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I was really skeptical of lemmy [1] when I first heard about it during the blackout. I joined yesterday and it completely changed my mind. Yes, it is going to f

I was really skeptical of lemmy [1] when I first heard about it during the blackout. I joined yesterday and it completely changed my mind. Yes, it is going to face some growing pains (see the total user growth in the past few days) [2] in the coming weeks and months but it really has the potential to replace Reddit with a federated system of communities. One that won't be damaged by investors or executives attempting to pivot over to the latest social media trend. As many people have recently noted, Reddit quietly became an extremely important repository of text-based knowledge. Distinct from Wikipedia and Archive.org, but no less important, Reddit is full of valuable procedural (how-to) and consumer (product-related) knowledge. Reddit has countless small communities built around hobbies and other niche interests, which places it in the same role once fulfilled by Usenet and later independent web-based forums. While those technologies still exist, they face enormous challenges with discovery (try to find a new forum on Google recently?), single-sign-on, and moderation. These were all solved by Reddit and I believe lemmy solves them too. The fediverse [3] truly has the potential to liberate small internet communities from the vagaries of Big Social Media, of which Reddit is only the latest example. [1] https://join-lemmy.org https://join-lemmy.org [2] https://the-federation.info/platform/73 https://the-federation.info/platform/73 [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fediverse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fediverse

