I'm a fan of the Fediverse, but what are the major issues we faced right now because of the limitations of the #ActivityPub protocol? Recently, decentralize social networks are at their peak, big players are trying to be part of it, and is constantly in the news....
No. A better analogy would be like phone number portability. You can “own” your number, and if you want to change your company you can take the number with you.
So, with news of Reddit making deals to sell user data for AI training, I think we should really start organizing ourselves for an effective migration campaign....
So? You still need to convince the people of that community that it’s a good idea, or do you think they will just follow a handful of mods blindly?
Even the longest of the journeys start with a single step.
You are right, we need to find a mod that is willing to do it.
Then we need to work on how to message it for the redditors
Then we need to collect feedback and see what is working and what needs improvement.
Then we need to improve the existing Lemmy clients, because onboarding is still messy. I’d like to make a “friendly” fork of Voyager which can use my “login with Reddit” system to auto-migrate users, but if the main dev doesn’t want to accept, I guess I will have to manage the fork myself.
Then we will need to improve the existing servers, because we are not really ready for 100-200k active users.
Then we will need to find a way to save on resources, because the new version of Lemmy is a hog.
Then…
Then…
Then…
I know it’s a lot of work, but it makes no sense to let be taken by anxiety and just looking at everything that needs to be done. I’m just asking for you to look at the first step.
We could… but people have concerns about their communities being always operational and their accounts always working.
Part of the job of any project manager is setting the right expectations. We shouldn’t be promising a flawless execution and we should be upfront to mods and the userbase that the whole idea is to do this as an exercise to find out the issues and learn the best workarounds, so that we can be ready to do it in a larger scale.
Not only I don’t see any “harm” done there (I mean, really, was there any bad serious consequence of a system that replicated a few million comments?), to me it’s a good example of this “progressive” generation acting like extreme reactionaries. Instead of adapting to a new scenario (hey, browsing by all is not really going to work if we have that many people posting content, maybe I should learn to curate the communities) and trying to learn with the new information and see where it would go, most people were just decided to take it as a personal attack on them (it wasn’t) and their preferences.
Likewise, I refuse to see “trying to hard to get people to switch” as a bad thing. I honestly see it as a moral imperative: if corporate-controlled social media is bad for us, and if any social network depends on a sizable number of participants, then it stands to reason that we are only going to have a “healthy” internet when the mainstream is here. This is not just a fight over what site people use to share stupid memes, this is about not letting our collective imagination and culture be controlled by some oligarchs.
I don’t see it as “telling people how to use it”. What I wonder is how would people react differently if those were not really bots but just the people from Reddit actually moving over here. Would they keep complaining about people “flooding” or would they just accept that curating and filtering is indeed part of the toolbelt and should be used for this.
It’s more or less the same people that complain about the bridges “because of privacy”, but would be better off if they understood that using a “public social network” and keep expecting “privacy” is just the wrong tool for the job. If someone is using a system in a way that is not aligned with its intended design, there is no point in complaining about others breaking your expectations.
Anyway, I digress. I appreciate the improved tone in the conversation. I just hope that we can make it more productive as well.
But the protocol is the least important thing, it’s the applications that come out of it.
Granted, I think it would be an improvement if we didn’t have to care or think about what server you are using and people could keep their same identity regardless of the application they are using.
Yeah, it would be nice if I could keep my “communick.com” handle everywhere, but my usage and conversations on Lemmy are different from when I am on Mastodon. The audiences are different. It’s a good example of The medium is the message.
Yeah, totally. My name is Raphael and I people keep confusing me with the Ninja turtle…
I don’t want to waste any more time with this ridiculous argument. This is unbelievably boring. If you understand what I mean, then the communication was successful. Instead of nitpicking over the terminology, I would appreciate if you responded instead with something pertinent to the discussion.
just because i understood doesn’t mean anyone else would.
Then it’s on me to adjust my language to the different audience.
Look, you made a request and I already denied it. If you are more concerned with the form over the content of the discussion, please find someone else to pester. I really don’t respond well to this hallway monitor attitude. It’s this type of tone policing that sometimes makes a normal conversation impossible.
