> We are individuals with our own opinions. If you disagree with these, it is no problem! You can still freely use the Lemmy software on different instances. If you host your own instance, we have no control over it at all and are unable to censor what users say.
Love this! This is the true spirit of FOSS software, and I hope more projects adopt this ethos.
Don't like how it works? Stop complaining and fork it. Don't like how it's being operated? Stop complaining and host your own instance!
3. Click through to any community on any instance that looks interesting and add its RSS feed to your client.
I don't know precisely what the future of Lemmy will be, I wish them well because they've produced a cool piece of software which is more open than Reddit and puts RSS front and center. But for the time being I simply have some Lemmy feeds right next to the old.reddit.com feeds in my RSS reader, pure win for me as a user. My universe grew and I don't have to have a horse in anyone's race. This is why we RSS.
Well, OP already states that RSS is solely for people who only consume, not contribute. So no voting or commenting.
Then again, I have hacker news in my RSS feed and get a link to both the article and comment thread. That's how I'm now able to reply to your comment. Not sure if Lemmy (or reddit) support this out of the box as well.
RSS doesn't need to solve this problem. If you decide you care enough about a given community you can make an account on that instance and go do it the regular way.
The problem RSS solves is it prevents your whole world being captured by a particular community, instance, server, platform, company, whatever. Half the Internet is having an existential crisis over the Reddit implosion. RSS users aren't - we're kind of shrugging our shoulders and saying, well that's one of 10 places we get community, info, whatever, sure it's a big one but if it vanished overnight (which it sort of did) 85% of my feed would still be there.
Reddit, Lemmies, blogs, podcasts, Mastodon instances, weird alt Tube sites, the Chans, the Tildes, SDF, probably more - contrary to recent HN posts about how all the web feels "samey" now, it's a big 'net out there these days. It's merely a question of the company you keep. If you only ate at chain restaurants, you'd feel that food has gotten pretty lame too.
Until it does it's not an alternative to SOCIAL networks
> If you decide you care enough about a given community
What if I don't have time to evaluate the whole community and just decide that I care enough about a given piece of content and want to add my very valuable contribution by upvoting?
> whole world being captured by a particular community, instance, server...
This is a nonexisting problem since there are many of those, so
> one of 10 places we get community, info ... 85% of my feed would still be there
this comparison doesn't make sense, if you only used Reddit for 15% of you news/ consumption, didn't care about it (didn't have any social capital there etc.) or other users, you'd also not have any existential crisis regardless of whether you used RSS or something else to read Reddit/other sources
> Until it does it's not an alternative to SOCIAL networks
I get what you’re saying butI think this doesn’t matter quite as much as it does with Twitter, Facebook, etc.
Plenty of us preferred when Reddit was less like a modern social media network (mostly the pitfalls) and are more than happy just lurking. I don’t need an online status light. I don’t want some weird “snoovatar” NFT nonsense. I want /r/videography so I can continue to learn about my craft. An RSS feed sounds great and I’m kind of annoyed at myself for no thinking of it already lol.
I don't get the broader point you're trying to make here. That RSS is no good because it doesn't provide some kind of unified ID, posting/commenting capabilities etc.?
It's well documented that 95% of users are lurkers. 95% of the time I'm lurking, too. That's why following multiple communities across multiple platforms is useful. For the frequent times when we all lurk.
The broader point is pretty simple - you suggestion fails in the relevant problem domain, which is social networks
> It's well documented that 95% of users are lurkers
then you wouldn't mind citing a source? Though bear in mind that in this context lurker is a social media platform user who:
a) reads but
b) never interacts (no likes, no shares, no comments, no posts, no messages, no games etc.)
> weird alt tube sites
What does this look like for you? I've failed to migrate any of my video consumption off YouTube due to lack of discoverability. (I know you can sub to yt channels via rss too but I'd like to do that less ideally to de-silo my video sources)
Discoverability is rather hard, not all YTers will announce their alt channels. I’ve found the most luck with LBRY/Odysee, especially STEM channels, and they even have a plugin for this[0]. However I haven’t tested it personally.
I also suggest using Invidious for getting YT RSS feeds, its incredibly simple and a much cleaner (and more private) experience all around.
There's money to be made in constantly ringing the outrage bell.
Remember Jordan Peterson talking about building a censorship-free Patreon[0]? That was 5 years ago. Never went through with it obviously, because Patreon is just one of many things that carnival barkers "content creators" can make hay with. Tomorrow, it'll probably be a Disney movie.
This bring me memories of when Google Reader closed. The existing back then alternatives got hammered badly by the relatively sudden massive influx of new users.
Still the numbers are low, and what users will find is something different from what they used to, but I think the more diverse landscape will push a change in how people use internet to connect each other and to content, beyond reddit/lemmy/etc kind of usage.
I remember when he first took over and he was all like: “I’m gonna listen to the community and do and AMA often”.
Beginning of this year they told devs: we’re not gonna mess with the API situation anytime soon. And then they did, but he: it makes sense and I’m sure the pricing will be reasonable.
Then the last three months happened. I’ve rarely seen goodwill burned so quickly.
The fediverse is an ok alternative for some people, but not all.
Just the past few days I was troubleshooting some Linux issues with my new installation and 90% of the useful search results I found were from reddit. If global text search is not implemented on the fediverse, then it's just gonna be useful for twitter like content, not reddit content.
Reddit has a 16-year head start in domain authority, search engines will be obviously do a better job of indexing their pages than a mostly new service. In time, alternative sources will be indexed and visible in search results as well.
As long as those issues persist (and the post title is likely a hard one), Reddit will always have an advantage since it's built to be more SEO friendly.
Reddit may be more SEO friendly for now, but if it's content suffers and search results are degraded, search engines will probably to look to change how they rank results.