jurassicfoxy 3y ago
Yes, I just saw the r/StarTrek migration, and visited Lemmy for the 3rd time or so this week, and quite frankly, I could drop reddit entirely now, if I knew how to find communities. I feel some real hacker/dev excitement for the future of Lemmy.
- soundsgoodtome 3y ago
  Let us know if/when you figure out how to find communities. Discoverability seems to be a real problem with Lemmy.
  - Solvency 3y ago
    I literally can't even sign up for Lemmy.world. The button after entering a new username/pw just spins indefinitely, forever.
    - hinkley 3y ago
      If I were a smart man, and that seems to depend on the day of the week, I’d put the services that can swamp the whole system on a separate VM that’s resource constrained so it has its own back pressure built in. It’s possible you’re seeing a bug, and it’s also possible that The System is Working. I can tell you that the login link takes me to a form on Safari. When did tech people stop stating which browser they’re using and what quirky tools they have installed?
    - chongli 3y ago
      Try a different server, ideally one closer to you. Lemmy.world is currently the most popular server (located in Finland) which has seen the largest influx. Here's a big list of servers (and their countries) sorted by MAU [1]. Note that the MAU data is out-of-date now that there's been a huge spike in the past few days. [1] https://the-federation.info/platform/73 https://the-federation.info/platform/73
    - b5n 3y ago
      It's a bit confusing because it doesn't notify you that a verification email has been sent when you sign up. If you've already checked your email maybe try the spam folder.
  - camel-cdr 3y ago
    I just use the communities tab [0], that's on every instance. Then select All to get a list of all communities federated with this instance sorted by size. Other wise I just, use the search bar. I just tested it with the goal of finding a photography related community. Found it with the first search result from "photography". [1] Another example, I wanted to find a risc-v related community, one simple search [2], boom, I found one [3] [0] e.g.: https://feddit.de/communities/listing_type/All/page/1 https://feddit.de/communities/listing_type/All/page/1 [1] https://beehaw.org/search/q/photography/type/All/sort/TopAll/listing_type/All/community_id/0/creator_id/0/page/1 https://beehaw.org/search/q/photography/type/All/sort/TopAll... [2] https://beehaw.org/search/q/riscv/type/All/sort/TopAll/listing_type/All/community_id/0/creator_id/0/page/1 https://beehaw.org/search/q/riscv/type/All/sort/TopAll/listi... [3] https://lemmy.ml/c/riscv https://lemmy.ml/c/riscv Edit: Also, idk how I missed it, but the communities tab [0] also has a search, so there you go, I don't even know what else you'd want.
- gman83 3y ago
  On the communities page of your instance, select "All" instead of "Local" to search for communities on all servers, for example: https://lemmy.world/communities/listing_type/All/page/1 https://lemmy.world/communities/listing_type/All/page/1
  - dawnerd 3y ago
    If anyone is wondering it’s still not quite perfect as some instances have inadvertently blocked federation while they deal with growth. It should work itself out once the dust settles
    - moffkalast 3y ago
      > have inadvertently blocked federation I assume the Enterprise is on its way to resolve the issue diplomatically
      - x86x87 3y ago
        The Enterprise also tried solving the ridiculous Reddit api pricing, but could not interfere because of the prime directive.
      - andrewstuart2 3y ago
        Important clarifying question: Kirk or Picard?
        goatlover 3y ago
        Janeway.
        unixhero 3y ago
        What for? The whiskey voice? Other than that she was quite erratic
  - andrewstuart2 3y ago
- voisin 3y ago
  > if I knew how to find communities. This is the biggest source of friction for Lemmy and the Fediverse. Non-tech savvy folks will not make the shift if it is such a pain to find the communities you want to join.
  - qznc 3y ago
    What is a pain is „joining a remote community nobody on your instance has joined so far“. For the usual cases the normal UI should work fine.
    - hinkley 3y ago
      Adoption cycles are older than dirt. Only the innovators have to go alone, and they have a thick skin and a romantic notion of adventure. Just wait for someone to point out the new thing, and you can still be an early adopter. You can join in telling the late adopters that this forum is not appropriate for your peripherally related topic and you should post your question in X.
- hinkley 3y ago
  When feed readers worked for me, which was all the way back when Slashdot was in its early phase of decline, I would keep tabs on the domain named for the threads I got engaged in, and if I saw a pattern I’d go look for an RSS link, and then sometimes I got to be the one to post the interesting article. I’m hoping Lemmy has a cross posting function that will serve a similar use case. You start in a woodworking forum here and someone reveals the DIWhy forum to you organically. After six to twelve months you have your hands full.
- shagie 3y ago
  Out of curiosity... why not alt.startrek? Other than the "not a lot is happening there now", but there's some activity. The most recent posts on the server I'm on: The Lower Decks crossover to live action in Strange New Worlds Star Trek Discovery Canceled ‘Galaxy Quest’ TV Series in Early Development at Paramount+ Jack Crusher is how old? Star Trek The Lower Decks S03E09 was everything I wanted. (spam - into the kill file that poster went) TOS Film marathon (crossposted trolling - more kill file material) Captain Burnham mob/cops/big city episodes (Star Trek Discovery) (crossposted trolling - figured out how to do more complicated rules - "cross posted to more than 3 groups and newsgroups match \.politics\." with this reader) (crossposted trolling - even more kill file material) Ode to Spot. (this post is from 2012) When will the new Star Trek merge with the Twilight movies? (this post is from (2011) No emoji. No reaction gifs. No memes. Just text content. edit: and as I write this, a new post just showed up in the past 2 minutes about Strange New Words S02E01.
  - anigbrowl 3y ago
    No emoji. No reaction gifs. No memes. So none of the things many people like. I loved usenet back int he 1990s, but the refusal to adapt to what users like to do is a large part of what killed it.
rwetgerger 3y ago
I only use Reddit logged out. Are there any apps that give me the same logged out experience with Lemmy?
- truemoose 3y ago
  The official Android app, Jerboa, doesn't require an account at all and defaults to anonymous browsing.
  - rwetgerger 3y ago
    Cool thanks
- BashiBazouk 3y ago
  The base Lemmy site does allow that. It looks like every button should lead to sign up dialogs but doesn't. Just select a serer, then join a server, hit communities at the top and select all in the green menu. I don't know if it shows you everything but it does give many pages of topics and what server they are on. The interface is not up to old.reddit standards but better than the modern reddit interface. I like that because there many servers, any popular topic will have a bunch of subs to choose from. Seems a bit sparse with subscriber numbers per community but if that grows, I could see it scratching the reddit itch...
PKop 3y ago
How do these independent servers cover the costs of "success", if more users join it's more cost, more moderation hassle. Who pays for it?
- sempron64 3y ago
  Who pays the moderators of all the major subreddits?
  - PKop 3y ago
    The mod workload on fediverse is in addition to, and magnifies, the operational cost of running the servers. Put aside moderation then, I don't see how decentralized independent servers scale if "free", whereas centralized cos has VC and ad money to achieve this
    - libraryatnight 3y ago
      Communities with sufficient interest in existing with any control over their future and content may need to fund themselves via donation. Also, in the 90s and early 00s, game servers cost money for many online FPS games - people hosted long running communities. Sometimes surviving via donation, sometimes just the benevolence of a person into the hobby with money. Community finds a way.
    - jtode 3y ago
      The operational cost of growing marijuana, even indoors with pretty high-powered lights, is actually extremely low. You can make it expensive buying fancy nutrients and gimmicky hydro systems but when I was growing for the black market before legalization, me and every other grower I knew (we were legion) poured reasonably-priced nutrients into cheap pots under cheap lights and grew dank buds ferda. Now (here in Canada anyways), a few giant corporations, in theory, do all the growing for the legit market, and need to handle a lot of large-scale problems, like big central grow ops requiring 1.21jigawatts instead of a bunch of houses using a bit of extra hydro each, security, pilferage, all the big problems of scale. These are problems of growing at scale, though, not problems inherent to growing weed. We didn't have the problems of scale as a community of indepdendent growers. We had other problems: cops, filtering the smell so as to be good neighbours, larger ops had to deal with moisture, the reputation brought on by low-rent gangster scumbags who rent houses, setup and then threaten the landlord. We had the problems of an unregulated market, and the quality of our product as well as knowing a dealer determined our success, but basically anyone with basic competence and the ability to keep their mouths shut (ie. the barest of street smarts) could make an okay living back then. I would say that Silo/Fedi is going to have a similar dynamic, minus the cops. Moderation happens by volunteers because people want to have a voice in determining what rules make the most sense for the communities they participate in, it's a non-issue in either world. Smaller instances will have smaller moderation loads, larger instances will either get supported by their users (money, work, whichever) or break up, or whatever, but it's going to settle into a congenial equilibrium in which the community of operators and users all look out for each other. We have seen the alternative, and we do not care for it, so we are going to put in the effort.
HelloMcFly 3y ago
I cannot for the life of me login to lemmy.world even after creating an account today. Is this due to increased traffic today or something else I don't understand about the platform?
- chongli 3y ago
  Yeah. See my second link. If you scroll down you can see per-server user counts. Lemmy is exploding!
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
DelightOne 3y ago
Lemmy comments are broken on Safari - they do not render.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- Phelinofist 3y ago
  For me on Firefox drop downs are unusable as the selection keeps jumping around. Also when scrolling the whole content jumps.
nomilk 3y ago
Do all lemmy servers host the same content or does selecting an appopriate server really matter a lot? (I was just signing up and had no idea what considerations one should make when selecting a server) Unrelated: is there a way to do `random search term site:reddit.com` for lemmy?
- theossuary 3y ago
