It’s been a long journey, but here we arrive. Welcome home.
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It’s funny to read this article about the death of Digg again:
In reality, Digg changed their business model and pretended that they didn’t. That is something that is unacceptable with communities and won’t be forgotten. Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian hit the nail on the head in an open letter to (now former) Digg CEO – Kevin Rose:
“You chose to grow with venture capital and you’ve no doubt (I hope) taken some money off the table in your Series C round. I say this because this new version of digg reeks of VC meddling. It’s cobbling together features from more popular sites and departing from the core of digg, which was to “give the power back to the people.”https://searchengineland.com/digg-v4-how-to-successfully-kill-a-community-50450>
Sadly, this is the only logical conclusion of things that are run for profit. Here’s hoping the federated model proves more resistant in the long run.
Doctorow has it right. Enshittification.
Funding, even in a not-for-profit sense, will always be an issue. Wikipedia struggles, but kinda makes it work. We’re going to need something creative for the fediverse…
that doesn’t really hold because Wikipedia does not struggle with funding in the sense you’re thinking: https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/wikipedia-millions-bank-beg/
so, survival doesn’t necessarily have to be at stake
I donate to them fairly regularly, Wikipedia is fucking great!
Oh sweet, sweet irony.
At least Ohanian is married to Serena, and left reddit 10 years ago. Spez (aka Steve Huffman) is a fucking piece of shit that betrayed both of his co-founders
They removed Aaron from the list of founders at some point.
Tbh, I totally forgot that Ohanian left Reddit like 10 years ago 🤦
Tried the official Reddit app today and boy people weren’t joking when they say it sucks. I thought it’d just be the usual experience plus some ads but I was totally wrong.
The official app doesn’t respect your subreddit subscriptions at all, instead force feeding you feeds of whatever their algorithm thinks will drive maximum engagement just like a shit version of Facebook. The “hot” etc functionality is completely stipped from it entirely.
Guess I’m here to stay on the fediverse now.
What absolutely sucks about this is that I had carefully curated my subscriptions on RIF in order not to exacerbate my dumb mental health issues.
Hell, I’ve read angry posts about people in recovery from addiction and alcohol saying how they keep seeing ads for beer or gambling and things like that.
It’s horrifying!!
people in recovery from addiction and alcohol saying how they keep seeing ads for beer or gambling
Not that this is how it works, but I imagine a diligent algorithm looking at those individuals and that content, and then thinking “mhhmm this will generate maximum revenue!!”.
I think that’s absolutely how it works (in part). Ads curated toward your demographic! Maybe it’s not inherently purposeful, but it’s harmful, nonetheless.
In a subr×ddit about alcohol recovery? “Our algorithm detected that your post history contains the word “alcohol” or “beer” a lot! We will tailor your ads to cater to your interests for maximum profits!” Boom. There you go.
It takes the human aspect out of the community and drives it to become harmful at worst and soulless at best.
The algorithm really doesn’t work when you are critical or sceptical over a subject. For instance crypto sceptics from r/buttcoin being shown binance ads. Yes, they do show an interest in crypto, but may be the least suceptible persons to that ad.
It’s different with subs focused on addiction & recovery though.
Maybe it’s a very bad idea to targeted knife ads in a suicide watch sub, you know? Susceptible people and all.
I completely agree with you, and your example is very good indeed. (Maybe my previous comment was not clear ? English is not my mothertongue)
Nope nope sorry sorry! I just woke up and misread your comment as disagreeing with the sentiment, but I just reread it and realize that you were in agreement. I was just trying to explain my view further.
Sorry!! Lol I’ll try to post less when I’m still tired!!
Me too. I suffer from PTSD myself so I avoid things like the war coverage in Ukraine. The app is full of it and I can’t filter it fully like I can in RIF.
you don’t mention the copious, copious amounts of ads and sponsored contents
wow thanks reddit, you are more and more Facebook-like now, congratulations.
Yeah, that’s pretty bad too but I was at least willing to accept there is a valid reason for that to keep the lights on.
However, when they go as far to break the core functionality of the website and turn it into another Facebook with psychological manipulation at its core then that’s a whole other thing entirely.
Agreed. Honestly, if I want a FB-like Reddit, fuck that, I’ll going to Facebook.
Enshittification sucks I would say.
It’ll be great to see more people showing up on Lemmy.