What do you think about the idea of having the fediverser bots mirroring the subreddit content into the lemmy community? It would help both to bootstrap the lemmy community and also showcase the migration tool.
The thing is that fediverser (my project for mirroring content and to help people migrate) can work transparently with the actual Lemmy community. No need to create separate communities and then getting people to subscribe to two separate things.
We can turn the mirror into a bridge, and make the conversation two-way. And even if we didn’t, you can take part anyway because there will be (hopefully) an increasing number of people there who are actually native to Lemmy.
I will be honest with you, I haven’t put much work on Fediverser since December for two reasons:
I haven’t come up with a design that is simple enough for the Lemmy users to indicate how they want their message replicated to Reddit (i.e, should the response be sent as a comment, as a DM, none at all?)
Time taken by job search and building more stuff in Communick to try to generate income. I applied to NLNet for a grant for Fediverser, and it’s being evaluated. If I get it, then I’ll be able to focus again on it, but if not I will be even more pressured to find some other way to make money.
Do you think so? I’d personally would prefer to not have any comments in the public threads. So, I’d like my comments to be sent as DMs to the OP just to let them know about the conversation on Lemmy and to encourage them to signup here. Don’t forget that the main goal is to make it easy for people to migrate away from Reddit. If we just implement a two-way bridge, we’d be effectively giving no incentive for Redditors to move out.
My thesis is that content is king. There is a good number of people who are on Reddit not because it’s their favorite platform, but because they can’t find the content elsewhere.
If we mirror the content on Lemmy, then Lemmy will have the same content as Reddit, then the “lack of content elsewhere” stops being a problem, and then these people will be “free agents”.
If we have content here, the “problems” of Lemmy are not going to be seen in such a bad light. Conversely, if Reddit does not have exclusivity of the content, people are not going to feel the need to put up with all their crap.
Having a “two-way” bridge is not necessarily bad, but the more we have people saying “look, someone responded <quote original comment> on <lemmy community>, to respond, signup via <link to fediverser migration tool>” it will start creating a situation where people will be realize that they can choose between:
staying on reddit, to see reddit content, deal with Reddit management and being periodically pointed to more content on Lemmy.
create an account on Lemmy, see all of the content from Reddit + Lemmy, free from Reddit management.
I am treating those in the “I will be annoyed by a bot asking me to migrate” as “people who are loyal to Reddit and not willing to move away”, so the sooner they block the bridge, the better for everyone. But again, my thesis is that these people are not so numerous as the ones that will just move to the platform that provides them the most content.
5 to 10% of people creating new accounts would be amazing. The mirror accounts from fediverser collected around 1.5M accounts in about 2 months. 5% of that is 75 thousand, which means that we could be bringing 37.5k new users to Lemmy per month.
folk having less incentive to engage with those threads if it’s extremely unlikely
This will change with (a) the cumulative effect of new users migrating and (b) if we successfully explain to people that the idea is part of the orchestrated effort to get people out of Reddit.
I very strongly feel that a true 2-way bridge is the best solution,
There is also a practical issue to avoid sending comments to every reply. I will only have a message being sent to the comment if I can send it from the Reddit user (meaning, the Lemmy user that wants to use the two-way bridge needs to have an account on Reddit as well, ideally use their own API key to do it). I rather not use the fediverser API key to do that, because it can be flagged as spam and it will be likely to trigger a game of cat-and-mouse between Reddit admins and those running fediverser instances.
So this is why I’d like to make it configurable. There will be people like you, who’d be okay with mirroring your comments. There will be people like me, who do not want to contribute to Reddit further and just to use the response system as a tool to get more content on Lemmy and eventually start converting some of the users.
Project Springtime (www.project-springtime.org)
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What are the proposal to make the ActivityPub protocol better?
I'm a fan of the Fediverse, but what are the major issues we faced right now because of the limitations of the #ActivityPub protocol? Recently, decentralize social networks are at their peak, big players are trying to be part of it, and is constantly in the news....
Bluesky opens up federation, letting anyone run their own server | TechCrunch (techcrunch.com)
A different strategy for promoting the Threadiverse
So, with news of Reddit making deals to sell user data for AI training, I think we should really start organizing ourselves for an effective migration campaign....