  Picking a Lemmy server mostly matters because different servers will have different moderation practices, UIs, and communities. So you should pick a server that gels with what you want from a community. Also keep in mind many servers have explicit federation block lists. Once you've picked a server and signed up, you can access any community on any other server by just searching for the community url on your instance. If you subscribe, your instance will begin federating that community to your instance. It's pretty well described here - https://join-lemmy.org/docs/en/administration/federation_getting_started.html https://join-lemmy.org/docs/en/administration/federation_get... So far for me, I've noticed about half of my communities are instance local, and half are federated. The expectation I think is different communities in different instances will win and be the primary places for games, or technology, etc.
  - Semaphor 3y ago
    > Also keep in mind many servers have explicit federation block lists. available under server.tld/instances
  - CBarkleyU 3y ago
    >The expectation I think is different communities in different instances will win and be the primary places for games, or technology, etc. So there will be several r/games, r/videos, r/gifs, [...] on the Fediverse? This seems like a big hassle, no? Is there a built in solution to aggregate these? One could argue that on Reddit subreddits also competed against each other, but in reality most of the time, the subreddit with the most approachable name always won. r/godot is obviously going to be the main Godot subreddit, even if there is a r/godot4coolkidz "competing" with it.
TechBro8615 3y ago
Lemmy has the same discoverability and usability problems as Mastodon. Especially for non-technical users, there's too much friction required to find their communities and aggregate them into a single usable feed with a nice client. And that's assuming they can even conceptualize what the fediverse is. I'm a technical user, and I closed join-lemmy.org after ten seconds because it was too many clicks to get to an interface that looked like Reddit. I did manage to find a community by clicking "join," and arbitrarily picking one of the communities on the page (which were presented in random order on every page load). I was disoriented and didn't know what this community was - did I land on the equivalent of a subreddit? Or is this a federated instance that includes all "subreddits" the server is connected to? Then I saw an intimidating user interface with sparse activity and low numbers of comments. So I concluded that if that's how I felt as a technically sophisticated user, then Lemmy doesn't stand a chance of gaining traction with the average redditor. I went back to Reddit and noticed most of the subs I like are done with their blackout. Lemmy can succeed, but it needs a usable client that abstracts away the complexity of federation and choosing which servers to join. It seems like a perfect opportunity for Apollo, RIF, and the other award winning Reddit clients that are about to shut down. Why not port their apps to point to Lemmy backend(s) instead of Reddit? They could bring their loyal userbase to Lemmy, solving the chicken-and-egg problem and helping to bootstrap activity. And they can keep their UI, solving the problem of the intimidating user interface that would otherwise inhibit adoption of Lemmy. It seems like there is a relatively straight-forward path to integration, but the opportunity window is probably closing soon. They'd need to act fast. The first step would probably be for Lemmy contributors to build an open source interopability layer that implements the Reddit API (maybe this already exists?), and for the client apps to figure out how to add one more layer of indirection to their interface ("servers").
- beowulfey 3y ago
  Try Lemmy.world. Currently the fastest growing Lemmy server. It feels basically like any other social media site, like Hacker News or Reddit. I was using it, and seeing people post from other servers was pretty seamless and felt intuitive. Honestly, I say this all the time but I think people just need to treat federation like it's email. The difference is that the "email threads" are public to all, rather than in your inbox.
BashiBazouk 3y ago
The problem with the Fediverse as it currently stands is it goes against my long time use of forums. I'm usually only logged in on a desktop where I would post comments from. Most of my reading happens on pad, mobile or work where I have little desire to log in and in the case of a work computer I refuse to log in to anything personal. Kind of defeats the purpose of the whole thing...
- deleted 3y ago
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- truemoose 3y ago
  Not sure why you couldn't continue doing so with Lemmy. Like reddit, you only need an account to participate, not browse.
  - BashiBazouk 3y ago
    Ya, I figured that out when I decided to give it a go and sign up. It takes two screens that look like one needs to sign up (just about everywhere else on the net would require it with a similar screen) but then it lets you pick a server without signing up. There is a big improvement they could implement: make it more obvious with less screens that you can browse without logging in...
Solvency 3y ago
I know it would be technically feasible, but would it be fully legal for Lemmy to scrape and re-populate posts from all of Reddit's niche community subreddits (and threads and conversations), 1:1, even maintaining the original user names associated with them... but not connecting them to actual accounts? Almost like static content. And they could use that as a basis for the new community, so that there is at least a baseline repo of content to peruse as real members start to join and post new topics/content? I feel like that's a nice unorthodox way of making it not feel so viscerally "new and empty", which is usually what leads to a kind of inexplicable ick factor most people have when evaluating whether or not to join a community.
- x86x87 3y ago
  Idea for a commedy show: the above but actually pay for Reddit api access.
- covercash 3y ago
  Just use the pushshift archives?
- thrtythreeforty 3y ago
  I've thought about similar techniques (mainly a static redirect for all reddit links to a read-only archive, as a browser plugin). Technically speaking, this is mass copyright infringement, unless it happens to fall under fair use. Reddit wouldn't have standing (for content its admins didn't create), but every other user would. I can conceivably see a copyright suit being granted class action status, and Reddit (who does have a vested interest, even if they had no standing) bankrolling the whole thing.
- MisterBastahrd 3y ago
  That depends entirely on whether they want to get sued through the floor. I granted reddit the right to use my submitted content. I never granted that to lemmy. Someone would sue, and they'd win.
_8j50 3y ago
Lemmy is a good idea with a terrible name and a misunderstanding of the experience users look for, much like mastodon. For example, I will never join any of these services but I will browse r/All, many lurkers drive traffic and reddit would be almost nothing without r/All which I can't figure out if lemmy has.
- vruiz 3y ago
  Exactly, someone with more time than me please create a nice looking, lurker friendly, read-only aggregator with all the different content in all the different servers/communities. Ideally merging submissions and comments when possible. You would have me immediately as a user and I bet I wouldn’t be the only one. It’s so obvious that I guess someone must have done it and I just haven’t heard about it yet.
  - DropInIn 3y ago
    So... Sounds like you want what I keep thinking about: Front end that works with feeds from multiple sources, like RSS, and permits comments, posts etc using SSO, with all interactions logged centrally in the SSO account (for later edits deletes etc). Sound about right? Because you me it seems like every provider in that list should be able to make a profit off the data and interactions... With users who want increased privacy able to pay for an SSO subscription to prevent the sale of data on that end. And we already have all the parts to make it work...
    - vruiz 3y ago
      Yes although me being primarily a lurker I need even less. More than post or comment, if I have an account it would be to block some things and prfioritize other things more closely. What you describe would make sense for more extended functionality, but there is silent majority of lazy lurkers like myself that could be served very easily.
      - DropInIn 3y ago
        So my model would be one where you pick a site as your front end, most of which would have default curation and subscription to various subs, providing an experience like /all by default. Though it would look like /all what it would really be is more like an RSS reader aggregating multiple sources according to your preferences. A Reddit alternative would naturally form in this ecosystem, with smaller alternative front ends abounding, and take dominance just as Reddit did, but unlike Reddit it would not be able to screw over sub mods etc. Subs would be truly independent of the front end site, even if they are themselves also front end providers. It's Distributed Reddit in a sense.... Though in my view it'd be best to make it content agnostic, so it can be adapted to other uses, specifically for a YouTube clone and such. Really, there's a model where for most it's essentially a Facebook alternative that integrates into thousands of third party forums seemlessly...
traverseda 3y ago
I'm the head mod of a pretty big subreddit, /r/3Dprinting, with 7 million views a month and 1.8 million subscribers. At the beginning of this I set up a lemmy instance at https://rhombik.com https://rhombik.com and linked to it from that subreddit. From the roughly 150k uniques per day we had on /r/3Dprinting zero of them have tried the lemmy instance. So make of that what you will.
- phkahler 3y ago
  Give them a reason to switch, not just the option. Say "no new posts here, go there." Enforce that for one day and see what happens.
  - goykasi 3y ago
    > no new posts here, go there. Thats a horrible reason for users to go sign up on a completely new, unknown platform. Sounds less like a reason and more like a mandate.
- wvenable 3y ago
  Perhaps setting up your own instance for a single community is the wrong approach. You're basically hosting an entire Reddit for a single subreddit. It probably hurts discoverability a bit. There are already 3D printing communities on Lemmy. https://lemmy.ca/c/3dprinting@lemmy.ml https://lemmy.ca/c/3dprinting@lemmy.ml
  - llampx 3y ago
    The crux of the problem right here. Modding is ultimately a power trip, and no mod wants to give up their power. A "head mod" of a popular subreddit wouldn't just join a random lemmy where they can't assert their power.
    - Forgeties79 3y ago
      I’m a mod for a 1.5mill sub community and I’d gladly drop it! The only thing I care about is the community being able to move somewhere where we can continue to have interesting discussions about the thing our sub is dedicated to. I could not care less about continuing to be a mod. I only do it at this point because the community is awesome and I still learn a ton there.
deleted 3y ago
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koboll 3y ago
A single glance at your first link and it becomes blindingly obvious that this will never, ever gain mass adoption in its current form. This type of design, jargon, style, is just anathema to a non-technical audience. They don't wanted federated whatever, they just want reddit without the problems.
rufus_foreman 3y ago
Is there a way to get RSS feeds the way you can with Reddit?
- camel-cdr 3y ago
  Yes, just click on the little RSS icon next to communities, it's just right off the sorting selection icon next to the (?).
  - rufus_foreman 3y ago
    Got it, thanks!
coryfklein 3y ago
