That’s great and imma let you finish but remember that decentralization is strength on the fediverse. Join or create other instances, join or create communities on other instances, thats our strength.
On the fediverse, instances come and go. I’ve seen big instances go down either permanently or temporarily, and ive also seen big communities decide they’re turning off federation. The only way to be safe from that is to decentralize, so if something happens there’s still something worth doing on the fediverse.
Besides that though, congratulations lemmy.world, I love to see the thrediverse Renaissance we’re in, and nothing but love for the folks running this instance and the folks participating on it.
It seems like this person had a somewhat similar experience to yourselves in that they were frustrated with the development of lemmy. Some effort was made to contribute but it didn't work out. The frustrations mounted and eventually a new project was the only way forward.
Same the mbin folks, a chat server was a useful off-threadiverse venue where ideas coalesced and relationships were built. As a participant in mbin do you catch my drift that they are roughly parallel trajectories? I'm not in either community don't know the details.
But notice how the problems with other people or orgs is only mentioned in that they are relevant to this story. And while it does allude to some problems which were emotionally taxing, the focus on what was done to fix it and the outcomes.
So far the mbin project still exists and I do see people using it. If it's going to be a long term thing youse should consider how you are representing yourselves. Being a weird Earnest accountability stalker is off putting. If you were doing it on your own behalf it would be a little disturbing. But you so clearly are doing it as some sort of ambassador in order to suggest people use mbin; and other mbin people have said similar things so I am not intending to single you out. This behaviour makes you and by extension mbin seem like a bunch of unhinged petty drama queens. It give a shine to the project as a whole. It is unnecessary. It will continue to have no helpful impact on the outcomes of kbin.
I think it is possible at this point to set a new tone if you want. Try the link, maybe even get to know these folks if you don't already because I bet it would be productive. Youse are probably facing similar issues with federation. Just need to decide what chat software to use.
Yeah that makes sense and frankly I was a bit scared at first that mbin wouldn't last long. But it's still here and actively being developed. What we have to try to avoid Indeed is forking again.
Your opinion is welcome and duely noted. I am posting this on my own behalf, no others related in any way to mbin are involved
When I have time I will read the link you've supplied
However, Please don't spin the situation of kbin so that it looks like I'm the one causing it or making it up. Reality remains that one person controls the main hub kbin.social and has proven and admitted before that he can't handle it by himself.
Put it simply I just hate ads. Anything that puts in ads is terrible. Including Sync for Lemmy who seems to have completely missed the point of getting the hell away from Reddit.
The next terrible thing is automatically generated content and bots, but I guess those are also really just ads.
Tbf, it seems like the current "mass-AI-generated propaganda and disinformation" has actual humans behind it i.e. state-sponsored disinformation as part of modern warfare, as opposed to just sheer random BS pooped out of an algorithm designed to maximize short-term profits for the person trying to use enough buzzwords to get their algorithm bought out by someone dumb enough to fall for their pitch and short-sighted enough to not realize the wider implications... or worse yet, if they realize, who simply does not care.
It reminds me of the story behind the USA tax preparation software companies who intentionally went on a campaign to confuse military veterans and students (seriously!? what kind of evil mfers...!?), and while they got caught and even punished & fined, it was something like a decade later and ofc the original CEO and also the next one etc. had long since received their fat bonus checks, leaving the company holding the bag (liability). Thus it was "a smart move", so long as you entirely disregard ethics. What was presented as a "free gift", to generate good PR for the company, was in reality predating upon people that they deemed would be highly trusting or at least minimally likely to sue them... and they were correct. Now, watching interviews of these tech-bros, I get the same vibe as in like who cares so long as I get mine.
Web of trust solves this problem, until people start intentionally trusting AIs as much as they do other humans, at which point it’s no longer a problem.
The second ads are required the customer stops being the users and starts being the advertisers. This starts the enshittification snowball shitball, Randers.
I disagree. I hate ads with a passion too. But as long as we can pay a sum to remove it, it is fair to have a free option with ads. A kinda unlimited “demo”.
We are fools for thinking anyone would give away their own time and effort for free forever. We have completely lost the perspective of how much things should cost because of how much we’ve taken for granted that was paid for with our personal data. And the biggest fools is those who think most software developers and server admins can live reliably on donations alone.
Though Youtube is taking the ads a bit far, maybe. One shouldn’t scare away users before they have even become customers.
So you really believe that FOSS is only developed by people doing this for free. Not saying there are no hobby projects developed by people in their free time but thinking that is how it works is pretty dumb. Postgresql, Mozilla, various Linux distributions providing “business solutions” - hell, even the Lemmy developers are funded.