It's not about 16 years of SEO optimization, it's about a good chunk of the fediverse being opposed to search indexing because they have nightmare about bots:
That is about what I expected, honestly. Only the people who really care will migrate, just as with Mastodon. The vast majority don't care and will continue using Reddit.
Unsurprising at all. The lack or the reduction of 3rd part app and API access does not affect the vast majority of reddit users who use the official website and the official app. The vocal minority is unlikely to convince the majority users to boycott. The moderators who choose to keep any subreddit private extended period of time is effectively choosing to slowly kill off their subreddit, after which a replacement subreddit is likely to just spring forward and replace. I think this whole saga is emotional and irrational response.
Irrational because there's no path and clear leverage that helps them get to the purported end-goal. It is more like a tantrum than a strategic calculated response, which makes it more irrational than rational.
When we have actually decentralized apps I believe we'll see much better adoption. The fediverse has all the worse parts of decentralization with none of the benefits. For example you can go to another instance where a community is mirrored and create an account with the same username as a prominent poster and impersonate them.
That's also a small minority of people, they'd have to care about third party apps which are already a minority and also walk away from using the site, which can be hard if you already use it heavily, which it's likely that third party users do so.
For example, I've been using third party apps for years but I downloaded the official app because I honestly don't care about the client I use for a particular site.
Time will tell, but third-party apps users (and old.reddit's[1] ones) also tend to be the most prolific users, and it's the posters and admin that run the show.
[1]: they've already removed i.reddit earlier this year, I don't expect old.reddit to make it to 2024.
My wording is backward actually, what I meant is that third-pary apps users are a much more active user base than the average joe, not that the most prolific are necessarily on third-party apps.
From a sub with reasonable traffic non-tech sub that I moderate...
Normally I have ~75 new subscribers per day and less than 5 unsubscribes per day.
Just prior to the strike, the subscribers dropped to ~35.
At the start of the strike, unsubscribes went up to ~10 while new subscribers went up to ~100.
During the strike, the number of new subscribers went up to ~175. Other subs with a similar topics (and the big one) had gone private during that time.
I'm back to ~75 new subscribers per day.
As to old vs other... page views per day for the past 30 days (very spiky) and the previous 30 days
Past 30 days | Previous 30 days
Client Low High | Low High
old.reddit: ~35 ~100 | ~25 ~75
new.reddit: ~200 ~900 | ~200 ~400
Mobile web: ~100 ~300 | ~100 ~150
Android client: ~1000 ~2000 | ~1000 ~1500
iOS client: ~2000 ~6000 | ~2000 ~3000
Total: ~2500 ~9500 | ~3000 ~5000
The past 30 days have been very spiky. Not just a little, but very. The previous timeframe was very regular.
Old.reddit... yea, it doesn't have the numbers at all, though I'll note that most people using the sub appear to be people browsing on their phone as even new.reddit isn't that much higher than old.reddit stats.
I'm gonna say though, that for a sub that is for "regular people" - the most prolific users aren't 3rd party apps or old.reddit. At least not with with the people who browse this sub.
Now, for a tech oriented very low traffic sub... (and looking at its stats, it went way up during the strike since the high traffic ones closed from less than 500 page views to about 1500). Normally it gets a subscriber a day with 5 new subscribers being a significant growth... there were 55 new subscribers during the strike.
Past 7 days | Previous 30 days
Client Low High | Low High
old.reddit: ~25 ~75 | ~10 ~60
new.reddit: ~400 ~600 | ~75 ~475
Mobile web: ~150 ~250 | ~30 ~150
Android client: ~125 ~350 | ~25 ~100
iOS client: ~400 ~700 | ~25 ~250
Total: ~1000 ~1500 | ~175 ~1000
New.reddit seems to be the preferred client there, though its such a small sample that its difficult to say much.
The API appears/is believed to to show up under mobile web as the bucket - along with people still using the mobile web client. The page served to a browser pretending to be an iPhone is doing calls against the newish gql.reddit.com APIs.
> the API appears/is believed to to show up under mobile web as the bucket - along with people still using the mobile web client. The page served to a browser pretending to be an iPhone is doing calls against the newish gql.reddit.com APIs.
My understanding is that 3P apps used to be their own explicitly tracked category with a android/iOS split but then get mixed into the regular android/iOS categories with the first party client.
No, Reddit relies on people needing to mindlessly scroll, barely reading even the headlines, all to fill up minutes in an empty existence. "Caring" doesn't feature highly. The 35 million members of /r/aww aren't there because they care deeply about something.
Most of the active users are non-power users who are flummoxed at why mods have shut down their favorite subreddits. They are complaining in droves. Lots of long-winded Facebook boomer-style rants about how they read the subreddit with their kids and they need it back up to entertain them.
Some subs are protesting the spez moderator removal threat by changing the topic of the sub entirely.
Meanwhile, most of the content producers seem to have fled the site and latest high quality serious content is a week old at this point.
I don’t see how Reddit recovers from this without losing a great deal of value for their shareholders. I’m expecting Huffman to resign based on how much he has damaged their monetization potential with advertisers.
Loss of the primary content creators is serious, more than I think most realize. Without active serious creators you end up with nothing but an endless feed of endlessly recycled memes. Reddit was already trending that direction anyway with repost bots posting almost as much as real users, and creators leaving will only accelerate the process.
A lot of their messaging to advertisers revolves around discussing the value proposition of subs like /r/buyitforlife which has 1.5 million users who are likely actively considering a purchase at the moment of viewership, are willing to be convinced to spend more money, and are relatively affluent. Klaje (Reddit’s rev executive) loves talking about trust and positivity of the user base. I’m not sure how that messaging survives if the site moves away from quality content.
But now their serious competition is 9gag not quora or some other site. Most of my regular friends started using Reddit not just for the memes but the text based ones (like AITA, BORU) and local subs. Good luck making them look good with a large fraction of creators and good mods leaving.