Having heard the Lemmy recommendation multiple times, I went ahead and tried the Lemmy.world instance but it appears completely broken. As far as I can tell, clicking "Login"[0] doesn't even trigger a network request? [0] https://lemmy.world/login https://lemmy.world/login
- SrZorro 3y ago
  > doesn't even trigger a network request? It does via websocket
StrictDabbler 3y ago
BeeHaw just defederated from sh.itjust.works and lemmy.world. A poster came onto sh.itjust.works claiming responsibility for that. They described the very minor trolling they used to achieve it. They say they work for Reddit and are personally invested in proving that federation is impossible. So hey, it's the internet, assume everything in that is a lie, but it shows that there's emotional resonance in the idea of preventing this shift. There are a lot of malcontents and radicals in the lemmy sphere and many of them are very angry about the Reddit exodus invading their space. It will be a few months before these things settle out.
hinkley 3y ago
Internet search is fundamentally broken now due to perverse incentives and game theory. I won’t say we are “going back to the Before Times” because that’s not accurate, but we need to go back to the In-between Times when you searched for new-to-you ideas and found curated communities that had depth of experience. It’s possible that google is overtrained, that it got too good at finding things in the structures of the Internet (see: PageRank), and that structure collapsed because we have Google for that now, so why bother? And then Google couldn’t tell the Pulp from the Real, and SEO became far too powerful. I doubt that’s what happened, but I can’t rule it out. In some of my hobbies, Co-ops are a powerful force for good (or at the very least, mediocrity++). These federations are just a fancy word for Co-op, IMO. If I can’t have Good, I’ll settle for mediocrity++ over mediocrity—-, which is the precipice we stand on with Reddit current events.
basch 3y ago
reddit and steve are too overconfident to see and realize that joining federation is their path to survival. fear and denial will drive them to build garden walls when they should be transforming to stay ahead of obsolescence. turning into tiktok is fad chasing and a means to end of times, destruction, and relegation to has been status. myspace and tumblr realized too latomethi/ng e, and their transformations were never positioned to restore former glory. what i would like to see is federation separate itself into three components. identify, client, server. the identity system should be divorced from the other two components and allow me to sign into any server. (as much as typing this next sentence will lose some people, public blockchains are a good way to store identity, where different servers can collaborate to host a unified identity database.) anyone should be able to use any client with any server. adding servers to my client should be no harder than an rss subscription. my configuration, my subscriptions should be stored with my identity, (not in an instance) and instantly portable to new clients. having an identity protocol, many client vendors, and multiple standardized server implementations will create something long lasting and resilient. the firms who choose that path will be the leaders. how could reddit monetize this? run an identity server, have a direct messaging path to customers. fracture and make many competing clients for different peoplebases and community types. some free, some not. build an open source server backend and go the redhat model, selling enterprise support to large firms that want to host a community, and sell development services to honor feature requests from those customers. (i know the fediverse is close to a lot of this, but the way identity is tied to instance isnt something i see as ideal. a lack of nomadic identity / identity portability makes the fediverse as fragile as any other centralized site. the fediverse being grafted onto existing dns, and having identity owned by a specific downstream host is problematic. identity should be distributed above the dns layer, not below cnames. the same applies to communities not being able to push themselves to new instances in an .. instant. serving of data is too centralized, and a p2p cdn layer /ipfs would help. the instance and the client seem too closely tied together as well. the way i see the current instances is the opposite of portability. im sure there is a lot of fast moving development going on, and hope someone can correct me. top answer here is a bit of a dealbreaker https://www.reddit.com/r/Mastodon/comments/134oud8/are_there_any_plans_to_introduce_nomadic_identity/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Mastodon/comments/134oud8/are_there... and where a blockchain ecosystem could help.) [reposted from the star trek thread, probably belongs in this one more]
nullityrofl 3y ago
Federated services will never become mainstream. This is just the reality that people need to come to accept. I find them heavily talked about in circles with my colleagues and in my profession but the attraction of decentralized services just isn't there for the vast majority of people. I find Lemmy frustrating to use and it isn't just growing pains: it's the same reason I find Mastodon frustrating. Do I care if username@somecommunity.infosec.somecommunity matters? Do I care if I use lemmy.world or do I have to find some server? Which server? Centralization works. It's convenient. It doesn't require a user guide. It's approachable for laypersons. This is just the reality. I wish people would focus on building services that meet peoples needs and not just as an expression of their idealogies.
- bamfly 3y ago
  Works for email. There are only a few big hosts and some larger-but-not-huge number of mid-sized ones, sure, but they all play nicely with one another. Like if you could post on Twitter from your Facebook account. Of course, I doubt we could create email today, if it didn't already exist.
  - nullityrofl 3y ago
    Email works because despite it's decentralized nature, it's functionally transparent to the user and you aren't constantly forced to acknowledge that nature. The issue with "Fediverse" technologies is not dissimilar from crypto: it's designers care more about the ideology and the concept of being in the fediverse than they do meeting an actual product need. In spite of a _dire_ gap in the market place and a substantial marketing opportunity to pick up market share, Lemmy and Mastodon remain largely unadopted by the masses and will likely remain in a similar market place as Diaspora*.
    - bamfly 3y ago
      > Email works because despite it's decentralized nature, it's functionally transparent to the user and you aren't constantly forced to acknowledge that nature. You are forced to, every time you have to write the bit after the @ in an email address, though! > The issue with "Fediverse" technologies is not dissimilar from crypto: it's designers care more about the ideology and the concept of being in the fediverse than they do meeting an actual product need. I think the trouble is that they're still trying to be too centralized(!) and keep too much control over content on the side of the various federated servers. Email defers to the client far more than these systems do. Gmail's not going to cut off "federation" with @microsoft.com because some of its users are sending solicited racist newsletters and MS refuses to ban them, for instance (if they become a spam farm and a huge proportion of Gmail's users complain about it? Yeah, then, maybe). Fastmail probably won't ban you because you're receiving racist newsletters. There aren't content moderators, just mostly-automated responses to user reports of abuse. The user is in control, and the servers don't try to proactively police or curate content that users want to read (they filter spam, sure). (I mean, there's the further problem that it's nearly impossible to create a new open protocol of any kind and get any notable adoption these days, but that's not the fault of the federated model) [EDIT] To be clear, I'm not advocating for racist newsletters in the above, that was just an unambiguous example of the kind of thing that'll draw swift and harsh moderator action on a lot of federated servers but that can (I assume—admittedly, I've not tried) get passed around via email without problems—my point is that the issues with "drama" and network-churn and such in federated networks, that may disrupt the usage patterns of ordinary users, is connected to how much control the server operators have. More fundamentally, this is connected to making the activity of these communities public on the Web by default—which I think is largely a mistake, I think it's really weird that it's become common for groups of people chatting about whatever to put everything they say on billboards in flashing lights all around the world.
ghostpepper 3y ago
Can I just join "lemmy" or do I need to pick a specific sub-group to join? Which one did you pick?
- wccrawford 3y ago
  I just joined. My understanding is that you pick your home server (I chose sh.itjust.works) and then you can add the local communities from there, as well as other communities on other servers. SJW (unfortunate acronym, IMO) had a list of local and remote communities that it already knew about that I could easily choose from, and my understanding is that there's a way to add more, but I didn't look into that because it had all the communities that I had considered joining directly anyhow. It was pretty painless, though I haven't tried actually posting anything yet.
MuffinFlavored 3y ago
My first reaction is: there should be an aggregator for all of these instances: https://join-lemmy.org/instances https://join-lemmy.org/instances because my first instinct guess is, there's going to be huge overlap on submissions daily there's only so much new news daily and a certain niche of people who read it/contribute scattering them out to a bunch of obscure niche places probably doesn't help there are even boring days on HackerNews. how many monthly active users does this site have roughly? 500k? 1m? way less?
- assbuttbuttass 3y ago
  The way the fediverse works is, you can see posts and interact with communities on other instances as long as they federate with your "home" instance
deleted 3y ago
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silverbax88 3y ago
Thanks for this. I can see Lemmy as a definite alternative now. I joined a couple of Lemmy servers and I definitely like it so far, and I'm looking to move away from Reddit anyway.
FalconSensei 3y ago
Honest question: for the user, how does the federation work if your "subreddits" (sublemmies?) are scattered between 10 different instances? On Mastodon it's quite a pain sometimes, if you open a link to someone else's instance, and then have to copy their link and paste on your instance to be able to follow I think this is probably way harder/more annoying on lemmy, since if I have 1 user on abc.xyz, and I also browse and want to comment/upvote on qwerty.cxz and asdf.rocks
dbbk 3y ago
Dead on arrival. There are 6 separate "general" instances. Normal people will never use this.
- moffkalast 3y ago
  All of the ones I've tried just result in a spinning ball of death when trying to sign up too, I'm not sure if any of this actually works, or if registrations have been disabled so god forbid anyone can migrate from reddit. Do I seriously have to set up my own instance so I can make a fucking account or what?
w1nst0nsm1th 3y ago
I became a fan of American politics by reading reddit... Then, I stopped watching the walking dead
assfart 3y ago
[flagged]

