Technology

Anything that takes social media out of the power of greedy corporations is an A+ in my book.

It's interesting but I still think the federated universe still has too many quirks to be understandable by most people. To be honest, I haven't bothered documenting myself so I might say stupid things but I can't understand why identity is tied to a server, it seems like a terrible design mistake when it's obviously the first thing i'd want to decentralise. In short, I'm me, it shouldn't matter that I'm on beehaw, lemmy or some random mastodon or kbin server. Huge mistake imho.

Then the content obviously needs a lot more contributors but many of the good reddit contributors where also mostly tech illiterate and I'm still worried that the high complexity to enter the fediverse will put off many people and keep it a fun, but somewhat boring, little niche.

i like the community but

1. this app needs a better ui...i know that comes secondary but it just seems to vague. whats with the weirdly small coloured thread indicators?
2. theres gotta be a better explanation of federation out there. there's gotta be. i didn't understand it for days because i couldnt find any decent sources on lemmy

Tbh I have no idea what’s going on.

honestly I hope it stays this active. fediverse feels more at home to someone whos been on the internet since before it was so centralised, something like this feels like a good mix. lots of different decentralized sites able to communicate with eachother, rather than just one site holding everyone hostage. mastodon never really took off too big but I hope lemmy can make it happen.

I love it actually. I feel like there is a stronger sense of community here. It's encouraging me to engage more whereas I would just lurk on Reddit. I also like the UI, both on desktop and on Jerboa for Android.

UX wise its okay, content wise, we are getting there. I am also happy its written in Rust, I am keen to contribute to the project in the future.

I like it - I just want a few Reddit-ish features:

1. Hiding reply chains for scrolling cleanliness in comments of a post
2. Hiding posts on the main page should be easy to do (buttons unclear)
3. Dedicated copy link button - so it's clear I'm copying the link to the page that is being spoken about in a post, rather than a link to the comments of the post itself.

I'm still confused by the instance decentralized structure. And my feed seems chaotic. But so far I'm liking it !

I think its a little rough around the edges, but thats to be expected given that its less than a year old. The big hit for me is the mobile app which just isn’t that good. This will come with time. I’d rather have an half-baked implementation thats showing promise over what Reddit is doing. I like decentralized social media because you can pick and choose what communities you interact with. If lemmy.world decides to go full enshitification (although I can’t figure out how they would monetize), you can just pack up and going to another community.

This honestly reminds me of when I was growing up in the early 00s, I was part of several different community forums that I loved dearly. There were other groups I looked into, but some were just toxic and unappealing, so I left after a while. I feel like Lemmy gives us the same freedom. I really hope to meet some awesome people here. Right now it’s just big enough to still allow meaningful dialogue and create cool relations. I felt like Reddit was too big for its own good even with niche subreddits; it didn’t feel like posting was worth it as it would get buried or just get a low effort response.

Honestly, I kind of hate it, but since Reddit is unusable, considering all the subs that have gone dark (presumably permanently).

I'll be honest. I don't like the Fediverse concept - the fatal flaw of decentralized systems is that sometimes centralized systems are great. Basically, reddit was ONE BBS style forum for everything, which was the killer convenience. Similarly Twitter was the ONE microblogging platform for everybody, which was the killer convenience.

Because the moment anybody can operate a service, everyone does.

Right now, I need to buy a car, I can't find a good Lemmy community to get advice from. Searching for 'cars' in all federated communities returns:

Fuck Cars@lemmy.ml - 3.41K subscribers
Cars@lemmy.ml - 104 subscribers
Fuck Cars@lemmy.ca - 56 subscribers
Self Driving Cars - 19 subscribers
IdiotsInCars@lemmy.world - 11 subscribers
Electric Cars@lemmy.ca - 4 subscribers
RC Cars@lemmy.world - 4 subscribers
Cars@lemmygrad.ml - 3 subscribers
Fuck Cars@lemmy.world - 2 subscribers
Cars@lemmy.world - 1 subscriber

Leave aside for a moment that "Fuck Cars" has 34x more subscribers than the biggest Cars community - there are two different "Fuck Cars" communities, and three different "Cars" communities. It's great that you have subscriber numbers, but there's no definitive place to find out information on cars. Reddit's CEO is right that Reddit was organized like a landed-gentry where a first-come-first-serve approach to the most popular forums was done, but that landed-gentry system solved this problem, whatever new problems it may have introduced.

Now, you could look for a technological solution to solve this problem: For example, you could have a centralized server for all federated Lemmies, some sort of "lemmyhub.com"

We'd all have to agree on it. People could set up alternatives, but we'd all have to basically coalesce and say: Yes, this is the thing we want. Maybe it'd use blockchain, I don't know. Point is, it's centralized and easy to find information. It would work "just like Reddit" where you would have ONE authentication/authorization that works seamlessly across all instances (the current system is anything but seamless), and there would be ONE key/value combo for keyword. So, instead of going to Cars@lemmy.ml & Cars@lemmygrad.ml & Cars & lemmy.world, you just go to cars.lemmyhub.com.

If you want to post, you just use your lemmyhub account and your post appears on the "default" community. You can still post on individual lemmies by going to the individual lemmy page as well, or by specifying which of your Lemmy instance accounts you want to post as.

Here's the problem with the merging all the cars communities together, though: There is nothing to prevent someone from creating Cars@NeoNaziHeartsFascism.com and spamming the community with bile or trolling. Lemmyhub could operate a blocklist for troll and hate communities and instances, but once you're doing that, you're making editorial decisions. And forget all the nasty ethics problems around "what's free speech/what's hate speech?" "what's acceptable to view/what's not?", you have legal liability problems if anything slips through the cracks.