I don't understand why people talk about the current mods as "good." They were literally chosen the same way future mods would be chosen, by volunteerism. There is no reason to believe future mods would be any less good than current mods. And I should amend my previous statement, text based subs that generate drama also generate ad impressions, ie AITA or BORU. I'm talking about how Reddit is moving away from niche text based communities since those do not generate nearly the same amount of ad impressions.
Maybe they can replace mods with new volunteers, but Reddit Admins have also just explicitly shown that mods with valid complaints will get no support, may be libeled, and potentially have an admin-led coup done against them if they don't comply.
This is likely to dissuade folks who are in it for the right reasons and want to do a good job with good tooling and proper care and power hungry weirdos who now know that if they disagree with the Admins, the Admins have shown they can weather any storm and don't care if any user, even powerful mods, disagree with them.
I'm not sure why anyone would decide to be a mod at this point. Before this month, it was a chance to run your own corner of the internet, for better or worse. Now it's been made very clear who actually runs the show, and that those people could not care any less about you.
No, the current mods were picked by 15 years of natural selection, where mods that don't care about their role have had the potential to get bored and leave or have their community migrate to a different subreddit that more matches what that community wants.
Antagonizing a large swathe of your volunteer-base of active mods all at once and then replacing them with new mods who seem fine with that antagonistic behavior is not going to select for the same group of people.
> Meanwhile, most of the content producers seem to have fled the site and latest high quality serious content is a week old at this point.
I highly doubt this, most content producers explicitly can't post their content because their subs are restricted or private, eg AskHistorians.
> I don’t see how Reddit recovers from this without losing a great deal of value for their shareholders. I’m expecting Huffman to resign based on how much he has damaged their monetization potential with advertisers.
No, this is great for shareholders as it explicitly removes users using apps that are not able to show Reddit ads.
I’m an avid Redditor and have been for a decade. I just stopped using it since the blackout. Turns out life is fine without it. Occasionally I go into it when I have a specific question or something but that’s it. Screw that site and these myopic CEOs who think they’re Elon Musk 2.0. I doubt I’m the only big contributor to do this. Whether the subs come back or not, I give Reddit a mere 50% chance of being able to survive this long term. Eat this shareholders, for leaving an idiot on as CEO.
Again, shareholders explicitly love this action by the CEO. As for survival rate, it depends on your definition of longterm but every social network eventually dies. Most people simply don't care about the internal politics of a company whose social network they're using. For all of Facebook's scandals, they still have 3 billion monthly active users.
Maybe myopic share holders sure. There’s no way a logical person would think this is going to increase their returns on this company. Alienating your top creators is not a great strategy.
As for your Facebook analogy, I don’t buy it. Every young person I know (less than 45 yo) both in US and India maybe logs into FB once a month to see if someone in their extended life got married or bit the bullet. That’s it. The 3 billion number seems to be some clever accounting to me. I agree that between instagram and WhatsApp they have covered most people however, but not by just Facebook. And I’d argue that’s not necessarily because they alienated their users actively anyway. Not like Reddit is doing now.
Users being mad at mods that think that they own communities that aren't theirs? Shocking! What a bunch of boomers, they should just let the mods get their powertrip! It's not like they are volunteers that could just... Go away if they dont want to moderate the community anymore.
(Again, moderators do not own the subreddits, they can't unilaterally close it. I mean, they can, but they can't be surprised if they lose mod rights. The funny thing is that they are all reopening now that they might actually lose their little fiefdom. Random readers being affected didn't matter to them, but once there was even a hint that they could lose their online janitor status they quickly caved in. Very very selfless)
> Users being mad at mods that think that they own communities that aren't theirs?
This is one of these places where the concept of "ownership" falls apart, at least in the monolithic ownership. A community consists of users, mods, and the platform operator. As soon as one of these components defects, the community is destroyed. So really the community as an entity can only exist when all three sides cooperate, which makes the question of who owns it somewhere between unhelpful and nonsensical.
Mastodon is unusable to me because I need two accounts to be parts of the math community and programming community.
N accounts for N interests I have. Doesn't work for me.
Reddit had subs. With one acocunt, I could sub to any number of interests. Twitter is flat. Again, I can get content from all areas of interest fron one account.
Huh? What makes you think that? If you set up an account on a Lemmy instance, you can subscribe to communities on any other instance. You absolutely do not need an account on each server. Thats kinda that whole point of the fediverse.
Heck, you can even follow Lemmy communities from a Mastodon server, or a Calckey instance, since they all talk ActivityPub.
Edit: ahh, I just noticed I misread the parent post, as they are talking about Mastodon, not Lemmy.
Of course my comment also largely applies to Mastodon, save that you follow people instead of whole communities.
Yes, that means you really have to build a good followed list to get the most out of it.
Short of following everyone on the other instance, the "local" view on each likely has people that you aren't following.
You can't get the "what's the buzz on the other one?" from viewing the home, local, or federated views.
Additionally, the discoverability of your content on one server depends on it getting followed and people watching the federated feed rather than local or home feeds (and when people on the site are following other sites, your content is difficult to be discovered).
The federated feed is a firehose that goes too fast for discovery.
The local feed is domain/subject/theme appropriate and where most people likely browse content.
Your content would only show up in the local feed of the other if someone on that other one boosted it which implies that they discovered it on the other instance and followed your account there.
If you post something math related on the programming instance, the only way for it to show up in the local feed of the math instance is for someone to boost it there. Short of having someone boosting everything that you want to say on the other topic on the other instance, it might be less friction to maintain multiple accounts.
That's not the way that it "should" work, but that's the way that people are using it. The "town square" of the local feed is where interesting things happen.
Eh, that comes down to how you choose to use the platform.
Speaking for myself, early on I used the local and federated feeds to find interesting people to follow, but once my followed list was built up, I found I rarely spent time in those feeds.
Personally, I'd say if folks are using Mastodon in the way you're describing, they'd be better off using Lemmy or kbin, which are centered around communities containing topics, as then you can just follow those communities rather than following individual people.