jurassicfoxy 3y ago

Yes, I just saw the r/StarTrek migration, and visited Lemmy for the 3rd time or so this week, and quite frankly, I could drop reddit entirely now, if I knew how to find communities. I feel some real hacker/dev excitement for the future of Lemmy.

soundsgoodtome 3y ago
Let us know if/when you figure out how to find communities. Discoverability seems to be a real problem with Lemmy.
- Solvency 3y ago
  I literally can't even sign up for Lemmy.world. The button after entering a new username/pw just spins indefinitely, forever.
  - hinkley 3y ago
    If I were a smart man, and that seems to depend on the day of the week, I’d put the services that can swamp the whole system on a separate VM that’s resource constrained so it has its own back pressure built in. It’s possible you’re seeing a bug, and it’s also possible that The System is Working. I can tell you that the login link takes me to a form on Safari. When did tech people stop stating which browser they’re using and what quirky tools they have installed?
  - chongli 3y ago
    Try a different server, ideally one closer to you. Lemmy.world is currently the most popular server (located in Finland) which has seen the largest influx. Here's a big list of servers (and their countries) sorted by MAU [1]. Note that the MAU data is out-of-date now that there's been a huge spike in the past few days. [1] https://the-federation.info/platform/73 https://the-federation.info/platform/73
  - b5n 3y ago
    It's a bit confusing because it doesn't notify you that a verification email has been sent when you sign up. If you've already checked your email maybe try the spam folder.
- camel-cdr 3y ago
  I just use the communities tab [0], that's on every instance. Then select All to get a list of all communities federated with this instance sorted by size. Other wise I just, use the search bar. I just tested it with the goal of finding a photography related community. Found it with the first search result from "photography". [1] Another example, I wanted to find a risc-v related community, one simple search [2], boom, I found one [3] [0] e.g.: https://feddit.de/communities/listing_type/All/page/1 https://feddit.de/communities/listing_type/All/page/1 [1] https://beehaw.org/search/q/photography/type/All/sort/TopAll/listing_type/All/community_id/0/creator_id/0/page/1 https://beehaw.org/search/q/photography/type/All/sort/TopAll... [2] https://beehaw.org/search/q/riscv/type/All/sort/TopAll/listing_type/All/community_id/0/creator_id/0/page/1 https://beehaw.org/search/q/riscv/type/All/sort/TopAll/listi... [3] https://lemmy.ml/c/riscv https://lemmy.ml/c/riscv Edit: Also, idk how I missed it, but the communities tab [0] also has a search, so there you go, I don't even know what else you'd want.
gman83 3y ago
On the communities page of your instance, select "All" instead of "Local" to search for communities on all servers, for example: https://lemmy.world/communities/listing_type/All/page/1 https://lemmy.world/communities/listing_type/All/page/1
- dawnerd 3y ago
  If anyone is wondering it’s still not quite perfect as some instances have inadvertently blocked federation while they deal with growth. It should work itself out once the dust settles
  - moffkalast 3y ago
    > have inadvertently blocked federation I assume the Enterprise is on its way to resolve the issue diplomatically
    - x86x87 3y ago
      The Enterprise also tried solving the ridiculous Reddit api pricing, but could not interfere because of the prime directive.
    - andrewstuart2 3y ago
      Important clarifying question: Kirk or Picard?
      - goatlover 3y ago
        Janeway.
        unixhero 3y ago
        What for? The whiskey voice? Other than that she was quite erratic
- andrewstuart2 3y ago
voisin 3y ago
> if I knew how to find communities. This is the biggest source of friction for Lemmy and the Fediverse. Non-tech savvy folks will not make the shift if it is such a pain to find the communities you want to join.
- qznc 3y ago
  What is a pain is „joining a remote community nobody on your instance has joined so far“. For the usual cases the normal UI should work fine.
  - hinkley 3y ago
    Adoption cycles are older than dirt. Only the innovators have to go alone, and they have a thick skin and a romantic notion of adventure. Just wait for someone to point out the new thing, and you can still be an early adopter. You can join in telling the late adopters that this forum is not appropriate for your peripherally related topic and you should post your question in X.
hinkley 3y ago
When feed readers worked for me, which was all the way back when Slashdot was in its early phase of decline, I would keep tabs on the domain named for the threads I got engaged in, and if I saw a pattern I’d go look for an RSS link, and then sometimes I got to be the one to post the interesting article. I’m hoping Lemmy has a cross posting function that will serve a similar use case. You start in a woodworking forum here and someone reveals the DIWhy forum to you organically. After six to twelve months you have your hands full.
shagie 3y ago
Out of curiosity... why not alt.startrek? Other than the "not a lot is happening there now", but there's some activity. The most recent posts on the server I'm on: The Lower Decks crossover to live action in Strange New Worlds Star Trek Discovery Canceled ‘Galaxy Quest’ TV Series in Early Development at Paramount+ Jack Crusher is how old? Star Trek The Lower Decks S03E09 was everything I wanted. (spam - into the kill file that poster went) TOS Film marathon (crossposted trolling - more kill file material) Captain Burnham mob/cops/big city episodes (Star Trek Discovery) (crossposted trolling - figured out how to do more complicated rules - "cross posted to more than 3 groups and newsgroups match \.politics\." with this reader) (crossposted trolling - even more kill file material) Ode to Spot. (this post is from 2012) When will the new Star Trek merge with the Twilight movies? (this post is from (2011) No emoji. No reaction gifs. No memes. Just text content. edit: and as I write this, a new post just showed up in the past 2 minutes about Strange New Words S02E01.
- anigbrowl 3y ago
  No emoji. No reaction gifs. No memes. So none of the things many people like. I loved usenet back int he 1990s, but the refusal to adapt to what users like to do is a large part of what killed it.

rwetgerger 3y ago

I only use Reddit logged out. Are there any apps that give me the same logged out experience with Lemmy?

truemoose 3y ago
The official Android app, Jerboa, doesn't require an account at all and defaults to anonymous browsing.
- rwetgerger 3y ago
  Cool thanks
BashiBazouk 3y ago
The base Lemmy site does allow that. It looks like every button should lead to sign up dialogs but doesn't. Just select a serer, then join a server, hit communities at the top and select all in the green menu. I don't know if it shows you everything but it does give many pages of topics and what server they are on. The interface is not up to old.reddit standards but better than the modern reddit interface. I like that because there many servers, any popular topic will have a bunch of subs to choose from. Seems a bit sparse with subscriber numbers per community but if that grows, I could see it scratching the reddit itch...

