No casual user is ever going to leave Reddit for Lemmy. Even for myself I’m probably not going to use Lemmy because it seems stupid to have to join multiple “Lemmys” and make multiple accounts, this isn’t a good user experience. People are supposed to have separate accounts for every Lemmy? All the communities are disparate and separated? It makes no sense to me at all.
As far as which instance to join, well, that’s kinda like email, too. Look at the instances that are out there (the email providers in this example, like Gmail vs Mailfence), see if you like their policies and moderation and community “vibe,” and join the one that suits you.
https://beehaw.org is a big one that I like very much. Not really any memes there, the user base tends more toward the mature and considerate, and overall the level of interaction feels much better than Reddit ever did, post Digg exodus.
Ok, that does not sound reassuring. What does that mean for my account if the server I am on disappears? Can I still login? Will my posts disappear? (probably not, but join-lemmy.org doesn‘t say if I am not mistaken)
My email provider has some way to make money. There is a good chance that it is around in 10 years. What about these servers? Who is running them and why should a single one still be around in 10 years?
If the choice of a server really is not important, why doesn’t join-lemmy.org have a "join random server" button.
Maybe these are non-issues. As a casually interested person I genuinely don’t know.
... From a technical perspective. But most people don't care about that. It's a social network, and they want to use it as one. They already have the experience of reddit, where there's thousands of seamless communities and one account gives you access to all of them. Lemmy feels like a big step back for anyone who doesn't care about the technical details. Which is basically everyone.
There are literally thousands of sites that let you login with your google account.
When's the last time you heard of Fastmail saying that they were now blocking all emails from Zoho because they didn't like the way a single Zoho user was using Zoho?
Yet this is the sort of thing we see in the Fediverse when one admin takes issue with another admins attitude.
This is also a problem with mastodon. As well as the fact that instances constantly shut down or have insane admins.
But it isn't. People aren't looking for an alternative to email.
It's a brand new technology and system, for the most part. Give them time to make it more user-friendly. It's worth it joining and participating now IMO, but I think in 6 months or a year it will be MUCH more friendly to the average Joe.
Tbh I’m not sure what the main advantage of federation is if they all have the same subreddits (news, tech, pics, etc). It seems like it just fragments the userbase, I’d get it if each subreddit was one instance
Would much better understand if each 'subreddit' was something that was federated and could be defederated and users all moved to another instance.
But right now, it's just too fragmented.
- There are some ideas of "grouping" communities/subreddits to better dedup but still allow crossposting and discussion.
- There are some ideas of introducing moderation tools (currently the only tool is "defederation").
Most of this has not been developed as the 2 developers behind Lemmy were working on a "get paid to introduce milestone features" basis before the Reddit refugees came over. I expect this friction to iron out over time.
The largest instances have a little duplication so there are something like 3 large gaming-related communities, 3 large world news communities, etc. This is not generally the case, for many topics communities on particular instances either "win out" so to speak in terms of subscribers or duplication doesn't exist.
This is a feature in my opinion. Mass adoption has ruined so many sites (including reddit). It's taboo, but gatekeeping communities is absolutely required to stop mass adoption and the downward spiral. Reddit was better in 2010 than in 2020.
I tried to join a server.
Went through a long list of them. I was confused on which to pick, and if that decision mattered, and what would be the security implications of it.
I finally picked one reluctantly. The server was down.
Not a great feature. Feels more like a bug.
> Mass adoption has ruined so many sites (including reddit).
Nonsense. Mass adoption means it's the place to go to consume and produce content.
If the feature of Lemmy you single out as being better is that no one uses it then I'm not sure what would be the point of joining, or why are you promoting the service so that others join.
> Reddit was better in 2010 than in 2020.
No it wasn't. At best, it was different.
And people like me are leaving 2023 Reddit, not 2010 Reddit. What we want is an alternative to today's service, not nostalgia.
Everyone should be furious that Twitter was purchased by a billionaire to basically promote his own tweets and other viewpoints he agrees with. Reddit users shouldn’t be happy about a site (and app) that has only gotten worse over the years.
It has also never been easier to replace Reddit and Twitter technologically.
This is a key opportunity to fight against the enshittification of the internet and you’re on here complaining about creating multiple accounts… Ugh
1. Twitter was and still is a commercial product, not to mention publicly traded. Buying and selling it is completely fine and ordinary. It's nothing to feel furious about, especially if you aren't going to put up a competing offer.
2. Wouldn't you (and 99% of people) also spend money to amplify your opinions far and wide if you had such money? Hell, the entire reason most people use social media is because they want to amplify their opinions far and wide.