When groups that formed around hashtags on twitter moved to mastodon, they did so as a group. What was #footwitter is now local on foostodon.social. For example "energy twitter" (where people discuss power grids) https://twitter.com/hashtag/energytwitter has had a partial migration to https://mastodon.energy/public/local
When people migrated off of Twitter, and mastodon.social wasn't accepting new registrations, and "taking over" a random one was seen as impolite, someone stood up an instance and said "hey, we're over here" and local will be encouraged to have mostly energy related information.
If you were following two different hashtags on twitter, and they're now two different mastodon instances, to have a similar experience you need to be able to follow local on each and push content to either such that it shows up in local on the proper one.
With the way that mastodon is organized, that's not an option and the way to get to that similar experience is to have an account in each.
Would Lemmy or kbin have been a better choice for such? Maybe. However, for a twitter like experience, they aren't a proper substitute.
As others have suggested: this sounds very much as if you don't understand federation.
So long as you're on a well-maintained instance (one that responds reasonably quickly and appropriately to abuse reports), you can interact with ("federate") with any person or group on any other well-behaved instance.
(The full reality is ... slightly ... more complicated, but generally, where you are doesn't have much impact on whom you interact with).
I do agree that the focus on interest-specific instances is cumbersome, and probably a poor choice. That is, it affects a small minority of instances and Fediverse participants, and there are instances whose focus is actually a core of the local community --- @ColinWright's Mathstodon and Jerry Bell's infosec.exchange, for example).
Otherwise, join a general-interest instance, or one that corresponds with one of (or your primary) interest(s).
What I meant is that I want algorithm suggested content come to me automatically like it happens in Twitter or Reddit.
In Reddit, you can sub to r/math and r/programming with a single account and have content appear on your feed.
In Mastodon, I need to explicitly follow accounts from other instances and get the content they post, or repost.
This is very bad to me.
In FB there are groups, in Twitter, you just follow people, in Reddit there are subs. And entire different instants for different communities? Nah I simply don't like it.
I want to be able to follow whole _instances_ rather than follow people from instances.
(PS: I do understand federation, and have merged code PRs in multiple fediverse-related repos.)
Algorithmic content promotion is fundamentally antithetical to Mastodon's intent, as well as most other Fediverse systems:
You know best what you want to see on your home feed. No algorithms or ads to waste your time. Follow anyone across any Mastodon server from a single account and receive their posts in chronological order, and make your corner of the internet a little more like you.
This doesn't mean that someone couldn't create an algorithmic Fediverse server, which would ingest a large number of feeds and then specifically surface particular posts and/or profiles to people. It's just that that's not the present project's philosophy, and you'd probably find any such instance defederated by most other instances.
There are a few ways you can follow topical rather than profile-based content, and several others may be emerging.
- Mastodon has recently enabled subscribing to hashtags. So long as others are tagging content reliably, you can see discussion on a specific topic, either in its own stream (as a pinned Hashtag) or within your Home stream.
- There are several group-based services, with gup.pe (<https://a.gup.pe/>) which allow people to subscribe to a feed on a specific theme or topic. You follow the group, and post specific topics to that group --- the overall function is much like a mailing list. Chirp.social and Qoto are similar services.
yes, and the moderation problems will start July 1st. 26k is nothing, for sure, to Reddit. But every movement starts small. For now, Reddit doesn't have to worry and Lemmy can up their game.
Also, what about kbin numbers? How many have stopped using Reddit, but didn't switch networks?
This one number doesn't mean much since Lemmy isn't Reddit's only problem.
As with Twitter, I suspect, most people won't 'migrate to a Reddit replacement' - they'll just use Reddit less.
They'll open it and find the app they have doesn't work, maybe install the official one but find it's different from their experience before, and just use it less.
Instead they'll go to other places - the ones they were already going to before - more, Discord, YouTube, TikTok, etc. Hacker News for programmers, etc.
Twitter is different - I followed 5-10 people I really cared about, and I followed them to Mastodon. The issue with Reddit is there were no single people I really cared about on Reddit that I could follow to Kbin or Lemmy. Cocktail Reddit closed, and I'm sure there's some equivalent on Kbin or Lemmy, but at this point, I just assume it's worse, and honestly, I wasn't contributing to it myself on Reddit, so I'm just waiting it out to see if that community reforms somewhere.
The value of Reddit was that you'd just run into domain experts. Roasters from well known coffee shops would pop in with advice on r/coffee. Bartenders at prestigious bars I'd been to would sometimes post recipes on r/cocktails. World-class award winning folks would post their trees to r/bonsai. At this point, I assume those people now just all have their own independent Instagram pages they're posting to instead, but I have no way to find them, so I'll just live without.
In some ways, the best Reddits were a community aggregator for niche communities. It was an easy place to get a link to the official patch notes for a game as well as the youtube video links for the major community members who were explaining it. It was all content that existed other places, but it was the easy place to find it all together. I can do that work for myself, and I'll do it for some of the interests, but it was nice to not have to.
I think that it is pretty fair that it will be a waiting game to most people. But I think there is definitely a mutual exchange relationship - dedicated members and enthusiasts post and build up communities, keep them going, and moderate them. Then when the experts come in, their is already a place for them to show off, where they know that people who understand what makes their talents special will appreciate it. So they end up working together, and if you give the finger to the enthusiasts who log on everyday and facilitate discussion, then the domain experts will eventually follow because there is no reason for them to post to a dead community.
This seems true, but there's also another level to it. If you're a major figure in a community yourself, you have plenty of other outlets to show off and get your message out. Those folks come to posts on Reddit because the audience is there. Maybe they're just cross-posting their instagram posts, but they're doing it because they know it'll reach a decent amount of people that wouldn't see their stuff otherwise.
