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People who have tried both lemmy & kbin, is full text search available on these platforms? I am thinking of closing my reddit account but I am unsure which one of these to create an account on:
Looks like #Lemmy / #KBin corners of the #Fediverse are going to get some real-life testing of their moderation tools and procedures, and of their general community resilience. :blobcateyes:
Tech Press don’t understand the #Fediverse, so how can they understand its growth?
To hear them talk, most of them believe that #Mastodon and the Fediverse are one and the the same. Some of them go so far as to call the Fediverse the “Mastodon network”.
Which means that they don’t have a clue about what the Fediverse entails, nor how it has grown.
Case in point: between Jan-May 2023, #Misskey and its forks grew by 300,000 accounts. No one in the Tech Press reported this.
Okay, perhaps they didn’t know because the bulk of growth happened in Japan. But still, this is fairly important to know since Misskey is now responsible for generating the bulk of Fediverse content. Even so, Tech Press think the Fediverse is about Mastodon.
And now, #Lemmy and #Kbin are experiencing lots of growth, with both collectively gaining 100,000 users in a week. This is quite a noteworthy event since the #RedditMigration is part and parcel of dissension on #Reddit – a pretty major Big Social platform.
Does the Tech Media report on this? Nope. But again, that’s because they don’t understand the Fediverse nor what it entails.
Then Meta signal that a new project they’re making, #P92 (a.k.a., #Barcelona), will be joining the Fediverse. There’s even screenshots that show this app interacting with remote Fediverse servers.
But instead of reporting about how this will affect the existing Fediverse, press such as the #BBC say this is an altogether different social network than Mastodon.
That’s right! Tech Press don’t even realize P92 will be joining the Fediverse – a social network that already exists!
Is this all ridiculous? Yes.
But this is why we have to be forthright about what the Fediverse is, what it entails, and why it all matters.
Hey @mastoblind and other #blind and #a11y folks: are there any #accessibility focused #lemmy instances or communities yet? Do we know the status of Lemmy with a #screenreader? The mod team over at /r/blind has been discussing the way forward for us if the #Reddit API closes. We have no firm plans or anything, but it would be good to know things about where the largest #federated Reddit alternative stands, and if moving the r/blind community to the #fediverse is even a workable proposition at the moment.
One of the interesting things I've seen on the fediverse:
blahaj.zone run both a #calckey and #lemmy instance under the same domain/community. (I learnt this by running into @ada on lemmy, who is also @ada on calckey)
I don't know how effective it is in practice, but it sure seems like a great way to foster more diversity and richness in the fediverse experience, especially if some integrations can be built, like mutual ids.
We are working to add the ability to follow #Lemmy instances (ie: pin timelines).
You will be able to interact with your Mastodon accounts. It will work like other followed instances. #Fedilab
Three months ago I submitted a post to the #Rust sub-reddit called 'Building a better /r/rust together' wherein I hailed #Lemmy as a fitting successor.
Today we have 3 moderately active Rust spaces on the threadiverse. To counteract community fragmentation we need the ability for #ActivityPub groups (Lemmy community or #Kbin magazine) to follow other groups.
Help needed from fedi-curious Rust developer out there: Implement FEP-d36d for Lemmy!
Funny enough, last December, I predicted there would be another Big Social migration to the Fediverse. I even predicted it would happen in June.
I just didn’t think that Reddit, of all platforms, would be the one to cause the migration.
Big Social has a habit of creating shitty user experiences, and attempting to squeeze every bit of ARPU possible.
Until recently, if you didn’t like it, your only option was to kick rocks.
Reddit doesn’t give a damn. There have been plenty of Reddit alternatives in the past, and almost all of them have crashed and burned.
Except this time, when people join #Lemmy and #kbin, they are interacting with a network of 10 million Fediverse accounts – possibly more. No Reddit alternative has ever had 10 million accounts.
Understand this. Even if Lemmy and /kbin make up an insignificant chunk of the Fediverse right now, everyone who uses those services can talk to 10+ million Fediverse accounts.
Which means that this time Reddit detractors have serious options.
And believe me, more Big Social platforms will cause further migrations to the Fediverse. Each time this happens, that detraction will compound more and more.
Reddit probably doesn’t think this is a big deal. They probably think this is like the other times users expressed dissent.
But this time, these Redditors are discovering the Fediverse.
Mastodon has the responsibility to promote diversity in the Fediverse
I love the Threadiverse. Compared to the microblogging Fediverse’s sea of random thoughts, Lemmy and kbin are so much easier to navigate with the options to sort posts by subscribed, from local instances or everything federated. You can also sort by individual community, and then there are the countless ways to order the posts and comments (which are stored neatly under the main post, by the way). That people can more easily find the right discussions and see where they can contribute also means that the discussions tend to be more focused and productive than elsewhere. Decentralisation also makes a lot of sense, since it is built around different communities. All that’s needed is users.