The flaw of lemmy's design is that communities reside on a single service, so you will end up with multiple "Science" communities, because in the founding phase several people created such a community of the same name on multiple servers. They should instead have used a hashtag-based approach (granted, problem then is the tight-knit moderation that makes subreddits like AskHistorians so valuable), or implement something like communities subscribing to other communities (like a community-ring) etc.
That's not entirely true, some of the larger instances have no open federation policy, meaning the owner of the instance you are on has to get itself allowlisted in order to federate.
In practice this means that you can follow _some_ communities on _some_ other servers, but not all, and not every popular server.
Add that to the fact that some larger instances have stopped federating with each other and you have the current state; a minefield where your average user tries Lemmy, pastes a link into it's search box as instructed, nothing shows up and goes back to Reddit.
The whole point of federation is to avoid the problems we're seeing with Facebook, with Instagram, with Reddit, with Twitter: control over your internet content. Not having a mega-corp bent on maximizing profits and using you as a milking cow, but instead have a say and have actual power in how communities are built and managed. It is 100% expected that Lemmy or KBin is different from Reddit. You say that's not a good user experience, but I challenge that assertion: I say it's not a bad UX, but it's a different UX, and you don't want to change. Well, if you don't want to change, stay on Reddit, that's not a problem. But if you're going to investigate what the fediverse is, please learn what it's about, how it's built. Don't expect to find the same old world you know, that's on purpose !
> It makes no sense to me at all
You're on HN, a forum where members pride themselves in being intelligent enough to dig around, learn by themselves, be different, hack around. You haven't made efforts understanding how the fediverse works, or why it's different, and your conclusion is _not_ that you should investigate, but that you should complain that it's too different. I don't understand this reasoning.
I think an issue in the mentality in this forum is that people mostly expect products, ie a package that is made by an entity and that is served to users. The package is expected to be complete, shiny, wonderful, the entity is expected to do whatever it takes to convince users. It's an asymmetry that is completely opposite to the whole concept of being a hacker, which is supposed to be the H of HN.
Here's a good post explaining what the fediverse is about: https://medium.com/@VirtualAdept/a-friendly-introduction-to-...
And here are a few links and resources if you want to go deeper: https://github.com/emilebosch/awesome-fediverse
This isn't to be gatekeeping, but I think trying to hope for some magical, identical reddit but without reddit's BS is both a fever dream and shortsighted. Do you believe Reddit2 to not fall into the same trap as reddit?
We'd need something different to prevent that, and different is going to be less intuitive than the familiar. It's fine if you don't want to be in that firsr wave of figuring out how to make different work, others will figure It out and communicate their findings.
One Private/Public key-pair is all you need to fetch data from, and upload your own posts to all NOSTR relays.
The only complicating factor now is that, to prevent spam, some relays [0] are requiring a one time or recurring payment.
It's super-neat, actually.
Change doesn't have to come overnight, or even soon. Better is not on a deadline. Society can adapt & improve slowly too, in difficult not easy win struggles. This article is about 0.025% of the planet signing up, mostly within a couple months. To me, one that that ain't bad! The growth trend isn't likely to continue apace but this like critical mass, like a seed successfully germinating, for a long life, that can bring who knows what.
But of course overwhelmingly negative doomsaying 'it'll never work' is the tried & true forever response to all efforts to do anything other than a couple centralized megaproperties. Everything is too hard for users at scale. Only bad can win. Resign. Give up. Don't try. Unless you have 3b+ users you shouldn't even try.
This is just going to be the same point forever & ever, anytime anything good might possibly happen.
From the point of view of active Lemmy users, this is not a problem. Casual users don't contribute, so they're essentially just leeches from the point of view of the overall service. Kinda same thing as with pure FOSS. Non-contributing users are tolerated, but they are not really useful in any way.
Not at all. In fact it is the non contributing users that give value to your product. Imagine Firefox but without any end users. Similarly, reddit is valuable mostly because of the massive number of people viewing content on it. Youtube is valuable because of the huge number of people who just watch videos, never make anything.
The content creators, or contributors, will flock to wherever the non contributors are.
And even if i just looked on non-contributing users in a utilitarian way, they are still useful for project brand recognition.
Don't overthink which instance to choose. Just sign up for Lemmy.world or any of the other "general purpose" instance. It's not terribly important.
The one caveat to that is that you may want to choose beehaw instead if you strongly value a more heavily moderated experience. As I understand it, Beehaw intends to refederate once there are better moderation tools available on Lemmy but for now they are separated.
This is an outstanding advantage. Let Reddit be Reddit with its eternal September and easy access for everyone. Lemmy could build smaller and much more useful and expert communities.
If one has something important to share, then finding an instance is no obstacle. If one just wants to mindlessly shitpost, then maybe it's good some social media sites will be worth too much effort for them to sign up.