Getting to that point takes time, and it takes dedicated amateurs keeping the community growing, engaged, and excited in the meantime to get it to the point where it's big enough that bigger names care to jump in.
It's not nothing, it's 27k. There's a point at which a social network has enough content to be usable. Reddit (to me) hasn't significantly increased in value since I started using it 15 years ago. People post the same links. Some of the conversations are a little better. The spam and reposting is a lot worse.
It’s big for Lemmy, but it’s nothing for Reddit. If the Reddit blackout were serious, I’d expect that number to be a jump to 1M+.
Just to put things in perspective, I mod’s a sub with 20k subscribers. I literally took 5 mod actions in the years that I was a mod. There just isn’t enough activity.
27k is great for Lemmy, but it’s not enough to change their trajectory.
It doesn't need to change Reddit's trajectory, it only needs to exist as a viable alternative.
Here we are on HN, and HN isn't nearly as big as Reddit either but still a valuable platform, significantly better than r/technology. More users doesn't equal better content.
I don't know about you, but my web searches have been severely hamstrung by the blackout, so it looks like a lot of subs are still taking it seriously. There is so much content that is now gone and inaccessible, Reddit's bounce rate on Google has to be through the roof.
It's not that the blackout isn't serious, it's that Lemmy isn't yet a viable alternative for most people.
The number that matters isn't really what dents Reddit, but what gives Lemmy (or the fediverse as a whole) the critical mass to actually become viable.
27k isn't yet there. If I had to guess, I'd say maybe 200k is where you need to get to. You need niche topics of interest to say, 5% of the population to get communities of at least 10 active people who will post, comment and curate. If only 10% of people do that, you have to have a user base such that 0.5% of it can sustain an interesting content.
However it isn't uniform, so perhaps 27k is already enough for the very largest communities to get off the ground.
They might just be counting their instance. These things get way more complicated to figure out in a federated world (which is actually good in some respects). There are at least half a dozen instances where people are going to.
EDIT: someone posted below some stats showing it's at least roughly counting all instances. Quite surprising though I wonder if it's lagging a bit. Also keep in mind, for a good amount of time during the blackout they were down or had registration closed.
That's quite shocking. I run a push notification service and have ~25k daily active users, and it runs on a single 2 core machine with 2 GB RAM. I'm not saying that it's easy to run a service for so many users, but the largest of the Lemmy instance has ~3k users. That's super small, and a lot smaller than expected.
Maybe its just me but I'm not a massive fan of the lemmy 'front-page', it feels too squashed horizontally, and also too vertically spaced-out. The font feels too big,
Or maybe I just hate all change and want it to look more like old.reddit.com...
I have been trying out Tildes and I absolutely love their UI/UX! It’s minimal, very easy to read, yet offers great functionality. I think it can also be used with JS disabled.
HN could learn a bit from it (at least make the collapse button a slightly bigger target for mobile)
Yup. It's the main thing making me want to use kbin.social. Even there I had to use Stylebot to force a wider layout but the default is much better.
I can't quite understand what the obsession with narrow layouts is these days. It's not like most of these sites don't have separate mobile layouts. Are they really just lazy about design and can't be bothered testing reflow of their text?
In practice, dealing with PRs of potentially questionable quality is still a lot of work. You have to review the code, test the changes, make sure the docs are up to date, and explain to the contributor in the nicest possible way where they messed up.
For some of my future projects, I'm even considering not accepting anything but docs and bugfix contributions at all due to the amount of work it takes.
I understand it to mean armchair experts and people who complain are welcome to contribute or they can understand the subtle message that they're just annoying otherwise.
Patches welcome = "It's free software; don't act like you're a paying customer."
The amount of times I've been told "Read the manual" and then the link to the manual was down, or the manual was out of date, or the manual was so disorganized I couldn't find what I was looking for far outnumbers the times a manual was useful.
My guess is people who angrily retort "rtfm" are not the best at actually writing manuals.
> The amount of times I've been told "Read the manual" and then the link to the manual was down,
Patches accepted for fixing links so you can read the fucking manual.
> or the manual was out of date,
This is deb-old-doc list, the mailing list for archiving vintage manuals. To discuss out-of-date manuals in current versions of Debian you must subscribe to deb-doc-old
> or the manual was so disorganized I couldn't find what I was looking for far outnumbers the times a manual was useful.
Did you file a bug report?
> My guess is people who angrily retort "rtfm" are not the best at actually writing manuals.
It's possible. On the other hand: you don't exist. Go away.
That is your sign to figure out the answer and fix the manual. This is often the most needed contribution. If you do well your feature requests are get priority as you are an active contributor.
Investing dozens of hours into learning something deeply enough to be able to modify it is a bit silly when someone who already knows what they are doing could probably do the same thing in half an hour.
It is only silly if you're willing to pay someone who already knows what they are doing to do it.
Are you willing to pay? No? Are you willing to do the work? No? Then you're just being an annoyance.
You aren't entitled to anyone else's effort. No matter how little effort you think it will be. (Hint, your estimates are almost certainly off, generally by orders of magnitude.)
How hard is it to say "that's not going to work" or "maybe one day" or "that's a good idea". If it's something open and collaborative, maybe someone will see the idea and be willing to implement it. Also, on a separate note, why are you so aggressive and belittling?
FWIW the belittling part is assuming you're entitled to someone else's half an hour.
Personally, I welcome feature requests and bug reports as long as effort is put into communicating them properly. I thank the reporter, give them pointers, and encourage other people to contribute the feature/fix. If I have time I fix it myself.
But if you act like I work for you in the report, you'll get the same measure of respect in return.
Tangentially, the time you spend learning the project will make you a better contributor. You'll be able to contribute more quickly next time. Now the project has two people that can implement the requested change in 30 minutes.
Please put in that time for projects you care about and help maintain them.