You are a fool if you think all Foss developers are anticapitalist idealists.
I don’t really know the solution either… I can’t afford to pay for all the things I enjoy online.
I was considering supporting 1 Twitch streamer I enjoy until I saw subscription cost. And if I paid that for every streamer or YouTuber I enjoy, I’d be broke in a single day lol.
I get so much incredibly good info and discussions online about my hobbies, all for no charge.
I used to subscribe on Patreon to my most useful resources/people, but in the end I just could afford it and had to cancel all my Patreon
I hate ads but I don’t understand how the internet would function without ads. No one could afford it
Yeah, I’m not rich enough to pay for every site and service either. A site like rockpapershotgun I left when it paywalled most of its contents, it wasn’t important enough to me to pay for. I’ve never paid for reddit, but i probably should have by how much i used it. Not that I will do that after what they’ve pulled lately. I donate to a fediverse server to put my money where my mouth is and at least pay for what I want to keep alive.
It would take some adjustment, but ads and data harvesting are the core problem to the enshiftification of the entire internet. You can’t have it both ways. We have this endless game of cat and mouse where we keep moving to the next platform after the last one becomes unusable due to ads and data harvesting.
You have to draw the line somewhere to end this pointless cycle and it is either pay for software and services or have people do only what they want to when they want to (FOSS). It really doesn’t cost that much if it isn’t attempting to compete with other software that grew with ad and data harvesting money.
It’s not because Lemmy is FOSS it doesn’t cost any money. Infrastructure costs and the time invested by those that help the fediverse grow is a cost too. Be it the time invested by the people running instances or those writing custom ui’s, tools and yes even Lemmy apps. And if some people prefer to be compensated what’s wrong with that? You think the Lemmy devs are doing it for free?
I don’t see the relevance to my opinion that ads are bad, but it is an opinion that Lemmy developers also share. Also for the 1000th time there is nothing wrong with selling software. I just disagree with ads and data harvesting.
I think you’re wildly underestimating the cost of people’s time, resources, infrastructure etc
“You can’t have it both ways” is exactly right. If the internet was user funded, as in, the user subscribes to every website or internet service they wish to use, then the internet would probably stop existing. (maybe I’m being too dramatic but also maybe not)
What’s the true cost of YouTube without ads or data harvesting? Probably only the rich could afford a subscription, which in turn would destroy the platform user base.
I disagree. Paying to remove ads is one of the core problems with ads. If the only way to develop your software is either to frustrate them enough to pay to remove ads or have ads then your software shouldn’t exist. You don’t get to do something bad just because there is an option to pay them to stop doing that bad thing. That doesn’t make it right. The whole concept is basically like a really mild protection racket.
This is such an unbelievably naive take. People’s time is worth something. Relying just on donations from a small percentage of users here and there is not going to cut it for someone who is developing the software full time.
There are plenty alternatives which is great. I think it’s just an absurd take to bash a solo dev who is working on an app as their full time job for trying to make money.
We have different reasons for getting the hell away from reddit. I came to lemmy because reddit killed sync. I paid like $3 for Sync in 2014 and used it every day until Reddit killed it without seeing a single ad. So, not only do I disagree with Sync for Lemmy missing the point of getting away with reddit, but I also disagree with the notion that sink for Lemmy is in any way bad for having an ad - supported tier when you can pay a negligible amount of money ( $20 in 2023 ) and never see an ad again for the entire lifetime of the app.
Sync is garbage. I’ve tried every Lemmy app and settled on Voyager. It’s no Relay but it’s one of the most developed Lemmy apps available.
(I’m still upset that Relay’s developer decided to play along with Spez’s new rules and start charging users for API access. It was such a good app and I’ll miss it dearly)
It still has ads. It can’t take the moral high ground of selling software if it also has a free with ads version to try and convince people to subscribe. Get rid of the ad version and only sell the software and then it will actually have some integrity.
Wait… So you’re arguing… Less options is BETTER? That somehow if they took away the choice of seeing ads and made payment mandatory, instead of giving users the choice, that would be more moral?
Obviously less options isn’t better in all circumstances. When of the options happens to be predatory then yes obviously it is better to not allow such a thing.
Imagine you have two options. You can either pay a one time fee of $50 or you can borrow the $50 and pay back $2 a month with 75% interest. Is allowing people the option to accidentally pay 5 times the amount something is valued better? Not that this situation is completely analogous to what is going on with Sync, but the point is to demonstrate that there exists a circumstance that less options is better for the consumer. Or at least a circumstance where having the only option has more integrity.