People are so confused and overwhelmed about the fediverse mechanics though.
Maybe there is room for a product that is an aggregator for aggregators. Like, a centralised service that scrapes and collects all Lemmy instances into one super instance.
Its actually simple. Tell them, its like Email. You have an email account at gmail, but can perfectly fine have email conversation with someone on outllook. Lemmy instance = the same as a web email interface of any email provider. Most people will get their head around that.
As soon as you have to explain the fediverse to someone using analogies my experience is that most people have already given up. They just can’t be bothered to learn something new.
do birds fly? do ducks duck?
For what it’s worth, there is an issue on staying on the same instance when clicking on a different instance’s community and dessalines agreed with the concept, so we might be seeing a change there soon.
I love this. Perfect analogy because it’s literally the same.
Got to say I’m really excited that nobody can own the master instance of say Technology. If some channel goes rogue, there can be easily a competing instance that challenges the top spot. And the same applies to servers themselves. Everyone has to cooperate or you will be excluded.
Ohhhh I kept hearing the email analogy but never WHY it was like email. Thanks for the ELI5!
Great description. Im stealing that one
Pardon my confusion since I’m new to the fediverse as well, but isn’t every Lemmy instance like the super instance you are describing? You can access any community on any instance from any other; there are commentors in this thread from beehaw.org, lemmy.world, lemmy.sdf.org, programming.dev, and many others.
Nah those are like sibling instances. I’m talking about a parent instance that combines all the children instances with a new community that aggregates multiple remote communities.
Just thinking out loud, haven’t really fleshed out the idea yet.
That already exists. ATM, the thing you’re confusing it with is that there are 4-5 “gaming” subs, but eventually if one gets big enough or the others get taken in by one this will happen, and it’ll look like this instance “Technology@Beehaw.org” (p.s. I’m accessing this from Sopuli, so not on Beehaw).
I guess its just a natural progression of being absorbed by other communities that are larger. What I was getting at was a new feature that combines multiple communities into a single one on the backend and presents them as a single one (with interleaved posts/comments from all 5 communities or whatever)
Yeah, I think I get it - there’s a bunch of smaller gaming@<lemmy-instance> kind of things, you’re talking about a master c/gaming that combines all of the smaller lemmy instances of gaming channels, right?
Yeah, like multireddits!
From what I know, the instances share the posts between each other, but they need to have had contact with another instance somehow before they can get posts from there. Something like a user searching for an instance that isn’t yet known to their “home” instance yet or following a link to it.
As I understood it, this lets the instances know of each other. Posts of unknown instances won’t show up on your instance until the connection has been made.
So maybe a super instance could somehow include a newly created instance as soon as it has connected with any other instance already in the super instance.(might not be too coherent since I know little about this all as of now ^^)
I don’t think such an aggregator is required. Interoperability is smooth enough that you don’t have to think about different instances most of the time. I’ve only really noticed two points that would be confusing:
- the sign up process
- the “local”/“all” distinction
So I think what we really need to do to make this platform intuitive to people that aren’t already familiar with it is:
- Somehow streamline signing up. The process from googling Lemmy to having an account on an instance should not be confusing or intimidating.
- Filter by “all” by default. The default should cater to the users which are less likely to figure it out themselves. If you don’t understand what instances are and what “local” vs “all” means, then you are probably here for the “all” experience. If you understand and really want “local” you are probably fine having to set it yourself.
The all for default is actually an admin setting (for users not signed up)
That would be https://lemmy.directory
OMG the “All” on that thing is about as useless as Mastodon"s “All”. Crap flying by so fast you can’t read it.
Don’t look by new?
for me it was just
reddit --> Lemmy
You are here, so you are not late.
Unless you count a few random forums when I was a kid, same. You think we’ll age out before whatever war starts?
I realise that this is unpopular. But personally while I disagree with the decision to charge (exorbitantly) for the api and appalled at the slander hurled at the dev, I think that is an business choice and one more item that I have to disagree and live with.
But I am very excited about the rise of the fediverse. I know that a company will eventually make a decision that I feel very passionately about, but I will be stuck making a difficult choice. With the fediverse, it provides the users with the opportunity to have control. This power of course often comes with various other costs (lack of a dedicated sre or moderation teams, etc). But I expect that over time this will evolve into options where paid offerings will come up that allows for higher QoS where required.
