At least not as an expensive leech at the head of the whole thing. He probably earns more on his own as what every single instance collects in donations.
The only reason it is better right now is a combination of obscurity and people not grasping how federation works as a slight barrier to entry means it has fewer people who all want to be here instead of somewhere else.
Reddit went downhill when it because universally popular and enough people were there to attract jerks who just go where everyone else is and overwhelm moderation. So I don’t want federation to become the standard, as other less popular options won’t be there to attract the attention seeking jerks that are drawn to the popular sites.
Popularity ruins social media because the most popular place is where the worst tend to congregate and overwhelm moderation.
Federation has a built-in solution to address this. Once the garbage starts overtaking quality, you can just move to an instance with a stricter federation policy. Traditional services do not provide this option.
While it provides a level of mitigation, malicious actors can overwhelm the system as a whole by switching instances, creating new accounts, and other intentional actions. Moderation cannot scale indefinitely even with better tools.
If the vast majority of users moves to instances with stricter policies that will increase the moderation burden on those instances. Kind of like how on reddit the smaller subreddits were managed well and most of the trash were ruining the popular subs.
So the current solution works for now, and might scale better than a centralized system, but if it reaches a certain point it will either end up being fractured significantly or end up swinging back to centralization.
All of those are reasons I think lemmy’s smaller population is a benefit right now and there is still plenty of room to grow.
I don’t think the vast majority of users will ever be interested in the sort of atypical content that niche communities provide. They generally prefer the more mainstream stuff, it’s kinda baked-in.
Also, I’m not talking about moderation, but federation. If you only federate with three instances, then only those three’s users can interact with you. This does not increase any moderation burdens.
I find the moderation is better here. My posts aren’t being removed because they didn’t match some forced title formatting or some other arbitrary reason.
People also aren’t just redirecting people to decade old posts and megathreads which is nice.
Think about what AskReddit is like with the same kind of posts over and over again because they decided to limit posters to the title text.
That’s part of the reason I am hoping Lemmy doesn’t become the new Reddit with a total migration of users. I like the smaller userbase as selfish as that is. I feel like at least with the federated nature of Lemmy we would see less power mods that run a majority of communities preventing crosspromotion with other communities/instances and limiting feedback.
I get why rules need to be added as a community grows but with Reddit this seems to mean a lot of micromanagement over things that wouldn’t effect enjoyment of subreddit members and adding hurdles for new or infrequent users
Here’s a hypothetical example that kind of goes along with my previous comment:
I want to post in a Elder Scrolls game modding subreddit asking about quality of life mods for games before Skyrim. It gets removed because the subreddit requires you to tag a specific game using a format like [Oblivion] or [Morrowind] for easier searching and sorting. The issue is I am not just talking about one game and tagging every TES game since Arena would eat up a lot of title space.
In the grand scheme of things it makes sense but it’s annoying to deal with especially if the subreddit doesn’t clearly prompt users on why their post was removed and people who are just popping by to ask a quick question might be discouraged.
I am hoping we don’t see things like that become the norm on Lemmy.
I think a lot of the annoyance that comes from rules similar to your example is the fact it is a system bolted on to whatever is available in Reddit. And the UI/UX is almost always TERRIBLE.
If it was easier to make clean and functional post/comment flows this would be less of a burden.
Your points still stand. But I do think a large proportion of the friction from many rules comes from Reddits architecture. And frankly, the fact that they support apps. If it had stayed just the website, we would have probally seen more movement on improving these flows. But it’s deemed too complicated to support in two formats. Also, Reddit probally just does not give a shit.
I would hope Lemmy could be a place where it’s easy to deploy systems for proper labeling and tagging in niche communities that gain a lot from better taxonomies and other systems.
I realize the hardware and software cost money for a site. I’m ok with paying either by a friendly use of ads, or a decent subscription.
I was on the verge of starting to pay for Reddit to stop the ads when I used the website. I happily paid for my 3rd party app. But that was right when Reddit nerfed the subscriptions and went to their current version. And then stopped the API.
I happily paid for the Lemmy 3rd party app. I need to look into donating for the server.
Parts are better, I like being able to block entire instances of troll users.
But I miss the constant barage of new content and a more active community.
I supose that I am still dealing with the aftermath of using Reddit for 8,5 years and suddenly dropping it even now after the better part of a year.
I am glad however that /u/spez isn’t running things here, and I hope that he stubbs his toe hard once every 7-9 weeks for the forseeable future.
I have found that the Lemmy community as a whole seems to be quick with branding people fascist if they say anything even slightly less left than socialism in political discussions, though that has mostly been from Hexbear, so it is probably just a vocal minority.
It’s owned by money, not people. I left with apis and 3rd party apps. Glad I did, quality has taken a real noise dive. Now I just read from old. If there’s a reason, without logging in.
I can use whichever method of access I want while not having to deal with 26263663 different types of data harvesters.
The few ads there are are easily recognizable spam posts, as opposed to sanctioned ads camouflaged as user content.
Fewer reposts.
Generally better quality members. Yes, that includes YOU
No. I didn't much like Reddit but I have never had so many problems with a social media site as I have with Lemmy. Right now there's 17 comments in my notifications page, but no way to access them because it just says "404 - page not found." And there's no way to view or erase them.
Lemmy has tons of connectivity problems also. On a scale of 1 to 10, I'd have to rate it minus 100. I've left Kbin and actually am no longer even using Lemmy but once in a grand while. I'm looking for other sites that will work better.
You’re making complaints about Lemmy while posting from kbin and complaining about kbin bugs. Everything your pissing and moaning about is kbin. I also use kbin but I understand it’s an alpha service that goes down for weeks on end.
Oh, I didn't know they were separate entities, yes my complaints are about kbin (don't know what lemmy is, I guess). I didn't mean to cause confusion, I'm just a newbie about these things....
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