The best option I see for Sync that doesn’t implement ads at all and thus being bad is to have a less featured version for free and then sell premium features. Or of course just sell the whole thing with no free version. There is also a the concept of a limited demo so you can try before you make your decision to purchase. There are so many things you can do that don’t involve ads.
Yeah, no. I think that’s a ridiculous opinion to have. FOSS is all about personal choice, yet here you are arguing that choices should be limited because you personally don’t like one of the options. We’re just going to have to disagree on this.
A ridiculous opinion to have is that ads are bad, except for this one particular situation. If you want to convince me that this is ok then you need to at least hold the opinion that ads aren’t bad and then go from there.
Lemmy has gotten quite a bit of money in grants. It’s safe to say that without the grants allowing the lemmy devs to work on it full time, it wouldn’t be as functional as it is now. Getting grants really isn’t easy and that shouldn’t be the barrier to whether or not you can be compensated for your work.
Because although it is in a very early state compared with Sync for Reddit it is also a great product.
I use Sync for Lemmy, Voyager and Summit and overall I think Summit is a better client as of now, but Sync doesn’t fall too far away.
What dark pattern for real lol, we users asked for it, the dev didn’t even care nor know about Lemmy if it wasn’t for us, he listened and now he is present around here with a very competent client.
Would the world be better for you if Sync ceased to exist LMAO.
Well, the latest version fixed the crash that I was having (pressing the three dots upper right when I was inside a post) so that’s good!
I have some ideas in mind that Sync could do better, some of these are compared with Summit or other clients, or even Lemmy backend lol (be aware that probably some of these ideas are fixable for example using another view type, I couldn’t tell because I always use “slides views” or it could be that I’m missing it because Sync already has tons of features lol):
The instance name doesn’t appear next to the community name when you are inside a post (it is only visible on the feed), I think the same behavior occurs with the instance name for the username’s poster, I think it is important to distinguish all the time who we are referring to.
Summit supports a limited version of “multisubreddits” even when I find it awesome that Summit’s dev added this, I feel the better way would be to wait and implement it when Lemmy has this built inside its backend… Although I’m pretty sure Lemmy has a lot of more stuff to worry about currently lol.
I don’t know if it is only me and I consume a whole lot more of content with Lemmy than Reddit, but with Sync for Reddit whenever I wiped read posts I didn’t need to care about this again, at least in the current session, with Sync for Lemmy I am constantly hiding read posts and I even get a prompt saying all posts cleared from 1st, 2nds, 3rds pages etc. I think it would be nice if we could increase the fetching of new posts, so the hiding feature works better, we already see duplicated content here because of the way Lemmy works compared to Reddit, so that’s maybe why I end up cleaning more posts than in the other site.
Indeed the only way I can use Lemmy is having the show read posts option disabled within the Lemmy web settings, note, all the other Lemmy clients I have tried suffer from a similar issue like this… Maybe except Connect for Lemmy, which has a similar approach to the Lemmy way of hiding such read posts, but client side like all the others (no hide read posts option/button, they hide automatically, so I kinda never compare it with others).
Which leads me to the next point, it would be nice to have a way to manage your Lemmy web’s settings within Sync for a Lemmy, this is possible from some clients like Summit and Jerboa.
I think all clients suffer from this because Lemmy works this way, but IMO if you are using the Lemmy option to hide read posts, it shouldn’t hide your own posts, they should be accessible all the time when you navigate to your profile so if Sync could have a way to whitelist this it would be awesome.
The new way to surf through instances is awesome, and I don’t recall other clients to have it, I could be wrong, but I think it would be better if it did fetch locally the instances that are cached within your instance, or the ones you are subscribed to, instead of getting the banner to load locally, I suppose there is a reason why you implemented it that way though.
Now that we can browse instances (which doesn’t work with) this would be great and well this feature is very limited because it only works with two kinds of views types, I don’t know why this is legacy, but I am using this very often.
This occurred to me with Sync for Reddit too, when writing a post, or a comment or anything that involves the keyboard and changing to another app or minimizing Sync when re opening it it would always dismiss the keyboard, I find this behavior not be the same with other clients, it is only a tiny annoyance to me 😅
I don’t know why Sync doesn’t show negative numbers (downvotes), only “0” it would have be fun to see the real votes for the Reddit AMAs lol
Those are my ideas, I think I’m not missing anything else, but as you can see not all these problems are Sync for Lemmy only, but it for sure would be awesome to have this working with this client.