Honestly, if spez hadn’t already sold the site to white supremacists, I’d be a lot quicker to defend this.
The api changes really were about protecting their gold mine of data from ai data models scraping for data. Reddit wants to use that data to create its own models and then replace moderators with those models. The ultimate goal here is to turn the existing dataset into an automoderator on steroids that they could sell anywhere. Trouble is someone else is going to beat them to it.
There was a reason these changes lined up so nicely with Google doing the same thing. Everyone’s realizing they’ve been spouting their gold from firehoses and they’re being reactionary and turning them off asap instead of just like, accepting it as a facet of having a public social network.
Who are the white supremacists he sold to?
It was the Chinese that he sold out to. Not the white supremacists.
He did what now?
I must’ve missed that part of the story…
I’m also very optimistic right now. The challenges I see are more around funding, as continued work on the code bases and hosting seem to be the largest hurdles and ultimately easier with money than without. The Fediverse feels like an incredibly natural next step for a lot of users that are coming from a Reddit or Reddit-like background. Everything else (robust collection of communities, moderation, 3rd party tooling, etc) comes with the crowd and from the community, not from the “owner”, and will only take time if we can solve for the funding/scaling challenges.
It is just the catalyst we need to transcend the status quo and normalize technology that respects its users.
If you still have a Reddit account, unsub all the subreddits that are refusing to participate in a strike.
Fucking scabs
Good idea! Apparently most of my subs participated, so I only had to unsub a few times. Eerie view to see an empty front page after I was done, never had that.
Apart from this short visit, I stay away from reddit.
I’m kinda proud all the communities I follow followed suit! Even some pretty small/niche ones.
Damned good idea. I deleted all my posts and comments but also removing subs is good too.
What would that do? Not like they can pay the mods any less lol
Gonna be honest it’s kinda weird to me as someone who did just move over that there’s a bunch of posts from people who just found the Fediverse claiming it as home while there’s people who have been here since it’s creation. It’s got the implication that this was created as some sort of next jump from Reddit which doesn’t really seem to be the case from my perspective.
I see what you mean to an extent, and I also just moved over, but it’s worth remembering that Digg -> Reddit was the same afaik. Like Reddit had been around and established for a decent amount of time before the fall of Digg. (This is second-hand info because I wasn’t around at the time)
I’ve been on reddit for a couple years before the flood from Digg. The quality of content and especially comments went down right then, and never recovered.
Depends entirely on the subreddit, in my experience. Places like AskHistorians didn’t even exist when the great Digg exodus occurred. My favorite sub was /r/cfb which also benefited greatly from the mainstream popularity.
Not coincidental that both of these are relatively strongly moderated compared to many of the biggest/default subs.
I bet some early Redditors felt the same way about the DIgg refugees.
That feeling makes sense, but I think everyone knows that the Fediverse wasn’t created specifically to give them a landing in this event, just like Reddit wasn’t created to catch the Digg refugees, etc. More of a “next phase in the evolution of this concept”, and while it took a catastrophe, they’re ready to consider that it’s time to move on now.
The trick is going to be walking that line between preserving what made the Fediverse great and not alienating the newcomers. I think there’s room for everyone, though, and really the big advantage of the Fediverse - we don’t have to agree to co-exist, and can even co-existing completely separately if needed.
I think you bring up a pretty important point about federation in that it allows for and even encourage expansion in some ways, so that’s a good way to keep optimistic about it. I guess I just feel a little embarrassed. Especially when you look at posts like the recent one asking Lemmy users how they feel about the reddit refugees, and it’s flooded with responses from Reddit refugees instead offering unsolicited feedback about design choices. Then you have threads like this with people laying claim to the fediverse more or less. It just feels like some kind of a Christopher Columbus situation. While I realize that might be a little tone-deaf it’s the best analogy I have for it.
Any community is a sum of it’s members, good bad, or otherwise. I think there will be a wave of us Reddit refugees, but also word is going to spread to other places like Meta and hopefully bring in even more people. Getting people sorted into servers that are going to be able to handle the load, or even better getting them to host their own servers is going to be the way to go. Sorry if we’re stumbling all over your garden in the meantime.
Getting people sorted into servers that are going to be able to handle the load, or even better getting them to host their own servers is going to be the way to go.
