforms are probably the strongest options. I've helped curate a selection here: <https://social.antefriguserat.de/index.php/Platforms_and_Sites https://social.antefriguserat.de/index.php/Platforms_and_Sit...> Attempting to migrate to a not-yet-developed / early-beta project ... tends not to go very well.
dredmorbius 3y ago
Mastodon grew from earlier tools (ActivityPub, GNU Social, StatusNet) dating to the early aughts. I'd joined in 2016, kicked tyres for a bit, and increased my own usage around 2018. By the time Twitter's October Revolution arrived in 2022, the platform was sufficiently well-developed to both accommodate a substantial new influx and appeal to at least some of those new participants. And Mastodon and the Fediverse had seen previous waves of adoption, often led by drama, dissatisfaction, or shutdowns at or of other networks (Twitter, Facebook, Google+, etc.). What tends to occur is that systems evolve and develop over time, as do the communities making use of them. It's less that there's One Big Event than there are a succession of smaller ones ... until a tipping point is reached. Where the Fediverse is in terms of the long slow implosions of Twitter and Reddit remains to be seen, but don't discount long-simmering discontent and the emergence of new options. As a podcast noted recently: even power users of Twitter refer to the service as "Hellsite", and that's a very unstable situation. People remain out of inertia and lack of alternatives, not from some deep and abiding love of the service. Reddit increasingly seems to be in a similar place.

progval 3y ago

I run a Mastodon instance. I strongly dislike the v4 redesign, so I stick with the v3 branch for now. Unfortunately, there will be a day they stop maintaining v3, so I'll have to update to v4 if I don't want to be stuck with known security vulnerabilities. Maintaining a fork isn't an option because even a small patchset like glitch-soc takes a lot of work to keep updated.