Oh, and finally I gotta ask, how the heck did you manage to make Sync for Lemmy and Reddit to stick for so long in the RAM? I was using a custom ROM that handled my 6 GBs of RAM like if it was only 1 GB lol, and Sync would stay in the background like a champ, when all the others apps would refresh a lot, it was a true nightmare to browse Lemmy without Sync because of this feature that I never see mentioned, currently I ditched such a custom ROM and the new one handles this better, Sync still working superbly ofc, indeed when I used Boost for Reddit in MIUI I needed to pin the app so MIUI would never kill it (which is a neat feature if you ask me), this wasn’t even necessary with Sync for Reddit even when MIUI is known to have a deficient RAM management.
re: “multi communities” I too think its best to wait for a proper lemmy solution here. The only other way I can think to do it is to manually call the posts api n times for each community. Its not going to be a good experiene.
re: hiding, the solution sync has now isn’t the best but I’m waiting for this to also be added on lemmy
re: web settings: there’s an open ticket for this and I’ve just marked it as high priority. I’ll try to get that added for the next release.
re: long pressing: there’s an open ticket for this too
That was actually caused by using old import files.
I should have known… I suspected about it though.
re: “multi communities” I too think its best to wait for a proper lemmy solution here. The only other way I can think to do it is to manually call the posts api n times for each community. Its not going to be a good experiene.
Yeah, I also think it would not be the best experience… I only mentioned it because Summit has it and Lemmy needs to fix lots of more stuff first before adding new features.
re: hiding, the solution sync has now isn’t the best but I’m waiting for this to also be added on lemmy
I think it is not the same that I meant? I mean I don’t want to hide them entirely as you can with Reddit, I only hide read posts per session based (or that is what I want to accomplish), so what I meant was to be able to do this without hitting the hide read posts button too much.
It is very handy to handle all this client side because a simple refresh would bring back all those read posts hence you can see updates of such posts or whatever, as I’m using Lemmy implementation for hiding the read posts so I’m missing on that.
The amount the world would be better if Syncs ads didn’t exist would be negligibly minuscule to be sure, but it would be better. Every time someone was displayed an ad it made the world just a tiny bit worse. Even if it is the equivalent of a grain of sand on the beach. Perhaps overall there was a net positive, but my only point is that ads are bad and only doing it a little bit doesn’t mean it is good.
Like killing one person to save 10 doesn’t mean killing one person was good in of itself. The stakes are obviously quite low in the case of ads in this particular piece of software, but I still don’t agree with it on principle. If all ads on the internet were eliminated then the whole experience would be greatly improved.
Huh, it turns out anti-ad extremism is a thing after all. Your behavior here is especially odd when the developer himself is an active user you can easily reach out to, and there’s a dedicated community for constructive discussion of the app; yet you would rather compare its ads to people dying instead. And you’d say Sync is what makes everything worse somehow, out of all things in the world?
I am not vocally questioning your intention at this point in time, and would rather not be forced to. Do know that this is not a good look, and please mind your behavior going forward. Thanks.
Bad content feels much much worse to me. E.g it is so infuriating to see those fake prank videos with tons of likes and positive comments. It kills my hope in humanity every time… At least an ad could be for some interesting legit product. 🫠
That isn’t a good justification to me. If it’s ok for you then it’s ok for the rest of the world too. You might believe ads aren’t bad and that’s fine. At least we can agree to disagree on that as our opinions aren’t reconcilable. If your app can’t exist without ads then I don’t believe it should exist at all. Or any other software in the world.
You want developers who spent years studying design and development, to spend months developing an app, to just give that app away for free?
People like you are why more and more developers join big corporations for salaried position rather than trying to make it by themselves in the indie scene. Because they know they can’t make it in the indie scene because you are too cheap to pay for their apps (either by buying the app, or by consenting to see ads)
If your app can’t exist without ads then I don’t believe it should exist at all.
Sync for Lemmy exists as a paid, ad-free version. The ad-supported version only exists for people who don’t want to, or can’t, buy the app.
I just wanted to say I greatly appreciate everything that you’ve done for reddit/lemmy in app development. Without Sync I’m not sure how I’d browse the web without pulling out all my hair due to all the ads and inconsistencies.
I hate ads too, but devs have to eat so why should we not pay them when we use an app or service they spend countless time making and maintaining?
Sync is a one-time payment of £17.99 / $20 to remove ads and for the amount I’ll be using this app, I think that’s absolutely fair. I’ll spend more on one takeaway pizza on a Friday night.
It would suck if Sync was the only option but it’s not. Nobody forces you to use it. You have such a hateboner for Sync it’s ridiculous. So the guy asks money for his work, who fucking cares.
It just happens to be a great demonstration that there can be no exceptions to eliminating ads. People seem to agree that ads are bad, but then have no principles or conviction when presented with the slightest inconvenience. “Guy just needs money” is not a good enough reason to change my opinion to ads are actually good. I’m not sorry. This has nothing to do with Sync or this person in particular.