PKop 3y ago

How do these independent servers cover the costs of "success", if more users join it's more cost, more moderation hassle. Who pays for it?

sempron64 3y ago
Who pays the moderators of all the major subreddits?
- PKop 3y ago
  The mod workload on fediverse is in addition to, and magnifies, the operational cost of running the servers. Put aside moderation then, I don't see how decentralized independent servers scale if "free", whereas centralized cos has VC and ad money to achieve this
  - libraryatnight 3y ago
    Communities with sufficient interest in existing with any control over their future and content may need to fund themselves via donation. Also, in the 90s and early 00s, game servers cost money for many online FPS games - people hosted long running communities. Sometimes surviving via donation, sometimes just the benevolence of a person into the hobby with money. Community finds a way.
  - jtode 3y ago
    The operational cost of growing marijuana, even indoors with pretty high-powered lights, is actually extremely low. You can make it expensive buying fancy nutrients and gimmicky hydro systems but when I was growing for the black market before legalization, me and every other grower I knew (we were legion) poured reasonably-priced nutrients into cheap pots under cheap lights and grew dank buds ferda. Now (here in Canada anyways), a few giant corporations, in theory, do all the growing for the legit market, and need to handle a lot of large-scale problems, like big central grow ops requiring 1.21jigawatts instead of a bunch of houses using a bit of extra hydro each, security, pilferage, all the big problems of scale. These are problems of growing at scale, though, not problems inherent to growing weed. We didn't have the problems of scale as a community of indepdendent growers. We had other problems: cops, filtering the smell so as to be good neighbours, larger ops had to deal with moisture, the reputation brought on by low-rent gangster scumbags who rent houses, setup and then threaten the landlord. We had the problems of an unregulated market, and the quality of our product as well as knowing a dealer determined our success, but basically anyone with basic competence and the ability to keep their mouths shut (ie. the barest of street smarts) could make an okay living back then. I would say that Silo/Fedi is going to have a similar dynamic, minus the cops. Moderation happens by volunteers because people want to have a voice in determining what rules make the most sense for the communities they participate in, it's a non-issue in either world. Smaller instances will have smaller moderation loads, larger instances will either get supported by their users (money, work, whichever) or break up, or whatever, but it's going to settle into a congenial equilibrium in which the community of operators and users all look out for each other. We have seen the alternative, and we do not care for it, so we are going to put in the effort.

HelloMcFly 3y ago

I cannot for the life of me login to lemmy.world even after creating an account today. Is this due to increased traffic today or something else I don't understand about the platform?

chongli 3y ago
Yeah. See my second link. If you scroll down you can see per-server user counts. Lemmy is exploding!
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]

DelightOne 3y ago

Lemmy comments are broken on Safari - they do not render.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
Phelinofist 3y ago
For me on Firefox drop downs are unusable as the selection keeps jumping around. Also when scrolling the whole content jumps.

nomilk 3y ago

Do all lemmy servers host the same content or does selecting an appopriate server really matter a lot? (I was just signing up and had no idea what considerations one should make when selecting a server) Unrelated: is there a way to do `random search term site:reddit.com` for lemmy?

theossuary 3y ago
Picking a Lemmy server mostly matters because different servers will have different moderation practices, UIs, and communities. So you should pick a server that gels with what you want from a community. Also keep in mind many servers have explicit federation block lists. Once you've picked a server and signed up, you can access any community on any other server by just searching for the community url on your instance. If you subscribe, your instance will begin federating that community to your instance. It's pretty well described here - https://join-lemmy.org/docs/en/administration/federation_getting_started.html https://join-lemmy.org/docs/en/administration/federation_get... So far for me, I've noticed about half of my communities are instance local, and half are federated. The expectation I think is different communities in different instances will win and be the primary places for games, or technology, etc.
- Semaphor 3y ago
  > Also keep in mind many servers have explicit federation block lists. available under server.tld/instances
- CBarkleyU 3y ago
  >The expectation I think is different communities in different instances will win and be the primary places for games, or technology, etc. So there will be several r/games, r/videos, r/gifs, [...] on the Fediverse? This seems like a big hassle, no? Is there a built in solution to aggregate these? One could argue that on Reddit subreddits also competed against each other, but in reality most of the time, the subreddit with the most approachable name always won. r/godot is obviously going to be the main Godot subreddit, even if there is a r/godot4coolkidz "competing" with it.

TechBro8615 3y ago

Lemmy has the same discoverability and usability problems as Mastodon. Especially for non-technical users, there's too much friction required to find their communities and aggregate them into a single usable feed with a nice client. And that's assuming they can even conceptualize what the fediverse is. I'm a technical user, and I closed join-lemmy.org after ten seconds because it was too many clicks to get to an interface that looked like Reddit. I did manage to find a community by clicking "join," and arbitrarily picking one of the communities on the page (which were presented in random order on every page load). I was disoriented and didn't know what this community was - did I land on the equivalent of a subreddit? Or is this a federated instance that includes all "subreddits" the server is connected to? Then I saw an intimidating user interface with sparse activity and low numbers of comments. So I concluded that if that's how I felt as a technically sophisticated user, then Lemmy doesn't stand a chance of gaining traction with the average redditor. I went back to Reddit and noticed most of the subs I like are done with their blackout. Lemmy can succeed, but it needs a usable client that abstracts away the complexity of federation and choosing which servers to join. It seems like a perfect opportunity for Apollo, RIF, and the other award winning Reddit clients that are about to shut down. Why not port their apps to point to Lemmy backend(s) instead of Reddit? They could bring their loyal userbase to Lemmy, solving the chicken-and-egg problem and helping to bootstrap activity. And they can keep their UI, solving the problem of the intimidating user interface that would otherwise inhibit adoption of Lemmy. It seems like there is a relatively straight-forward path to integration, but the opportunity window is probably closing soon. They'd need to act fast. The first step would probably be for Lemmy contributors to build an open source interopability layer that implements the Reddit API (maybe this already exists?), and for the client apps to figure out how to add one more layer of indirection to their interface ("servers").

beowulfey 3y ago
Try Lemmy.world. Currently the fastest growing Lemmy server. It feels basically like any other social media site, like Hacker News or Reddit. I was using it, and seeing people post from other servers was pretty seamless and felt intuitive. Honestly, I say this all the time but I think people just need to treat federation like it's email. The difference is that the "email threads" are public to all, rather than in your inbox.

BashiBazouk 3y ago

The problem with the Fediverse as it currently stands is it goes against my long time use of forums. I'm usually only logged in on a desktop where I would post comments from. Most of my reading happens on pad, mobile or work where I have little desire to log in and in the case of a work computer I refuse to log in to anything personal. Kind of defeats the purpose of the whole thing...

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
truemoose 3y ago
Not sure why you couldn't continue doing so with Lemmy. Like reddit, you only need an account to participate, not browse.
- BashiBazouk 3y ago
  Ya, I figured that out when I decided to give it a go and sign up. It takes two screens that look like one needs to sign up (just about everywhere else on the net would require it with a similar screen) but then it lets you pick a server without signing up. There is a big improvement they could implement: make it more obvious with less screens that you can browse without logging in...