Personally, I would like paid and privacy-respecting social media sites focused on experts in their fields. Much like academic journals, but with modern social media features and for industry experts and enthusiasts as well as academics in a wide variety of fields traditional and not - everyone who is willing to put some effort into what they spend time on. I think that 0 price of entry is unnatural. No one accepts people in their social circles who spend 0 effort on participating in a mutually-beneficial way. And yet on the internet, that's the only kind of social networking most of us can do.
So I say it's good we have a tiny test of effort for people who sign up to Lemmy. Socializing with 0 skin in the game is very unnatural and even if it's better in some philosophical way, the human brain hasn't evolved to deal with a massive amount of garbage that this kind of social networking brings. If you want to communicate something to a lot of people, the price of entry should be at least a modicum of effort.
And this is not some far-out untested idea, it worked very well in the 90s.
Having all the casual users left behind and siloed on Reddit would be glorious. Lol.
Actually you only need to join one lemmy instance, then you can just use that for everything.
And stuff like https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/469273-lemmy-universal-lin... would help not to use yours.
Kind of like with email, you don't need to have account with Gmail to send an email to friend on that server.
I like Lemmy in general, it's what you would expect from a Reddit clone... but because of this kind of stuff, it's really going to be a hard sell for anyone who's not fundamentally a "fediverse" fan who wants Reddit to burn.
- Yes, it takes five minutes of research to figure that out. It might also take another five minutes of research to ensure you don't choose an extremist or troll instance that will get defederated from all the others. Yes, there is friction that wasn't there with Reddit. Convenience is not what Lemmy is optimised for. If you value convenience above all else then it's probably not for you.
Then one day later there were over 600 users registered on my instance.
All of those 600+ new users were spam bot accounts.
Lemmy is sorely lacking the tools for dealing with that kind of thing.
So in order to avoid that the spam accounts that were created could cause problems for other instances, I temporarily shut down my instance until there are tools that I can use to deal with the spam accounts.
I wonder how many of the 2M users mentioned in the OP story are real persons, and how many are spam accounts.
But on the other hand, in my casual use of Lemmy.world I have yet to encounter any spam at all. So either the mods there are really incredible, or the spam problem isnt so bad
The spam bots that signed up did not start posting on my instance yet at the moment when I discovered them.
Probably they are stockpiling accounts for later use.
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3200#issuecomment-1...
Just like they are talking about, the version of Lemmy that I ran when the wave of spam bots hit me did not have Captcha at all.
OP doesnt mentioned that users behave like bots so this question is logical.
1. Will apps like Liftoff, Boost for Lemmy, and Sync for Lemmy support Kbin instance accounts? Should I be signing up for Lemmy instead if I want a familiar mobile app?
2. If I register a Kbin account, can I register with the same username on a different "home instance"? Can you login (not federate) to a different instance with a Lemmy/Kbin account? e.g., if I sign up for an account on kbin.social, can I login to lemmy.world with the account since most apps currently only support Kbin instances?
3. What happens if your home instance goes down temporarily? What happens if it goes down permanently? What if there is drama and suddenly many instances stop federating with your home instance? What if my instance stops federating with an instance I participate in? Do you need to start over somewhere else?
4. Are there multi-reddits to combine the same topic from multiple instances? What happens if multiple instances each have their own version of a community? 5. How do you moderate a community on Lemmy/Kbin? How do you deal with spam?
6. How do I link to or save a post? How do I search?
I want to sign up, contribute, and give the best chance of it taking off. But I don't understand the future implications of which instance I sign up on.
This is scary. With that much public information all of your accounts are surely pwned and you'll be a prime target for AI based scam attacks. It's probably enough data to build an AI profile that'll be more real than real YOU to other people and all it takes is couple of API calls/scrapes of your reddit account.
No one should ever have a personal reddit account that is older than a year.
What? So? How does the age of the account imply that they’ve stored anything remotely useful/identifiable?
People have different standards for privacy and different needs and desires for identity. Just because you disagree doesn’t mean that you should push people in a direction baselessly.
> It's probably enough data to build an AI profile that'll be more real than real YOU to other people and all it takes is couple of API calls/scrapes of your reddit account.
Human has been reduced to a series of API calls ever since the rise of smartphones. AI doesn't change that.
It's different than a forum in that all the instances can be connected to each other, so that's an improvement over a standard forum in that you can still interact and get content from outside of your silo.
I do agree it's hard to get an idea of what an instance is all about and I think there could be better and more detailed descriptions to help people decide what community they want to be a part of.
Why did Lemmy migration fail? (65 comments)
(dead) I'm leaving Lemmy (0 comments)
The social website without users and content (128 comments)
I follow /r/soccer which has not just the userbase but people posting goals in _real time_ a lot of times even before happened on your regular broadcast. There is no replacement for that.