It’s just the ad driven business model as a whole.
I give a simple personal opinion that ads are bad and people start losing their minds. You are arguing with my opinion like you can persuade me that ads are good as objective fact. You can view as many ads as you wish, but that isn’t going to change how I feel about it.
A lot of people are on the Fediverse to escape these corporate data-hoarder apps. It’s so weird to still see people embracing the abusers. It’s like we’ve learned nothing.
Speaking as an instance admin, I don’t want this. It would create the idea that we’re selling something to people, and then moderating users that have either received or granted awards would become more complex.
As it stands now, we have an open donation and we don’t ask for any information about the donors Lemmy account. I don’t want to know
If people like the instance, they can donate and help us cover some costs, and the reward is improved sustainability for our instance.
@ada Also, the vulnerable whilst being the most in need of protection and a safe place, are often the least able to afford to provide financial support.
Prioritising "paying" users by giving them special benefits and worrying about the loss of "income" if they need to be moderated tends towards a road that ends up with the minorities paying for it with their safety instead.
Makes my heart full to know that my admins think pretty much the same way I do about this. Doing subscription tier BS against people who have multiple intersections as minority folks is some peak online capitalist ick IMO. Rewarding and/or preferencing folks who can pay is just reinforcing more of the structural crap we face on the daily in user-pays driven meatspace.
I'm pretty happy with kbin.social. It's a nice place, with several devs actively looking at making the experience better, it just takes a while being an open source project and all
I like kbin, it’s it’s own unique take on micro blogging and aggregated linking. I’m sure itA call’s out to a certain demographic that isn’t me, but I’m glad it exists
It’s an OK article but would’ve liked Max to be a little kinder in terms of an explanation as to why both Lemmy and KBin are at the state they’re currently in.
Six weeks ago, the two dev teams (and for KBin that was one person) were writing code for barely used platforms. Now all of a sudden, the code they’re writing is catering to over a million people across hundreds of instances. This is Alpha software so of course some tools and documentation are missing. These two dev teams have been in fire-fighting mode for the last few weeks I expect. There’s no large dev teams here, no billionaire backers able to throw money at an issue.
The article was good overall but it would’ve been better if there’d been an explanation offered as to how they’re being developed and why some features are not in place yet.
Because mastodon doesn’t have an algo that promotes division and controversial topics. These hashtags are what normal, everyday people talk about. Drama isn’t its strongest side.
I guess the reality is that I want at least SOME controversy. I don’t know why the only two choices have to be “fascism-enabling hellscape” or “nobody saying anything interesting ever.” There has to be at least some possible middle ground!
I can imagine some alpha-cunt Tate-esque grifter selling courses on how to "Just Shout at People" like it's some sort of magic spell that mysteriously makes everything that you want happen.
Selling it like it's the hidden secret sauce to the universe or whatever, rather than just being a dick to everyone.
Would the community even be any worse, I wonder? :)
I agree. I want to see people’s opinions on the news of the day. By the way, I recommend following @BlackAzizAnansi if you want a little controversy. He was one of my favorite posters from Twitter & has gone all-in on Mastodon.
Are you saying that Lemmy does have those algorithms? Because this shit is never boring lol so many instances I never wanted to see or know existed…
Slightly related: how many freaking instances of “yiff” shit do we need!? I couldn’t believe I was STILL seeing it after I blocked like 7 separate instances lol
Mastodon “Trending” is just stuff that wasn’t talked about, suddenly being talked about. That’s why constantly popular things don’t appear on Trending, but things like “BigBoobFridayWhatever” (or equivalent) gets trending (people don’t use the hashtag for a week, and everyone use it for that day). I see how they thought it’s perfect for world-wide events, but it just end-up being a bunch of “weekly” stuff.
Furries invade every tech space because they’re all programmers for some reason. Must have something to do with being bullied as a kid and/or never seeing boobs irl. I know because I like their porn but not their identity, I’d never wear a suit but a cat is fine too
yeah sounds like boring shit. I get that already from talking to actual people, not virtue signalling boomers on mastodon
the lack of algo reduces the quality of content to this garbage, but this is the same people who think more content is bad as well. I don’t want some breaking or interesting post to be hidden by some random person posting completely meaningless garbage
*useless only if you have no interests. There’s plenty of people talking hobbies and interests. If you’re just shooting shit, I agree, it’s boring. And no, there’s no middle. Maybe Instagram is the middleground?