Reddit wasn't perfect, and certainly they could have been more proactive with shutting down hate speech, and more speedy with shutting down illegal content, but by and large reddit worked. Reddit's authoritarian approach worked because it was mostly benevolent -- right up until the point that it wasn't.

So I don't think Lemmy can technologically make it's way out of the situation.

I think what needs to happen is a solution like the Wikipedia foundation; we establish a non-profit designed to create a centralized server which may choose or not choose to incorporate Lemmy instances. It runs on donations, not advertising, and it's not designed to maximize profit, only to keep the servers running. It would borrow heavily from the Wikipedia model in organization and structure.

Because I'll be honest - Lemmy and Mastodon are okay, but there's really nothing in them improving on the old Newsgroups system of the late 80s and 1990s. Reddit captured the market for forum discussions because it was simply a better solution, there's nothing in Lemmy that makes it better - for the user - than Reddit.

Should we then abandon Lemmy and go back to Reddit? No, of course not. Reddit, if anything shows us that eventually all authoritarian systems, no matter how benevolent they start, always eventually turn tyrannical, and can do so on a whim, and once they do so, it is impossible to get back to benevolence.

But I've been a redditor for 15 years - I predated subreddits, if you can believe that. And I'm not finding the things I used to go to Reddit for here on Lemmy - information, expert and informed discussion, and niche topics. Maybe that's an adoption problem that will be solved with scale (and I hope it is), but right now, I feel like my luxury Bently sedan got totaled and I'm driving a 20 year old Honda Civic with manual transmission. By all means I'm grateful for the tent, but I still miss my Bentley

I love it. It feels like a more niche community (that's a plus). There's a strong sense of community here. I also like the UI (except for kbin--which I know isn't Lemmy--I can't seem to collapse comments there). Is it a little janky? Yes--and I'd argue that's part of the charm, sometimes.

So far pretty good. I like the idea of the fediverse, but I'm not sure if it will catch on.

Also, I hope some of the UI/UX stuff get ironed and are sharpened. I also miss old reddit.

But overall, it works and I am happy.

So far so good. This is actually my first comment.

I had a hard time wrapping my head around how the federation worked. But figured out I just search here in communities only with my keywords. If I don't get a result here and https://browse.feddit.de then it means no community has yet been created anywhere.

I decided to make Beehaw my 'home' server after discovering it actually had an 'interview' that I jived with and a moderated/structured set of communities. As my first deeper 'test' of lemmy I have created my first community at lemmy.world since it seemed like the place for my random community about a grocery store chain: !traderjoes@lemmy.world

If I was making a specific tech/software related community I likely would have chosen lemmy.ml as that's where many other tech/software related projects have landed so far. But lemmy.world seemed the better choice for random.

Does this seem relatively close to be how I should handle things in the lemmyverse?

Edit: It would be nice if there was a user setting to open external links in new tabs.

First impression is very good. But many instances do not allow the creation of new communities. Which brings me to all the little specialized subreddits that I used daily on Reddit are not on Lemmy. :-( Yeah general ones like Movies is there but I need my fix for r/Dune! :D

I know it's in its infancy but the great thing about Reddit was I could search any niche topic and guarantee there was a subreddit setup for it.

Obviously this is solved by more and more people using Lemmy but I personally can't see Lemmy appealing to the the masses. Depending how active the communities become I can see me using Lemmy going forward but I don't think it will be the "One site for everything" that Reddit has become but rather 1 of many sites I check going forward instead

The fediverse? Meh. Beehaw? Loving it

Ok so far. Only complaint is posts moving when new posts get added while I'm in the middle of scrolling. It's a little clunky.

I like the concept, and overall experience. On a more technical side getting my own private lemmy instance up and running (I wanted to retain full control of my account) was not easy due to somewhat lacking documentation on the process. Had to dig through posts from other people having similar issues, and do a bit of troubleshooting to fill in the gaps.

Now that I have it working will see if I can find the time to do a writeup on the process if others are looking to do the same.

I love it. I love how I don't usually have to deal with "right-wing" extremists. They're usually contained to lemmy.grab, but I suppose one or two might break containment every now and then.

Still, a hell of lot better then seeing their bullshit as the first comment on a new post. :|

I've moved from Twitter to Mastodon and Reddit to Lemmy and am so far loving both. Even though they're taking a bit to get used to they're mostly pretty straight forward and familiar feeling in how they work. I will definitely miss certain subreddits but many of them are already here in some form or in the process of moving over. I really love the distributed model that is not at the behest of a single corporate entity or billionaire.

I’m loving it.

I was wondering about situations where there are multiple communities about the topic on multiple instances… is it possible to subscribe to all of them easily or maybe have a way that the communities can “share” posts? Like sister communities or something?

Example, I post to dogsinbikinis@whatever.com, users of dogsinbikinis@whateverelse.com would automatically be able to see and comment on it.

One thing that I'm looking for is to see where (if?) the moderation teams and content providers of existing subreddits migrate over to Lemmy/Kbin and if the Reddit userbase migrate as well and become the de-facto communities on subjects.

I guess that's part of the community aspect that Reddit harboured with the moderators - that they infer and define the culture and dynamics of their particular subreddit - and if I have the choice of three or four fediverse communities on the same topic, I can maintain some continuity by joining the one maintained by the ex-Reddit mods.

It's like leaving infant school and going to high school - amongst the hundreds of strangers, it'd be good to see a few familiar faces.