Discord for large communities is dumb as shit. There’s literally too many people that real communication becomes impossible unless you move to DMs or an empty room.
Discord is just an AOL chat room. Great for short-term conversations among 20 or fewer people. It’s not a good place to store your FAQ. It’s not a good place for large teams. It’s not a good place for anything searchable. It’s transactional. And I don’t know why people treat it otherwise.
Yeah, I hate discord for many reasons but the primary reason is that I just think it is a terrible place to have a conversation. All the channels I see are always dominated by really low quality effort interaction, interesting conversations just get drowned out and lost by someone sharing another meme or responding to someone else’s low effort meme.
As someone with pretty intense ADHD, Discord is just so fragmented with so many channels each with their own conversations all fracturing out in different directions with no capacity to keep a handle on it. I hate it.
I love discord for small communities, not that I have that many I’m in though. But friend groups, and niche topics. Places where the chat generally is a single discussion or two at a single point in time. And the voice chat is superb. Just drop in and out is convenient.
But it sure as fuck doesn’t compete with what reddit and Lemmy is doing.
To be honest even for small communities I just find discord an extremely difficult format to follow., especially because search of previous conversations is an afterthought (???).
I think it is easy to miss how powerful the reddit type thread structure is among the noise of how toxic and shitty reddit itself can be. I love lemmy because I think the reddit type thread structure is in most ways a direct upgrade to message boards/forums. The problem with message boards was that as a thread gets longer the probability increases steadily to 100% that the thread will be utterly derailed by people arguing over the most trivial detail of the conversation. This seems like a weird thing to empathize, but consistently I would find a thread on a message board that felt like a goldmine of interesting information and ALWAYS I would find to my consternation that the last three pages to the thread were people arguing over some stupid fact one of the commenters used incorrectly early on in the thread to make some ancillary side point.
The Reddit structure smoothly siphons off these side conversations and allows the wisdom of the crowd to direct the focus of the conversation through upvotes and downvotes. Does the Reddit structure get petty, toxic and judgemental? Yes, but I think it still qualifies as a near direct improvement on messageboards if the objective of the messageboard is to be a curated source of expert/niche conversations. Lemmy is awesome, you can learn so much just from reading quality comments sections.
Yeah and it is easy to think of Lemmy as a shadow of Reddit because it is so much smaller, but even if for the foreseeable future that is highly unlikely to change, now is the first time the form of messageboard popularized by Reddit can finally grow and evolve beyond whatever limited vision the company that owns Reddit has and that is huge. We are in a new era of social media. Now anybody can experiment with tweaking the Reddit form by adding this, taking away that, changing how upvotes or downvotes work… who knows?
This is just the VERY beginning of exploring the space of social network structures like Reddit and it is going to be awesome. People don’t get excited for new social networks anymore (corporations have made them so repulsive and unhealthy) but this is a super exciting time of innovation and evolution in the different ways we bring humans together in conversations online.
God I can’t stand servers that are Nazis for that. Guess what…natural conversation will change topics over time. I’m sorry I can’t keep up which of your 100 channels I need to jarringly break away from the convo and hop into whenever the topic even remotely, slightly drifts from what it started with. Discord channel Nazis don’t understand how human conversation works.
Right and when you step back and think about it, why create a conversation system that demands so much admin for moderators? A reddit-like system obviously still desperately needs good human moderation but the moment to moment guidance of conversation focus doesn’t require a human mod to always interject to refocus things, just an engaged and genuine audience.
As for funding, the servers are supported on a donation basis, with no big corporations behind them. This leads to a problem concerning user data and privacy, as there isn’t a single accountable entity behind the network.
It’s actually not wrong if you look at it in another way.
Big tech will abuse your data, but it will do within legal constraints, and there is actuall (though weak) accountability of these companies due to the legal system.
On federated services like Lemmy, instances are hosted by anonymous individuals. Most social media laws don’t apply to them, and their legal accountability is basically zero.
Lemmy, for example, does not comply with GDPR. There is no legal notice, no privacy contact person, no banner asking whether you are ok with the fact that your data is sent to unknown servers in random nations, no nothing. Private messages aren’t even encrypted, so any admin can read them without issues.
There is no way to actually delete your data, as the GDPR requires. Deleted posts are only marked as deleted and you can see their plain text content by just pressing the “reply” button in any of the apps. There isn’t any kind of guarantee, that your post will be deleted on other instances. If federation has problems, the post will remain on other instances and is now permanently undeletable by the user.
There are no moderation standards. Some instances will delete nazi content, some basically require nazi content. And some instance admin might even edit your posts to say something completely different. It’s all possible and in the hands of random people on the internet.
Hobbyist-run services are much worse when it comes to availability and reliability. If something happens while the admin is on holiday, nothing will get fixed. If the admin runs out of money, doesn’t care anymore or even dies, the instance with all it’s content and users is just gone.
So there are very real risks attached to a hobbyist-run service with no legal accountability and no transparency at all.
We all know the downsides of Big Tech though, so it’s everyone’s personal choice to figure out which disadvantages hurt them personally more.
That’s a bit misleading to say like that. Go to the website, scroll to the footer and click on “Legal”. Your instance, feddit.de, has a legal notice, with a privacy contact person, mentioning you can request data erasure, and detailing where your data goes. Mine, lemmy.world, has a number of in depth legal documents attached there.
However, yes, other instances they are federated with might not take it as seriously though, and if all your data is going there too, then that’s a hole in your data privacy.
I imagine that this calls for a feature that can erase your data on every other federated server. If the activitypub protocol can send data from one server to another, it should be able to delete it or find a way to disable viewing said data.