The amount of people on Mastodon who are like “ahh finally, nothing interesting to look at now that I left Twitter, I am at peace and can just scroll through pictures of someone’s dinner and obscure academic naval gazing :)” is so high
I’m truly not being a negative nancy but the last time I checked reddit had 400M user accounts. We should be comparing active user numbers, but either way, this is a drop in the bucket and reddit rightly does not consider Lemmy a threat to its supremacy at this point.
I mean, it’s more of a threat than it was. In all likelihood, this won’t be the last time reddit does something to really anger it’s userbase. There is a much higher chance of people leaving in future incidents if there is an alternative platform with enough users to actually have the content people want.
I kinda don’t agree that that would provide any valuable insight unless you factor in the ease of access to the internet and speeds and availability of smartphones and computers across the world back when reddit was in its infancy
It would provide more insight than comparing their current figures. When Uber started, if you compared the number of people that got taxis in those first months to Ubers numbers you’d have bet on Uber to be out of business in months.
Quite–that’s why active is a better metric. And as others have stated, metrics maybe don’t even matter; or they misrepresent.
My point was only for those who want to know the fate it Lemmy as it compares to Reddit: Reddit doesn’t care right now. They’re not going to feel the pain of the bleed for quite a while yet
Personally I don’t care if I’m talking to millions of people vs hundreds of thousands as long as there are enough people to make it feel alive and like a community.
Exactly. I don't give a fuck about Reddit any more. I'd rather be in a niche community with (some) quality content than on some huge site with mainly reposts. We're not in competition with Reddit. Were trying to be a better alternative.
I’m truly not being a negative nancy but the last time I checked reddit had 400M user accounts. We should be comparing active user numbers, but either way, this is a drop in the bucket and reddit rightly does not consider Lemmy a threat to its supremacy at this point.
Even when considering accounts across all lemmy instances, it still only combines for a total of 2 million. But overall I’m optimistic about lemmy’s trajectory too.
It’s a hard habit to break, because we’ve been trained to think this way for years, but try to remember: we don’t need to attract millions of users to be valuable. This isn’t a commercial enterprise. We don’t sell advertising. We don’t measure success by the number of eyeballs we can promise paying customers.
What matters now is the quality of conversation. In fact, that’s the ONLY measure of any consequence. It’s strange, because in the past, someone’s often tried to use services like this as a way to make money, or as a way to make something else they were selling more attractive. We expected it. It was always in the back of our heads. It even got to the point that if a company did something that wasn’t an effort to increase profitability, we criticized them. Generosity, real generosity, was alien to us.
It’s hard to wrap your head around the idea that people volunteer their time and money to build and maintain the fediverse, simply because they want us to be able to communicate. That’s it. There’s no hidden agenda. There’s no quest for profit at our expense.
I’m perfectly fine with the fediverse growing slowly. I don’t want it to be strained beyond what the mods can handle. Bigger isn’t necessarily better.
Coming from the non-profit world, it is never that easy. Even when there is no one officially making any money, there are people who will see it as a way to make some bank. There is also a drawback in that not making money can and will affect the amount of time people can put in unless there is a fair way to get them compensation. Volunteering also brings a huge amount of interpersonal and inter-organizational drama. That is why grassroots organizations and movements have a habit of fracturing into smaller groups.
At the same time, there is power in goodwill and being non-profit. You just really need to be careful in vetting your instance and keep an eye on issues in a way people not used to this type of world are not familiar with.
But I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t have a belief that it could be successful enough as a community. I also wouldn’t have been working in the NGO world for the past decade if I didn’t believe in that. But let’s not have too rosy glasses on. Growing slowly will also give this community a chance to work out the kinks and not die in a blaze of fire.
Agreed on the need to adjust mindset. Initially I behaved similarly to how I did on that other site until I realized that Lemmy is different and that’s ok. It’s a lot smaller and federation has its advantages and drawbacks and we’ll see it in action soon enough. Many seek the comfort of the familiar and are not always finding it. Start by appreciating the hard work that has allowed many of us to transition here quite easily. Take a deep breath, look around and realize that we are now playing a different game.
I personally don’t derive any value from high quality conversations about topics I don’t care about. That’s why I need these millions of users, so that there are people I can talk with. About topics I care about. I’m willing to go on a limb here an say that your interests and mine don’t fully align.
In the case of social network like this, bigger generally is better for the users. The thing that made Reddit great was that whatever your niece interest, there was a community of thousands of other interested people. There was so much information and advice on whatever obscure topic.
There’s a reason why there’s only around 10 really popular social networks and it’s certainly not that those platforms are any good. The network effect is important.
On a user-driven platform, not all users are created equal. Lurkers bring little to no value to the platform beyond clicks. There might be a huge engagement difference on a per user basis.