Things were going quite well for a while when Reddit killed third-party apps, prompting many to leave and find the Threadiverse. However, it is quite difficult to entertain a crowd that has grown accustomed to a constant bombardment of dopamine-inducing or interesting content by tens of millions of users, if you only have a couple hundred thousand people. This is causing some to leave, which of course increases this effect. The active users have more than halved since July, according to FediDB. The mood is also becoming more tense. Maybe the lack of engagement drives some to cause it through hostility, I’m not quite sure. Either way, the Threadiverse becoming a less enjoyable place to be, which is quite sad considering how promising it is.
But what is really frustrating is that we could easily have that userbase. The entire Fediverse has over ten million users, and many Mastodonians clearly want to engage in group-based discussion, looking at Guppe groups. The focused discussions should also be quite attractive. Technically we are federated, so why do Mastodonians interact so little with the Threadiverse? The main reason is that Mastodon simply doesn’t federate post content. I really can’t see why the platform that federates entire Wordpress blogs refuses to federate thread content just because it has a title, and instead just replaces the body with a link to the post. Very unhelpful.
The same goes with PeerTube. There are plenty of videos on there that I am quite sure a lot of Mastodonians would appreciate, yet both views and likes there stay consistently in the tens. Yes, Mastodon’s web interface has a local video player, but in most clients it is the same link shenanigans, may may partly explain the small amount of engagement. This is also quite sad, because Google’s YouTube is one of the worst social network monopolies out there, if not the worst.
And I know some might say that Mastodon is a microblogging platform and that it makes sense only to have microblogging content, but the problem is that Mastodon is the dominant platform on the Fediverse, its users making up close to 80% of all Fedizens. It has gone so far that several Friendica and Hubzilla users have been complaining about complaints from Mastodonians that their posts do not live up to Mastodon customs, and of course, that people frequently use “Mastodon” to refer to the entire Fediverse. This, of course, goes entirely against the idea of the Fediverse, that many diverse platforms live in harmony with and awareness of each other.
The very least that Mastodon could do is to support the content of other platforms. Then I’d wish that they’d improve discoverability, by for instance adding a videos tab in the explore section, improving federation of favourites since it is the dominant sorting mechanism on many other platforms, and making a clear distinction between people (@person) and groups (!group), but I know that that is quite much to ask.
P.S. @feditips , @FediFollows , I know that you are reluctant to promote Lemmy and its communities because of the ideology of its founders, but the fact is firstly that it’s open source and there aren't any individual people who control the entire project, and that the software itself is very apolitical. In fact, most Lemmy users both oppose and are on instances that have rules against such beliefs, so I highly encourage you to at least help raise awareness on the communities. Then, of course, there’s kbin, which isn’t associated with any extremism at all. As a bonus, it has much better integration with the microblogging Fediverse, but it is a lot smaller and younger, and still very much under development.
Anyways, that was a ramble. Thanks for hearing me out.
A pic of me just browsing the @ArtemisApp magazine on Artemis.
We just coded up the last bits for the first limited release. Feeling like a real #kbin app! (#lemmy support planned for next month).
What we have in dev build:
Browse Home or the magazine of your choice
See images and open links (in app)
Login or browse anonymously
See comments (collapse threads at your will)
Vote and boost 🚀
Huge thanks to our first volounteer dev for helping w some of these! (What’s ur @ here lol?) We’re also getting an Android dev involve to help w giving as much love and care.
Open sourcing will come once we get the codebase in a good place. Kitchen gets a bit messy this early 👩🍳
#Reddit users are mad about the #API charges that hit third party #apps, but I actually find this from #Huffman much more concerning: "...data licensing is a new potential business for us."
What he's actually saying - they want to sell user data to AI companies for them to train their models. This should be a reason to delete all your content and leave the platform. In Europe, you should raise a #GDPR-deletion request.
Reddit's strategy of antagonizing app writters, moderators, and millions of redditors is good news for reddit alternatives like KBin and Lemmy. And not just them! The fediverse has always grown in waves and we're at the start of one.
Previous waves have led to innovation but also major challenges and limited growth. It's worth looking at what tactics worked well in the past, to use them again or adapt them and build on them. It's also valuable to look at what went wrong or didn't work out as well in the past, to see if there are ways to do better.
Here's the current table of contents:
I'm flashing!!!!!
But first, some background
Don't tell people "it's easy"
Improve the "getting-started experience"
Keep scalability and sustainability in mind
Prioritize accessibility
Get ready for trolls, hate speech, harassment, spam, porn, and disinformation
Invest in moderation tools
Values matter
This is a great opportunity – and it won't be the last great opportunity
Uh oh. My more recent experiences with #Lemmy and by proxy #Kbin are becoming increasingly like they were with Reddit (not good). What's the deal with that? Why is the discourse I find on #Mastodon so much more positive and productive than there? Is it an influx of ex-Reddit users bringing bad habits and negative energy with them? Is it the actual software; the format; the layout? What is it? #Fediverse
YSK r/Futurology has an official Lemmy instance (futurology.today)
An announcement post has been made a week ago btw...