That already exists. The person who created a post or comment can delete it. But it only works sometimes, since federation is constantly not working correctly.
Eh, that’s a mixed bag. Absolutely, one could setup shared delete requests, to federate a delete request, but it would be a bit of a lie as anyone could simply… update their instance to simply ignore delete requests.
For now, simply not having a delete feature is a more honest to the realities of the fediverse. There’ll never be a “true” delete, even if they do eventually support one that’s “good enough”.
The GDPR notice on feddit.de is not GDPR compliant, and the link isn’t even visible on mobile.
If you request deletion, they can’t guarantee that the data is deleted on federated servers. They can send deletion messages, but federation is constantly not working correctly, other instances can decide themselves whether they do delete stuff, and if an instance is unreachable for a while, the deletion message will be dropped.
Lemmy, or even ActivityPub are designed to be non-GDPR compliant. (Probably not on purpose, but the way it works makes it basically impossible to be GDPR compliant.)
Very much this. Plus, how easy will instance admin Joe Schmoe fold under external pressure to give access to certain groups, government bodies etc? And how well have Joe Schmoe implemented good security practices on the server and related things? Etc.
Eh, it is a con when there are problems, service problems, bugs, etc…
My instance have had a few of them and for a while our 1 admin was unavailable.
It is difficult or impossible to get it resolve because there is no contact point, nobody hired to fix issues that need immediate triage, etc… which can result in longer outages or bugs on specific instances.
I’m not complaining. This is a fantastic service that is being offered completely free from actual altruistic incentives, unlike corporations. There are a few downsides though.
But feddit.de just became usable again after more than two weeks of being basically unusable - because the 19.0 and 19.1 releases of Lemmy were buggy and there was no downgrade migration possible on the database. No big corporation would break their product for two weeks like this.
Kind of funny how the privacy crowd is big on Lemmy but it skips over the fact that all of its Lemmy data is hosted on the machines of people that have no accountability…
You’re always free to spin up your own server and host it if you’re concerned about the way your data is being handled. Not something you can do with the corporate alternatives
ActivityPub does not have support for private messages. Services that try to shoehorn a direct message as “private” are misusing the protocol. You could configure client-side encryption but thats outside the scope of ActivityPub
No personally identifiable information or private account information is transmitted between instances. The only thing that is synced is the content of your posts, reports and up- and downvotes. And all of that serves a purpose and is shared willingly.
I may be naive, but even though I don’t personally know my admin, this is a person who has a stellar reputation, and who I’d trust far more than some massive corporation that has to abide(1) by some anemic laws
there isn’t a single accountable entity behind the network
Yeah, Instead of a single entity i know will never be held accountable for selling my data and storing my information in an unencrypted txt file, there are unknown entities! Like the Simpsons (d’oh) quote says, “It could even be a boat!”
The illogic reminds me a bit of Google’s new targeted ad privacy settings where your “privacy” is google’s pinky swear that they alone are profiting from you.
When you see takes this weird do you wonder as i do whether it is intentionally worded to push some kind of narrative (though i don’t really know what that would even be in this case), or is it written by someone so deeply in the tech bubble world that they are wildly out of touch? I don’t know.
I had been on reddit since 2008, I was looking for an alternative to the message boards I belonged to after the popularity of Facebook killed them off. I really enjoyed it, not the same level of community that you find in a message board but still good for conversation.
Then trump happened and it turned to shit. It’s so fucking toxic and I ended up getting banned for defending myself. Apparently fascism is good and standing up for yourself goes against community standards.
I’m a disabled 49 year old just looking for conversation. Facebook is also a toxic wasteland now. To say I miss myspace is an understatement but there’s hardly anyone there anymore.
I’m happy whenever I find a place that’s put the social back into social media because antisocial media is just trash.
I’m into Linux, but also into Factorio and motorcycles.
Lemmy genuinely is a replacement for r/Linux because the activity here is just as high as there.
But there is very few content about Factorio and motorcycles here. They are communities, but they don’t really replace the reddit ones, especially r/factorio.
Edit: Almost forgot about incremental games. Basically no content exists on those here.
As a not really techy person but one who has been cruising online for a long long time I feel Lemmy is a lot like old old Reddit. Reddit was full of techies when I joined. It grew over the years into a bigger thing but it started with a bunch of nerds talking about shit I didn’t understand.
Fuck Reddit, but shouldn’t be so excited for external validation. We’re doing a good thing building this community, we know that without them signing off.
Good publicity means more traffic, which means more people for community, which means more content, which means the network is more entertaining as a whole (hopefully)
A prominent /c/Risa shitposter accused the mods of transphobia, loudly quit Risa and started their own meme community (and later deleted the comments after any evidence of transphobia failed to materialize).
Around the same time, a Risa mod removed some particularly low-effort posts despite Risa having “no rules”, which upset some users and so they fled to the other guys’ meme community.
Now there are two Star Trek themed meme communities.
Stamets. He actually banned me from the new place after posting a dumb meme he just didn’t like (said I was “ban evading”). Did not know about him crying transphobia but it doesn’t surprise me, the person has a serious temper issue.
EDIT I forgot he also retroactively removed two AI shitposts posts I made after writing a rule about it (yet didnt remove his own)
In that list, only Lemmy has voting or comments in a tree, both key features that make reddit into reddit. If I was going to put together a list of reddit alternatives, those last 3 wouldn't be on it.
i actually prefer to browse lemmy from a mastodon account but it probably isn't for everyone: iget every comment on a subscribed community in reverse chronological order in one feed.
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