Moreover… I just want my niche communities to be active. We will never have Reddit’s archive of content, but we can get to a point where the Lemmy’s corpus of knowledge grows to at the same rate as Reddit’s. I don’t know how many users it’ll take to achieve that; 500k? 1m? 2m? 10m? No one knows that number, but to me that is the number to beat.
No, what we should be comparing is Reddit year 1 numbers with these. They’ve had 20 years to grow organically. I bet Lemmy’s start would look a lot more promising than Reddit’s. And Reddit also had much larger competitors when it came out, if you recall.
Some thoughts on that, Reddit has half a billion monthly active users. Lemmy has about 50k monthly active users. That’s .01% or one ten thousandth. We won’t be displacing Reddit anytime soon, but then we don’t want to. That’s the main problem with Reddit, it’s too damn big and too damn corporate. The main thing is Lemmy sees enough growth to stay relevant and viable. It doesn’t have to compete with anyone.
I did rm -r * / the first time I ever jailbroke an iPhone by spazzing and hitting enter before I’d finished typing the full command. (I’m terrible at mobile typing.) I’ll never forget the full body sweat that put me in immediately.
Did that once many years ago on a Linux system, wanted to delete a directory tree, but I was logged in as root and didn’t realize I was at the root prompt. Wiped out the whole drive. Not a big deal since it was just a test install so I was being careless anyway.
Back then Linux didn’t protect root from making stupid mistakes. I think now you need another switch to actually delete the root directory. I’ve since gone to using FreeBSD mainly and I haven’t tried it there, but I think at root as root you can still wipe the drive with that command. FreeBSD is less idiot proof than Linux. I think iOS is based on BSD Unix, isn’t it?
Woof. I’m glad I’m not the only one that’s done these things!
I want to say that you’re right, but I’m not NEARLY as familiar with *BSD or it’s history as I am with Linux. My understanding, though, is that iOS/macOS are based upon Darwin, and that Darwin derives a fairly significant portion of its code base from BSD. So, in part I believe the answer is yes.
As a total side note: do you have a recommendation for a good BSD derivative distribution to try? I’ve tried probably 15 Linux distros, but never made it to BSD-world!
do you have a recommendation for a good BSD derivative distribution to try?
The thing about BSD is it’s fully POSIX compliant which can be good and bad. The good is it’s highly consistent in terms of architecture and how things operate. The bad is standards constraints can limit flexibility. Linux is somewhat POSIX compliant, but has a tendency to go off the rails at times. In any case if you’re comfortable with Linux you’ll be comfortable with BSD right out of the gate.
Linux can suffer a lot from fragmentation due it’s market bazaar style development. FreeBSD is run by a single entity responsible for design top to bottom. There’s been some big changes to Linux in modern times I don’t really care for (such as systemd). With BSD you always know what to expect. You won’t get blindsided by some off the wall change in architecture or design which happens a lot with Linux.
There’s a number of BSD distributions that are open source and free. The main open source BSD distros are FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, and DragonFly BSD. FreeBSD is most popular and is designed to be good all around. It’s probably going to have the best device support, but other BSDs can have other strengths. For example DragonFly BSD is stronger for desktop use.
Honestly the best application for BSD is in a sever or development environment. Linux is more advanced when it comes to support for desktop use. Though I think BSD provides a much cleaner and consistent operating system as it conforms to specific standards. You can get it to work well for desktop use with a little extra work and preselection of compatible hardware.
I don’t need Lemmy to compete with or kill Reddit. All I wanted was any one platform to get enough of an influx of users to be self-sustaining even after the outrage started to die down, which appears to have been successful.
Exactly. I don’t want or need to build another McDonalds or Starbucks; I just want to go to the Mom and Pop down the road without worrying if they’ll tank.
It should behave as a viable and threatening adversary for reddit. As long as reddit carries on doing as it does and lemmy’s communities carry on building, we’re winning by blocking Reddit’s monopoly on mainstream forum-type social media.
I tried a few different apps but I settled on just using the mobile website on my phone. The interface is solid even there, which I think is a great feat.
I’ve only just been able to log into this account using private mode, I only just realised that emptying the cache would’ve worked or something - but the weird thing is my account wasn’t working on mobile apps either so I didn’t think to empty cache on desktop…
Exactly. Well said. We have all the time in the world to grow. What we needed was a good start, and we got it. Just keep creating content, volunteer to mod somewhere, and don’t look back.
I agree. Just give me some decent posts and discussion. For niche things I can go to a big platform with all the users. For my daily browsing, I appreciate a small but active community.
That actually tracks, since lemmy is supposedly populated mostly by “older nerdy males”. I mean they have a point, the quality of discussion is definitely better – for now. That could end with an Endless September event.