Solvency 3y ago

I know it would be technically feasible, but would it be fully legal for Lemmy to scrape and re-populate posts from all of Reddit's niche community subreddits (and threads and conversations), 1:1, even maintaining the original user names associated with them... but not connecting them to actual accounts? Almost like static content. And they could use that as a basis for the new community, so that there is at least a baseline repo of content to peruse as real members start to join and post new topics/content? I feel like that's a nice unorthodox way of making it not feel so viscerally "new and empty", which is usually what leads to a kind of inexplicable ick factor most people have when evaluating whether or not to join a community.

x86x87 3y ago
Idea for a commedy show: the above but actually pay for Reddit api access.
covercash 3y ago
Just use the pushshift archives?
thrtythreeforty 3y ago
I've thought about similar techniques (mainly a static redirect for all reddit links to a read-only archive, as a browser plugin). Technically speaking, this is mass copyright infringement, unless it happens to fall under fair use. Reddit wouldn't have standing (for content its admins didn't create), but every other user would. I can conceivably see a copyright suit being granted class action status, and Reddit (who does have a vested interest, even if they had no standing) bankrolling the whole thing.
MisterBastahrd 3y ago
That depends entirely on whether they want to get sued through the floor. I granted reddit the right to use my submitted content. I never granted that to lemmy. Someone would sue, and they'd win.

_8j50 3y ago

Lemmy is a good idea with a terrible name and a misunderstanding of the experience users look for, much like mastodon. For example, I will never join any of these services but I will browse r/All, many lurkers drive traffic and reddit would be almost nothing without r/All which I can't figure out if lemmy has.

vruiz 3y ago
Exactly, someone with more time than me please create a nice looking, lurker friendly, read-only aggregator with all the different content in all the different servers/communities. Ideally merging submissions and comments when possible. You would have me immediately as a user and I bet I wouldn’t be the only one. It’s so obvious that I guess someone must have done it and I just haven’t heard about it yet.
- DropInIn 3y ago
  So... Sounds like you want what I keep thinking about: Front end that works with feeds from multiple sources, like RSS, and permits comments, posts etc using SSO, with all interactions logged centrally in the SSO account (for later edits deletes etc). Sound about right? Because you me it seems like every provider in that list should be able to make a profit off the data and interactions... With users who want increased privacy able to pay for an SSO subscription to prevent the sale of data on that end. And we already have all the parts to make it work...
  - vruiz 3y ago
    Yes although me being primarily a lurker I need even less. More than post or comment, if I have an account it would be to block some things and prfioritize other things more closely. What you describe would make sense for more extended functionality, but there is silent majority of lazy lurkers like myself that could be served very easily.
    - DropInIn 3y ago
      So my model would be one where you pick a site as your front end, most of which would have default curation and subscription to various subs, providing an experience like /all by default. Though it would look like /all what it would really be is more like an RSS reader aggregating multiple sources according to your preferences. A Reddit alternative would naturally form in this ecosystem, with smaller alternative front ends abounding, and take dominance just as Reddit did, but unlike Reddit it would not be able to screw over sub mods etc. Subs would be truly independent of the front end site, even if they are themselves also front end providers. It's Distributed Reddit in a sense.... Though in my view it'd be best to make it content agnostic, so it can be adapted to other uses, specifically for a YouTube clone and such. Really, there's a model where for most it's essentially a Facebook alternative that integrates into thousands of third party forums seemlessly...

traverseda 3y ago

I'm the head mod of a pretty big subreddit, /r/3Dprinting, with 7 million views a month and 1.8 million subscribers. At the beginning of this I set up a lemmy instance at https://rhombik.com https://rhombik.com and linked to it from that subreddit. From the roughly 150k uniques per day we had on /r/3Dprinting zero of them have tried the lemmy instance. So make of that what you will.

phkahler 3y ago
Give them a reason to switch, not just the option. Say "no new posts here, go there." Enforce that for one day and see what happens.
- goykasi 3y ago
  > no new posts here, go there. Thats a horrible reason for users to go sign up on a completely new, unknown platform. Sounds less like a reason and more like a mandate.
wvenable 3y ago
Perhaps setting up your own instance for a single community is the wrong approach. You're basically hosting an entire Reddit for a single subreddit. It probably hurts discoverability a bit. There are already 3D printing communities on Lemmy. https://lemmy.ca/c/3dprinting@lemmy.ml https://lemmy.ca/c/3dprinting@lemmy.ml
- llampx 3y ago
  The crux of the problem right here. Modding is ultimately a power trip, and no mod wants to give up their power. A "head mod" of a popular subreddit wouldn't just join a random lemmy where they can't assert their power.
  - Forgeties79 3y ago
    I’m a mod for a 1.5mill sub community and I’d gladly drop it! The only thing I care about is the community being able to move somewhere where we can continue to have interesting discussions about the thing our sub is dedicated to. I could not care less about continuing to be a mod. I only do it at this point because the community is awesome and I still learn a ton there.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

koboll 3y ago

A single glance at your first link and it becomes blindingly obvious that this will never, ever gain mass adoption in its current form. This type of design, jargon, style, is just anathema to a non-technical audience. They don't wanted federated whatever, they just want reddit without the problems.

rufus_foreman 3y ago

Is there a way to get RSS feeds the way you can with Reddit?

camel-cdr 3y ago
Yes, just click on the little RSS icon next to communities, it's just right off the sorting selection icon next to the (?).
- rufus_foreman 3y ago
  Got it, thanks!

coryfklein 3y ago

Having heard the Lemmy recommendation multiple times, I went ahead and tried the Lemmy.world instance but it appears completely broken. As far as I can tell, clicking "Login"[0] doesn't even trigger a network request? [0] https://lemmy.world/login https://lemmy.world/login

SrZorro 3y ago
> doesn't even trigger a network request? It does via websocket

StrictDabbler 3y ago

BeeHaw just defederated from sh.itjust.works and lemmy.world. A poster came onto sh.itjust.works claiming responsibility for that. They described the very minor trolling they used to achieve it. They say they work for Reddit and are personally invested in proving that federation is impossible. So hey, it's the internet, assume everything in that is a lie, but it shows that there's emotional resonance in the idea of preventing this shift. There are a lot of malcontents and radicals in the lemmy sphere and many of them are very angry about the Reddit exodus invading their space. It will be a few months before these things settle out.

hinkley 3y ago

Internet search is fundamentally broken now due to perverse incentives and game theory. I won’t say we are “going back to the Before Times” because that’s not accurate, but we need to go back to the In-between Times when you searched for new-to-you ideas and found curated communities that had depth of experience. It’s possible that google is overtrained, that it got too good at finding things in the structures of the Internet (see: PageRank), and that structure collapsed because we have Google for that now, so why bother? And then Google couldn’t tell the Pulp from the Real, and SEO became far too powerful. I doubt that’s what happened, but I can’t rule it out. In some of my hobbies, Co-ops are a powerful force for good (or at the very least, mediocrity++). These federations are just a fancy word for Co-op, IMO. If I can’t have Good, I’ll settle for mediocrity++ over mediocrity—-, which is the precipice we stand on with Reddit current events.