The problem is that when the dev says "that's not going to work", then it is likely that the dev has just opened the door for an argument with a user who refuses to see that it won't and will try to argue for it at length. It doesn't take many of those to take all of the fun out of open source development, and have devs walk away from the project. I've seen it happen plenty of times. I've had it happen to me. It really is a soul-sucking distraction.
As for your claim that I'm being belittling, I'm really not. I'm just telling you how this works in the real world.
The one who is being belittling here is you, with your assumption that someone else should do what you want because they have developed skills and expertise that you haven't. But nobody else owes you their time and energy. You can pay them in money, you can pay them in showing such courtesy so that they want to do it, or you can pay by spending the effort to learn to do the work yourself. Assuming you can get it for free because you throw around words like "silly" is you dismissing the rights of others as unimportant. All that I'm doing is pointing that fact out to you.
There are a few thousand people who still pay for AOL dialup every month.[0] It was around 2 million back in 2015 but AOL has intentionally made it almost impossible to sign up for dialup. They primarily sell a "computer security" service these days and they still offer email addresses.
I think lemmy can work for if you want to move your sub across, it may never replace the monolithic reddit but its an adequate replacement for people that want to discuss a specific topic. It can work as an ok substitute.
Please don't take HN threads on generic flamewar tangents, and especially not for ideological or nationalistic battle. We're trying to avoid that here.
Your comment would be better if you could link to a source or proof. And more specifics, what exactly did they do?
BUT!
Even stipulating everything you said is true does not mean we shouldn’t support Lemmy. Open source code can live or die on its own merits. To punish them in one area because of political views in another is another toxic manifestation of cancel culture.
I've swapped my whole computer stack except for one gaming PC to Linux. I adamantly avoid any hardware whose stack is owned by anyone in China, and I run a pretty tight ship when it comes to my firewall and networking.
There isn’t any response to your point that can’t easily be deflected as being in “bad faith” because your own argument is an emotional appeal. Your position is that the people you despise are so bad that their code is itself tainted to the extent that even running it runs the risk of… genocide or something?
In order to achieve a purity in your view would require a line-by-line political Bill Of Materials that includes the political beliefs at the time of the coders at time of each commit. It is nonsensical.
> Your position is that the people you despise are so bad that
Well, no, I've given a very specific and reasonable reason. They support authoritarian censorship and control, states that perform authoritarian censorship and control.
They're trying to run an open message platform.
It's not just because they're bad people, it's because they support states that are involved in the active censorship of speech.
You're trusting them with a message platform that's supposed to promote free speech.
It's not emotional, that's not just them being bad. It is a hilarious and obvious conflict of interest.
> code is itself tainted
Yeah. If you can't trust the authors you can't trust the code. You can perform a audit on it, you can create a team that maintains it as a fork, and at that point it's safe.
Unless you're willing to do that work, and nobody's willing to do that work, it's not safe.
> In order to achieve a purity in your view would require a line-by-line political Bill Of Materials that includes the political beliefs at the time of the coders at time of each commit. It is nonsensical.
No, I just don't want the developers to be obvious and blatant supporters of what are basically fascist nations.
If they really love mixed housing developments I don't really care. It's not about their politics, it's about the fact that they have specifically very extreme politics that are a conflict of interest with the very software they're developing.
I wouldn't want them to be hidden either, but I'm not going to notice if it's hidden and then I would tell you the same thing except instead of obvious and blatant I would say sneaky weasly and malicious.
Thank you for clarifying that you don’t want to run code written by people that support authoritarianism regardless of their public stance on that.
I’m confused though, if you’re very adamant about not running code that was written by authoritarians, how do you use a computer at all?
I appreciate that you switched to Linux — it being open source means you (or your team) can audit it to make sure that it isn’t supporting genocide. That isn’t something that you could do with closed source software like Windows, so it makes sense with your ideological goal.
Considering the Herculean effort it takes to track the political leanings of contributors to the Linux kernel and the multitude of various packages, is there any open source software that you suggest people not run that doesn’t happen to be a Reddit competitor?
This is where I come back to pointing that your arguing in bad faith here.
You're trying to argue to absurdity.
Here I have a concrete example of a group that is explicitly politically extreme. They are explicitly in contrast to the values of open source.
Linux, meanwhile, is an absolutely massive project with billions of eyes on it every day which is head and resisted multiple attempts to compromise it.
I'm confident that the software I'm running still has bugs holes and inroads to malicious actors.
But, like you said, you basically can't use a computer if you want to avoid them all together.
So you avoid the obvious cases, you do what you can, and you keep on going forward.
Same story with buying stuff made in China. You don't do it when you can, you do it when you have to. You support laws and regulations that encourage people to move away from it.
Be pragmatic, focus on what you can accomplish, and don't worry about being perfect.
Is there a single other piece of open source software that you feel this strongly about? Just one example?
What exactly does “bad faith” mean?
Edit:
To make myself clear: You propose that your issue with the Lemmy software is based on your strongly held principles. I have asked you about how those strongly held principles apply to your usage of software.
If your principles only apply to one piece of software, my response is that they are not principles at all and that you are working backwards from not liking Lemmy and creating justifications to support that. My point is that your argument appears to be either
OK, I briefly looked at posts on Lemmy.ml. I saw nothing about China or communism. But so what if it is there? Other people posting on a particular instance doesn't reflect at all on the Lemmy code or project. Is it so hard to link to something specific and offensive the authors themselves wrote or did?
The lemmy.ml authors appear to be communists. Their ideology and support of China doesn’t mean they are somehow funded or corrupted by China. That is an irrational and conspiratorial line of thought.
Or would you prefer to ban communists and their ideas from the internet? What would that make you?
I think you’re going to have to be more specific with what you mean by “authoritarian control” because I have a feeling that there are some fundamental differences between the way China operates and the way an open source message board project operates.
The Chinese government reserves the right to ban censor and shut down any form of online speech going on in the country.
In fact, they reserve the right to throw you in jail for doing it.