That part still worries me a smidge, and it’s somewhat related to my other concern about funding/scaling. As more of the general public discover and move over, the % of the general population willing and able to host their own instance is going to steadily decrease. Not saying that we’re all gonna die or anything, but it’s going to be a shift and we’ll have to continue to adapt.
Hmm. Theoretically you could commercialise an instance, I guess.
I expect that in time, that’s exactly what will happen. Some instance somewhere will offer guaranteed availability and performance for a monthly fee to it’s members. That feels icky at first blush, but why should it? It’s not everyone’s cup of tea, but no one is forced to use that instance to be part of the larger community, and one instance can’t hold the community hostage like a single company social media company could. They’ll have success right up until they don’t and the Fediverse will sort it out through migrations of users and communities.
or make a non-profit. archiveofourown have ~20% of reddit’s traffic and run purely on donation.
That might work too, but I feel like it could be tricky to fundraise if there’s 1000 equivalent large-ish instances.
kind of a Christopher Columbus situation. While I realize that might be a little tone-deaf it’s the best analogy I have for it.
I definitely get the sentiment. Everyone is looking for how to make this what they “need” (want) without enough consideration for what it already is and who got it there. It’s going to be a journey, that’s for sure.
The one true constant for me is 4chan 😅
I kinda grew out of it. It was funny when I was an edgy teenager but it got progressively more cringeworthy as time progressed for me, even though the content may not have changed much.
I stopped engaging with Reddit when meme-ification happened.Wheb it became all about the lolz abd short pithy responses, I started using it to find more interesting articles. Gone are the days wheb the average Redditor would read and make thoughtful contributions.
That is in part because the reddit algorithm doesn’t like thoughtful contributions. These take time and understanding of the discussed matter. When your metric is positive (upvote) interaction per timeframe you need easily digestable content that people immediately react to. If I have to carefully read and think about the content my vote/comment is far too late to be “hot” on reddit.
Yeah that’s basically it. Bots had overtaken Reddit too and just propagated that problem by re-posting posts/top comments.
That depended on the subs you were in IMO, there was a lot of that but there were others that still had worthwhile stuff that wasn’t just silly shitposting for fun. Now we’ve got Lemmy though and multiple instances of it!
I used 4chan when I was younger but trying to go back after reddit was super depressing, I lasted about 5 minutes.
I stopped using 4chan when the probability of getting goddamn CP snuff videos in the browser cache because of a /b/ raid got beyond trivial, so like pretty fucking early on.
4chan definitely got worse. like it was always edgy and stupid, but after 2015 every board just kind of became /pol/
Yeah, nazis kinda ruined it. pre-2010 it was more whimsical and ridiculous as opposed to cringey and unironically bigoted.
Digg -> Reddit -> Lemmy
After experiencing the death of two “power to the people” platforms due to profit-driven VC-backed corporate meddling, here’s hoping the third platform is the charm Lemmy & the fediverse.
I don’t think the Fediverse will suffer the same demise as Digg and Reddit, precisely because it’s not owned by a profit-driven VC-backed corporation, but there are a couple of other serious threats to its longevity:
- Moderation. If the Fediverse isn’t adequately moderated, it will quickly be overrun by Nazis, pedos, and spam. That’s what killed Voat and Usenet.
- Funding. This isn’t like IRC, where a modern server can support tens of thousands of users in its sleep. Running a system along the lines of Reddit or Twitter requires a lot of computing power, and that’s expensive. Where’s the money going to come from?
I think smaller instances of a maximum of 1-2000 people are the way to go for the future. Most instance owners are hosting it because they want to and they have a lil extra cash to throw at it, the 500-2000 people instances are usually funded by the likes of a patreon ko.fi or other donation setup.
These instances aren’t big enough that the cost is of an instance isn’t massive and can therefore avoid the likes of Venture capital and Angel investors, and if they start to reach the level where funding is getting a bit short even with donations, they can close new account creation untill the number of donators increases beyond a point
TL;DR: Essentially instances should be welcoming new accounts in waves. So that their growth doesn’t outpace donation income.
I think the difference here is that Digg and Reddit were both VC-driven companies that wanted power, and the fediverse is fundamentally different.
I was on reddit before digg, but left reddit for digg until diggv4, then I went back to reddit lol. The decentralized nature of Lemmy and the fediverse seems like it will be more resistant to that sort of bullshit though.