This actually makes a lot of sense and I am surprised that there isn't a lot of government already doing it. That and celebrities. It's basically instant verification.
KBin/Lemmy should provide a combined local view for duplicated magazines/communities across the fediverse. Treating the concept like a hashtag.
The point of the fediverse is to distribute content so no one has a monopoly. People squatting on communities/magazines don't understand there is nothing stopping people creating one on a hundred other instances.
Each kbin/lemmy instance decides to follow magazines/communities from others through activity pub and stores it locally for the instance.
Having the UI retrieve all local posts with the same magazine/community name (e.g. m/star_trek@kbin.social c/star_trek@lemmy.world). Wouldn't be hugely difficult, I believe Kbin uses postgres database as the local store and suspect it would be a tweak to the SQL query it runs.
Even if that wasn't an option, there is a means to get all of the magazines/communities from the kbin UI/lemmy REST API. As well as retrieve all posts for a specific magazine/community. So you could do it entirely in a web client, for KBin it would be more work.
The combined view wouldn't change how you comment on specific posts. The issue is where do you post and what view would take dominance (e.g. if a magazine had themed itself).
The solution here would be to default your local instance if it exists or the instance providing the most posts/comments. Perhaps with a drop down so users can choose.
I would also configure things so instances can select a site wide default if they can't moderate it effectively. For example pushing all posts to the star trek instance rather than local magazine with a mod who is MIA.
This would remove most of the concerns users have about the fediverse, since they wouldn't be confronted by different instances. To them the fediverse is <insert instance> it would also encourage distribution of content.
can each kbin/lemmy/etc. also query the upvotes/boosts/likes from all instances and combine them to create ranking(s) of posts that represent the interactions from the whole user base?
In a perfect world I’d like to see some kind of meta community system where the individual communities still exist but kind of automagically cross pollinate with each other so that users, server, and moderation load is split somewhat democratically. Not going to happen any time soon since it would probably take dev work and they have their hands full.
Practically what will probably happen is certain communities will become the “standard” ones and others will be smaller versions, just like there were countless “true” subreddits.
What you can do is subscribe and post to whatever one you like, and then feel free to cross post to other communities. Cross posting works really well on Lemmy.
This would likely cause moderation issues across instances with similar subject matter but different rules. We don't necessarily need to share the load across instances like that. Simply federating as normal should suffice, and what we really want is a separate tool on a layer between the instance and user that can gather a lot of related instances and bundle them into one supercommunity.
I think this is very doable and would most likely be done in the form of a Lemmy/Kbin mobile app or website front-end. Something that doesn't dig its grubby mitts into the way the actual communities themselves are operated, but can integrate lots of them together into a convenient feed using some logical rules. Communities that want to be included in a service like this can place tags in their sidebars, in a standard configuration easily parseable by a bot, which can then easily aggregate content from appropriately tagged and crawlable communities. Communities without tags are either skipped, as it's a sign the owner either does not want to be included in the supercommunity or else has not done the requisite minimum to be considered worthy of inclusion, or else loosely bundled anyway using whatever half baked keyword matching a bored dev decides to cook up. Duplicate links in the feed can, at user option, be removed (leaving only the link to the post on the largest community/with the most engagement/on a selected default community) or posted anyway, giving an option of reducing spam or being easily able to engage with all communities.
Comments sections will be a little more difficult, but I'm a fan of a tabbed system where you can have separate sections to show comments from each instance that is commenting on a duplicate link.
Given the time and motivation I probably could eventually make this myself, but I have neither, so instead I talk about it here in the comments section and hope someone else takes up my torch. If anyone wants to actually use my stupid ideas, I give you free and full license to do so with or without crediting me for it. Go forth and build shit.
Yeah that’s essentially the system I was thinking of but more something the communities could opt into with each other, and could easily moderate how much and what “meta” content made its way into their community.
Big communities would probably just share common posts between each other like they might use a mega thread for, small communities might pull more “meta” content to keep activity up. But making it all an opt in kind of thing on the community level.
The main reason I think it needs to be a core part of the software is just buy in. Like, whatever the solution to this thing that apparently a lot of people think is something or an issue, it needs to be pretty well supported by everyone. Like, apps, instance admins, mods, they kinda all need to be on board - and that probably means something coming to the closest thing this whole mess has to a top.
I think it’s absurd to give Meta the shadow of a benefit of the doubt. in the past, they have explicitly stated their intention to make facebook the internet. If zuck had his way, there would be exactly one website, a monolith collecting your data to more efficiently serve you ads. There is no world in which their participation in the fediverse is not self serving and a net loss for the rest of us.
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