Where is ever an event or a situation or a topic of discussion which the state does not like they flip a couple of switches and all across the country firewalls begin blocking words, banning access to VPNs, and generally preventing those topics from being able to be discussed.
They believe this is good because it promotes social stability, when in reality it's just a massive system that empowers the government and ensures that the people can never easily disagree with it.
Anyone who supports such a system or a country who runs such a system should not be running and open source message board.
I really don’t think the argument that because China is authoritarian, by your measure, internet communists will do ??? to mess with private instances holds any water.
I'm making the argument that because the developers of living support China and their forms of authoritarian control they are likely to publish updates and make changes to their software which enables and helps to promote those ideals that are ultimately against the ideals of all things open source.
And at the end of the day unless you want to be running software on the public internet which is out of date, you're going to be running their updates, which gives them long-term control and ability to mess with the network after time.
Plus the basic fact that writing such a large and popularly used piece of software gives you a fair amount of social credibility and attention which is not served by those people.
If someone is willing to go and do the legwork of doing a full audit and commit to maintenance of the project in the future I would totally run that code.
Until someone does, you should stay the heck away from it.
I'm torn. I despise the CCP and everything it stands for. I personally can't stand the idea of supporting them in any way. But on the other hand, what do we stand for? We disapprove of China silencing dissent. Why?
I believe that the free interaction of ideas is invaluable to society. Suppressing dissent isn't just bad because it helps a government maintain a monopoly on power. It's bad because it creates an intellectual monoculture, and a monoculture is extremely vulnerable. Without exposure to a robust culture of debate and discussion, people are far more vulnerable to manipulation by the next great demagogue or by their country's propaganda or by their opinionated uncle. Citizens in a free nation need to learn to weigh ideas and discard the bad ones, and we build that capability by exposing people to many ideas, both good and bad.
If we continue this trend of suppressing any views that are distant from the mainstream, our ability to judge ideas will atrophy. We'll be doing the intellectual equivalent of becoming a couch potato: by never allowing ourselves to hear a narrative we dislike, we lose the ability to judge right and wrong for ourselves. We sacrifice our own judgement and replace it with the shifting tides of conventional morality.
In Fahrenheit 451, Faber (the covert intellectual) says this to Montag as his captain finishes defending their acts of censorship (book burning):
> All right, he's had his say. You must take it in. I'll say my say, too, in the next few hours. And you'll take it in. And you'll try to judge them and make your decision as to which way to jump, or fall. But I want it to be your decision, not mine, and not the Captain's. But remember that the Captain belongs to the most dangerous enemy of truth and freedom, the solid unmoving cattle of the majority. Oh, God, the terrible tyranny of the majority. We all have our harps to play. And it's up to you now to know with which ear you'll listen.
> Suppressing dissent isn't just bad because it helps a government maintain a monopoly on power. It's bad because it creates an intellectual monoculture
My short response to this is that you can let people speak freely while not trusting them to run platforms where there are clear conflicts of interest.
I do not care that tankies exist. They can have their communities, they can run their communities, they can have their platform and try to make their point. That is fine, that is good, that is healthy.
They should not, however, be running the platform that you are trying to speak on. Lemmy is a platform that you are going to be trying to speak on, and it is a platform that they have control and power over.
As people who support authoritarian control, that power is going to lead to the sort of authoritarian monoculture that you do not want to see happen.
So you support the platforms that are actually pro free speech, that are actually not having this massive conflict of interest. You support platforms which you can trust to actually care about the values they are promoting.
Lemmy is not such a platform, you should not support it. Because if you do, they will close that door and they will empower the sort of authoritarianism that you fear will occur.
Adamantly defend their right to exist and speak freely, adamantly defend your own right to ensure they never hold any form of power, because they will take it and they will destroy you with it.
Lemmy isn't a platform at all. It's a piece of software that can be used to run many platforms. The software is open source, so if the creators put crap into it for censorship they will rightly get called out for it, as already happened with the slur filter. In the meantime literally anyone can spin up an instance and thereby create a new platform that stands on its own. If they don't like the direction the project is taking they can fork it. Developing a piece of software in the open like this does nothing to suppress free speech.
On the other hand, what you are proposing is that we should boycott the software because of the personal views of the people creating it. As that attitude has become widespread, it has already had very real and tangible negative effects on freedom of speech. When people get the sense that their expressed political opinions can have lasting negative effects on their lives and projects, they become much more reticent. It doesn't matter whether those negative effects are imposed by an autocrat, a tyrannical majority, or a loud minority, the effect is the same: silence.
> On the other hand, what you are proposing is that we should boycott the software because of the personal views of the people creating it
I don't agree with "boycott" as a framing.
None of us have infinite time to contribute to open source projects – so we all have to pick and choose which projects to get involved in.
How do you decide? There are many relevant factors – interests, technical factors, career prospects, among many others – but the community is also an issue. If the culture of the community around an open source project puts you off, that's going to discourage you from getting involved in it.
The stuff I hear about the developers of Lemmy (and Mastodon too) – that they are dominated by people who are very political and hard-left – it doesn't make it sound like a welcoming community for someone who doesn't share those politics. Why bother getting involved when there are other projects with a culture I'd experience as more welcoming? That's not a "boycott", that's just rational decision-making. And if enough other people feel the same way, those projects will suffer for it – and maybe, at some point, someone will create a less political fork, and some people who are put-off by the culture of those projects might be willing to contribute to that fork instead.
> The software is open source, so if the creators put crap into it for censorship they will rightly get called out for it
Unless they sneak something into a binary.
Or create a backdoor that doesn't get noticed for months or years.
Or they just design the software to make it difficult to weed out incursion attempts from butt networks like we've seen Russia and China use to influence American opinions.
Or they use the fact that basically everyone joins the main instance of these networks to run regular censorship and defederate with anyone who goes against that.