Renegade BBSes -> IRC -> slashdot -> digg -> reddit -> imgur -> discord -> mastadon -> lemmy
with plenty of side quests along the wayPre search engine time on Geocities trading mutual linking on each other websites, reams and reams of messages and emails
So we’re a side quest then?
It’s hard to tell… it doesn’t feel like one, but it remains to be seen.
But I feel like the other alternatives to Reddit and the fediverse are more of a sidequest at this point.
Not going back too far, mine was IRC > Slashdot > StumbleUpon > FuckedCompany > Fark > 4chan > Reddit > Digg > back to Reddit lol > Lemmy
I loved StumbleUpon. But I do like the forum style discussions from Reddit and now Lemmy.
Finally more people moving to fediverse
Same fucking journey as you. Reddit was a good run for 10 years, let’s see if Lemmy can work.
What do we do if it doesn’t? Just crawl back and apologize?
I don’t think so. Although many will remain with Reddit, there is no incentive or loyalty for a significant % to do so. If reddit is shit, why not just use FB, Twitter or regular message boards? Already I saw many subreddits have discords already.
The question for most of those useea is there a lesser evil in choosing one bad company over another? Unfortunately I just see this community content becoming fragmented as a result and no winners emerging.
I like Lemmy / kbin but I am concerned that a dev could just shutdown their server and a community, accounts are gone. Who pays the server bills, and maintenance backups etc. This seems incredibly problematic.
Beyond that they need a strong mobile app and 3P decs, a tool to read a users reddit profile and subscribe to similar channels, one click registration without selecting a server. It would be good to also have a mechanism for showing cross-platform posted content in a single view.
If honestly feels like the 90s wild west Internet days again. No alternative I have seen so far can address these concerns.
Discord is way too engaging
@collegefurtrader @Cobe98 I find it’s impossible to follow a conversation on Discord :(
Theres can be 100 conversations going in the same chat, its insane. Anyway a chat room isn’t what I’m looking w.
Really depends on the size of the active user base, the quality of moderation and layout of the discord server.
I find while I have a bunch of larger discords that I’m not very active in them. The smaller discords are often where it’s at.
I mean, since there’s no central site to shut down, Lemmy failing would pretty much just mean that it stagnates and some of the bigger instances shut down, at which point there still would be some remnant of it left to stay on, if a smaller one. Failing that, it isn’t the only reddit alternative that people have been working on, so maybe one of the others will be more successful.
Exactly; if an instance goes down, then users can migrate to a new instance.
We make it work!
glares menacingly at Lemmy
Nah. If Lemmy/Fediverse doesn’t work out, there will be others. This has all happened before…
If the fediverse idea doesn’t work out and it’s yet another company the cycle is bound to continue.
A big chance is in front of us to break the cycle!
Oh, I agree wholeheartedly. Decentralization is the way to go and I hope Lemmy succeeds. This particular implementation may or may not work out long term, but the underlying idea is sound.
We’ll get it. Might take a couple tries, but we’ll get it.
Consider exploring other Fediverse platforms before heading back to Reddit.
I’ve been using Mastodon for some time now so the Fediverse won’t lose me, the question is if my redditing can be migrated.
@OneRedFox @amki Yep. There’s #Kbin and #Lotide.
Yeah, I almost did it, skipped digg. Seemed like a poor reddit clone at the time. Was nice to be on the right side, but sad to see it fall away. All for RSS, open source and federation though, so its nice. Reddit could have done the same - when they open sourced and allowed voat to be, they could have had a federated framework then - and allowed individual servers to handle their own APIs. They could have charged a license fee or something to commerical users who put ads on and made profits, but open source wins again I guess!
I skipped Fark, but my progression is largely the same. Once in a blue moon, I still visit Slashdot. It’s like checking up on an ex to see how they’re doing.
Journey Before Destination
Fuck Moash
Air-sick low lander, that one.
:D
I miss Lopen-bot…
Me too, I’m really trying to work with the community leaders to bring them here, but I haven’t gotten much in the way of responses yet unfortunately.
“You didn’t let your friends drown in nameless oceans during a frigid storm. That was, sure, basic friendship rules right there” ~The Lopen
Do we have a sub on this side yet?
Not that I’ve heard of or seen unfortunately