For me personally to use any of these sites, it has to at a minimum be a place where one can learn and have stimulating conversation. Reddit was like that in 2008, and it stopped being that way when memes, marketers, and political correctness took over. HN is the only site of this style that I regularly frequent because the quality is relatively high. Without keeping a high quality bar, I don't see why anyone would care to use any of these sites unless there's enough of a differentiating factor, and I don't think fediverse is an attractive enough of a feature to attract any serious users long-term. I mean look at Mastodon - it peaked when Elon took over Twitter, but has just been in decline since then.
I built my own HN/Reddit alternative [1] with the sole mission of retaining a high standard of quality. Will it work? Doubtful without at a minimum getting the ball rolling seeding it with content, and marketing is not my forte or interest. But in any case I hope we'll see more competitors trying to build a "better" Reddit than attempt to replicate the cespool that is Reddit (outside a few high quality niche subreddits), that persists not due to any superiority but simply just from network effects at this point. We don't need more of the same, we can do better.
It's probably reasonably expected to get a surge of new sign-ups when a competitor does something controversial, then drop back down to a more natural rate (but hopefully still higher than pre-surge). I don't think this on its own indicates failure.
> I built my own HN/Reddit alternative [1] with the sole mission of retaining a high standard of quality. Will it work?
At the risk of being snarky myself, I'd claim the mission is a failure right from user #1: https://i.imgur.com/57BhkkJ.png - the quality standard of ad-hominem soapboxing is already near rock bottom.
Did you have an actual counter-argument? (article referenced in the image: https://jsavage.xyz/2022/09/30/debate-exposes-bigotry-of-wok...)
You're kind of proving my point here. On Reddit this would get downvote censored with no one even attempting to come up with a coherent counterargumemt, just people using downvote as a disagree button, squashing out all unorthodox views, and breeding the hivemind.
Its lead developer is Ernest from Poland and it's implemented in good old php.
This doesn't bode well from a security perspective.
Graphical search indexes for finding and joining an instances aligning with your interests:
An index of subreddit migrations, both official and unofficial community spinoffs to subscribe to:
- https://lemmyverse.net/communities
A list of alternative clients for mobile, desktop, and web browsers:
Lemmy is free and open-source software for running self-hosted social news aggregation and discussion forums
Also, bravo to that dev. Seriously, v0.0.2 and you are killing it mate. You should be proud.
For example, I commented on one post, which added that community to my instance, but then my instance never did sync up with any new comments from that post so I just thought there was no activity on it until I went to the original instance and saw all the new comments.
To be fair, it could be on me and my configuration. I'm not really sure, but it makes it difficult to keep track of moving discussions and will probably drive me away from it eventually.
If he can use his UI skills to give the level of quality that Sync offered, packaged with Reddit users in mind, I think this will absolutely solve this.
It's because of attempts at excluding spam accounts: https://fedidb.org/site/news The author's mastodon has some posts on this: https://mastodon.social/@dansup
I'm on lemmy.world and personally not seen any spam though.
Overall, I'm not surprised with what happen to reddit or even twitter. This crawling enshittification driven in most cases by the greed and power lust; I've seen this happen many times in the Polish part of the Internet and it looks like it's an inevitable stage in platform's life.
I'd encourage people not to give up hope. You don't have to give up using Reddit and YouTube, but instead you should find other sites that match your values and give them preferential treatment.
I signed up for a Lemmy instance. I took 10 minutes and logged into it on all my devices and removed all the quick links to Reddit. During my 10 minutes of discipline I made it as easy as possible to use alternatives during my times of low-discipline. I did whatever I could to redirect my "I'm bored, I'm going to click on something for entertainment" energy towards Lemmy instead of Reddit.
Basically, just make sure you put alternatives first on your list and Reddit and YouTube come last. I wont visit Reddit for entertainment unless I've first read through a bunch of posts on Lemmy. If a specific search directs me to Reddit, so be it, but I wont post there for fun; not unless I have to, not unless I've tried the alternatives first.
Remember how easy it is to type another URL into your address bar.
If picking a server and understanding how it works is too much effort for you, then don't use it. You have had to put effort into understanding every single service you use. Lemmy, Mastodon, Kbin and other federated services are no different.
If it's too much, stay with Twitter or Reddit. It's okay.
It wasnt quite clear how serious the reddit event but it seems now more than a blip. Many subs still silent or disable comments because they cant moderate without the tools.
The fediverse platforms and overall design have still some way to go but those inroads are vital validation and testing at scale.
Remember these are still tiny teams with very limited funding. When the history of social platforms is written they will be hailed as heroes and visionaries long after the lazy comments on HN are forgotten.