There are many many have a news for abuse. We're only assume that because something is open source that it is trustworthy. When you make that assumption you're making a bad assumption and you're making yourself not secure.
Security takes actual vigilance, and a lot of that vigilance comes in the form of trusting the person you're using the code of.
> When people get the sense that their expressed political opinions can have lasting negative effects on their lives and projects, they become much more reticent
At the end of the day my priority of not enabling Chinese control over our lives in society is far more significant than protecting the Lemmy developers feelings.
I agree with you in abstract, we should hesitate to enact things like this unless it is strictly very important to do so.
This is a case where it is strictly very important to do so.
> At the end of the day my priority of not enabling Chinese control over our lives in society is far more significant than protecting the Lemmy developers feelings.
This is, I think, the problem. You're prioritizing your fear of an external threat over what I see as the much more real concern of growing democratic censorship within the US. I don't doubt that China is a threat, but all too often we become single-minded in defending against a single obvious enemy and lose sight of the much more subtle but no less dangerous threats that are closer to home.
EDIT: fwiw, I upvoted your top-level and wish that people hadn't flagged it.
> This is, I think, the problem. You're prioritizing your fear of an external threat over what I see as the much more real concern of growing democratic censorship within the US
No, both things are issues and both should be concerns. I generally support open source platforms because they generally do allow for people to speak their mind more freely and federation allows for a more open system.
If I was fearful of opinions from communists or people with bad political opinions I wouldn't support decentralized software at all. I'd support centralized clothes communities like reddit that have "the right opinions".
This isn't the case of being single-minded, this is a case of just genuinely the external threat being real and you needing to respond to it.
Follow the links for the people associated with the project and the links for which they provide for themselves. Note avatars, profile backgrounds, and posts.
There are a few examples elsewhere in this thread where people have linked to supporting evidence. It's really obvious as well if you just go to the website and browse for a bit but it's infested with tankies, and has the support of the developers.
There's a fine line between not liking something going on in the US, and turning around to do a full 360 and adamantly supporting a state and its practices when those practices involve regular and very strict authoritarian censorship, state control of society and media, the total subversion of basic human rights protections like open courts and democracy.
From what I've seen these people are very much on the other side of that line.
> It really really matters that the authors are supporting authoritarian nations that engage in active censorship when they're running a platform that's supposed to be against censorship.
What platform? lemmy.ml? You're free to not use it if you disagree with how it's moderated.
Or are their political beliefs part of Lemmy, the software?
The beauty of OSS is that you can change whatever you disagree with. The beauty of federated software is that you're free to use any instance you _do_ agree with.
In any case, this is not something the authors should be vilified for. Stop it.
> You're free to not use it if you disagree with how it's moderated.
Yes, and I urge everyone reading this thread to also not use it. I'm telling them why they should opt not to use it.
I disagree, and I disagree to the extent that I think it would be counterproductive for anyone who believes in open source or freedom of speech to go use an instance run by people who clearly hold positions counter to those values.
Because at the end of the day you don't trust people who support authoritarian censorship with the stack that you try to speak freely on.
You're still missing the point that this article is about Lemmy, the software, and not about a specific instance. There is no single Lemmy "platform".
Maybe you didn't read it, so I'll reproduce a part of it here:
> As you can see we are not a faceless corporation that is accomodating to everyone. We are individuals with our own opinions. If you disagree with these, it is no problem! You can still freely use the Lemmy software on different instances. If you host your own instance, we have no control over it at all and are unable to censor what users say. For more details read the documentation on censorship resistance. In practice, the instance list already contains various instances whose content would be banned from lemmy.ml immediately.
Whatever disagreement you have with the developers, it has no relevance to the software.
I hope you realize the harm that comments like yours do to the adoption of software that benefits society. You're doing more harm than whatever you blame these developers for.
I detailed very specifically why their opinions are of interest here.
Unless you have a reason to tell me that their support for a country which actively and happily censors people and the ideals which allow that censorship to happen is not relevant, you aren't making a solid point here.
This isn't just a cute little disagreement of opinion that you can brush over.
And you cannot disconnect the developers from the software. They are very connected in the developers still have a lot of influence over it, even if it's open source.
Not when the people who run that software happily support China.
I've said it elsewhere in this thread, but unless you want to audit the whole network stack, maintain that software going forward, and somehow totally disconnect the name Lemmy from the people who wrote the software, you're empowering them by using it.
And while China does not support free speech within their country, sure they would be ecstatic to have the opportunity to own run or maintain or have people friendly to them owning running and maintaining software that other countries use to have speech within themselves.
It would be very foolish to give them that ability.
> On another topic, there are rumors circulating that we are fascists or supported genocide.
Nope, theyre communists that supported genocide.
> Regarding development, we are happy to collaborate with anyone who is willing to put in the work, regardless of politics.
That's new. I guess they've grown as people.
Anyway, I'm very happy to see use of Lemmy exploding at the expense of Reddit, and am personally a very satisfied Lemmy user. I'm glad to see it exist, like I've said before, we all have our own reasons to want to see this thing become reality. I wish those two the best and hope to see them complete this difficult project and create something truly compelling.
Hilariously a year after saying they would never remove the slur filter, they did just that in 0.14 (https://lemmy.ml/post/89740). I'm not sure if that's a good look or not.
It's definitely an improvement. Instances should be allowed to moderate speech however they want to.
Good software is continuously improved. Criticizing the authors for an arguably wrong design decision they've corrected years ago is vengeful and petty. It's no different than the viral rumors spread by the Mastodon thread TFA mentions. This is abhorrent behavior that has no place in the open source community.
Okay, the software has a slur filter built in. Seems great! I also assume users of their own instance can remove that, but this might affect visibility on other hosts.
Love this! This is the true spirit of FOSS software, and I hope more projects adopt this ethos.
Don't like how it works? Stop complaining and fork it. Don't like how it's being operated? Stop complaining and host your own instance!