basch 3y ago

reddit and steve are too overconfident to see and realize that joining federation is their path to survival. fear and denial will drive them to build garden walls when they should be transforming to stay ahead of obsolescence. turning into tiktok is fad chasing and a means to end of times, destruction, and relegation to has been status. myspace and tumblr realized too latomethi/ng e, and their transformations were never positioned to restore former glory. what i would like to see is federation separate itself into three components. identify, client, server. the identity system should be divorced from the other two components and allow me to sign into any server. (as much as typing this next sentence will lose some people, public blockchains are a good way to store identity, where different servers can collaborate to host a unified identity database.) anyone should be able to use any client with any server. adding servers to my client should be no harder than an rss subscription. my configuration, my subscriptions should be stored with my identity, (not in an instance) and instantly portable to new clients. having an identity protocol, many client vendors, and multiple standardized server implementations will create something long lasting and resilient. the firms who choose that path will be the leaders. how could reddit monetize this? run an identity server, have a direct messaging path to customers. fracture and make many competing clients for different peoplebases and community types. some free, some not. build an open source server backend and go the redhat model, selling enterprise support to large firms that want to host a community, and sell development services to honor feature requests from those customers. (i know the fediverse is close to a lot of this, but the way identity is tied to instance isnt something i see as ideal. a lack of nomadic identity / identity portability makes the fediverse as fragile as any other centralized site. the fediverse being grafted onto existing dns, and having identity owned by a specific downstream host is problematic. identity should be distributed above the dns layer, not below cnames. the same applies to communities not being able to push themselves to new instances in an .. instant. serving of data is too centralized, and a p2p cdn layer /ipfs would help. the instance and the client seem too closely tied together as well. the way i see the current instances is the opposite of portability. im sure there is a lot of fast moving development going on, and hope someone can correct me. top answer here is a bit of a dealbreaker https://www.reddit.com/r/Mastodon/comments/134oud8/are_there_any_plans_to_introduce_nomadic_identity/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Mastodon/comments/134oud8/are_there... and where a blockchain ecosystem could help.) [reposted from the star trek thread, probably belongs in this one more]

nullityrofl 3y ago

Federated services will never become mainstream. This is just the reality that people need to come to accept. I find them heavily talked about in circles with my colleagues and in my profession but the attraction of decentralized services just isn't there for the vast majority of people. I find Lemmy frustrating to use and it isn't just growing pains: it's the same reason I find Mastodon frustrating. Do I care if username@somecommunity.infosec.somecommunity matters? Do I care if I use lemmy.world or do I have to find some server? Which server? Centralization works. It's convenient. It doesn't require a user guide. It's approachable for laypersons. This is just the reality. I wish people would focus on building services that meet peoples needs and not just as an expression of their idealogies.

bamfly 3y ago
Works for email. There are only a few big hosts and some larger-but-not-huge number of mid-sized ones, sure, but they all play nicely with one another. Like if you could post on Twitter from your Facebook account. Of course, I doubt we could create email today, if it didn't already exist.
- nullityrofl 3y ago
  Email works because despite it's decentralized nature, it's functionally transparent to the user and you aren't constantly forced to acknowledge that nature. The issue with "Fediverse" technologies is not dissimilar from crypto: it's designers care more about the ideology and the concept of being in the fediverse than they do meeting an actual product need. In spite of a _dire_ gap in the market place and a substantial marketing opportunity to pick up market share, Lemmy and Mastodon remain largely unadopted by the masses and will likely remain in a similar market place as Diaspora*.
  - bamfly 3y ago
    > Email works because despite it's decentralized nature, it's functionally transparent to the user and you aren't constantly forced to acknowledge that nature. You are forced to, every time you have to write the bit after the @ in an email address, though! > The issue with "Fediverse" technologies is not dissimilar from crypto: it's designers care more about the ideology and the concept of being in the fediverse than they do meeting an actual product need. I think the trouble is that they're still trying to be too centralized(!) and keep too much control over content on the side of the various federated servers. Email defers to the client far more than these systems do. Gmail's not going to cut off "federation" with @microsoft.com because some of its users are sending solicited racist newsletters and MS refuses to ban them, for instance (if they become a spam farm and a huge proportion of Gmail's users complain about it? Yeah, then, maybe). Fastmail probably won't ban you because you're receiving racist newsletters. There aren't content moderators, just mostly-automated responses to user reports of abuse. The user is in control, and the servers don't try to proactively police or curate content that users want to read (they filter spam, sure). (I mean, there's the further problem that it's nearly impossible to create a new open protocol of any kind and get any notable adoption these days, but that's not the fault of the federated model) [EDIT] To be clear, I'm not advocating for racist newsletters in the above, that was just an unambiguous example of the kind of thing that'll draw swift and harsh moderator action on a lot of federated servers but that can (I assume—admittedly, I've not tried) get passed around via email without problems—my point is that the issues with "drama" and network-churn and such in federated networks, that may disrupt the usage patterns of ordinary users, is connected to how much control the server operators have. More fundamentally, this is connected to making the activity of these communities public on the Web by default—which I think is largely a mistake, I think it's really weird that it's become common for groups of people chatting about whatever to put everything they say on billboards in flashing lights all around the world.

ghostpepper 3y ago

Can I just join "lemmy" or do I need to pick a specific sub-group to join? Which one did you pick?

wccrawford 3y ago
I just joined. My understanding is that you pick your home server (I chose sh.itjust.works) and then you can add the local communities from there, as well as other communities on other servers. SJW (unfortunate acronym, IMO) had a list of local and remote communities that it already knew about that I could easily choose from, and my understanding is that there's a way to add more, but I didn't look into that because it had all the communities that I had considered joining directly anyhow. It was pretty painless, though I haven't tried actually posting anything yet.

MuffinFlavored 3y ago

My first reaction is: there should be an aggregator for all of these instances: https://join-lemmy.org/instances https://join-lemmy.org/instances because my first instinct guess is, there's going to be huge overlap on submissions daily there's only so much new news daily and a certain niche of people who read it/contribute scattering them out to a bunch of obscure niche places probably doesn't help there are even boring days on HackerNews. how many monthly active users does this site have roughly? 500k? 1m? way less?

assbuttbuttass 3y ago
The way the fediverse works is, you can see posts and interact with communities on other instances as long as they federate with your "home" instance

deleted 3y ago

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silverbax88 3y ago

Thanks for this. I can see Lemmy as a definite alternative now. I joined a couple of Lemmy servers and I definitely like it so far, and I'm looking to move away from Reddit anyway.

FalconSensei 3y ago

Honest question: for the user, how does the federation work if your "subreddits" (sublemmies?) are scattered between 10 different instances? On Mastodon it's quite a pain sometimes, if you open a link to someone else's instance, and then have to copy their link and paste on your instance to be able to follow I think this is probably way harder/more annoying on lemmy, since if I have 1 user on abc.xyz, and I also browse and want to comment/upvote on qwerty.cxz and asdf.rocks

dbbk 3y ago

Dead on arrival. There are 6 separate "general" instances. Normal people will never use this.

moffkalast 3y ago
All of the ones I've tried just result in a spinning ball of death when trying to sign up too, I'm not sure if any of this actually works, or if registrations have been disabled so god forbid anyone can migrate from reddit. Do I seriously have to set up my own instance so I can make a fucking account or what?

w1nst0nsm1th 3y ago

I became a fan of American politics by reading reddit... Then, I stopped watching the walking dead

assfart 3y ago

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